American Cinderellas on the Broadway Musical Stage: Imagining the Working Girl from Irene to Gypsy is now available!
Book Description
Drawing upon Broadway musicals ranging from Irene (1919) to Gypsy (1959), American Cinderellas on the Broadway Musical Stage considers how Broadway musicals from the 1920s through the 1950s adapted and transformed Perrault's fairy tale icon in order to address changing social and professional roles for American women. Drawing heavily upon historical research in American culture and gender studies, Cantu analyzes female lyricists and librettists who were significant in translating Perrault's heroine to the contexts and concerns of the American "working girl." In exploring how these and other writers (of both sexes) adapted the Cinderella myth to a twentieth-century urban landscape, this book challenges traditional assumptions about the American musical's relationship to both feminism and modernism -- placing the Cinderella story into the Broadway musical canon.
Table of Contents
Introduction: Glass Slippers and Glass Ceilings in the Twenty-First Century, or Cinderella Returns to Broadway
1. "Who Are These American Cinderellas?:" Working Girls, Chorus Girls, and American Dreams for Women in the 1920s
2. Merman Was a Lady: The 1930s Cinderella-Broad and Burlesquing the Genteel Tradition
3. "Make Up Your Mind:" Boss Ladies and Enchantresses in the 1940s Broadway Musical
4. "Twentieth-Century Fairy Tales:" Princesses, Prostitutes, and the Feminine Mystique in the Broadway Musicals of the 1950s
5. Coda: Rewriting the Broadway Cinderella Story
Editorial Reviews
"What Maya Cantu has achieved is to link mid-twentieth-century Broadway and Hollywood's fascination with Cinderella imagery and plots to modern feminism, and to the shifting conditions of American women. This book opens a rich vein of musical theatre study not unearthed before. She has written a real gem: fresh, comprehensive, engaging - often even revelatory." – Stuart Hecht, PhD, Associate Professor, Theatre, Boston College, USA and author of Transposing Broadway: Jews, Assimilation, and the American Musical
"American Cinderellas on the Broadway Musical Stage convincingly argues for the Cinderella motif as crucial to American musical theatre. Instead of pre-modern waifs and princesses, however, Maya Cantu finds her Cinderellas among the working girls, gold diggers, broads, boss ladies, and prostitutes of modern American culture, reminding us of the centrality of spunky girls in the musical. An insightful and illuminating read." - Pamela Robertson Wojcik, Professor, Department of Film, TV, and Theatre, University of Notre Dame, author of Guilty Pleasures: Feminist Camp from Mae West to Madonna
"This book is not only a smart, fascinating, and entertaining celebration of Broadway's love of the working girl's rags-to-riches dream, but also an engaging, thoughtful and perceptive exploration of our cultural values and the theatre artists who shaped them. A joy!" – Jack Sharrar, PhD, American Conservatory Theater, author of Avery Hopwood: His Life and Plays
Book Reviews
"American Cinderellas provides a compelling and detailed insight into the development of female narratives from the familiar fairy tale into a fundamental component of storytelling in American musical theatre writing. It is bound to inspire further study of the themes it discusses and will hopefully encourage further scholarly interest in the real-life women it also showcases." -- Hannah Robbins, University of Sheffield, Studies in Musical Theatre, 10.1 (March 2016)
"(American Cinderellas) triumphs as a classical history text: a rich, resourceful chronology of stage musicals that focuses on the shows' dramaturgy with a consciously feminist perspective."--Helen Deborah Lewis, Boston Conservatory, New England Theatre Journal, Vol. 27 (2016)
"Drawing from feminist theory and theater history, Maya Cantu argues that the Cinderella myth, an amalgamation of rags-to-riches story and magical marriage plot, offers a compelling matrix to negotiate theatrically the various economic, gendered, and marital expectations for working women....Cantu's strong theoretical interventions...are sharp, nuanced, and sociologically grounded. American Cinderellas is a lush, captivating, and necessary addition to the fields of theatre history, women performers, and feminism in performance." -- Yasmine Marie Jahanmir, University of California, Santa Barbara, Theatre Survey, 58.2 (May 2017)
"American Cinderellas on the Broadway Musical Stage is an important resource that fills a gap in the scholarly literature (of the topic).... In a text that makes connections between actresses and characters, Cantu offers readers a revelation of America's trend of using the Cinderella narrative during the past one hundred years." --Alicia M. Goodman, Texas Tech University, The Journal of American Culture, 40.2 (September 2017)
"As scholarly considerations of the musical theatre's fascination with Cinderella analogues are curiously scant, Cantu's project proves valuable in that it addresses a gap in the extant literature and explores a remarkably rich phenomenon hiding in plain sight....Cantu's book is expertly researched...(and) often an alluring read....Cantu's prose is lively, playful, and periodically employs vernacular from the era under scrutiny. More importantly, she contributes a new study to the field of musical theatre history that not only builds on the work of such scholars as Stacy Wolf and Stuart Hecht, but also indicates additional avenues for investigation."--Bryan M. Vandevender, Bucknell University, Theatre Annual, Vol. 70 (2017)
The book is also available at the following libraries.
Book Description
Drawing upon Broadway musicals ranging from Irene (1919) to Gypsy (1959), American Cinderellas on the Broadway Musical Stage considers how Broadway musicals from the 1920s through the 1950s adapted and transformed Perrault's fairy tale icon in order to address changing social and professional roles for American women. Drawing heavily upon historical research in American culture and gender studies, Cantu analyzes female lyricists and librettists who were significant in translating Perrault's heroine to the contexts and concerns of the American "working girl." In exploring how these and other writers (of both sexes) adapted the Cinderella myth to a twentieth-century urban landscape, this book challenges traditional assumptions about the American musical's relationship to both feminism and modernism -- placing the Cinderella story into the Broadway musical canon.
Table of Contents
Introduction: Glass Slippers and Glass Ceilings in the Twenty-First Century, or Cinderella Returns to Broadway
1. "Who Are These American Cinderellas?:" Working Girls, Chorus Girls, and American Dreams for Women in the 1920s
2. Merman Was a Lady: The 1930s Cinderella-Broad and Burlesquing the Genteel Tradition
3. "Make Up Your Mind:" Boss Ladies and Enchantresses in the 1940s Broadway Musical
4. "Twentieth-Century Fairy Tales:" Princesses, Prostitutes, and the Feminine Mystique in the Broadway Musicals of the 1950s
5. Coda: Rewriting the Broadway Cinderella Story
Editorial Reviews
"What Maya Cantu has achieved is to link mid-twentieth-century Broadway and Hollywood's fascination with Cinderella imagery and plots to modern feminism, and to the shifting conditions of American women. This book opens a rich vein of musical theatre study not unearthed before. She has written a real gem: fresh, comprehensive, engaging - often even revelatory." – Stuart Hecht, PhD, Associate Professor, Theatre, Boston College, USA and author of Transposing Broadway: Jews, Assimilation, and the American Musical
"American Cinderellas on the Broadway Musical Stage convincingly argues for the Cinderella motif as crucial to American musical theatre. Instead of pre-modern waifs and princesses, however, Maya Cantu finds her Cinderellas among the working girls, gold diggers, broads, boss ladies, and prostitutes of modern American culture, reminding us of the centrality of spunky girls in the musical. An insightful and illuminating read." - Pamela Robertson Wojcik, Professor, Department of Film, TV, and Theatre, University of Notre Dame, author of Guilty Pleasures: Feminist Camp from Mae West to Madonna
"This book is not only a smart, fascinating, and entertaining celebration of Broadway's love of the working girl's rags-to-riches dream, but also an engaging, thoughtful and perceptive exploration of our cultural values and the theatre artists who shaped them. A joy!" – Jack Sharrar, PhD, American Conservatory Theater, author of Avery Hopwood: His Life and Plays
Book Reviews
"American Cinderellas provides a compelling and detailed insight into the development of female narratives from the familiar fairy tale into a fundamental component of storytelling in American musical theatre writing. It is bound to inspire further study of the themes it discusses and will hopefully encourage further scholarly interest in the real-life women it also showcases." -- Hannah Robbins, University of Sheffield, Studies in Musical Theatre, 10.1 (March 2016)
"(American Cinderellas) triumphs as a classical history text: a rich, resourceful chronology of stage musicals that focuses on the shows' dramaturgy with a consciously feminist perspective."--Helen Deborah Lewis, Boston Conservatory, New England Theatre Journal, Vol. 27 (2016)
"Drawing from feminist theory and theater history, Maya Cantu argues that the Cinderella myth, an amalgamation of rags-to-riches story and magical marriage plot, offers a compelling matrix to negotiate theatrically the various economic, gendered, and marital expectations for working women....Cantu's strong theoretical interventions...are sharp, nuanced, and sociologically grounded. American Cinderellas is a lush, captivating, and necessary addition to the fields of theatre history, women performers, and feminism in performance." -- Yasmine Marie Jahanmir, University of California, Santa Barbara, Theatre Survey, 58.2 (May 2017)
"American Cinderellas on the Broadway Musical Stage is an important resource that fills a gap in the scholarly literature (of the topic).... In a text that makes connections between actresses and characters, Cantu offers readers a revelation of America's trend of using the Cinderella narrative during the past one hundred years." --Alicia M. Goodman, Texas Tech University, The Journal of American Culture, 40.2 (September 2017)
"As scholarly considerations of the musical theatre's fascination with Cinderella analogues are curiously scant, Cantu's project proves valuable in that it addresses a gap in the extant literature and explores a remarkably rich phenomenon hiding in plain sight....Cantu's book is expertly researched...(and) often an alluring read....Cantu's prose is lively, playful, and periodically employs vernacular from the era under scrutiny. More importantly, she contributes a new study to the field of musical theatre history that not only builds on the work of such scholars as Stacy Wolf and Stuart Hecht, but also indicates additional avenues for investigation."--Bryan M. Vandevender, Bucknell University, Theatre Annual, Vol. 70 (2017)
The book is also available at the following libraries.