2009 ASTR Conference

Catherine Young
City University of New York Graduate Center

Raymond Knapp contends that “musicals have helped us envision ourselves as a nation of disparate peoples, functioning within a world of even more extreme differences.” Knapp also asserts that “arguably the central theme in American musicals” is the urge to “define America.” [...]

Korey Rothman
South Carolina Washington Semester Program

In 1928 Paul Robeson famously shocked London audiences when he changed the lyrics to “Ole Man River” to “Show a little spunk and you land in jail,” not knowing that “spunk” was slang for semen. As global boundaries shrink and musical markets become more international, moments like Robeson’s [...]

Ellen Peck
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Rodgers and Hammerstein’s 1947 effort, Allegro, came on the heels of two phenomenal successes, Oklahoma! and Carousel. Its record-breaking box office advance of $750,000 – the largest in history up to that point – testified to the high expectations Allegro carried with it. But while Oklahoma! and [...]

Sam O’Connell
Northwestern University
Released in 2003 as a 10‐song concept album, Neil Young’s “musical novel” Greendale tells the story of three generations of the Green Family as their way of life is threatened in the fictional, eponymous California town at the hands of political corruption, pollution, and crime. Since its release, this story has since been [...]

Erika Hughes
University of Wisconsin-Madison

This essay examines national and cultural identity in the children’s musical Ab heute heißt du Sara [From today you are called Sara] alongside Inge Deutschkron’s life and work on tolerance education in the German public sphere. First produced by the GRIPS Theater of Berlin in January 1989, the play follows the life [...]

Barbara Grossman
Tufts University

In Mel Brooks’s madcap musical romp The Producers, impresario Max Bialystock, once the “King of Broadway,” has just produced his latest flop: a musical version of Hamlet called Funny Boy. Desperate to claw his way back to the top, or at least to turn a profit once again, Max has an epiphany [...]

Laura Farrell-Wortman
University of Arizona
Following in the footsteps of the mega-musicals of the 1980s and 1990s, the dance production Riverdance appeared on the global theatre scene in 1995, and was marketed as a pop culture phenomenon. The show has since become synonymous with Irish culture. Riverdance’s undeniable influence as a cultural product for Ireland, both at [...]

Michelle Dvoskin
University of Texas, Austin
Performances of the past offered in musical theatre have typically been understood as, at best, nostalgic representations of a past stripped of its complexity, and their visions of “America” seen as similarly simplistic. In my work, however, I argue that musical theatre is, in [...]

Zachary Dorsey,
St. Lawrence University
Choreographer/director Bob Fosse’s “Mexican Breakfast,” a three-and-a-half minute dance routine performed by Gwen Verdon and two other dancers in June of 1969 on The Ed Sullivan Show, has gone viral, demonstrating that contemporary technology and new fan-based practices have altered the well-rehearsed destinies of musical theatre products (out-of town try-outs, [...]

Ken Cerniglia
Disney Theatrical Productions

Disney stories and characters have delighted international audiences for more than eight decades, but as The Walt Disney Company has sought to reach new markets in the twenty-first century, Disney’s live theatrical productions have served a unique and important ambassadorial function.  Twelve years ago this November, Julie Taymor’s production of The Lion [...]