Cultural collaborations: Re -historicizing the American musical

“Cultural Collaborations: Re-Historicizing the American Musical” is a sociology of musical theatre—a mutual genealogy of influence—that posits that the text must be studied in conjunction with performance, reception, and cultural and social contextualization if historical meaning is to be created. I identify musicals as documents that reflect shifting arrangements of class, gender, ethnicity, and race in America during the twentieth century. Since musicals are the most collaborative of theatrical forms, I argue against histories which privilege the text, rather than the gaps and absences created by performance, reception, and historical relativism, the cultural moment that produced the product.;Musicals are cultural collaborations in the broadest sense. The text collaborates with performers, the performers collaborate in production, and all this is “read” by audiences during a given cultural moment. I contextualize the musical in terms of shifting leisure patterns, changing class structures, and socially constructed representations of identity to trace the musical's reflexive influence on American culture. Historians who try to understand the American musical through linking texts in a linear order miss the cultural interchange between performance and reception that helps create meaning.;Musicals are at once conservative and progressive, hegemonic and subversive. I frame the musical in terms of the Anglo-melting pot aesthetic, cultural pluralism, and muticulturalism. Like opera seria, the non-integrated musical venerated the performer as co-creator in a text that was never meant to be fixed. The playful theatricalist performativity of stars like Jolson, Cantor, Merman, and Channing transgressed perceived notions of essentialist identity. On the other hand, the integrated musical, which has been privileged along the Oscar Hammerstein model, borrows from realism, expressionism, and epic theatre. It often tackles serious social problems, as in the concept musical, but offers utopic solutions that hegemony itself can provide, which reflects neo-Gramscian cultural theorists like Richard Dyer and John Fiske.;Using both cultural studies and performance studies approaches, I argue that musicals thrive on ambiguity, incompleteness, and openness. By privileging only the text, historians destroy what makes musical theatre alive and vital: its complex relationship to its historical moment of creation and performance.