Media and Performance in the Musical: An Oxford Handbook of the American Musical, Volume 2

by Raymond Knapp (Editor), Mitchell Morris (Editor), Stacy Wolf (Editor)

For the past several years, the American musical has continued to thrive by reflecting and shaping cultural values and social norms, and even commenting on politics, whether directly and on a national scale ( Hamilton ) or somewhat more obliquely and on a more intimate scale ( Fun Home ). New stage musicals, such as Come from Away and The Band's Visit , open on Broadway every season, challenging conventions of form and content, and revivals offer audiences a different perspective on extant shows ( Carousel; My Fair Lady ). Television musicals broadcast live hearken back to 1950s television's affection for musical theatre and aim to attract new audiences through the accessibility of television. Film musicals, including Les Misérables and Into the Woods, capitalize on the medium's technical capabilities of perspective and point of view, as well as visual spectacle. Television has embraced the genre anew, and with unexpected gusto, not only devising musical episodes for countless dramatic
and comedy series, but also generating musical series such as Galavant and Crazy Ex-Girlfriend . And animated musicals, such as Disney's Moana , hail child and adult audiences with their dual messages, vibrant visual vocabulary, and hummable music.

The chapters gathered in this book, Volume II of the reissued Oxford Handbook , explore the American musical from the various media in which musicals have been created to the different components of a musical and the people who do the work to bring a musical to life.

336 pages, Paperback

Published October 2, 2018

About the author

Raymond Knapp came to UCLA in 1989, with degrees from Harvard (BA cum laude in music), Radford (MA in composition), and Duke (PhD in musicology). He has authored four books and co-edited a fifth: Brahms and the Challenge of the Symphony (1997), Symphonic Metamorphoses: Subjectivity and Alienation in Mahler’s Re-Cycled Songs (2003), The American Musical and the Formation of National Identity (2005; winner of the George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism), The American Musical and the Performance of Personal Identity (2006), and Musicological Identities: Essays in Honor of Susan McClary (2008, with UCLA alumni Steven Baur and Jacqueline Warwick). His published essays address a wide range of additional interests, including Beethoven, Wagner, Brahms, Tchaikovsky, nationalism, musical allusion, music and identity, and film music. His current projects include a book that considers Haydn and American popular music in the context of German Idealism, and a book co-edited with Stacy Wolf and UCLA’s Mitchell Morris (forthcoming from Oxford). He has originated courses on Mozart and on the American Musical, and has recently given seminars on nationalism, Mahler, Haydn, Mozart, absolute music, allusion, and the American musical.

Reviews

[Mills College Library]

782.14097 M4891 2018