Courses

This course offers a critical introduction to the development and history of American musical theatre. We will examine the musical theatre canon, beginning with Shuffle Along in 1921 and finishing with Hamilton in 2015, to understand how the musical developed as an American theatrical form. We will also consider how the musical responds to the cultural and historical moment surrounding it. As David Savran has written even for “many devotees of the so-called straight theatre, musical theatre remains (at best) a guilty pleasure – a little too gay, too popular, too Jewish, and too much damned fun.” This course will analyze the theatrical form of that “guilty pleasure.” We will pay particular attention to what these musicals tell us about race, gender, ethnicity, and sexuality in America. Our class discussions will focus on contextualizing the various affordances of the musical and closely analyzing the specifically musical attributes of a show. This course will invite students to develop in-depth readings of musicals by analyzing the genre’s formal components: music, lyrics, book, orchestrations, and choreography. Throughout the course we will pay particular attention to a set of key questions: how do these musicals represent what it means to be an American? Who is marginalized in musicals and who is centered, and how do musicals change when they are revived? How do musicals represent and engage with changing conceptions of race and gender? What does the experience of watching a musical do to an audience, and how does the experience create a plurality of possible meanings at different historical moments? While we will listen to music in this course, the ability to read music is not required.