- Contemplating the Afterlife:Musicals in Revival as Pedagogical Intervention
Courses that center musical theatre as an object of analysis frequently attract ardent devotees of the form. In order to activate and leverage my students' existing knowledge, I open these courses with an invitation: identify your favorite musicals and explicate their merits.1 The students' fidelity to musical theatre is apparent during this activity as they index and defend their choices with zeal. Among the cataloged titles, recent musicals—works that received their initial first-class production within the past decade—commonly represent a majority.2 Moreover, several students acknowledge that their enthusiasm for these works derives from having consumed their original productions as performance, whether on Broadway, on tour, or as a bootleg video. When I ask them to expound on their love for a given musical, they frequently conflate its textual elements (libretto, lyrics, and score) with the original production's mise-en-scène (directorial concept, design, and choreography) and thereby suggest that an inaugural production represents the musical's apotheosis. In their estimation, a musical's legibility hinges on its original mise-en-scène. For example, Hamilton (2015) is not merely a musical composition penned by Lin-Manuel Miranda but rather a composite text that necessarily includes David Korins's scenery, Paul Tazewell's costumes, and Andy Blankenbuehler's movement vocabulary.3 My students later confirm their orientation toward musical theatre when they assess productions staged at their high schools or community theatres. The most frequently invoked measurement of success is the degree to which a creative team emulates the given musical's original first-class production. Through their discussion of favorite works and prior spectatorship, many students unwittingly contend that a musical's inaugural production is indistinguishable from the musical itself.
I challenge this assumption by suggesting that a musical's text (like any other work of dramatic literature) can inspire numerous productions. The inaugural first-class production with which they are most familiar represents only one of countless permutations. Revivals, as I argue, can be as illuminating and significant as an original production. I also endeavor to displace New York and London as the principal sites of musical theatre creation by complicating the students' understanding of the term "revival." In current parlance, "revival" generally refers to a first-class presentation of a play or musical that postdates its inaugural production. The common usage also reasserts the primacy of the work's original production. While new productions of the operatic or classical theatre repertoire are ubiquitous, the designation of "revival" normally classifies a new production as a localized and exceptional event. I challenge these assumptions by acknowledging any presentation of a preexisting play or musical as a revival. Pursuant to this logic, all subsequent productions are revivals regardless of their venue: regional and resident theatres, concert halls, fringe theatres, stock theatres, colleges and universities, primary and secondary schools, houses of worship, community theatres, and dinner theatres. These performances join with first-class revivals to constitute a dramatic work's complete performance history, or, to borrow language from Jonathan Miller, its "afterlife" (23). By complicating my students' understanding of what the term "revival" connotes, I aim to broaden their understanding of who contributes to the project of revival and where this undertaking occurs. Revivals are not the exclusive province of eminent theatre artists stationed in New York and London. To the contrary, anyone who contributes to the production of established musical theatre repertoire is an active participant in the project of revival. [End Page 19]
To support this orientation, each course I teach that addresses musical theatre includes a consideration of notable revivals.4 This task represents an active intervention as most histories of the musical theatre (which often serve as foundational texts in musical theatre courses) privilege and even fetishize inaugural first-class productions.5 While monographs, edited collections, and journal articles in musical theatre studies have acknowledged significant first-class revivals, many sources continue to address an inaugural production's textual elements as if they are incontrovertible. Because a concentrated analysis of musicals in revival does not yet exist, revivals (as a practice and product) remain somewhat undertheorized within musical...