Maternal Representations In Twenty First Century Broadway Musicals

Maternal Representations in Twenty-First Century Broadway Musicals: Stage Mothers analyzes Broadway productions within the context of their presentation and assessment of motherhood and the variety of roles for mother figures. Using a frame of feminist and psychoanalytical positions, Gina MacKenzie establishes, defines, and interprets mother figures in contemporary Broadway, according to original categorizations of the absent, inconsequential, and overbearing mothers. MacKenzie considers how and why commercial representation of mother figures are limited and predominantly negative, even as fiction, poetry, and other forms of drama offer a much wider and progressive view of the varieties of motherhood possible in society, asserting the need for greater representation of mother figures in commercial musical theatre today.

This anthology examines maternity in contemporary performance at the intersection of a wide range of topics from nationhood to mental health, queer parenting, embodied dramaturgy, cultural practice, and immigration. Across the breadth of these themes, we interrogate the cultural implications and politics of how we script, perform, receive, and define mothers, challenging many of the normalizing and patriarchal tropes associated with the mother-as-character. This book includes critical essays examining twenty-first century dramatic literature, first-hand ethnographic accounts of motherhood in practice, interviews, feminist manifestos, and artist reflections. In its deliberately curated variety, this collection seeks to resist homogeneity and offer instead a range of approaches to key questions: what versions of motherhood get staged, and why? And what do dramatic representations tell us about the role of mothers in our own fraught contemporary moment? This collection will be of great interest to those in academia who are teaching, researching, or studying in the fields of Theatre and Performance Studies, American Studies, and Feminist and Gender Studies.

Disciplines from literary studies to environmentalism have recently undergone a spectacular reorientation that has refocused entire fields, methodologies, and vocabularies on the world and its sister terms such as globe, planet, and earth. The Bloomsbury Handbook of World Theory examines what “world” means and what it accomplishes in different zones of academic study. The contributors raise questions such as: What happens when “world” is appended to a particular form of humanistic or scientific inquiry? How exactly does “worlding” bear on the theoretical operating system and the history of that field? What is the theory or theoretical model that allows “world” to function in a meaningful way in coordination with that knowledge domain? With contributions from 38 leading theorists from a vast range of fields, including queer studies, religion, and pop culture, this is the first large reference work to consider the profound effect, both within and outside the academy, of the worlding of discourse in the 21st century.

Why the Theatre is a collection of 26 personal essays by college teachers, actors, directors, and playwrights about the magnetic pull of the theatre and its changing place in society. The book is divided into four parts, examining the creative role of the audience, the life of the actor, director, and playwright in performance, ways the theatre moves beyond the playhouse and into the real world, and theories and thoughts on what the theatre can do when given form onstage. Based on concrete, highly personal examples, experiences, and memories, this collection offers unique perspectives on the meaning of the theatre and the beauty of weaving the world of the play into the fabric of our lives. Covering a range of practices and plays, from the Greeks to Japanese Butoh theatre, from Shakespeare to modern experiments, this book is written by and for the theatre instructor and theatre appreciation student.

20 Seasons: Broadway Musicals of the 21st Century catalogues, categorizes, and analyzes the 269 musicals that opened on Broadway from the 2000-2001 season through the 2019-2020 season. This book is the first to comprehensively examine the musicals that premiered on Broadway during this important historical period, which was bookended by the 9/11 terrorist attacks on one end and the Coronavirus pandemic on the other. It begins by exploring the historical context for the first 20 years of the 21st century and how this impacted American culture and theatre. Rather than chronologically, the musicals are then organized into categories based on their source material and whether they were original musicals or revivals, painting a detailed picture of the Broadway musical in first 20 years of the 21st century. Jukebox musicals, screen-to-stage musicals, revivals, and other original musicals are all covered, and each chapter ends with reading guides and discussion prompts. The book not only discusses what was produced, but by whom, uncovering the stark lack of representation for women and artists of color on Broadway musical creative and design teams. Additionally, the last chapter discusses the COVID-19 pandemic, the Broadway shutdown, and what happened to the Broadway musical during the shutdown, including the response to the Black Lives Matter movement in the summer of 2020. 20 Seasons: Broadway Musicals of the 21st Century will appeal to fans and scholars of musical theatre, as well as students of Musical Theatre, Musical Theatre History, American Studies, and Pop Culture Studies.

The Decades of Modern American Playwriting series provides a comprehensive survey and study of the theatre produced in each decade from the 1930s to 2009 in eight volumes. Each volume equips readers with a detailed understanding of the context from which work emerged: an introduction considers life in the decade with a focus on domestic life and conditions, social changes, culture, media, technology, industry and political events; while a chapter on the theatre of the decade offers a wide-ranging and thorough survey of theatres, companies, dramatists, new movements and developments in response to the economic and political conditions of the day. The work of the four most prominent playwrights from the decade receives in-depth analysis and re-evaluation by a team of experts, together with commentary on their subsequent work and legacy. A final section brings together original documents such as interviews with the playwrights and with directors, drafts of play scenes, and other previously unpublished material. The major playwrights and their plays to receive in-depth coverage in this volume include: * Tony Kushner: Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes, Part One and Part Two (1991), Slavs! Thinking About the Longstanding Problems of Virtue and Happiness (1995) and A Dybbuk, or Between Two Worlds (1997); * Paula Vogel: Baltimore Waltz (1992), The Mineola Twins (1996) and How I Learned to Drive (1997); * Suzan-Lori Parks: The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World (1990), The America Play (1994) and Venus (1996); * Terrence McNally: Lips Together, Teeth Apart (1991), Love! Valour! Compassion! (1997) and Corpus Christi (1998).

The belief that the Virgin Mary was bodily assumed to be crowned as heaven’s Queen has been celebrated in the liturgy and literature of England since the fifth century. The upheaval of the Reformation brought radical changes in the beliefs surrounding the assumption and coronation, both of which were eliminated from state-approved liturgy. Queen of Heaven examines canonical as well as obscure images of the Blessed Mother that present fresh evidence of the incompleteness of the English Reformation. Through an analysis of works by writers such as Edmund Spenser, Henry Constable, Sir John Harington, and the writers of the early modern rosary books, which were contraband during the Reformation, Grindlay finds that these images did not simply disappear during this time as lost “Catholic” symbols, but instead became sources of resistance and controversy, reflecting the anxieties triggered by the religious changes of the era. Grindlay’s study of the Queen of Heaven affords an insight into England’s religious pluralism, revealing a porousness between medieval and early modern perspectives toward the Virgin and dispelling the notion that Catholic and Protestant attitudes on the subject were completely different. Grindlay reveals the extent to which the potent and treasured image of the Queen of Heaven was impossible to extinguish and remained of widespread cultural significance. Queen of Heaven will appeal to an academic audience, but its fresh, uncomplicated style will also engage intelligent, well-informed readers who have an interest in the Virgin Mary and in English Reformation history.