Beyond Broadway: The Pleasure and Promise of Musical Theatre Across America

Professor Stacy Wolf

Nov 2019 · Oxford University Press

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The idea of American musical theatre often conjures up images of bright lights and big city, but its lifeblood is found in amateur productions at high schools, community theatres, afterschool programs, summer camps, and dinner theatres. In Beyond Broadway, author Stacy Wolf looks at the widespread presence and persistence of musical theatre in U.S. culture, and examines it as a social practice--a live, visceral experience of creating, watching, and listening. Why does local musical theatre flourish in America? Why do so many Americans continue to passionately engage in a century-old artistic practice that requires intense, person-to-person collaboration? And why do audiences still flock to musicals in their hometowns? Touring American elementary schools, a middle school performance festival, afterschool programs, high schools, summer camps, state park outdoor theatres, community theatres, and dinner theatres from California to Tennessee, Wolf illustrates musical theatre's abundance and longevity in the U.S. as a thriving social activity that touches millions of lives.

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Stacy Wolf is Professor in the Program in Theater in the Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton University. She is also the Director of the Program in Music Theater and Director of the Princeton Arts Fellows program. She is the author of A Problem Like Maria: Gender and Sexuality in the American Musical (2002), Changed for Good: A Feminist History of the Broadway Musical (2011), and co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of the American Musical (2011).