Book DescriptionIn this fresh approach to musical theatre history, Bruce Kirle challenges the commonly understood trajectory of the genre Drawing on the notion that the world of the author stays fixed while the world of the audience is ever-changing, Kirle suggests that musicals are open, fluid products of the particular cultural moment in which озалд they are performed Incomplete as printed texts and scores, musicals take on unpredictable lives of their own in the complex transformation from page to stage Using lenses borrowed from performance studies, cultural studies, queer studies, and ethnoracial studies, Unfinished Show Business: Broadway Musicals as Works-in-Process argues that musicals are as interesting for the provocative issues they raise about shifting attitudes toward American identity as for their show-stopping song and dance numbers and conveniently happy endings Kirle illustrates how performers such as Ed Wynn, Fanny Brice, and the Marx Brothers used their charismatic personalities and quirkiness to provide insights into the struggle of marginalized ethnoracial groups to assimilate Using examples from favorites including Oklahoma!, Fiddler on the Roof, A Chorus Line, and Les Misérables, Kirle demonstrates Broadways ability to bridge seemingly insoluble tensions in society from economic and political anxiety surrounding World War II through generational conflict and youth counterculture to corporate America and the "me" generation Enlivened by a gallery of some of Broadways most memorable momentsand some amusingly obscure ones as wellthis study will appeal to students, scholars, and lifelong musical theater enthusiasts "Bruce Kirle reassesses America's most distinctive and popular theatrical form, the Broadway musical, and demonstrates it to be an enormously complex social phenomenon By analyzing performance conventions-indeed, everything that never makes it into the published libretto or score-he sheds new light on many of the musicals we thought we knew so well " David Savran, author of A Queer Sort of Materialism: Recontextualizing American Theater "Sweeping through the twentieth century, Unfinished Show Business offers a new perspective on the function of the American musical and its importance to international theatre Kirles book will become a standard study of the form " Judith Milhous, The CUNY Graduate Center "Bruce Kirle argues that musicals are read by their audiences in theatres, not as scripts in libraries He makes a compelling case for musical theatre as an embodied practice of artmaking inevitably connected to its historical context and the presence of the bodies who create it Through personal anecdote, built from his long years working as a musical director on and off Broadway and on the road, and through meticulous research and nuanced analysis, Kirle creates a vibrant, usable past for a form too often approached through tired linear histories and hagiographies Unfinished Show Business is a must-read for musical theatre fans, scholars, and artists alike "Jill Dolan, University of Texas at Austin.  Книга ИЛукашовой2005 г 252 стр ISBN 0809326663.