Destabilizing the Hollywood musical
Subtitle: music, masculinity and mayhem
By: Kelly Kessler
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Published: 2010
Place of publication: Basingstoke, Hampshire [England]; New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 256
ISBN-13: 9780230230491
Subjects: Musical films; History and criticism; Masculinity in motion pictures
Description: By the mid-sixties, Hollywood's once conservative go-to-gal shed its tap shoes for something darker, hipper, and more in tune with the day's trends. Leaving Gene Kelly and Fred Astaire in their wake, films such as Tommy, Jesus Christ Superstar, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, and Hair reflected the times as they embraced swingers, youth rebellion, and Scorsese-esque aesthetics. Focusing mainly on the period between the genre's post- Sound of Music boom and its near-disappearance in the 1980s, Destabilizing the Hollywood Musical pushes past the idyllic world of Oklahoma! to examine emergent and socially contentious norms that defined decades of the genre and helped to form its millennial revival. Often rejecting love, marriage, and the USA, much of this later musical breed favours male stories of lust, deception, isolation, and failure wrapped in a haze of rock-n-roll, visual dynamism, and testosterone.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. 237-244) and index.
Table of contents: title: Introduction : The musical and masculinity take a turn for the ambivalent; title: Nothing is comin' up roses : the desertion of narrative utopia; title: On a clear day you can see the cracks in the scenery: visual reflexivity and realism trump nostalgic idealism; title: Wanna sing and dance? these new guys are ambivalent about it; title: The new guard's musical masculinity; title: Epilogue : I could go on singing.