Theatre in Context: Analysis & Research (140-2-20)

Topic

Musical Theatre Revivals & Revisals

Instructors

Janine Ellen Chow

Meeting Info

Wirtz 235 Seminar Room 1: Tues, Thurs 12:30PM - 1:50PM

Overview of class

This course interrogates musical theatre in re-performance, from Dani Goldberg's Funny Girl (Northwestern 2023) to Daniel Fish's Oklahoma! (Broadway 2019). The musical theatre is literate in its own history. When a show is revived—on Broadway, in community theatre, on campus, even online—it recognizes and responds to the original production of that text. In revival, old stories collide with new contexts, and live in new bodies. What endures? What changes? This course examines musical revivals as a complex conversation between text and context, inflected by collaborative creative choices of the director, designer, actor, choreographer, and theater. In particular, students will look to the American musical theatre's history of exclusion, and how revivals succeed or fail at striving for inclusion. Students in this class will engage in multi-modal analysis of performance text, along with archival reconstruction of past productions. These skills will be developed in a class-long paper sequence that culminates in a research paper incorporating primary analysis and secondary sources.

Class Materials (Required)

*This class requires you to attend the 81st Dolphin Show, Kinky Boots, which runs on weekends from January 19 to 27. Tickets range from $10 - $35. We will discuss the show in Week 5, on January 30. | All other texts/media will be posted to Canvas or available online.
$1-25

Enrollment Requirements

Enrollment Requirements: Reserved for Theatre Majors and Minors