Beyond Broadway, Stacy Wolf
Beyond Broadway, Stacy Wolf
List: $24.99 | Sale: $17.50
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Beyond Broadway
The Pleasure and Promise of Musical Theatre Across America

Author: Stacy Wolf

Narrator: Romy Nordlinger

Unabridged: 15 hr 10 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 08/11/2020


Synopsis

The idea of American musical theatre often conjures up images of bright lights and big city, but its lifeblood is found in amateur productions at high schools, community theatres, afterschool programs, summer camps, and dinner theatres. In Beyond Broadway, author Stacy Wolf looks at the widespread presence and persistence of musical theatre in US culture, and examines it as a social practice—a live, visceral experience of creating, watching, and listening. Why does local musical theatre flourish in America? Why do so many Americans continue to passionately engage in a century-old artistic practice that requires intense, person-to-person collaboration? And why do audiences still flock to musicals in their hometowns? Touring American elementary schools, a middle school performance festival, afterschool programs, high schools, summer camps, state park outdoor theatres, community theatres, and dinner theatres from California to Tennessee, Wolf illustrates musical theatre's abundance and longevity in the US as a thriving social activity that touches millions of lives.

About Stacy Wolf

Stacy Wolf is a professor in the Program in Theater in the Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton University. She is also the director of the Program in Music Theater and director of the Princeton Arts Fellows program. She is the author of A Problem Like Maria: Gender and Sexuality in the American Musical, Changed for Good: A Feminist History of the Broadway Musical, and coeditor of The Oxford Handbook of the American Musical.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Jeff on January 31, 2025

I appreciate the story that this book is telling: that in gymnasiums, tiny theaters, outdoor amphitheaters, dining halls, and dance halls all over this country. There is musical theater. That the musical is truly a way of life in the United States is clear, and it’s also clear how much musicals mean......more

Goodreads review by Neil on October 30, 2024

The author's appreciation for theater definitely comes through loud and clear. I was expecting something more about regional theater, but this is actually most prominently about children's theater camps and school theater, then next about community theater, then about dinner theater and other lower......more

Goodreads review by MH on September 18, 2021

Wolf argues that the true heart of the American musical isn't on Broadway but in dinner theaters, community theaters, high school stages and summer camps in this energetic look at these often-ignored (or academically derided) theater institutions. Her love of the subject and enthusiasm for the many,......more

Goodreads review by Lydia on December 17, 2022

Read for thesis. So good and just a cool concept.......more