Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Date of Degree

9-2024

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Ph.D.

Program

Theatre and Performance

Advisor

David Savran

Committee Members

Elizabeth L. Wollman

Edward Miller

Subject Categories

Acting | Dramatic Literature, Criticism and Theory | Playwriting | Theatre History

Keywords

Broadway, Hollywood, Nostalgia

Abstract

In this dissertation, I examine how Broadway staged classical Hollywood between 1960 and 1990 amid social, artistic, and industrial upheaval. While upheaval and experimentation are constants even during epochs of apparent stability, the story my dissertation tells is of an industry facing the perils of obsolescence by looking backward and westward to understand how its larger and more powerful culture industry sibling navigated similar moments of disruption. Building on Fredric Jameson’s notion of the “nostalgia film,” I contend that between 1960 and 1990 the nine “nostalgia musicals” under consideration served the same function for the Broadway musical that the nostalgia film served for the cinema. By appropriating nostalgia for classical Hollywood films, culture, and modes of production, nostalgia musicals made legitimate subject matter of Hollywood’s history, preparing Broadway for Hollywood’s newest encroachments around the turn of the millennium.

Though this dissertation is historiographic, I proceed thematically instead of chronologically, tracing connections between the musicals’ historical moments (on Broadway and in wider U.S. culture) and the moments of their settings (in Hollywood and in wider U.S. culture). Each musical provides a unique inflection on the larger topic and increases the points of contact across musicals and historical periods. To emphasize the continuing contemporaneity of these issues and questions, each chapter employs a 21st century screen-to-stage musical as a framing device. I first explore issues of genre and reception in Fade Out/Fade In (1964), A Day in Hollywood/A Night in the Ukraine (1980), and City of Angels (1989), framed by 2002’s Sweet Smell of Success. I then explore how some nostalgia musicals stage issues of labor and production, including the resurrection of the Silent Era serial queen in Goldilocks (1958), the anti-union rhetoric of What Makes Sammy Run? (1964), based on a book by Hollywood insider and HUAC “friendly witness” Budd Schulberg, and the representation of “below-the-line” labor in Singin’ in the Rain (1985). Tootsie (2019) frames the labor discussion. Finally, I explore matters of gender and celebrity in Mack & Mabel (1974), Platinum (1978), and Marilyn: An American Fable (1983), framed by King Kong (2018).

This dissertation challenges the ways in which scholars tend to inscribe a one-size-fits-all nostalgia as an immanent feature of the Broadway musical form. Even though I argue that the nine musicals examined in this dissertation paved the way for the Hollywood turn of the 1990s, that work was not part of a concerted effort by either Hollywood studios or Broadway producers, and as such resists teleology. If nostalgia functions outside of linear notions of time, it requires a non-linear, prismatic lens to articulate. I acknowledge that we can only understand these musicals, and nostalgia’s operations therein, in relation to the other points in time and space with which they dialogue. Freed from the anxiety of influence, I can assert the equal importance of both hits and flops in theatre historiography.

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