Musical Spectacle Research Articles

“An Adventure with Androgynous Creatures, What a Folly”: The Rock Horror Show: The Musical Spectacle and Censorship (1975)

Resumo Este artigo aborda o espetáculo musical The Rock Horror Show, que foi encenado no Teatro da Praia, no Rio de Janeiro, em 1975. No texto, apresento a análise dos mecanismos da censura, durante o processo de abertura política no Brasil, através dos pareceres da Divisão de Censura de Diversões Públicas (DCDP) para a liberação do espetáculo e das canções integrantes do long play (desdobramento do espetáculo). O estudo parte das seguintes indagações: se a censura das diversões públicas estava pautada pela dimensão moral, ou seja, orientada em defesa da “moral e dos bons costumes”, com quais argumentos os censores justificaram a liberação do espetáculo, que afrontava a moral conservadora, questionava os valores tradicionais, e apresentava temáticas tabus (como virgindade, androginia, incesto, bissexualidade, homossexualidade, práticas sexuais não convencionais, sadismo e uso de drogas)? Por que o espetáculo foi liberado, sem cortes, apenas com a classificação para maiores de 18 anos, e algumas canções foram vetadas? Problematizo, ainda, a repercussão na imprensa, nos jornais Jornal do Brasil, Diário de Notícias, Opinião, Folha de São Paulo e nas revistas O Cruzeiro e Manchete, para discutir a recepção da peça em meio à crítica teatral.

Music and Politics: An Introduction. By James Garratt

‘Writing about music and politics can sometimes feel like a no-win game’ (p. xiii). James Garratt’s assessment in Music and Politics: A Critical Introduction will be appreciated by many readers. The relationships between these fields are multifaceted, and inseparable from the wider composition of society. An illustrative example from Garratt’s text is North Korea’s public rallies and parades, where ‘the state’s musical beat is drilled daily into its citizens’ through months of rehearsals (pp. 124–5). Perhaps the success of this strategy in securing ‘complicity’ is now less ‘puzzling’ (if not less ‘objectionable’) (p. 125) to readers from Britain who in 2020 witnessed (or participated in) ten weeks of Thursday night ‘clapping for carers’, as the historically underfunded NHS strained to respond to the ‘first wave’ of the COVID-19 pandemic. Though the initiative arose outside of government and was widely seen as apolitical, the musical spectacle, with hundreds of thousands of...

«ТУРАНДОТ» Б. БРЕХТА НА СЦЕНЕ ТЕАТРА НА ТАГАНКЕ: ИСТОРИЯ СОЗДАНИЯ И МУЗЫКАЛЬНОЕ ОФОРМЛЕНИЕ А. ШНИТКЕ

The article presents the history of the creation of "Turandot" based on the play by B. Brecht at the Taganka Theater, directed by Yu. Lyubimov. A significant place as a prototype for Yu. Lyubimov's production is devoted to the unfinished play by the German playwright "Turandot, or the Congress of Whitewashers", work on which was interrupted for many years and resumed only in the early 50s. It is emphasized that in the Taganka Theater, the main form of performance was a musical spectacle with simple vocal and instrumental episodes. The paper analyzes ten zongs for male voice by A. Schnittke, created for the play "Turandot" to poems by B. Slutsky and A. Voznesensky and reveals their genre basis and musical expressive means. The suite principle of alternating zongs in the performance is combined with the form of the background, in which signs of cyclicity appear. It is noted that zongs embedded into the main fabric of the play added the necessary subtext and thus brought Brecht's play closer to the Soviet reality of the late 70s.

Hubristic Hydraulics: Water, Dictatorship, and Modernity in the Dominican Republic

In this article, I focus on how water operated as symbolic capital during the notoriously repressive dictatorship of Rafael Trujillo (1930–61) in the Dominican Republic. Under his regime, alongside an apex of territorial control and modern aesthetics came a nadir of political freedoms. During Trujillo's tenure, water took on important symbolic and material dimensions as a conduit for authoritarianism: it served as a tool to bind together dictatorial power and spatial order through a mode of territorial and urban design rooted in hubristic hydraulics. With hubristic hydraulics I refer to the strategic ways that water flow was harnessed through infrastructure and choreographed through landscape and monumental architecture to embody and lionize the dictator's power. Channeled into reflecting pools, nationwide irrigation works, and monumental fountains, water functioned at the juncture of aesthetics and politics as an important tool in the modernization of urban space and the territory at large. Water was a strategic resource that enabled Trujillo to be cast as the “arquitecto de la patria nueva” (the architect of a new fatherland), and the ways it was made to flow through modern architecture and infrastructure offer an illuminating means to expose the entanglement of territorial control, urban modernity, and authoritarian politics.

Madame Satã

A partir da tradição dos musicais brasileiros que despontaram na segunda metade do Século XIX, e dos musicais políticos, que entre as décadas de 1960 e 1970 fomentaram e diversificaram a linguagem teatral, o presente artigo traça uma análise de Madame Satã, um espetáculo musical que utiliza como fonte a musicalidade e corporeidade de matrizes afrodescendentes. O espetáculo que estreou em 2015 foi dirigido por João das Neves e Rodrigo Gerônimo e realizado pelo Grupo dos Dez, um grupo formado por elenco majoritariamente negro.

Welcome to the Peoples of the Mountains and the Sea: Evaluating an Inaugural Indigenous Cultural Festival

Welcome to the Peoples of the Mountains and the Sea: Evaluating an Inaugural Indigenous Cultural Festival

Słowno-muzyczne widowisko składankowe jako palimpsest kulturowy – na przykładzie Niech no tylko zakwitną jabłonie Agnieszki Osieckiej

Artykuł dotyczy koncepcji słowno-muzycznego widowiska składankowego autorstwa Agnieszki Osieckiej Niech no tylko zakwitną jabłonie, wystawionego w roku 1964 w Teatrze Ateneum w Warszawie. Ważne wydaje się nawiązanie Osieckiej do estetyki Kramu z piosenkami Leona Schillera, który w wielu swoich widowiskach przypominał historię XVIII / XIX–wiecznej Polski zapisaną w piosenkach. Osiecka rekonstruuje późniejszy niż Schiller okres historyczny, łącząc materiały dokumentalne z literackimi (także tymi słowno-muzycznymi), czego efektem stał się afabularny sceniczny collage, dzięki któremu widz mógł zanurzyć się w atmosferze epoki międzywojennej i dwudziestolecia tuż po odzyskaniu przez Polskę niepodległości. W ujęciu Osieckiej to już nie była sentymentalna Schillerowska Arkadia ‒ choć sceniczna rzeczywistość odzwierciedlała prawdziwość historycznych faktów, to jednak autorka traktowała ów świat z ironicznym dystansem, komentując go niejednokrotnie parodystycznie i pastiszowo.

The modern fairy tale: nation branding, national identity and the Eurovision Song Contest in Estonia, by Paul Jordan, Tartu, University of Tartu Press, 2014, 150 pp., $23.00 (paperback), ISBN 978-9949325580

What is the future of the Eurovision Song Contest – for over 60 years, an annual celebration of a shared pan-European belonging through popular music and media spectacle (in 2010 the contest motto ...

An Epoch of Child Spectators in Early US Theatre

Although histories of early US theatres are remarkably silent on the matter of child spectators, I establish their presence in urban playhouses based on the memoirs of thirty-five, primarily middle- and upper-class, white persons who first witnessed performances between the ages of seven and sixteen from 1749 to 1849. My examination of popular musical spectacles adapted from nursery stories and advertisements of half-price tickets for children under age ten or twelve explain how child spectators entered men’s cultural domain of theatre by experiencing the same repertoire as adults and subsequently drove theatre managers and critics to recognize, accommodate, and consequently differentiate their aesthetic tastes by the 1820s. Despite lingering anti-theatrical prejudices, this epoch of child spectators reveals how and why managers eventually instituted “family circle” seating in 1847 by instructing and amusing generations of young citizens.

Love's Old Song Will Be New: Deleuze, Busby Berkeley and Becoming-Music

This article argues that Busby Berkeley’s unique musical spectacles invert the cinematic taxonomy found in Deleuze’s twin volumes on Cinema through the process of ‘becoming-music.’ By taking up a form that I term ‘visual-music,’ in which musical properties are incorporated within the image, Berkeley’s work problematizes Deleuze’s philosophy of cinematic sound and benefits instead from the conceptions of the musical refrain and rhythm located in Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus . Breaking away from traditional Deleuzian readings of cinema, I demonstrate, through a close textual analysis of Berkeley’s use of both the aural and visual refrain, that Berkeley’s images become ‘visual-music’ in order to deterritorialize (i.e. reconfigure our understanding of) the sound rather than the image. Using the ‘Shadow Waltz’ from Gold Diggers of 1933 as an example, I argue that a Berkeley musical number resituates the music’s territory of soft romanticism to reveal the sexuality inherent in the sonic forms of popular music.

Rebel Girls and Singing Boys: Performing Music and Gender in the Teen Movie

Midway through the 1986 teen movie Pretty in Pink comes a strikingly memorable scene. The film's main character, Andie (Molly Ringwald), sits nonchalantly in the local record store where she works. Adorned with posters of mid-1980s post-punk groups like New Order and The Smiths, the store represents Andie's strong alternative music identity. In this particular scene, however, Andie's boss places a recording of Otis Redding's Try a Little Tenderness on the turntable, instantly transforming the mood. From out of nowhere, Andie's best friend, the overly-dramatic Duckie (Jon Cryer), bursts into the store and for the next two minutes proceeds to lip sync, dance, and gyrate his way through the climactic second half of Redding's 1966 soul classic. It is an enraptured, exuberant performance, almost as if he is physically possessed by the music. Andie, the object of Duckie's affections, however, is clearly unimpressed. Soon after his musical display, the deflated Duckie sadly learns that Andie's romantic longings lie elsewhere. His thinly masked musical cry for affection and tenderness has been in vain. As unique and unforgettable as this scene is, the gendered dichotomy that it presents between females as musical connoisseurs and males as emotional performers is far from rare within the teen movie genre of the mid-1980s to early 2000s. From Some Kind of Wonderful (1987) to 10 Things I Hate About You (1999) and Juno (2007), again and again we see female characters positioned as social outsiders via their devotion to alternative musical tastes. Likewise, in films as varied as American Pie (1999), She's All That (1999) and Napoleon Dynamite (2004), teenage boys repeatedly assume the roles of dynamic performers. By breaking out into song, and often dance, adolescent males attempt to overcome social challenges. These recurring tropes raise important questions about the teen movie genre and its use of popular music. How and why does the teen movie divide its musical scores along gendered lines? What do these musical differences tell us about the contrast between female and male adolescence? What is the significance of the Rebel Girl within the history of the teen movie, (2) and how are we to interpret the teen boy who bursts into song onscreen? My goal in this article is to dig more deeply into these questions by viewing the teen movie's soundtrack through the lenses of gender identity, musical genre, and the cinematic conventions of popular song scoring. As a coming of age film, the teen movie deals specifically with the gendered rites of passage that mark the symbolic transition from adolescence to adulthood. Music in these films can thus help underscore a character's social transformation. Regardless of how the music guides our understanding of these characters, popular song functions differently for boys than for girls. If we commonly find boys performing their gender in spontaneous moments of public music spectacle--what I call a form of karaoke masculinity--girls are more likely to maintain a consistent outsider musical identity. A female character like the rebel girl is granted a stability through her musical connoisseurship, only to meet with various threats and tests as she navigates her way through the teenager's turbulent social world. I begin this exploration by presenting a brief historical overview of the teen movie genre's birth in the mid-1950s and its musical scoring practices. From there I describe the changes that occurred in the early 1980s which ultimately served to redefine the teen movie. Specifically, this new wave of teen movies began to portray adolescence in a way that resembles anthropologist Victor Turner's description of the liminal journey, a socially defined process marked by rites of passage towards adulthood. Director and producer John Hughes is often credited with popularizing this narrative story structure, and from his very first teen movie feature, Sixteen Candles (1984), he deployed music as a way of enhancing character development, particularly along lines of gender, age, taste, and performance. …

Obama's iPod: Popular Music and the Perils of Postpolitical Populism

This article examines how Barack Obama has used popular music over the last several years as part of a populist communication strategy. It argues that thinking about the aesthetics of popular music helps us understand how populist logic functions. Examining the music used during the campaign, the inaugural celebration, and the In Performance at the White House series, I show how the aesthetic problems of Obama's musical spectacles are symptomatic of a postpolitical populism that is potentially unstable. Using a number of theories of populism and popular music, in particular those of Ernesto Laclau, Slavoj Žižek, and Stuart Hall, I argue that while the Obama White House effectively utilized a heterogeneous populist aesthetic to structure identification with Obama as a leader to win the 2008 election, its postelection praxis has left it unable to articulate the agonistic pluralism necessary for sustaining an effective political movement, setting the stage for the recuperation of populist affect by the homogenous populism of the right.

Positioning of sponsorships on the cultural events market

The paper deals with the relationship between cultural events and financial possession through which a complex web of communication can be discerned, in positions of social responsibility and consumerism. In the first part of the paper, sponsorship is described in its historical context in order to point out its key features and transformations over time, especially in the socialist and post-socialist period. By contextualizing sponsorship strategies and messages, one can accurately track the representations and values attached to the positioning of cultural products in the zone of national and global policies. Musical spectacles (concerts, festivals, assemblies etc.) are attractive and useful products in the sponsorship market. The EXIT festival, Jelen beer, Guča, Telenor, Alpha Bank, Bogoljub Karić, Zepter, Beer Fest, Tuborg, Kustendorf are just some examples - patents of sponsorship of cultural manifestations in the transitional period. This paper constructs three forms of sponsorship strategies in the domain of cultural festival scenes: ownership, leadership and partnership. In the domain of partnership between collective and private property, sponsorship strategies are based on an ethical mimicry of old/new rules and their enforcers within a gift economy, thus creating arbitrary spaces for action adjusted for crises (the grey economy, money laundering, unstable economic policies etc.). Leadership is a sponsorship strategy which entails complete domination in the sphere of decision making, utilization and spending, without the possibility of outside control. In leadership there is no opposition between owners and sponsors, and everything is subject to the authority of the individual as the one and only, inviolable self-sponsor. Partnership is based on the power of choice in the domain of competition and opposition as bipolar ownership. The tandems of spectacle - sponsor and enjoyment - monopoly, are viable projectors of various strategies for the shaping of ownership, leadership and partnership, thus projecting idealized perceptions and simulacra of common good and social harmony, which are actually just a disguise for various interests and antagonisms in a politically and economically unstable place such as Serbia.

The “Greek Project” of Catherine the Great and Giuseppe Sarti

The musical spectacle The Early Reign of Oleg—written by Empress Catherine II, with music by Giuseppe Sarti, Vassily Pashkevitch, and Carlo Canobbio—was performed in 1790 in St. Petersburg. Glorifying Russia's past and extolling its military power, the production foretold Catherine's unrealized plan of restoring the Byzantine Empire on the ruins of the Ottoman Empire through the inclusion of an excerpt from Euripides's Alcestis as a closing Greek Scene (Act V, scene 4). A multifaceted analysis of Sarti's music for the scene addresses such devices as melodrama, monodic texture, and the use of particular tonal structures, poetic meters, and melodic patterns appropriate for Attic paeans. Oleg's Greek Scene comprises Sarti's ingenious response to the pivotal antica e moderna debate, as well as to the political, intellectual, and cultural climate of late-eighteenth-century Russia.

World Music festivals and tourism: a case study of Serbia’s Guca trumpet festival

From its foundation in 1961 until the present day, the Guca trumpet festival has undergone significant transformations. Setting out as a small-scale cultural revival of Serbian brass orchestra tradition held annually in the village of Guca in the Dragacevo region of western Serbia, the festival has evolved over time into a great World Music spectacle. Disputes about the interpretation and representation of the national past and musical heritage have long been induced in public by the unsettled political situation in Serbia and by the festival’s gradual integration into the global music industry and cultural tourism market. In consequence, the festival’s relationship to issues of authenticity, tradition preservation, globalization impact, and representation politics continues to be viewed and discussed through familiar dichotomies. Using the interrelated theoretical models from World Music and cultural tourism studies, this paper aims to explore the reasons for the festival’s prominent status in national cultural policies, as well as the contradictory meanings that it has generated in a variety of discourses.

The Ruined Bridge: Studies in Barberini Patronage of Music and Spectacle, 1631-1679 (review)

The Ruined Bridge: Studies in Barberini Patronage of Music and Spectacle, 1631-1679. By Frederick Hammond. (Detroit Monographs in Musicology/Studies in Music, no. 56.) Sterling Park, MI: Harmonie Park Press, 2010. [xix, 303 p. ISBN 9780899901510. $55.] Music examples, maps, facsimiles, illustrations, bibliography, index. Those who work in area of seventeenth-century musical spectacle are acutely aware of issues plaguing our discipline, specifically small number of extant documents regarding performances of these events. Additionally, documents that allow us to reproduce performances are often no longer extant, or if they are, are either damaged or incomplete. In Frederick Hammond's The Ruined Bridge: Studies in Barberini Patronage of Music and Spectacle, 1631-1679, author deals with these issues head-on, making do with documents that are extant and placing them in their social and political context. The focus of Hammond's study lies in chivalric musical spectacle under Barberini patronage in seventeenth-century Rome. His study, as he notes, is based on five hypotheses, now generally accepted in remarkable development of Barberini studies during last three decades. First, that all important members of family of Urban VIII personally influenced artistic projects. Second, that these artistic projects embodied identifiable goals for papacy and for family. Third, that these goals were specific and consistent enough to comprise what may be termed program. Fourth, that this program was expressed in coherent symbolic language. Fifth and last, that Barberini program changed in emphasis and forum in response to political and intellectual events during two decades of Urban VIII's pontificate. (p. 3) He notes that this study is an outgrowth of his previous book, Music and in Baroque Rome: Barberini Patronage Under Urban VIII (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994), in which he attempted to trace musical patronage of pope and his three nephews during period of their hegemony (p. xvii). He notes that archival work performed for this earlier book has in some way surfaced in material of current volume. He does remark, however, that this first book might be considered as a coda in minor key to Music and Spectacle (p. xvii). Hammond's new volume is rich in its reproduction of primary source material. He provides an examination of manuscript orthography as well as illustrations of choreography used in these events. The book is plentiful when it comes to engravings, supporting author's points and illustrative descriptions. He copiously outlines various expenses associated with opera and other chivalric spectacle, sparing no detail, and gives same attention to funerals as celebrations, right down to expense of candles and manner in which they are sold. The book is divided into nine chapters, each of which examines different aspect of music in Barberini patronage, often devoting chapter to one or more works. Hammond's writing performs rarelyachieved feat: it is scholarly, yet accessible. The book's opening chapter is devoted to La Contesa of 1631, one of several works discussed belonging to Ferrarese tradition of opera-torneo, noting that the plot of torneo was built on familiar conceit or inventione of personifying cities by rivers (p. 21). In following chapter he sets political context for music and spectacle, specifically examining Il berrattino di Pietro. Chapter 3 looks at ways in which Galileo Galilei scandal affected Barberini patronage. The next two chapters pertain to entertainments put on for members of Barberini family, first examining social and political context of Le pretensioni del Tebro e del Po, work composed for entertainment of Don Taddeo Barberini in Ferrara, as well as alterations made to manuscript score; then looking at entertainment set up by Don Taddeo Barberini for his brother, Cardinal Antonio. …

Dreams of Difference, Songs of the Same: The Musical Moment in Film (review)

Reviewed by: Dreams of Difference, Songs of the Same: The Musical Moment in Film Julie McQuinn Amy Herzog . Dreams of Difference, Songs of the Same: The Musical Moment in Film. University of Minnesota Press, 2010. 236 pages. $25 paperback; $75 hardcover. Amy Herzog's examination of what she calls the "musical moment" in film, from a Deleuzian perspective, provides a multifaceted opportunity for the pursuit of meaning in film and the role that music and musical spectacle can play therein. Much of this volume is devoted to discussing the ideas of French philosopher Gilles Deleuze (1925-1995), his sometime co-writer, French psychoanalyst Félix Guattari (1930-1992), French philosopher Henri Bergson (1859-1941), and others—ideas related to time, memory, experience, representation, reality, perception, and identity. According to Deleuze, film is not a static object to be interpreted; rather meaning is generated in a film through the "mutual interactions between subject and object" (4). Thus meaning is never fixed, but constantly evolving, shifting, multiplying. Deleuze was concerned with the unique potential of the cinema to transcend the limits of representation, to move toward an affective and productive power capable of provoking thought and change. Herzog looks to the musical moment as an embodiment of these ideas, as creating an ambiguous and contradictory space in which the potential Deleuze described might be realized. Herzog defines the musical moment as taking place "when music serves as the dominant force in the work," drawing "attention to itself" (6). These moments, these "dynamic events" (16), these often fantastic musical spectacles, occur in irrational spaces, fairy tale spaces, "aqueous [End Page 114] spaces" (159), apocalyptic spaces, and everyday spaces, spaces in which bodies are multiplied, mirrored, and isolated, in which connections are simultaneously created and transcended, in which meanings and functions can be political, engaging with issues of identity, gender, race, consumerist and capitalist ideologies, and in which the transformation of "becoming" can be incited (182). In these spaces, logic and linearity are defied, as are boundaries of space and time; these moments are characterized by contradictions, dualities, incongruities, stutters, ruptures, "glitches, accidents, and discontinuities" (3). Possibilities vibrate and vacillate; trajectories pulse, thrust, and "take flight." And thus these moments possess the powerful potential to reveal, to provoke, to resist, to move, to create, to generate thought and action, even as they reinforce and reproduce the status quo, singing "refrains" that are ever so familiar to their audiences. Here reality and artificiality, cliché and depth of feeling, repetition and difference, reiteration and resistance are inextricably linked, creating both tension and release. The musical moment is not limited to the genre of the musical (though many of her ideas are clearly grounded in research on the musical) and Herzog's examples involve musical participation at many levels, in different narrative and non-narrative spaces. The works that attract her attention embrace both "high" and "low" art and in fact often play upon the tension between them. The objects of her case studies are not only diverse, but each is also atypical in some way. They include the not very popular cinematic jukeboxes—the Soundies of 1940s and the Scopitone of the 1960s; two Carmen films—Preminger's Carmen Jones (1954) and Godard's Prénom Carmen (1983); the films of Jacques Demy, focusing on Les parapluies de Cherbourg (1964) and the fairy tale film Peau d'âne (1970); Esther Williams's "synchronized swimming extravaganzas" (10) of the 1940s; and Tsai Ming-liang's apocalyptic musical, The Hole (1998). It is the links between these very diverse films that make this study fascinating, for in each case, she asserts the power, the affective force (37), of the "false" to create. In Carmen Jones, for example, disconnections between voice and body, the "real" and the "false," high and low, black and white, all produce an overarching sense of artificiality, and a tension that she argues is "the subject matter of the film" (110-11). Deleuze's conception of the refrain, which Herzog defines as "repetition in relation to wider processes of territorialization" (81), informs her analyses extensively. Connections between "texts" pervade our artistic culture, including music and film, and the analysis of these connections is hardly a...

Baseball on the Boards

Damn Yankees, the smash-hit 1955 musical, is easily is the best-known, most frequently revived baseball theater piece. Other high-profile plays include Elmer the Great (1928), a Ring Lardner comedy that was produced by George M. Cohan and featured Walter Huston as the title character, a comically thickheaded hurler; Bleacher Bums (1977), conceived by Joe Mantegna, which charts the frustrations of Chicago Cubs fans; Fences (1987), August Wilson's Pulitzer Prize-winner about a bitter ex-Negro Leaguer (a role created by James Earl Jones) and his relationship with his football-playing son; and Richard Greenberg's Take Me Out (2002), a drama about a gay ballplayer.Remarkably, no memorable baseball stage piece dates from the 19th or early 20th centuries. No major producer of the era-no David Belasco, Charles Dillingham, or Charles Frohman-saw fit to mount a baseball play. No Broadway headliner signed on to thrash the villain and smash home runs right before the final curtain.This is not to say that the theater and baseball were then the equivalent of water and oil. On the contrary. During this pre-radio, pre-television era, Americans regularly attended live stage performances. Minstrel shows and vaudeville thrived. Starting in the late 19th century, baseball stars began spending their offseasons appearing in theatrical presentations in which they recited monologues, acted in skits, or tapped their toes in musical numbers. For their efforts, they often earned more money in several weeks than they did for their season-long ballyard heroics. Most significantly, playwrights of all stripes were penning baseball-related dramas, comedies, musicals, skits, and operettas.A representative list of such titles is found in the Library of Congress Copyright Office's Dramatic Compositions Copyrighted in the United States, 1870 to 1916. It includes at least 36 indisputably baseball-themed titles (see the table at the end of the article), testament to baseball as a fertile ground for invention.Yet collectively, these titles have for decades been languishing in obscurity. One would have to pore through countless big-city and small-town newspapers to determine whether any of them were ever produced-anywhere. But they did exist, at least on paper, and their authors expectantly submitted them to the Library of Congress for copyright.Additional titles in Dramatic Compositions appear to be baseball-related, yet likely are not. Among the characters in The Bat and the Ball; or, Negative Evidence (1889), a farce by F.E. Chase, are a photographer, a photographer's assistant, and a journalist. None are ballplayers; the ball of the title is in fact a Policemen's Ball. The title character in Gabe's Home Run (1911) is no slugger. This comedy by William and Josephine Giles charts the antics of a harassed husband whose wife chides him for never coming home in time to complete his household chores.Some of the authors of bona fide baseball pieces were established theater professionals. Miron Leffingwell (A Home Run, 1909), for example, was an actor-playwright. Gustav Blum (A Double Play, 1912), was a producer-director-actor who was affiliated with 16 plays that came to Broadway between 1923 and 1946. Bolossy Kiralfy (The Sporting Ballet, or, Turf, Oarsmen, Base Ball, Hunters, etc., 1887), was a dancer-acrobat-pantomimist who staged musical spectacles and worked for the Barnum & Bailey circus. Frank Dumont (A Base Ball Crank, 1890), wrote and acted in scores of minstrel sketches and managed the Eleventh Street Opera House in Philadelphia, described in the New York Times as one of the most famous homes of minstrelsy in America. Richard Walton Tully (Base Ball Game, 1910), was a playwright-director-producer whose best-known stage works, including The Rose of the Rancho (1906) and The Flame (1916), were nonbaseball- related. All made it to Broadway. Base Ball Game did not.Others were thriving writers. Philip Verrill Mighels (On the Diamond, 1906), worked as a reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle and published non-baseball-related novels, short stories, and poetry. …

Gotta Have An Effeminate Heart

The TV musical Gotta Have Heart (1997) portrays a love triangle among two men and one woman, located within a musical spectacle, and challenging conventional formulations of gender, sex, and sexualities. Synthesizing American, European, and Israeli imageries of the past—particularly 1950s and 1970s memorabilia, Israeli folk dances, and Eurovision song contests—this Israeli musical generates hybrid visualizations, integrating Israeli mainstream culture and queer imageries. Rather than merely producing a simulacrum of past decades, however, this synthetic utopia rewrites the Israeli masculinity and effeminates the cultural national agenda in regard to the politics of effeminacy, sissyness, and sissyphobia both outside and, particularly, inside the Israeli gay community. This article also examines the female protagonist's positioning in this TV musical as concomitantly a fag hag, a reified diva, and—in her ironic, reflexive performance—a young straight woman yearning for a big-hearted husband and family.

Le spectacle musical des métaformes

The Musical Spectacle of “Metaforms ” In 1957, Etienne-Bertrand Weill, following in the steps of Etienne-Jules Marey and of the experimental photographers of the 1920s, started making abstract photographs, which he named “metaforms.” The metaform is the outcome of a long process, which started with photographs of mimes and theater. A simple recording of an object in motion, it is a modern and demanding art form, stemming both from the synthesis of the arts and lumino-kinetics, as well as the tradition of the music of colors. For the artist, metaforms were to appear as contrapuntal elements within a live performance, when they could act directly on the perception of the spectator. Thanks to its plural nature, and its infinitely vast repertory, the art of the metaform always resonates with the arts it is associated with : contemporary music, dance, or poetry. Throughout his lifetime, Weill devoted all his energy to encouraging collaboration between artists so as to achieve the dream of a total spectacle.