Introduction: “Defying Gravity”
Introduction: “Defying Gravity”
This chapter introduces the key ideas and assumptions of the book. The Broadway musical is a commercial form of entertainment intended to please its audiences. The musical necessarily relates to its social and cultural historical context, sometimes directly and sometimes obliquely. Musical theatre is a collaborative performance form comprised of numerous intricately related elements, and those elements are used and re-used, adapted and revised in conventional ways within the genre. In this way, the musical is always in conversation with its own history. Gender functions as a conventional element of the musical, especially because many musicals are organized around the formation of a heterosexual couple. Thus, the musical relates to images of women in mainstream culture, often in surprisingly feminist ways. This book argues that the very form and structure of musical theatre is intertwined with the history of women in U.S. culture.
Keywords: convention, feminism, collaboration, commercial, heterosexual couple, women, entertainment, pleasure, history of women
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