Project MUSE®: Theatre Survey - Latest Articles
https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/904
Project MUSE®: Latest articles in Theatre Survey.daily12026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00text/htmlen-US Vol. 47 (2006) through current issueLatest Articles: Theatre SurveyTWOProject MUSE®Theatre Survey1475-45330040-5574Latest articles in Theatre Survey. Feed provided by Project MUSE®Circus Crossdressing, Shakespearization, Metamorphosis, and Broadway’s Exploits, Oh My!
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/980364
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True confession: I am totally theatre-geeking out about this issue’s material. We have early American circus cross-dressing performance, illustrations for the Stratford Edition of Shakespeare, a version of Kafka’s The Metamorphosis positing Gregor Samsa as a cyborg-vermin, and Bob Fosse’s choreography pushing dancers to superhuman extremes. What more could we possibly want? And for those of you who were expecting this issue to be our special topic exploration of archiving, just wait until the next issue, 67.2 (May 2026), for that!According to David Carlyon in “Zoyara Whirligig: Cross-Dressing Circus Delight,” in 1860 Omar Kingsley was the first to perform as “Ella Zoyara,” the cross-dressed equestrienne. The first
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/904/image/coversmallCircus Crossdressing, Shakespearization, Metamorphosis, and Broadway’s Exploits, Oh My!2026-01-23text/htmlen-USCircus Crossdressing, Shakespearization, Metamorphosis, and Broadway’s Exploits, Oh My!2026-01-232026TWOProject MUSE®101522026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-01-23Zoyara Whirligig: Cross-Dressing Circus Delight
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/980365
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He was unfortunate enough to lose her balance while performing his bare back act, and before she could recover himself, down she went, sustaining an injury to one of his feet, which incapacitated her from appearing for a short time. He is again on hand, however, or, at least, on foot, astonishing the spectators by her wonderful command over the horse.1This joke of alternating pronouns punctuated a cross-dressing circus craze in 1860. It began when Omar Kingsley performed on horseback as “Ella Zoyara.” As a male equestrian posing as an equestrienne, he-she sparked a sensation, with many imitators. They included at least one woman pretending to be a man pretending to be a woman, and extended beyond the circus ring
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/904/image/coversmallZoyara Whirligig: Cross-Dressing Circus Delight2026-01-23text/htmlen-USZoyara Whirligig: Cross-Dressing Circus Delight2026-01-232026TWOProject MUSE®1351332026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-01-23The Stratford Edition: The Old “Young America” and an Anachronistic Democratic Shakespeare
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/980366
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In 2013, Peter Whitfield remarked in Illustrating Shakespeare: “In the printed editions, the obvious course for American publishers was to copy from the vast store of printed Shakespeare imagery that had been built up in England in the early nineteenth century.”1 Of more than 160 pages of Whitfield’s work, focusing deliberately on book illustrations in contrast to paintings pertaining to the Shakespearean canon, only six pages are dedicated to the “American Shakespearean Art,” as, according to the author, “the fact seems to be that, in contrast to the painting of Shakespeare subjects, there was little that was innovative or memorable in the printed imagery of Shakespeare in America during these years [the
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/904/image/coversmallThe Stratford Edition: The Old “Young America” and an Anachronistic Democratic Shakespeare2026-01-23text/htmlen-USThe Stratford Edition: The Old “Young America” and an Anachronistic Democratic Shakespeare2026-01-232026TWOProject MUSE®1069772026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-01-23The Postsocialist Posthuman: Gregor Samsa’s Chinese Futures in Li Jianjun’s The Metamorphosis
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/980367
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“When Gregor Samsa woke up one morning from unsettling dreams, he found himself changed in his bed into a
monstrous vermin Chinese delivery driver.”1 This modified quotation of the opening sentence of The Metamorphosis (Die Verwand-lung, 1915) provides a fitting entry point for revisiting Franz Kafka’s classic account of modern alienation in light of China’s postsocialist condition. A localized stage adaptation of the novella by the Beijing-based New Youth Group (Xin qingnian jutuan; NYG) premiered in 2021 at the Aranya Theater Festival in Hebei Province. Directed by Li Jianjun, The Metamorphosis (Bianxing ji) reimagines the fate of Gregor Samsa against the backdrop of twenty-first-century digital capitalism. The
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/904/image/coversmallThe Postsocialist Posthuman: Gregor Samsa’s Chinese Futures in Li Jianjun’s The Metamorphosis2026-01-23text/htmlen-USThe Postsocialist Posthuman: Gregor Samsa’s Chinese Futures in Li Jianjun’s The Metamorphosis2026-01-232026TWOProject MUSE®1385102026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-01-23“Demanding in the Extreme”: Virtuosity and Labor in Bob Fosse’s Dancin’
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/980368
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“Why are there so many injuries in Dancin’?”1 Television talk show host Dick Cavett posed this question directly to Dancin’ director-choreographer Bob Fosse when he appeared on Cavett’s eponymous show in 1980.2 Cavett had a point: Dancers were injured in Fosse’s Broadway dance revue Dancin’ (1978) at a notable and alarming rate. Yet Cavett noted the danger’s appeal, saying, “You’re aware of that when you see it, and it adds to the excitement. It’s like seeing a wire-walking act.”3 Dancin’ gave Broadway audiences dance for dance’s sake to a catholic array of music ranging from Bach to Neil Diamond. Fosse’s choreography demanded virtuosic feats of the Dancin’ cast over its three acts, cementing the show’s reputation
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/904/image/coversmall“Demanding in the Extreme”: Virtuosity and Labor in Bob Fosse’s Dancin’2026-01-23text/htmlen-US“Demanding in the Extreme”: Virtuosity and Labor in Bob Fosse’s Dancin’2026-01-232026TWOProject MUSE®1562922026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-01-23Redface: Race, Performance, and Indigeneity by Bethany Hughes (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/980369
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About a decade ago, on a research fellowship in Berlin, I used the term “red-face” when commenting on a presentation that included photos and discussion of Germans dressed as “Indians.” Clearly, I’d hit a nerve, because the room practically imploded at my use of the term. Oh, if only I’d had Bethany Hughes’s book Redface: Race, Performance, and Indigeneity to share then! Its naming of redface as “the process by which a body is understood as legibly Indian” and discussions of “how the Indian is brought to life in/through a racialized body” onstage would have enabled a thoughtful dialogue of what I’d assumed was an obvious term for the visual markers that signal a performer’s identity as “Indian” (162). Hughes’s
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/904/image/coversmallRedface: Race, Performance, and Indigeneity by Bethany Hughes (review)2026-01-23text/htmlen-USRedface: Race, Performance, and Indigeneity by Bethany Hughes (review)2026-01-232026TWOProject MUSE®101992026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-01-23Queens of Afrobeat: Women, Play, and Fela Kuti’s Music Rebellion by Dotun Ayobade (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/980370
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In Queens of Afrobeat: Women, Play, and Fela Kuti’s Music Rebellion, performance studies scholar Dotun Ayobade centers the women whose labor was consequential to the making of Afrobeat but whose lives and work the archives diminished. In this methodologically rich book, Ayobade brings the reader closer to the Queens—Nigerian musical icon Fela Anikulapo Kuti’s wives and performance partners—to reveal their significant role in the making and popularity of Kuti’s career specifically and Afrobeat music more broadly. We are brought into these women’s complexities as humans, navigating the internal worlds of home and an external obsession with their (erotic) lives that rendered them hypervisible but shallowly understood.
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/904/image/coversmallQueens of Afrobeat: Women, Play, and Fela Kuti’s Music Rebellion by Dotun Ayobade (review)2026-01-23text/htmlen-USQueens of Afrobeat: Women, Play, and Fela Kuti’s Music Rebellion by Dotun Ayobade (review)2026-01-232026TWOProject MUSE®93782026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-01-23Disability Works: Performance After Rehabilitation by Patrick McKelvey (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/980371
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Disability performance studies has, since its inception, largely articulated its academic and political aims in reference to the disability rights movement of the 1970s. Buoyed by the legislative gains of the 504 sit-in and independent living movements, early disability performance scholars often wrote from inside the movement itself, narrating their and their comrades’ performances through the lens of disability culture. To be sure, their work continues to offer tremendous gifts to the field, providing detailed (auto)ethnographic accounts of disabled artists living and working in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Even so, this leaves much research to be done; indeed, much of disability
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/904/image/coversmallDisability Works: Performance After Rehabilitation by Patrick McKelvey (review)2026-01-23text/htmlen-USDisability Works: Performance After Rehabilitation by Patrick McKelvey (review)2026-01-232026TWOProject MUSE®94572026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-01-23Fantasies of Ito Michio by Tara Rodman (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/980372
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Although one of my research specialties is Japanese history and performance, before this book Ito Michio was just that German-trained eurythmic dancer haplessly orientalized (not to mention cross-dressed and species-crossed) by W. B. Yeats in At the Hawk’s Well (1916), hailed as a “noh dancer” by virtue of no more training than holding a Japanese passport. Fantasies of Ito Michio by Tara Rodman thoroughly filled in the copious blanks in my knowledge of this globe-crossing dancer and choreographer, especially in the decades-long career that quickly exceeded the avant-garde specialties that dominate conventional performance history curricula like the ones I have been schooled in. Further, Rodman’s method of following
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/904/image/coversmallFantasies of Ito Michio by Tara Rodman (review)2026-01-23text/htmlen-USFantasies of Ito Michio by Tara Rodman (review)2026-01-232026TWOProject MUSE®85702026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-01-23Enveloping Worlds: Toward a Discourse of Immersive Performance ed. by E. B. Hunter and Scott Magelssen (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/980373
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Having become synonymous with all things experiential across theatre, gaming, and other interactive events, the term “immersive” often operates as a catch-all for a wide range of practices that unleash the audience member from their static positions in orchestra seats to become those submersed in new worlds and fictions. In the collection Enveloping Worlds, editors E. B. Hunter and Scott Magelssen zero in on a set of immersive practices that have yet to be fully examined: those conceptualized and launched within the US patchwork of cultural events. Taking its direction from this geographic and cultural perspective, the volume allows an evolving discourse to emerge, divorced from the heavily European and UK-centric
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/904/image/coversmallEnveloping Worlds: Toward a Discourse of Immersive Performance ed. by E. B. Hunter and Scott Magelssen (review)2026-01-23text/htmlen-USEnveloping Worlds: Toward a Discourse of Immersive Performance ed. by E. B. Hunter and Scott Magelssen (review)2026-01-232026TWOProject MUSE®96332026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-01-23Experiential Spectatorship: Immersion, Participation, and Play During Times of Deep Mediatization by William W. Lewis (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/980374
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With Experiential Spectatorship: Immersion, Participation, and Play During Times of Deep Mediatization, William W. Lewis aims to create a user guide for anyone who has stood before a class of undergraduates in the last several years and thought, “Who are these beings and why do they have so many devices?” Writing from the positionality of “a member of the last years of Generation X” (1), Lewis focuses on the “coming waves of spectators who have formulated their world-view in an era where digital technologies are seamlessly integrated into everyday life and are therefore invisible” (2). The phenomena of “deep mediatization and technogenesis” (7), he posits, have led to a “cultural and subjective digital divide that
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/904/image/coversmallExperiential Spectatorship: Immersion, Participation, and Play During Times of Deep Mediatization by William W. Lewis (review)2026-01-23text/htmlen-USExperiential Spectatorship: Immersion, Participation, and Play During Times of Deep Mediatization by William W. Lewis (review)2026-01-232026TWOProject MUSE®116662026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-01-23Transformismo: Performing Trans/Queer Cuba by M. Myrta Leslie Santana (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/980375
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In October 2024, I had a former graduate student, Dr. Meiver De la Cruz, visit my seminar on ethnography and guest lecture on the meaning, responsibility, and challenges of the method: its working definition, challenges, issues of power, belonging, ethics, and assumptions. I remember her astute summary of what ethnography does. I paraphrase it here: “An attempt at writing and gathering a wholistic interpretation of others through description and/or one’s impressions—it needs the sensorial. It needs the historical and the contemporary, and it definitely needs political economy.”1 She later spoke to how assumptions of knowledge emerge given our positionality and our subsequent relationship with those Others of our
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/904/image/coversmallTransformismo: Performing Trans/Queer Cuba by M. Myrta Leslie Santana (review)2026-01-23text/htmlen-USTransformismo: Performing Trans/Queer Cuba by M. Myrta Leslie Santana (review)2026-01-232026TWOProject MUSE®100412026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-01-23Making Pagans: Theatrical Practice and Comparative Religion in Early Modern England by John Kuhn (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/980376
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John Kuhn’s Making Pagans: Theatrical Practice and Comparative Religion in Early Modern England attends to how English theatre of the seventeenth century constructed presentations of historical and contemporary religious difference. Borrowing methods from the field of repertory studies, Kuhn examines how the material conditions of stagecraft often necessitated the reuse of spectacular set pieces. Such repetitions of staged Roman pagan rituals and beliefs across a variety of non-Roman yet pagan contexts manufactured non-Abrahamic beliefs and practices as a homologous category in the popular imagination of early modern England. These constructions of ethnographic difference, especially as Kuhn argues of Native
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/904/image/coversmallMaking Pagans: Theatrical Practice and Comparative Religion in Early Modern England by John Kuhn (review)2026-01-23text/htmlen-USMaking Pagans: Theatrical Practice and Comparative Religion in Early Modern England by John Kuhn (review)2026-01-232026TWOProject MUSE®94782026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-01-23Dancing on the Fault Lines of History: Selected Essays by Susan Manning (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/980377
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Susan Manning’s methods for analyzing modern and modernist dance through models of spectatorship—how the power dynamics of watching dances determines the historical record—have defined the ways a generation of dance scholars approaches the practice of dance history. Manning’s career-spanning essay collection Dancing on the Fault Lines of History: Selected Essays is a primer in performance-centered historiographic research that interrogates the intersecting vectors of gender, race, sexuality, and transnationalism. The volume traces a history of Manning’s work alongside developments in the field of dance studies over the past forty years, particularly as dance studies, largely due to Manning’s efforts, aligned
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/904/image/coversmallDancing on the Fault Lines of History: Selected Essays by Susan Manning (review)2026-01-23text/htmlen-USDancing on the Fault Lines of History: Selected Essays by Susan Manning (review)2026-01-232026TWOProject MUSE®98112026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-01-23Fraught Balance: The Embodied Politics of Dabke Dance Music in Syria by Shayna M. Silverstein (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/980378
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Shayna Silverstein’s Fraught Balance: The Embodied Politics of Dabke Dance Music in Syria offers an interdisciplinary study of dabke as a dynamic cultural and choreopolitical practice spanning prewar Syria, the ongoing conflict (as of the book’s 2024 publication), and the diaspora. Drawing on ethnography, digital media, and performance studies, Silverstein fluidly navigates between lived experiences and broader national frameworks to examine how sonic, kinesthetic, and visual forms mediate complex entanglements of gender, class, violence, and resistance. The book is organized into three thematic sections, each containing two chapters—”Folkloric Dance,” “Everyday Performance,” and “Conflict and
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/904/image/coversmallFraught Balance: The Embodied Politics of Dabke Dance Music in Syria by Shayna M. Silverstein (review)2026-01-23text/htmlen-USFraught Balance: The Embodied Politics of Dabke Dance Music in Syria by Shayna M. Silverstein (review)2026-01-232026TWOProject MUSE®92662026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-01-23First Lady of Laughs: The Forgotten Story of Jean Carroll, America’s First Jewish Woman Stand-Up Comedian by Grace Kessler Overbeke (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/980379
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From the early twentieth-century vaudeville stage to the worlds of niteries, radio, and television, the four-decade career of Paris-born South Bronxite Jean Carroll carries every page of Grace Kessler Overbeke’s fresh take on our titular “First Lady of Laughs,” the United States’ “forgotten” Jewess pioneer of stand-up comedy. Readers will giggle out loud at Carroll’s recollected gags and cry a little (if like me) at the sensitive parts of the ingénue’s life outside the big lights, which the author includes with evident admiration.Navigating worlds as comic femme and caretaker in ways unfathomable to the “youth fraternity” of her male contemporaries, Carroll straddled the unassimilable roles of Jewish/female/comic
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/904/image/coversmallFirst Lady of Laughs: The Forgotten Story of Jean Carroll, America’s First Jewish Woman Stand-Up Comedian by Grace Kessler Overbeke (review)2026-01-23text/htmlen-USFirst Lady of Laughs: The Forgotten Story of Jean Carroll, America’s First Jewish Woman Stand-Up Comedian by Grace Kessler Overbeke (review)2026-01-232026TWOProject MUSE®88962026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-01-23Erratum
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/980626
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Jill Dolan’s name appeared twice in the credit line whereas LeAnn Fields’s name was omitted. This should have included both names, as both were part of the interview.Whereas Carrie Sandahl and Philip Auslander were both editors for their anthology, it was Sandahl rather than Auslander who wrote the author account that accompanies their book’s image.Our apologies.
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/904/image/coversmallErratum2026-01-23text/htmlen-USErratum2026-01-232026TWOProject MUSE®19192026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-01-23