Prof. David Savran (City University of New York):

“The Globalization of the Broadway-Style Musical”

 

Abstract:

In the twenty-first century, live performance enjoys unprecedented mobility. Music and theatre circulate across six continents and are disseminated across countless platforms. Among theatre forms, the Broadway-style musical has become exceptionally nomadic and pervasive, not only as a discrete canon (composed of large-scale works such as The Lion King and Phantom of the Opera) which travels globally but also, and more importantly, as a set of musical theatrical conventions and vernaculars uniquely adaptable to local traditions. Because no theatrical form is as chameleon-like as the musical, it has become a template for popular music theatre around the world. This talk surveys its circulation transnationally and answers the question: why has the Broadway-style musical swept the world?

 

My paper argues that the Broadway-style musical has become global currency because of its self-conscious theatricality and its particular admixture of spoken dialogue, popular song, and dance which makes it, in Stephen Banfield’s words, “more dramatically agile” than other forms of music theatre. Despite the unmistakable associations of the musical with the United States (and specifically with New York City), its agility has allowed it to become indigenized in many locales, where it often serves as a medium for the dramatization of cultural nationalist myths and the incorporation of heritage performance. Moreover, although the Broadway musical historically represents a large-scale mode of production, it has become uniquely adaptable to smaller-scale work, including performance that is often categorized as experimental or avant-garde. To illustrate my thesis, I study the migration of Broadway-style music theatre to South Korea and Germany and survey its contradictory affective and social power as both a cosmopolitan vernacular and a nationalist memory machine.