Lying in the Middle: Musical Theater and Belief at the Heart of America

by Jake Johnson

The local and regional shows staged throughout America use musical theater’s inherent power of deception to cultivate worldviews opposed to mainstream ideas. Jake Johnson reveals how musical theater between the coasts inhabits the middle spaces between professional and amateur, urban and rural, fact and fiction, fantasy and reality, and truth and falsehood. The homegrown musical provides a space to engage belief and religion—imagining a better world while creating opportunities to expand what is possible in the current one. Whether it is the Oklahoma Senior Follies or a Mormon splinter group’s production of The Sound of Music , such productions give people a chance to jolt themselves out of today’s post-truth malaise and move toward a world more in line with their desires for justice, reconciliation, and community. Vibrant and strikingly original, Lying in the Middle discovers some of the most potent musical theater taking place in the hoping, beating hearts of Americans.

192 pages, Hardcover

Published October 19, 2021

Reviews

[LaShana Claude · Rating 5 out of 5]

Individuals lie for all sorts of reasons, big and small; the lies that groups tell themselves with musicals, on the other hand, unsettle the fabric of reality in such more significant ways. We can look to communities who engage in theatrical deception as models for building our own alternate reality- a world with more satisfying answers to the kind of questions our actual world has yet to ask. Lies of this sort are often symbolic, usually religiously so. They ca do real harm; don't get me wrong. But their agreed-upon weightlessness permits such deceptions a pass into the figurative