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Broadway as Global Brand

  • David Savran

    David Savran is a specialist in twentieth and twenty-first century U. S. theatre, musical theatre, and social theory. He is the author of eight books, whose wide-ranging subjects include the Wooster Group, Tennessee Williams, Tony Kushner, white masculinity, music theatre, and middlebrow cultural production. His Highbrow/Lowdown: Theater, Jazz, and the Making of the New Middle Class is the winner of the Joe A. Callaway Prize. He has, in addition, served as a judge for the Obie Awards and the Lucille Lortel Awards and was a juror for the 2011 and 2012 Pulitzer Prize in Drama. He is the Vera Mowry Roberts Distinguished Professor of Theatre at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.

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Published/Copyright: April 28, 2017

Abstract

For 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.

About the author

David Savran

David Savran is a specialist in twentieth and twenty-first century U. S. theatre, musical theatre, and social theory. He is the author of eight books, whose wide-ranging subjects include the Wooster Group, Tennessee Williams, Tony Kushner, white masculinity, music theatre, and middlebrow cultural production. His Highbrow/Lowdown: Theater, Jazz, and the Making of the New Middle Class is the winner of the Joe A. Callaway Prize. He has, in addition, served as a judge for the Obie Awards and the Lucille Lortel Awards and was a juror for the 2011 and 2012 Pulitzer Prize in Drama. He is the Vera Mowry Roberts Distinguished Professor of Theatre at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.

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Published Online: 2017-4-28
Published in Print: 2017-4-1

© 2017 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

Articles in the same Issue

  1. Frontmatter
  2. Articles
  3. Theater and Mobility: By Way of Introduction
  4. “It’s a big world in here”: Contemporary Voyage Drama and the Politics of Mobility
  5. Broadway as Global Brand
  6. Theatrical Entrepôts: Mediating Locality on the Bandmann Circuit
  7. Hypermobility and Uncanny Praxis in Robert Lepage and Ex Machina’s Devised Solo Work
  8. Climate Change Theater and Cultural Mobility in the Arctic: Chantal Bilodeau’s Sila (2014)
  9. Theatre Without Walls: The National Theatre of Scotland
  10. On the Portability and Meanings of Blackness in Young Jean Lee’s The Shipment (2009)
  11. The Mobility of Suffering: Cosmopolitan Ethics in debbie tucker green’s Plays
  12. The Sacred Guest and the Ungrievable Sacrifice: communitas at the Theatre
  13. Performance Labor, Im/Mobility, and Exhaustion in Nature Theater of Oklahoma’s Life and Times
  14. The Immobility of Power in British Political Theatre after 2000: Absurdist Dystopias
  15. Anime Wong: Mobilizing (techno)Orientalism – Artistic Keynote and Conversation
  16. Reviews
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  18. Erin Hurley, ed. Theatres of Affect: New Essays on Canadian Theatre. Vol. 4. Toronto, ON: Playwrights Canada Press, 2014, 296 pp., C $ 25.
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  23. Magda Romanska, ed. The Routledge Companion to Dramaturgy. London: Routledge, 2015, 534 pp., £ 131 (hardback), £ 24.99 (paperback).
  24. Joan Fitzpatrick Dean, and José Lanters. Beyond Realism: Experimental and Unconventional Irish Drama Since the Revival. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2015, 222 pp., € 51.00. Christopher Murray. The Theatre of Brian Friel. London: Bloomsbury, 2014, xii + 289 pp., £ 17.09.
  25. Gobert, R. Darren. The Theatre of Caryl Churchill. London: Bloomsbury, 2014, xviii + 310 pp., $ 86.00 (hardback), $29.95 (paperback), $16.09 (PDF ebook).
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