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

The Walt Disney Company was founded in 1923 and has been creating and globally distributing influential popular culture products for almost a century. This edited collection of thirteen essays focuses on the stage and screen musicals produced by Disney, beginning with its first full-length animated film, Snow White and the Seven Dwarves (1937), and ending with Frozen (2013). As implied by the fact that the first and last of these essays analyze musical films, the emphasis of the collection is on the latter part of its title rather than the former.

As editor George Rodosthenous notes in his introduction, the book's purpose is to understand Disney musicals not just in terms of their influence on popular culture and as political and educational tools but also as artistic innovations. The collection is organized into broad themes: "Disney Musicals: On Film," "Disney Adaptations: On Stage and Beyond," and "Disney Musicals: Gender and Race." The thematic headings are perhaps not as helpful as one might wish; three out of the four musicals grouped in the first section could easily have been placed in the final section. That the essays are also generally organized in chronological order within and across these sections is more helpful; through careful reading of the articles, an artistic trajectory of Disney musicals is formed, and overlaying that trajectory are the social and cultural shifts taking place around the musicals.

The first two essays focus on visual aesthetics and how musical theatre conventions influence how we read animated musicals. The first essay, by Elizabeth Randell Upton, provides a structural analysis of Snow White, discussing how the placement of songs within the film's narrative helps see beyond the "uncanniness" of the realistically rendered human characters. Next, Raymond Knapp explores the artistic shortcomings, and successes, of Sleeping Beauty. Both essays locate the musicals within the history of film technology available at the time of production. The last two essays in the section examine the live-action/animated hybrid film musicals Mary Poppins and Enchanted. Tim Stephenson asks why Mary Poppins still resonates with contemporary audiences and concludes that it is because of its often-contradictory representations of gender and gender roles. In the next essay, Paul Laird examines how Enchanted maintains the Disney traditions of commercialism and retrograde femininity though musical pastiche.

The section organized around adaptation is the most heterogeneous of the three, both in terms of the material covered and in terms of approaches. Geoffrey Block deploys a heavy dose of irony in his discussion of four made-for-television Disney musicals from the 1990s through the 2000s, framing the corporation as an auteur with an aggressive marketing agenda and products designed to reflect that changing market through nontraditional and color-blind casting. Olaf Jubin supplies a distinct international approach to his investigation of the animated stage and film adaptations of The Hunchback of Notre Dame in Germany and the United States. His insights into the "warring aesthetics" (112) of Victor Hugo's original text and Disney's continual failed attempts to adapt the text such that it fit into the Disney mold illuminate both the mold and its constraints. In contrast to the travails of adapting Hunchback, Barbara Wallace Grossman traces out the production history of The Lion King from film into a "stunning realization as a daring theatrical event in which risk-taking at all levels yielded boundless rewards" (118). The section concludes with an essay that to a certain extent reads as an outlier in terms of its subject matter but nonetheless fits the broader scope of the volume. Stacy Wolf reminds us that beyond Broadway and Hollywood productions of Disney musicals are the literally thousands of productions licensed for performance by middle and high school students. Her essay explores the personal and cultural impact such productions have on students nationwide.

Of the three sections...