Lying in the Middle

For many people around the world, American musical theater and Broadway are one and the same. New York City remains, in both the popular imagination and in many critical studies, the most significant place where musicals happen. However, most people consume musicals not primarily as Broadway performances but rather through an astonishingly rich variety of musical productions found in national tours, cruise ships, film and television, and theme parks, or the amateur venues of high school plays, communitytheater, and regional pageants. This project thus seeks to re-place" Broadway as the exclusive site for American Musical Theater Studies by highlighting the practice of musical theater in other locations and with purposes differing from those of Times Square. This book takes the position that musical theater is a genre that cuts across social groups and demographics in a way that few other genres do. Acknowledging the important yet understudied role musicals serve in communities large and small across America, this book shifts the focus of musical theater studies away from Broadway and investigates how people make use of musicals in everyday contexts. Johnson makes the case for the social importance of many forms of musical drama in shaping religious, political, familial, and other cultural formations. In a current political climate where consumers are fixated on the perceived urban-rural divide and U.S. international relations, it seems especially important now for popular music scholars to turn critical attention to musical and dramatic practices outside of recognized institutions and explore the ways that American musical theater matters to communities far removed from Broadway"--