According to the Oxford University Press website, “The Oxford Handbook Series brings together the world's leading scholars to write review essays that evaluate the current thinking on a field or topic, and make an original argument about the future direction of the debate. Articles review the key issues, reveal original arguments and concepts, and set the agenda for new research.”Footnote 1The Oxford Handbook of the American Musical fulfills this charge in twenty-nine essays that explore the American musical through various lenses of critical inquiry and analyses of case studies.
The volume exists in three formats—hardcover (published 2011), online (www.oxfordhandbooks.com; published 2012), and paperback (published 2013). Importantly, the collection has a companion website, the address, username, and password for which are included in the printed volume. On the website's “Resources” section, links appear for nearly 200 audio and video examples (many of the video examples are on YouTube), illustrations, and short essays. (These short essays may be considered extended footnotes.) The website is extremely useful and precludes the need for musical examples and illustrations in the book.
The essays are written for non-specialists, though scholars and students of musical theater will also find them useful. The self-contained entities can be read, assigned, and enjoyed as independent items. Indeed, at Oxford Handbooks Online, one can locate the essays as discrete entities, separate from the volume in which they appear.
A wide variety of approaches appears in the volume, ranging from the highly theoretical to thoughtful and focused case studies to a combination of the two. This breadth is evident in chapters 10, 11, and 12. In chapter 10, “The Filmed Musical,” two of the Handbook's coeditors, Raymond Knapp and Mitchell Morris, offer three theoretical lenses through which the genre can be viewed: 1) through modes that evoke reality and artifice, including Knapp's own MERM (Musically Enhanced Reality Mode); 2) by investigating how songs are presented; and 3) via camp elements in terms of both presentation and reception. Chapter 11, Robynn J. Stilwell's “The Television Musical,” by contrast, offers a comparative analysis of the three versions of Rodgers and Hammerstein's television musical Cinderella (1957, 1965, and 1997), emphasizing their performance and cinematic aspects and referring only briefly to other types of television musicals.Footnote 2 Susan Smith blends the two paradigms in chapter 12, “The Animated Film Musical.” After providing insights into the cinematic approaches of Soviet filmmaker and writer Sergei Eisenstein, she ably demonstrates their influence in Walt Disney's animated films by applying Eisenstein's ideas to the animism and utopianism of the “Pink Elephants on Parade” sequence from Dumbo (1941) and subsequently to issues of race in The Jungle Book (1967). This particular succession of three notably different approaches provides a variety of models for future studies, although it causes a slight disruption to the general flow of the volume as a whole.
The essays are arranged into six categories: 1) Historiography, 2) Transformations, 3) Media, 4) Identities, 5) Performance, and 6) Audiences. If read in succession the reader would first encounter essays on the various components of a musical (“Part I. Historiography”) before moving on to chapters that trace milestone issues in the development of the genre (“Part II. Transformations”). Next come discussions of genres in which musicals are experienced: live theater, film, television, animated films, and cast albums (“Part III. Media”). Contexts existing in and around musicals unify the next set of chapters (“Part IV. Identities”) before the volume heads into the realm of performance (“Part V, Performance”). The journey concludes with contributions that concern audiences themselves (“Part VI. Audiences”).
The first set of chapters, “Historiography,” provides vocabulary and offers solid review essays on the constituent parts of the musical. After Mitchell Morris's “Narratives and Values,” in which he outlines large-scale frameworks for studying the musical, Jim Lovensheimer offers vital insights on the roles of collaboration and (multiple) authorship in his chapter, “Texts and Authors.” The remaining two chapters in the section afford informative overviews of two defining elements of the musical: music (“Musical Styles and Song Conventions” by Paul R. Laird) and dance (“Evolution of Dance in the Golden Age of the American ‘Book Musical’” by Liza Gennaro).
The second section, “Transformations,” is largely chronological in its organization. Thomas L. Riis offers important insights in “Minstrelsy and Theatrical Miscegenation” whereas Knapp and Morris explore the relationship between popular song and musical theater and film in “Tin Pan Alley Songs on Stage and Screen before World War II.” Geoffrey Block provides especially useful commentary on the idea of integration, one of the most talked-about aspects of the musical in current scholarship, in his chapter, “Integration.” Block provides not only a discussion of the concept itself but also its treatment in the larger historiography of musical theater. Jessica Sternfeld and Elizabeth L. Wollman then investigate issues affecting the contemporary musical, such as economics, spectacle (visual and aural), venue, advertising and marketing, nostalgia, and revisionism, in the final chapter of the section, “After the ‘Golden Age.’”
“Media,” the third large section, begins with Tamsen Wolff's thought-provoking essay, “Theater,” which explores the ideas of live performance and how communities are formed through singing and dancing, both onstage and in the audience. Following the three chapters discussed earlier (those on the filmed musical, the television musical, and the animated film musical), the section ends with George Reddick's essay “The Evolution of the Original Cast Album,” which includes information on the history of the Broadway cast album and explores how digital downloading is changing how listeners relate to a Broadway show recording.
The authors of the fourth section of essays, “Identities,” explore the performance of identity in musical theater, including Todd Decker on “Race, Ethnicity, Performance,” Stacy Wolf on “Gender and Sexuality,” Chase A. Bringardner on “The Politics of Region and Nation in American Musicals,” and David Savran on “Class and Culture.” The fifth section, “Performance,” includes chapters on the various types of individuals and institutions that bring musicals to the stage. These contributions are especially useful in that they demonstrate the many disciplines that come together in the creation of musical theater performance. David Sanjek, in “The Institutional Structure of the American Musical Theater,” offers insights into the roles of producers, publishers, publicists, and property owners, using Show Boat as a case study, whereas Dominic Symonds, in “Orchestration and Arrangement: Creating the Broadway Sound,” introduces the specific practices of important orchestrators such as Victor Herbert, Frank Saddler, and Robert Russell Bennett and considers the roles of amplification, virtual orchestra machines, and copyright in determining the sound of the Broadway pit. Barbara Wallace Grossman provides a history of “Musical Theatre Directors,” discussing the work of legendary figures such as Bob Fosse, Michael Bennett, and Harold (Hal) Prince. In his chapter, “Acting,” John M. Clum addresses the importance of interpretation, using the role of Mama Rose in Gypsy as a comparative case study. In “Singing,” Morris and Knapp provide a systematic overview of vocal production and voice types. Zachary A. Dorsey, in “Dance and Choreography,” offers a methodology for analyzing musical theater dance, especially as it appears in film, and applies his approach to the “Bye-Bye Life” sequence from the 1979 Bob Fosse movie All that Jazz.
“Audiences,” the sixth and final section, explores what happens beyond the stage itself. Steven Adler, in “Box Office,” explores the relationship between money and art in musical theater and bases much of the chapter on new interviews with individuals involved in the Broadway industry. In “Audiences and Critics,” Michelle Dvoskin discusses different types of audiences (live theater, film, and home viewing) as well as various ways in which professional critics and avid fans share their impressions, whether in print or online. This discussion leads nicely into Holley Replogle-Wong's “Stars and Fans,” which investigates the idea of making stars and creating star vehicles (such as Gypsy), along with notions of fan and fandom. Jennifer Chapman, in “Knowing Your Audience,” delves into the world of community theater and high school productions and illuminates the significance of these forums in the larger realm of musical theater. Knapp then concludes the volume with a summative essay, “Performance, Authenticity, and the Reflexive Idealism of the American Musical.” Through discussions of Bye Bye Birdie, Candide, and Man of La Mancha, Knapp investigates issues of authenticity in the inherently artificial art form of musical theater as well as ideas of interpretation and re-creation.
When read cover to cover, it becomes apparent that multiple discussions of the same show (most notably Show Boat and Gypsy) occur in various chapters, though from different perspectives. These repeated references hint at the notion that a small set of musicals have achieved some sort of canonic status. It is refreshing to see individual shows addressed in multiple contexts rather than solely as solitary entities—this is one of the volume's strengths and reflects the different ways in which a single show can be viewed within the tapestry of musical theater. It is also a liability, since details about certain shows are repeated in multiple chapters. As a collection of independent essays, the volume largely succeeds, for it offers explorations into many facets of musical theater, a number of which have hitherto not received this type of treatment. When taken as an organic whole, however, the book's shortcomings become evident, particularly the unevenness of scholarly depth and inquiry among the essays and the awkward balance between summaries of somewhat basic material on one hand and new, probing insights on the other. In short, because of the individual essays and the avenues they explore, the Oxford Handbook to the American Musical is a noteworthy contribution to the field of musical theater studies.
