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Thousands of shows have opened on Broadway. Why do we remember some and not others?
The musical theatre repertory is not composed of titles popular in the theatre but by those with successful cast recordings, movie versions, or even illegal bootlegs on YouTube. The shows audiences know, and the texts and music they expect to hear when they attend a production, are defined by media consumed at home more than by memories of performances witnessed in the theatre. For example, author Doug Reside shows that it is no accident that the serious book musical with a fixed score developed in the 1940s - when commercially pressed and marketed record albums made it possible to record most of the score of a new musical in a fixed medium. And Hamilton, a musical with dense lyrics and revolutionary musical style, would not have been as easily accessible to world audiences if most hadn't already had the opportunity to learn the score by listening to free digital streams of the original cast recording.
The technologies that made these media possible developed concurrently with and shaped the American musical as an art form. Reside uncovers how the affordances and limitations of these technologies established a repertory of titles that are most frequently performed and defined by the texts used in these performances. Fixing the Musical argues that the musicals we most remember are those which most effectively used their era's best recording and distribution technologies to document and share the work with those who would never see the original production on Broadway.
Author: Douglas L. Reside
Paperback Published 30 November 2021 192 pages
"In Fixing the Musical, Doug Reside brilliantly excavates what's been hiding in plain sight: how audiences, artists, and academics encounter, engage with, and enjoy musical theatre outside of the performance itself. This indispensable book tells the fascinating and surprising histories of musical theatre's various 'fixed' forms, from published librettos to cast albums, films, bootleg recordings, licensing, and more. Impeccable archival research and a lively, accessible voice make Fixing the Musical necessary and delightful." - Stacy Wolf, Author of Beyond Broadway: The Pleasure and Promise of Musical Theatre Across America
"Doug Reside has taken a deep dive into a hitherto unexamined side of musical theater: technology. He goes from how scripts and musical scores were first printed, up to the creation of ancillary materials licensing houses offer to help mount productions. Reside makes us question many of our assumptions while surprising us with a lot of new information." - Ted Chapin, Former President, The Rodgers and Hammerstein Organization