Contemplating the Afterlife: Musicals in Revival as Pedagogical Intervention

Abstract

Courses that center musical theatre as an object of analysis frequently attract ardent devotees of the form. In order to activate and leverage my students’ existing knowledge, I open these courses with an invitation: identify your favorite musicals and explicate their merits. 1 The students’ fidelity to musical theatre is apparent during this activity as they index and defend their choices with zeal. Among the cataloged titles, recent musicals—works that received their initial first-class production within the past decade—commonly represent a majority. 2 Moreover, several students acknowledge that their enthusiasm for these works derives from having consumed their original productions as performance, whether on Broadway, on tour, or as a bootleg video. When I ask them to expound on their love for a given musical, they frequently conflate its textual elements (libretto, lyrics, and score) with the original production’s mise-en-scène (directorial concept, design, and choreography) and thereby suggest that an inaugural production represents the musical’s apotheosis. In their estimation, a musical’s legibility hinges on its original mise-en-scène. For example, Hamilton (2015) is not merely a musical composition penned by Lin-Manuel Miranda but rather a composite text that necessarily includes David Korins’s scenery, Paul Tazewell’s costumes, and Andy Blankenbuehler’s movement vocabulary. 3 My students later confirm their orientation toward musical theatre when they assess productions staged at their high schools or community theatres. The most frequently invoked measurement of success is the degree to which a creative team emulates the given musical’s original first-class production. Through their discussion of favorite works and prior spectatorship, many students unwittingly contend that a musical’s inaugural production is indistinguishable from the musical itself. I