Broadway as Global Brand

Abstract

AbstractFor people around the world, “Broadway” means the Broadway musical, the epitome of singing and dancing, glamor and dazzle. Although the Broadway musical is customarily perceived as the most distinctively U. S. theatre form – whose national and municipal identity is embedded in its name – it has circumnavigated the globe countless times. As the globalized cultural economy increasingly facilitates the worldwide circulation of multinational theatrical productions, Broadway-style musicals are being manufactured from Hamburg to Shanghai. They are no longer a specifically U. S. form, but a global brand that freely crosses borders, genres, and styles.The mobility of the newly deterritorialized Broadway musical is the result of many phenomena, notably the rise of a generation of producers, writers, directors, and actors around the world who have absorbed the musical’s conventions and vernaculars and who disseminate locally-produced musical entertainments. In the twenty-first century, these new Broadway-style musicals have become the preeminent transnational theatre form, whose conventions have also been absorbed into both popular and elite theatrical entertainments around the world.