In Defense of Pleasure: Musical Theatre History in the Liberal Arts [A Manifesto]

Stacy Ellen Wolf

Theatre Topics, Volume 17, Number 1, March 2007, pp. 51-60 (Article)

Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press DOI: 10.1353/tt.2007.0014

For additional information about this article

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/tt/summary/v017/17.1wolf.html

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In Defense of Pleasure: Musical Theatre History in the Liberal Arts [A Manifesto]

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Stacy Wolf
I. The Problem: An Introduction Last spring, on the second day of my undergraduate honors seminar, Musical Theatre and American Culture, we read David Savrans essay, Toward a Historiography of the Popular. 2 Because the essay, which is directed toward theatre history scholars, academics, and professors, so persuasively articulates the importance of researching and writing about musical theatre and because Savran enumerates so clearly and thoroughly the range of historical, theoretical, methodological, and political issues that musical theatre imbricates, I thought it was an ideal reading with which to begin the class. In his essay, Savran outlines and refutes the central reasons for the dismissal of musical theatre as a viable and serious topic of study for theatre historians.3 He points to musical theatres middlebrow status, its blatant commercialism, and the lack of extant, stable evidence for study and analysis, and for each of these qualms he provides an answer. Musical theatres middlebrow position, for example, fosters the study of modes of consumption, since mid-twentieth-century musicals functioned as a kind of urban folk culture and are monuments of a shared, participatory culture (215). Musical theatres overt commercial aspirations mean that the aesthetic is alwaysand unpredictablyoverdetermined by economic relations and interests (213). Because of this, Savran asserts: [T]he musical is able to provide a virtual laboratory in which to study the circulation of the artwork-as-commodity (213). Methodologically, since many musicals libretti and orchestrations have disappeared, they present unique challenges for those concerned with questions of authenticity and evanescence (214). Finally, he writes, because of their status as popular entertainments, they often take upmore explicitly and pointedlymany of the same historical and theoretical problems that allegedly distinguish canonical modernist texts (215). He then goes on to list social issues and the musicals that represent them, including industrialization, urbanization, and the emergence of commodity culture (Show Boat, Ragtime), as well as innovative formal techniques, including sophisticated estrangement devices (Allegro, Chicago) (215). I was eager to discuss the article with my students, curious to see if it excited them to study musical theatre and wondering which issues grabbed them and which ideas were new to them. As often happens when one teaches an article for the rst time (and perhaps, especially, when one unthinkingly projects ones own assumptions onto students), I miscalculated entirely. They hated the piece! And why? Because he hates musical theatre, they said. Because he thinks that its dumb to study musical theatre. What? I said (trying not to get defensive since it was only the second day of class and I barely knew their names). Where does he say that?

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They proceeded (good and diligent highlighter-wielding students that they are) to read aloud (and with great indignation) the passages in which Savran discusses academias assumptions about musical theatre. They read the sentences where he notes his colleagues snobbery towards musical theatre and where he explains the reasons why few scholars take seriously the study of musical theatre. But he disagrees with all those ideas, I said. He is laying out the dominant point of view that he then critiques. They shook their heads. But why does he need to do this? they insisted. This isnt even true. Everyone loves musical theatre! I begin with this anecdote, which is both embarrassing and, I think, illuminating, for two reasons. How did I err when I assigned Savrans essay? First and most obviously, I didnt prepare the sophomore and junior undergraduates to read a complex polemic whose intended audience is theatre history scholars, academics, and professors. I didnt ready them to understand rhetorical conventions or the style or tone of the piece. I realized in hindsight that even a brief introduction to the article before they read it would have given them a clearer way in and might have allowed them to get it. Or perhaps not. More importantly for this essay, as I later gured out, Savrans motivation for writing Toward a Historiography of the Popular and his imagined adversarial reader completely bafed my students. More precisely, it was entirely illegible as an argument at all. The essay didnt speak to them because their cultural hierarchies are different than Savrans or mine. They dont live in a world in which high art is better than pop culture. They have grown up being thoroughly postmodern, moving easily among media in a culture that privileges what John Seabrook calls the nobrow: the mind-bogglingly active shifting of cultural categories of value and worth, both commercially and intellectually. Later in the semester, they were furious to learn that musical theatre critics and scholars love Stephen Sondheim and hate Andrew Lloyd Webber. They dutifully researched the debatesand found them interestingbut disagreed thoroughly. They analyzed Phantom of the Opera with as much respect and seriousness as Sunday in the Park with George. While I might have considered it my duty as a professor to provide their entre into the categorizations of high art, to acculturate them to value the intellectual capital that the university provides and values, I decided rather to build on their tastes and to draw on their preferences as a basis for inquiry. Their refusal of the cultural hierarchies I (and my colleagues) have naturalized and take for granted allowed my students and me to think about pleasure, to talk about affect, and to use our visceral engagement with musicals as a crucial part of our analysis. II. The Polemic: Why Teach Musical Theatre? Theatre studies bears an anxious relationship to the humanities curriculum in many universities. As Shannon Jackson writes: As elds with a historically marginal status vis--vis the literary canon, theatre and oral interpretation had an attenuated relationship to the arena of cultural capital and an uncertain status as humanist forms of inquiry (Professing 27). Then, in a disappointing and disturbing though unsurprising replication of that same dynamic, within many theatre departments musical theatre courses have an anxious relationship to the rest of the curriculum.4 Savran notes that even for many devotees of the so-called straight theatre, musical theatre remains (at best) a guilty pleasurea little too gay, too popular, too Jewish, and too much damned fun (216). Most universities do produce one musical a season, and these tend to be sure-re money-makers and crowd pleasers. The yearly musical often requires the most labor and moneysometimes more than the rest of the season combined. It is also usually the production that brings in the most revenue. How often, though, is the musical seen as a part of the intellectual project of the department?5 How often do these productions garner the same study and attention as plays by Shakespeare, Ibsen, or

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Hansberry? And during rehearsals for these productions, how much research do actors actually do? How does a dramaturg function on a musical? As Bill Worthen asks, Is it possible for theatre studies courses [ . . . ] to be in dialogue with the teaching of acting, directing, design, and / or with the mainstage season? (266). In terms of the academic curriculum, studies of musical theatre history, of libretti as dramatic literature, and of theoretical approaches to musical theatre seldom appear among the course offerings.6 Within theatre history courses, musicals are almost never on the syllabus.7 Like Savran, I believe that the study of Broadway musical theatre fosters a richly multivalent, multidisciplinary approach to US history, culture, and society. As such, I view musical theatre history not as a course that provides the background knowledge for the performances the students really prefer to be doing nor one that stuffs students full of facts to regurgitate on a test, but rather one that develops skills of reading, writing, critical thinking, research, and oral communication that are foundational to an undergraduate liberal arts education. I urge my colleagues to teach more musical theatre history courses, or to add a musical to a theatre history or dramatic literature reading list, or to study a musical in a theoretically or thematicbased course. My manifesto, then, is meant to build on Savrans call to study musical theatre as a central subject of theatre history: this is a call to include musical theatre as a key component of undergraduate theatre studies in the liberal arts. I hope the practical ideas that follow will demonstrate the value of musical theatre studies as well as the ease with which musicals can be added to a liberal artsbased course. III. Eleven Ideas for Teaching Musical Theatre 1. Read a libretto as a play. All of the skills of play analysis can and should be applied to a musical libretto. Reading closely for character, structure, style, imagery, the scripting of the audience,8 and so on enhances students experience with the play. Whatever play analysis text or method is preferred, it will yield surprises because musical librettos are intricately structured and complexly layered. Characters may not be fully psychologically developed, but they are always distinctive. 2. Treat lyrics like poetry. Conductor and musical theatre scholar Lehman Engel noted that in a musical, a three-minute song equals what, in a nonmusical play, would be fteen minutes of dialogue. This exceedingly condensed form of communication, from the point of view of the character, allows her to express herself and often takes her to a new place by the end of the song. At the same time, lyrics illustrate the shows setting, situation, mood, and tone. I encourage students to read lyrics out loud, after which we discuss them as poetry in both form and content before listening to the music. 3. Listen to the music. The music of musical theatre is at once its most seductive elementand for nonmusicians, its most elusive. As the means by which the audience is emotionally engaged, the music also conveys the character and his world, the moment and its importance in the story, and the world of the musical. Songs in musicals depend on structures of repetition and difference; harmonies and orchestrations converse with the melody. Songs in musicals sound like what they mean to say. Whether or not students can read music and analyze in technical terms how a song is constructed, practicing careful listening with ones ear and ones heart can facilitate meaning-making. As with lyrics, music heard alone conveys much. Spend time listening and discussing melody, harmony, accompaniment, and orchestration, then analyze the song as a wholelyrics and musicin what it attempts to say. Encourage students imaginative interpretations.9 4. Use musical theatres conventions to frame analysis and to historicize. Savran notes that musicals allow us to explore the problems of genre (216). Like realism, melodrama, expressionism, and Noh theatre, musical theatre has its own set of highly developed, historically specic rules. Like any play that might be considered realism although it both does and does not follow realisms

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traits, any musical both relies on and revises the form that precedes it. Musical theatres conventions provide a set of tools that can be used to study any show and discover the depth and complexity of any performance that may, cursorily, seem simple. Comparison between any two musicals, especially between a musical by Rodgers and Hammerstein and any other, foregrounds what conventions are present and how the latter show revises the R&H model.10 In addition to musical theatres formal principles, gender functions as a convention of sorts, since heterosexual courting, romance, and marriage provide the basis for many musicals plots. The romance narrative not only naturalizes heterosexuality through a musicals affective power, but it also naturalizes the union of the opposite values that the male and female principals embody and representcountry and city, work and leisure, European and US.11 In this way, questions of identity politics, of difference, of gender, race, sexuality, class, and ethnicity will invariably arise in discussing a particular musical. 5. Take advantage of the resources available, from primary documents in the archive, to critical scholarly books, to recordings, to lms. Archival materials such as programs, production photographs, reviews, artists papers and notebooks, and other rst-person accounts of past performances are invaluable resources. They offer students the opportunity not only to reconstruct imaginatively a performance in its time, but also to practice primary research and hands-on techniques of historiography. On the other hand, archival materials are only one means of access to musicals. Consider as the production a musicals opening on Broadway as well as revivals and productions at other venues across the country and the world. Bruce Kirle has argued for Broadway musicals inherent openness as he documents the extraordinary changes wrought on musicals through their process of creation, production, reception, and later re-production(s), and he cautions us against fetishizing the original Broadway production. While I urge students to differentiate between a cast album and a soundtrack, and between a Broadway opening and a lms premierethat is, I want them to understand the difference between live performance and a lmed versionI use lmed versions of musicals in my class all the time. I dont believe that the archival resources of theatre, such as programs, production photos, diaries, reviews, or promptbooks, are the sole means to analyze performance. 6. Compare productions. For most students, comparison sharpens analytical skills by foregrounding different choices of design, orchestration, casting, staging, acting, singing, and dance. Many musicals have more than one lm version. Some of my favorite examples that use lm versions of musicals include comparing: in Oklahoma!, Agnes de Milles with Susan Strohmans choreography of the dream ballet; 12 in South Pacic, the staging of Washin that Man Right Out of My Hair in the lm version with Mitzi Gaynor with the television version with Glenn Close (these lm versions can also be compared to production photos of Mary Martin in the same number); in Sweeney Todd, the rst set design with the recent Broadway revival (clip available on www.Broadway.com); in Gypsy, the acting choices of Rosalind Russell with those of Bette Midler in Roses Turn. To sharpen listening skills and aural analysis, any two versions of a song could be listened to as well; for example, in South Pacic, Mary Martins singing versus Glenn Closes (Gaynor was dubbed). Continue to ask students to describe what they see and hear and to explain why specic production choices are signicant. How do we interpret each version of a song or dance? Why do the production choices matter? What do they mean? 7. Start wherever you want. Does the history of musical theatre begin with Viennese operettas? With minstrelsy? With Show Boat in 1929? With Oklahoma! in 1943? Does it end with the end of the golden age in 1966? With Rent ? With Rent, the movie? Like any history, musical theatres is partial and fragmented. 8. Invite guests. Shannon Jackson suggests that disciplinary friction often derives from basic differences in what each of us is good at doing (Resist 245). I suspect that discomfort with discussing music or dance or text prevents some of us from teaching musical theatre. Those of us who

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have other skills love sharing them with students in other classes. I invited a colleague, Jim Bueller from the School of Music, to talk about analyzing music. I asked an MFA graduate student in dance, Rachel Murray, to work with the students to analyze choreography. I regularly take the students to the Harry Ransom Research Center on campus to work with Performing Arts curator Helen Adair to learn about the archives and undertake primary research on musical theatre productions. I have also been invited as a guest in other classes to teach play and performance analysis or to discuss production dramaturgy or acting for musical theatre. As professors and academics we naturalize and take for granted our own specialized knowledge and skills. We can and should take advantage of one anothers expertise in this extraordinarily multivalent eld. Better still, we should encourage students to share their own areas of expertise in whatever it isviolin or US history, or poetry, or philosophyto illuminate a musical. 9. Emphasize context. Musical theatre converses with its time. As a popular, commercial form it necessarily reects and speaks to and from the culture; as a highly collaborative form it encompasses the work of many artists. Select readings or assign student research (or, if you prefer, lecture) to place musical theatre within its context. More importantly, imagine broadly what context meansfrom the individual artist and her biography and inuences, to the specic dynamics of the collaboration among the artists, to the critical and commercial reception of the rst production, to the later life of the musical. Allow context to be a layered, even shifting, concept. 10. Model research as production dramaturgy. Musicals are both bound by time and not: a new revival of any given musical is always possible, and is merely a producers means, money, and passion away. To avoid what Ray Knapp calls the What a guy! and Heres some stuff! approach to musical theatre (that is, an unselfconscious listing of achievements and facts), we should stress how dramaturgical research includes practical, political, and theoretical questions that inform production choices, each of which inuences meaning and consequently reception. Would we do this show today? Why or why not? How does it speak to us? What happens if it is revised or updated? How did other revivals negotiate these concerns? What should this musical say and do in our moment? Intensify students motivation and investment in the subject by underlining the material effects of research. 11. Dont save musicals until after students have learned about real theatre and dont only teach musicals in their own course. Sweeney Todd is one of seven plays that we study in depth during the freshman seminar for theatre and dance majors that I teach. Whether or not students have a special interest in musical theatre (which many of them do), this musical always excites them and they do some of their best writing and thinking about it. Moreover, when they can select any play to study for their nal project, many of them choose musicals. They analyze and research these textslibretti, music, and dancein as much detail and with as much seriousness as their colleagues do with the plays of August Wilson or Paula Vogel. They view musical theatre as an integral part of drama, theatre, and performance. IV. Pleasure, Again Use pleasure as a way in. One of the oft-repeated critiques of musical theatre studies is that accolades and fandom stand in for the analysis, historicization, and theorizing expected of regular theatre histories. As educators, I believe that it is our duty to respect and draw out students preferences and passions and to consider their feelings as being socially contingent, historically grounded, and, in the words of Bourdieu, habitus-based. Savran identies this area as the politics of pleasure (215). We can foster students attentiveness to the ideology of aesthetics and to the historical formation of taste publics. As Tracy Davis writes, performance is simultaneously a form of cultural literacy and cultural inquiry (207). After spending much time and effort dissecting a musical, put it back together as a total artwork and enjoy. Pleasure motivates.

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APPENDIX A: Some Elements of Music Analysis What do these elements signify? Why are they important?
What is the relationship between the music and lyrics? (e.g., harmonious; discordant; shifting; in tension; mutually supporting; one more complex or simple than the other) What notes, what kind of melodic lines, and what kinds of rhythms are set to which words? (That is, again, what is the relationship between music and lyrics?) At what point does the song take place within the musical? (Which act and scene? What action precedes and what follows?) Who sings the song? To whom? For what purpose? To what effect? How does the song convey: 1) character; 2) setting; 3) mood or tone; 4) story? How does the song begin? What happens in the middle? How does it end? What does the song do? Does it tell a story, develop an emotion, evince a changed emotion? How is the musical different at the end of the song than at the beginning? What kind of vocabulary is used in the songs lyrics? Images? Metaphors? How does the rhyme scheme work? What kinds of words rhyme and where? How many syllables? Internal? End rhymes? Expected? Surprising? What is the meter of the song? 4/4? 3/4? Is it a waltz? A foxtrot? A march? What is the rhythm of the song? Does it change over the course of the song? Are there many notes or few? Are notes held for a long time or short? How do the duration and number of notes create rhythmic patterns? How is syncopation or silence used? What is the tempo of the song? Does it change over the course of the song? What is the style or type of song? (e.g., belting; jazzy; love song; subjunctive love song; I am song; I want song; charm song; ballad) How many singers are in the number? (e.g., solo; duet; trio; chorus) What voice part sings the song? How do the different voice parts relate to one another? What is the timbre of the singer(s)? What is the relationship between melody and harmony? Between sung music and the orchestration? How does the orchestration embellish or converse with or contradict the singing? How is the song structured? How does it develop across time? In verses? Refrain? Is there an introductory section? What is the relationship between the verse and the chorus?

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Is the song in a major or minor key? Does the song change key? When and how? Does the song cover a small or wide vocal range? How does each line of the melody work in terms of pitch, length, rhythm, rhyme, volume, and musical effects? How does each line relate to the one that precedes it?

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Does the song include special or unusual vocal or musical effects such as long-held notes, an especially large range, spoken sections, or others? How does the song use repetition and change? How is the song staged? How does the song relate to elements of the mise-en-scne?

APPENDIX B: Some Elements of Dance Analysis What do these elements signify? Why are they important?
What is the relationship between the music and choreography? (e.g., harmonious; discordant; shifting; in tension; mutually supporting; one more complex or simpler) What is the relationship between the dance and the lyrics of the song? At what point does the dance take place in the musical? (Which act and scene? What precedes and what follows?) Who dances? To or with whom? For what purpose? To what effect? How does the dance convey: 1) character; 2) setting; 3) mood or tone; 4) story? How is the musical different at the end of the dance than at the beginning? How many dancers are in the number and what is their relation to one another? (e.g., principal; duet; trio; variously numbered groupings) Who are the characters in the dance and what is their relationship to one another? How does the dance represent, develop, or change those relationships? How is the dance structured or how does it develop across time? Are there different sections of the dance? How does it begin? What happens in the middle? How does it end? Does the dance tell a story? Does it represent conict? Does the dance develop an emotion? Does the dance embody a changed emotional state? What kind(s) of movement vocabulary are used by each dancer? (e.g., pantomime; everyday gestures; symbolic gestures; abstract gestures; invented movements; danced steps) What styles or forms of dance are evident? (e.g., ballet; amenco; rhumba; jazz; tap; softshoe; modern; African dance)

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What kind of movement does each dancer perform? (e.g., light vs. grounded; broad vs. contained; vertical vs. horizontal; forceful vs. weak; sharp / angular vs. smooth; bounded vs. free) How does the dance use bodies in and across and in relation to space? (e.g., spread out vs. contained; lines; diagonals; clumps; patterns of movement; repetition of shapes) How do the dancers bodies relate to and interact with one another? How does the dance use repetition and change? How are movements and movement patterns phrased in the dance? How does the dance use elements of the mise-en-scne? (i.e., set and props; costumes; lighting and visual effects)

Stacy Wolf teaches in the Performance as Public Practice Program in the Department of Theatre and Dance at the University of Texas at Austin. She is the author of A Problem Like Maria: Gender and Sexuality in the American Musical (U of Michigan P, 2002) and other articles on musical theatre, feminist pedagogy, and theatre audiences. Wolf served as editor of Theatre Topics from 20012003.

Notes
1. I would like to thank Jonathan Chambers and Theatre Topics three anonymous readers for their helpful and generous comments on an earlier version of this essay. Thanks also go to the students in Languages of the Stage and in my Plan II honors seminars, whose enthusiasm for musical theatre inspired me to write this essay. 2. This essay appeared in a special issue of Theatre Survey, Theatre History in the New Millennium: A Forum, in which sixteen scholars responded to the question: What is the single most important thing we can do to bring theatre history into the new millennium? (Enders 174). 3. Savran notes how little of musical theatres histories are included in theatre history textbooks. Even the new and excellent Theatre Histories: An Introduction (edited by Phillip B. Zarrilli, Bruce A. McConachie [whose Cold War Theatre, with superb chapters on South Pacic, The King and I, and Flower Drum Song, is an enormously important contribution to musical theatre scholarship], Gary Jay Williams, and Carol Fisher Sorgenfrei) dedicates a mere two pages (of more than ve hundred) to musical theatre, and it receives only four other mentions. I know an introductory, world-theatre textbook is an easy mark, but its still worth noticing this absence. 4. See Romn 1830; Dolan. 5. In terms of the performance curriculum that trains students to perform in musicals, these classes are typically relegated to the lite side, since tap and jazz are less rigorous than ballet or modern dance, belting less technically advanced than opera singing, and acting in musical theatre less complex than straight acting. Skills required of musical theatre performance tend to be associated with students who either lack seriousness as artists or lack the self-awareness to be embarrassed by desiring to perform in the theatre worlds most commercial venues. 6. There are exceptions to this generalization, of course. At ASTR in 2005, along with Barbara Grossman and Korey Rothman, I co-facilitated a seminar on Musical Theatre Pedagogy in which participants shared syllabi and position papers on a topic that compelled them. Topics included: breadth vs. depth; where does musical theatre history begin?; working towards praxis; and access to materials for teaching; among others. It was a lively and engaging seminar, punctuated by superb contributions from the attendees. Seminar participants

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were Chase Bringardner, Brian Carney, John Clum, Bud Coleman, Brian Holmes, Mary Jo Lodge, Laura MacDonald, Jenny Nelson, Judith Sebesta, and Kellee Van Aken. I want to thank them for their work and their inuence on my thinking. 7. There are several notable exceptions among my colleagues here at the University of Texas at Austin. Deborah Paredezs Theatre History since 1800 course includes a section on musical theatre history and criticism, and the students watch clips from a number of lm musicals. Many of the graduate students in our PhD program in Performance as Public Practice who have designed and taught the 350-person Introduction to Theatre course (for nonmajors), including Shannon Baley, Chase Bringardner, Zachary Dorsey, Michelle Dvoskin, Rebecca Hewett, Jenny Kokai, Jaclyn Pryor, and Christin Yannacci, have had great success with musicals and a unit on musical theatre history in their courses. They have taught Into the Woods, West Side Story, Gypsy, Assassins, and Cabaret. My sense, though, is that, at other universities, this is the exception rather than the rule. 8. This phrase is Julian Olf s. His essay serves as one of my key guides for teaching play analysis (of both musicals and nonmusical plays). 9. Thanks to Jim Bueller, my colleague in the School of Music, who encouraged me to develop nontechnical means to analyze songs. See appendix A for suggested questions for aural musical analysis. 10. Musical theatre scholars continue to debate the importance of Rodgers and Hammerstein and their legacy. We disagree about the degree to which R&H built on earlier models or invented their own; about the degree to which later musicals did or did not follow their pattern for a musical play; even about the relative importance of the composer and lyricist in terms of a musicals performative power. Because the pedagogical model I envision depends on well-known shows, I have chosen to sidestep these debates and focus rather on R&Hs work as a useful comparison to later shows. 11. See Wolf. 12. Thanks to my former colleague Ann Daly for her excellent dance analysis outlines and methods, which served as models for mine. See appendix B for questions about dance analysis if videos are available.

Works Cited
Davis, Tracy. The Context Problem. Theatre Survey 45.2 (2004): 2039. Dolan, Jill. Geographies of Learning: Theory and Practice, Activism and Performance. Middleton, CT: Wesleyan UP, 2001. Enders, Jody. Introduction. Theatre Survey 45.2 (2004): 17375. Jackson, Shannon. Professing Performance: Theatre in the Academy from Philology to Performativity. New York: Cambridge UP, 2004. . Resist Singularity. Theatre Survey 45.2 (2004): 24146. Kirle, Bruce. Unnished Show Business: Broadway Musicals as Works-in-Progress. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 2006. Knapp, Ray. Personal communication. 26 May 2006.

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Olf, Julian M. Reading the Dramatic Text for Production. Theatre Topics 7.2 (1997): 15369. Romn, David. Performance in America: Contemporary U.S. Culture and the Performing Arts. Durham: Duke UP, 2005. Savran, David. Toward a Historiography of the Popular. Theatre Survey 45.2 (2004): 21117. Seabrook, John. Nobrow: The Culture of Marketing, the Marketing of Culture. New York: Knopf, 2000. Wolf, Stacy. A Problem Like Maria: Gender and Sexuality in the American Musical. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2002. Worthen, Bill. Acting, Singing, Dancing, and So Forth: Theatre (Research) in the University. Theatre Survey 45.2 (2004): 26369.