Chin Chin Chinaman – Doing Other Cultures

Abstract

Musical comedy’s identification with modernity involved at the same time a strongly asserted linkage between the modern and a British identity. With modernity normalized as the universal condition to which all aspired, it was also the case that British culture, in this cultural form as in many others, figured as the omphalos of modernizing forces – the centre of invention, democracy, liberalism and rationalism. Above all, and especially in this popular cultural form, Britain was the focal point of a palpable vitality, staged as nothing less than the modern spirit and, equally importantly, of a social inclusiveness that appeared to welcome everyone to the modern estate. Here was continuity with ‘Victorian’ order and efficiency, but also a break with its sobriety and its hierarchical control. On the musical comedy stage, Britain represented both the authority and the freedom of something constructed at the fin de siècle as the new modern. In its technical style, scale and wizardry as much as its narratological preferences, musical comedy evoked the virtues of a modernity explicitly staged as pervasive and yet decisively racialized as British, and British West End at that.KeywordsJewish IdentityMusical Comedy StageMusical Comedy TreatmentTheatrical ReproductionRacial SuperiorityThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.