This Honors Seminar will explore the Broadway musical as a reflection of its time. It will consider the productions of select works and how they relate to social events that were taking place when they opened.
The seminar will begin with a look at the roots of the musical in vaudeville, the variety show, and operetta at the end of the nineteenth century and its emergence as a genre in its own right in the first three decades of the twentieth century. The initial session will also consider the long, complicated process of creating a musical, an effort that involves an artistic team of script writer, book writer, composer, choreographer, director, and others, as well as a financial team of producers, investors, publicists, and others.
The seminar will then turn to specific, ground-breaking works and the social trends they reflect: Anything Goes of 1934 and the Great Depression; Oklahoma! of 1943 and the American Agrarian Myth; Fiddler on the Roof of 1964 and the issue of religious tolerance; or Hamilton of 2015 and the rise of multiculturalism, for instance. In each case the class will consider the music, characters, and plot of the musical and the contemporaneous developments in American society that are mirrored in the work. Students will be given listening and reading assignments for the class sessions, which will include presentations by the instructor and the students and breakout discussions devoted to the issues raised by the works studied. The final session will focus on the future of the Broadway musical and the directions it might take.