The Disney Musical on Stage and Screen: Critical Approaches from "Snow White" to "Frozen" ed. by George Rodosthenous (review)

Theater produced for children remains one of the most understudied areas of our field. This neglect seems especially surprising since Broadway alone abounds with shows catering to a family-friendly audience, including Anastasia, School of Rock, and Wicked. Recent scholarly work, including a 2012 special issue of The Lion and the Unicorn on "Children and Theatre" (guest edited by Marah Gubar), has worked to open up this area of inquiry. And now, with the publication of George Rodosthenous's edited collection, scholars have focused their attention on perhaps the most influential theater producer globally, the Walt Disney Company. In so doing, they lay the groundwork for future studies of the influence of theater in Disney films as well as the storytelling, business, and cultural practices behind Disney-produced theater on Broadway, across the United States, and around the world.

The Disney Musical contains thirteen essays, divided across three sections: "Disney Musicals: On Film"; "Disney Adaptations: On Stage and Beyond"; and "Disney Musicals: Gender and Race." The first segment studies four Disney films as musicals: Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Sleeping Beauty, Mary Poppins, and Enchanted. The strength of this section—indeed, of the entire volume—is the range of approaches employed by the authors. Elizabeth Randall Upton's study of Snow White, for example, offers a formal analysis that looks at the film's music and narrative structure, while Tim Stephenson unpacks the gender politics of Mary Poppins, a film that both features and lampoons the suffragette movement. Raymond Knapp and Paul R. Laird offer close analyses that contextualize their respective films, Sleeping Beauty and Enchanted, within the framework of the Disney film musical. Knapp, in particular, focuses on the formal unity between the use of music, dance, and drama within an underrated film in the princess canon. Laird, in contrast, turns to postmodernism and feminism to situate Enchanted—somewhat critically neglected as a live-action film compared to the company's animated productions—in the long-standing Disney tradition of the princess narrative. Spanning seventy years, these four films ably document Disney's contribution to the film musical.

The authors address Disney as adapter in part 2, covering an exciting mix of texts from television productions in the 1990s and 2000s to the amateur presentations that have contributed an important revenue stream in more recent years. Geoffrey Block offers a solid study of the live-action Disney musicals on ABC, including Brandy-led Cinderella as well as The Music Man with Matthew Broderick. In particular, Block pays close attention to how Disney's adaptation not only reimagined traditional casting practices for these shows, but also adjusted these integrated musicals' narrative structures. Olaf Jubin offers a production history of the difficulties that Disney faced with the animated version of Victor Hugo's The Hunchback of Notre Dame, whereas Barbara Wallace Grossman focuses on the successful Broadway staging of The Lion King by avant-garde director Julie Taymor. Both chapters offer in-depth looks into an area of growing interest in literature and media studies, namely the politics and practices behind cultural production in the contemporary media industries. Finally, in perhaps the most interesting chapter, Stacy E. Wolf discusses the licensing of Disney musicals for amateur production. These shows, condensed and packaged for local theaters, represent an intriguing new market. Such innovative research shifts attention not only toward nonprofessionals, but also toward how Disney's reach can be felt across communities nationwide and around the world. Taken together, these essays speak to how Disney stories—and influence—work historically, across media, and even beyond the silver screen and the Broadway stage.

Part 3, the last and perhaps the strongest segment of the book, offers intersectional perspectives on the Disney musicals. Aaron C. Thomas's analysis of Newsies and Dominic Symonds's chapter on High School Musical offer keen insights into masculinity in particular, which is quite necessary for a...