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
Oxford Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs , and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us .
