FALL 2007 HONORS COURSES

HONR 238D The Contemporary American Musical Theatre: From Hair to Hairspray
Monday and Wednesday 12:00-1:15
Dr. Korey Rothman, Department of Theatre

As America’s first indigenous entertainment, musical theatre has long been considered a quaint form of Americana and a staple of American popular entertainment. But looking just beneath the surface, one sees that the American musical has always served a critical social function that moves far beyond simple paeans to the golden haze on Oklahoma meadows. With its popular appeal and widespread audiences, the musical has been a fruitful place to critique American ideologies and institutions. And as America became more critical and rebellious in the turbulence during and following the Vietnam War, the musical followed suit.

This course will begin with the Vietnam-era musical Hair in order to consider how the American musical of the late twentieth century is a contested site – simultaneously a source of popular entertainment and profit and a means to make important political and social critiques. The course will move from the Concept Musicals of the 1970s, to the profit-driven Mega-Musicals and nostalgic revivals that dominated the 1980s, to the “Disneyification” of Broadway in the 1990s, to the current trend toward pastiche and satire, in order to explore the ways the musical has variously paralleled, reified, and challenged larger trends in the American landscape. The course will emphasize issues of race, ethnicity, sexuality, and class, in order to consider how America’s, and consequently the musical’s, treatment of those subjects has shifted in the last four decades.

Course assignments will include quizzes, regular journal entries, written reviews of live theatre, and oral class presentations. For the final project, students will work in a group to choose a source text (novel, film, short story, current event) to adapt to a new musical. The group will not write the musical but instead develop a “pitch” to sell their adaptation, emphasizing the ways they will make their musical adaptation relevant to a contemporary audience. This assignment requires extensive research, and students will submit their research in a written process paper as well as in an oral class presentation.

Because of the performative nature of musical theatre (and the limitations of some of the available resources) this class will require a combination of reading librettos, listening to cast recordings, watching available video recordings, and attending live performances.

Readings:
The Musical, by Richard Kislan
And selections from: Our Musicals, Ourselves: A Social History of the American Musical Theatre, by John Bush Jones; and A Problem Like Maria: Gender and Sexuality in the American Musical, by Stacy Wolf

Musicals for reading and/or viewing may include:
A Chorus Line
Assassins
Avenue Q
Cabaret
Cats
Company
Dreamgirls
Evita
Gypsy
Hair
Hairspray
Into the Woods
Oklahoma!
Parade
Rent
Spring Awakening
Sweeney Todd
Urinetown
Wicked

CORE: History or Theory of the Arts [HA] and Human Cultural Diversity [D]