This dissertation examines a range of musicals to understand how and why the features that make a musical a musical are used to tell history. I argue that the historical musical is a distinctive historiographic mode that intertwines these affordances to include multiple histories. In Soft Power (2018), a musical I explore in this dissertation, David Henry Hwang introduces the idea of the “delivery system” of the musical as a particularly effective way to tell stories in both cognitive registers and affective registers. As one of the characters in the musical states, “once those violins start playing, these shows go straight to our hearts.”
Many of the most beloved and most experimental musicals from the canon depict and deal with historical events. I argue that the musicals I study interpret important historical events, and do so by means of their formal properties, often intertwining several layers of history which can be experienced simultaneously by an audience.This dissertation close reads two musicals per chapter based on their historical contexts, both when they are set and when they are written. These musicals are paired together based on their shared thematic/historical and formal concerns. Soft Power responds directly to the imperialist attitudes and multiple histories at work in The King and I (1951), while both musicals consider what it means to be an American across a wide expanse of time.
I focus on 1776 (1969) and Hamilton (2015) and their responses to issues such as slavery, the role of women, and war as these responses are shaped by the politics and contexts of the moment in which they were written. I pair two shows by John Kander and Fred Ebb, Cabaret (1966) and The Scottsboro Boys (2010), due to their formal similarities in using the entertainment styles from the period in which the shows are set to comment on both entertainment and history.
My final chapter pairs Pacific Overtures (1976) and Assassins (1990), shows co-written by John Weidman and Stephen Sondheim, both of which critique American mythologies of historical progress. Because of the many layers that make a musical (choreography, song, orchestrations, text, and stars to name a few) there are many possibilities for layering multiple histories into any one musical. In conclusion, musical theatre is often considered fun and pleasurable, which it absolutely can be, but it also does complex historical and political work using a surprisingly sophisticated historiography to do that work.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:columbia.edu/oai:academiccommons.columbia.edu:10.7916/cfp5-3h36 |
| Date | January 2023 |
| Creators | Potter, Anne Melissa |
| Source Sets | Columbia University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Theses |
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