Gestures of Music Theater: The Performativity of Song and Dance offers new, cutting-edge essays focusing on song and dance as performative gestures that not only entertain but also act on audiences and performers. The chapters range across musical theater, opera, theater, and other artistic practices, from Glee to Gardzienice, Beckett to Disney, Broadway to Turner-Prize-winning sound installation. The chapters draw together these diverse examples of vocality and physicality by exploring their affect rather than through considering them as texts. The book's contributors derive methodologies from many disciplines. Resisting discrete discipline-based enquiry, they share methodologies and performance repertoires with discipline-based scholarship from theater studies, musicology, and cultural studies, among other approaches. Together, they view these as neighboring voices whose dialogue enriches the study of contemporary music theater.

Product Description: What is it about musical theatre that audiences find entertaining? What are the features that lead to its ability to stimulate emotional attachment, to move and to give pleasure? Beginning from the passion musical theatre performances arouse and their ubiquity in London's West End and on Broadway this book explores the ways in which musical theatre reaches out to and involves its audiences...read more

Product Description: Perfect for drama students, choir leaders, and aspiring singers, this insightful handbook provides insight into every aspect of performing in musical theater. Hints are provided for singers on developing vocal techniques, preparing songs for both audition and performance, and exploring character within song...read more

Product Description: British pantomime, a blend of commedia dell’arte and vaudeville-style performance, uses cross-dressing, familiar children’s stories such as Cinderella, and shouts from the audience as the basis for its matchless theatrical spectacle...read more