Musical theater -- Social aspects -- United States.
Abstract:
The musical Wicked, which opened on Broadway in 2003 and is the top-grossing
musical of the twenty-first century, features certain elements of a contemporary megamusical,
including spectacular visual effects, musical themes that thread through
the score, and global capitalist marketing, distribution, and production practices. But,
as I demonstrate in this essay, Wicked’s narrative and musical structure relies on the
building blocks of the “integrated” musical developed and conventionalized during
the 1940s and 1950s by Rodgers and Hammerstein and their peers. By starring two
women as its principal characters, and by employing mid-twentieth-century musicals’
conventions of speech, music, lyrics, and dance, this prequel to The Wizard of Oz tells a
queer and feminist romance. This essay explores recent scholarship on musical theatre
to consider how Wicked navigates the politics of race, how it represents a remarkably
appealing girl protagonist, and how it interpellates its audience through old conventions
to tell a new and progressive story.
This essay argues that critical emphasis on the autobiographical connections in Sarah
Kane’s 4.48 Psychosis threatens to oversimplify the play’s wider significance. The essay
re-addresses the play, utilizing Freud’s essay “Mourning and Melancholia,” to propose
that 4.48’s minimalist form and initial productions encourage melancholic identifications.
In conjunction with melancholia, this essay explores recent trauma theory,
including the audience’s potential positionings as witnesses. The essay concludes by
exposing 4.48’s political critiques, thereby broadening the ramifications of the piece.
As a student of Franz Boas, Zora Neale Hurston’s performative response to her anthropological
training is uniquely situated between theatre and anthropology. This essay
focuses on her work as a playwright and lifelong pursuits in the theatre. It argues how
Hurston’s continual reworking of the relationship between the performer and spectator
via a unique angular dramatic structure—derived from a broad repertoire of visual art
and dance and characterized by sudden shifts in theme and audience perspective—was
an attempt to solve a growing uneasiness with the authoritative elements of her own
ethnographic practice. The essay analyzes how angularity operates on the levels of
theme, staged space, and perspective in Cold Keener; explores her relationship to both
Harlem Renaissance and contemporary critical interlocutors; provides a brief history of Hurston’s theatrical aspirations and actual work in the New York theatre; and suggests
the ways in which theatre is a natural outgrowth of her work as a folklorist and
is a significant aesthetic intervention.
Arabic drama -- 20th century -- History and criticism.
Theater -- Arab countries.
Abstract:
Traditional Western scholarship on Arabic theatre has borne a strong colonialist
imprint, interpreting such theatre almost entirely as a form borrowed from Europe and
essentially developed according to European practice. In the later twentieth century,
however, more attention has been paid both by Arab scholars and dramatists to performance
techniques and practices from their own culture. Of particular importance
has been the circular space, the halqa, widely utilized in popular performance, where
the audience gathers around and interacts with performers at their center. This essay
provides a brief history of the use and symbolism of the halqa, and then discusses its
utilization by a number of leading modern dramatists and directors from across the
Arab world—from Tayeb Saddiki in Morocco and Abdelkader Alloula in Algeria, to
Sa’dallah Wannus in Syria. Major works of each of these dramatists are analyzed to
show how each has employed the traditional halqa as a means to explore liminality,
hybridity, and postcolonial agency. In order to retrieve this performance tradition, theatre
in the Arab world has become more and more improvisational and self-reflexive,
even though such retrieval is still negotiated within the paradoxical parameters of
appropriating and dis-appropriating the Western models. This modern effort started
with the call for an original/autochthonous Egyptian/Arabic theatre by Yusif Idris,
whose masterpiece, al-Farafir (The Flipflops), is still considered a central reference, with
a strong aura of authority all over the Arab world. Idris’s challenge, in turn, has led
some to the “worship of ancestors” and to a ceaseless quest for purity in the name
of “authentic” Arabic theatre. The reality, however, is that even so-called indigenous
performing traditions such as that of the halqa are cultural constructs undergoing
continual change.
This essay is devoted to the seventeenth-century Italian actress Caterina Biancolelli,
who lived and acted in France during the reign of Louis XIV, and, in particular, to her
creation of the famous comedic role of Colombina. It explores how Caterina’s character
acts as a superb illustration of transgressive humor, subversive performance, and improvisational
comedy by drawing from the rich oral tradition of the female performers
in the commedia dell’arte tradition as well as from her own comedic genius.
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