Since the release of Baz Luhrmann's Moulin Rouge! in 2001, the film musical has returned to popularity as one of the most important cinematic genres, with box office hits that appeal to audiences of all ages. Yet the history of the musical on film goes back over seven decades earlier, stretching from early examples like The Jazz Singer (1927), the first ever film with synchronized sound, through the Astaire-Rogers musicals of the 1930s, the MGM and Warner Brothers extravaganzas of the 1940s and '50s, and the roadshow era of the 1960s. The genre's renaissance with La La Land (2016) and The Greatest Showman (2017) proves that it remains as appealing as ever, capable of both high critical acclaim and widespread box office success.
The Oxford Handbook of the Hollywood Musical, curated by editor Dominic Broomfield-McHugh, reflects and expands on current scholarship on the film musical in a handbook that mixes new discoveries through archival research with new perspectives on familiar titles. It addresses issues such as why audiences accept people bursting into song in musicals; how technology affects the way numbers are staged; and how writers have adapted their material to suit certain stars. It also looks at critical issues such as racism and sexism, and assesses the role and nature of the film musical in the twenty-first century. A remarkable survey at the cutting edge of the field, The Oxford Handbook of the Hollywood Musical will be a resource for students and scholars alike for years to come.
Author(s): Dominic Broomfield-McHugh
Series: Oxford Handbooks
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Year: 2022
Language: English
Pages: 664
City: New York
Cover
The Oxford Handbook of the Hollywood Musical
Copyright
Dedication
Contents
Acknowledgments
List of Contributors
About the Companion Website
The Hollywood Musical and the Critical Lens: An Introduction
Part I. The Conventions of Breaking Into Song and Dance
1. Expressive Thresholds and Anomalous Utterances
2. “Make Like You’re Singing It”: Performing Musical Texture in Judy Garland’s Early Films
3. Revealing the Subconscious: The Dream Ballet in Movie Musicals
4. Singing and Dancing in Widescreen: The Extreme Aesthetics of the Mid-1950s Studio Musical Number
Part II. The Musical’s Othering Impulse
5. From Snow White to the Snow Queen: Voicing the Disney Princess
6. “Going Places”: Musical Latins in Latin Musicals
7. Performing Whiteness through the First-Generation American Immigrant Experience from Viennese Nights to Pitch Perfect
8. “Cubanenic, Carabenic, Castalenic, Harlemenic”: Reclaiming Blackness in Lena Horne’s Film Musicals
9. “I’d Do Anything” or Export Strategies for a Culturally Specific Product: Dubbing, Subtitling, and Cutting the Hollywood Musical for the German-Austrian Market
Part III. Production Histories
10. “Hear the Beat of Dancing Feet”: 42nd Street (1933) and the “New” Film Musical
11. When Fred Lost Ginger: Thoughts on the Genesis and Legacy of A Damsel in Distress
12. “The Perfect Nanny”: Casting in Disney’s Mary Poppins and the Children’s Musical
13. Developing the Screenplay for Singin’ in the Rain (1952)
14. Night and Day, the Musical
Part IV. Stars
15. The Problem of Playing Oneself: Oscar Levant and the Hollywood Musical
16. “Hard to Replace”: The Shadow of Judy Garland and the Artistic Remarriage of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers in The Barkleys of Broadway
17. “The Same Story Told Over and Over”: The Mythology of Stardom in the Musical A Star Is Born Films
18. The Auteur as Ghost Star: Vincente Minnelli’s Framings of Judy Garland
19. Esther Williams’s Latin Lovers
Part V. After the Studio System
20. Xanadu and the Musical’s History of Failure
21. “An Inescapable Failure”: The Little Prince, Realism, and the Golden Age
22. Yentl, Barbra Streisand, and Music of the Mind
Part VI. Musical Renaissance, Musical Reflexivity
23. Theatricality, Artifice, and Affective Space in the Works of Baz Luhrmann
24. Musical Television: Smash, the Backstager, and the Broadway Musical on TV
25. The Virtuosic Camera: Nostalgia, Technology, and the Contemporary Hollywood Musical
26. P. T. Barnum Reinvented for the Twenty-First Century
Selected Bibliography
Index
