College of Arts & Humanities

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The collections in this community comprise faculty research works, as well as graduate theses and dissertations.

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    MAKING MADNESS ON STAGE: AMERICAN MUSICAL THEATRE SINCE THE AMERICANS WITH DISABILITIES ACT
    (2023) Barr, Lindsey R.; Marshall, Caitlin; Theatre; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    Musical theatre, as the United States’ only unique theatrical genre to find global influence, is a powerful form of storytelling that began as staged reifications of American ideals. The American musical has been a prime location to explore what it means to be American and how American society reckons with its self-proclaimed status as a “melting pot” where people from diverse cultures and ethnicities come together to form the rich fabric of the nation. Though much scholarship focuses on the American musical as a site to reify American culture and ideals, this dissertation critiques exclusionary American ideologies that have harmed disabled people, mad people, women, and people of color for as long as it has existed. In this project, I argue that passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act in 1990, which established legal protections for people with disabilities, made physical and mental disability visible and relevant to the narrative action and staging of musical theatre in new ways. Combining my professional skills as a dramaturg with theoretical frameworks from performance studies, disability studies, and women of color feminisms, I examine Violet (1997), Jane Eyre the Musical (2000), and Next to Normal (2009) as my prime case studies. Through analyzing these case studies, this dissertation reveals an obscured history of how racialized and gendered disability ideologies inflect the narrative and staging of American musical theatre. I term this aesthetic and practical reliance on mad characters mad dramaturgy.
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    "Who expects a miracle to happen every day?": Rediscovering Me and Juliet and Pipe Dream, the forgotten musicals of Rodgers and Hammerstein
    (2004-05-13) Mariska, Bradley Clayton; DeLapp, Jennifer; Music
    Me and Juliet (1953) and Pipe Dream (1955) diverged considerably from Rodgers and Hammerstein's influential and commercially successful 1940s musical plays. Me and Juliet was the team's first musical comedy and had an original book by Hammerstein. Pipe Dream was based on a John Steinbeck novel and featured bums and prostitutes. This paper documents the history of Me and Juliet and Pipe Dream, using correspondence, early drafts of scripts, interviews with cast members, and secondary sources. I analyze the effectiveness of plot, music, and lyrics, while considering factors in each show's production that may have led to their respective failures. To better understand reception, emphasis is placed upon each show's relationship to the political and cultural landscape of 1950s America. Re-examining these musicals helps document the complete history of the Rodgers and Hammerstein collaboration and provides valuable insights regarding the duo's social values and personal philosophies of musical theatre.