Theses and Dissertations from UMD
Permanent URI for this communityhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/2
New submissions to the thesis/dissertation collections are added automatically as they are received from the Graduate School. Currently, the Graduate School deposits all theses and dissertations from a given semester after the official graduation date. This means that there may be up to a 4 month delay in the appearance of a give thesis/dissertation in DRUM
More information is available at Theses and Dissertations at University of Maryland Libraries.
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Item TRANSFORMING THE BEAST: THE THEATRE LABORATORIES OF THE “DISNEY RENAISSANCE” 1984-1994(2021) Mandracchia, Christen; Hildy, Franklin J.; Theatre; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This study investigates the ways that theatre professionals brought significant changes to the Walt Disney Company, from 1984-1994, in a period affectionately referred to, in popular discourses, as the “Disney Renaissance.” These individuals, including Peter Schneider, Linda Woolverton, Howard Ashman, Alan Menken, Bob McTyre, Ron Logan, Rob Roth, Matt West, Stan Meyer, and others came from Broadway, Off-Broadway, regional theatres, and local theatres, and represented a wide-cross section of theatrical disciplines, including production management, stage management, playwrighting, musical theatre, producing, directing, choreography, and design. In their respective Company divisions, such as animation and theme parks, they worked to transform their area of the corporation into theatre laboratories, where a series of experiments occurred. These tests challenged the lines of demarcation between theatre, animation, and theme park mediums, between the individual and the collective, between marginalization and the mainstream, and between spectatorship and participation. In 1994, these efforts culminated in the production of Disney’s Beauty and the Beast on Broadway. Through a combination of archival evidence and interviews with the surviving subjects listed above, my findings demonstrate a direct link between their theatrical knowledge and practices to the rapid growth and unprecedented financial, popular, and critical success, which the Walt Disney Company enjoyed during this era. Written in a year of Covid-19, when the American theatre industry was decimated, this dissertation tells the stories of theatre makers who, over thirty years ago, ventured into the non-theatrical contexts of Disney and transformed the culture, values, and ways of doing things at the large Company, making it a more collaborative, more empathetic, more innovative, and bolder place than it was before. In this way “Transforming the Beast” refers not only to the pivotal moment of Beauty and the Beast in on film, the theme park stage, or Broadway, but the value of theatrical knowledge in transforming a large entity like Disney to do better as a business, as a creative space, and as a collective of people.Item El Broadway in Spain: Musical Theatre, Cultural Transpositions, and Artistic Process(2019) Reales Gregory, Jose David; Frederik, Laurie; Theatre; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The Broadway musical has been shaped by a distinctly American identity, but its rapid international success underscores the need for research which further explores the complexities surrounding its cross-cultural jump into countries with their own histories and identities. In a country where performance research sits largely on flamenco, guitar, and zarzuelas, the 21st-century Spanish stage has been transformed by an unprecedented boom in musicals such as Chicago, West Side Story, Billy Elliott, Phantom of the Opera, and The Lion King. This dissertation follows theatre makers of Spain and dives into their productions of Broadway musicals to uncover the cultural, linguistic, and social negotiations behind their creative experiences. I journey into Spain’s past to decode various constructions of Spanish identity through musical performance, examining how the function of musical performance changes with shifting notions of nationhood. I look at Madrid and its professional companies, tracing urban and economic factors that feed into the replication of Broadway’s symbolic space. Joining the creative process of individual artists, I watch how amateur groups performing Broadway musicals in civic spaces of the provinces unite against a backdrop of local traditions to define their community through distinct linguistic and creative translation processes. Finally, I turn to a national Broadway musical theatre festival to determine how competition, programming, and workshop sessions construct audiences’ ideas of legitimacy for the purposes of strengthening belonging within the community. The transposition of these Broadway-style musicals to Spain are subject to the pressures and cultural politics of their space which creates new intersecting sites for the exploration of belonging between city and world, region and nation, and self and community. Ultimately, the Broadway musical genre is historically embedded with hegemonic power structures that, while consistent with the globalized market and its artistic community in the United States, are tough to negotiate at local and individual levels in other cultures – raising questions about the sustainability of national arts in today’s world.