Description

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But is it a musical? This question is regularly asked of films, television shows and other media objects that sit uncomfortably in the category despite evident musical connections. Musicals at the Margins argues that instead of seeking to resolve such questions, we should leave them unanswered and unsettled, proposing that there is value in examining the unstable edges of genre. This collection explores the marginal musical in a diverse range of historical and global contexts. It encompasses a range of different forms of marginality including boundary texts (films/media that are sort of/not quite musicals), musical sequences (marginalized sequences in musicals; musical sequences in non-musicals), music films, musicals of the margins (musicals produced from social, cultural, geographical, and geopolitical margins), and musicals across media (television and new media). Ultimately these essays argue that marginal genre texts tell us a great deal about the musical specifically and genre more broadly.

About the Author

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Martha Shearer is Assistant Professor and Ad Astra Fellow in Film Studies at University College Dublin, Ireland. She is the author of New York City and the Hollywood Musical: Dancing in the Streets (2016). Her work on the musical has also been published in Screen, The Soundtrack, and The Oxford Handbook of Musical Theatre Screen Adaptations (2019). Julie Lobalzo Wright is a Teaching Fellow in Film and Television Studies at the University of Warwick, UK. She is the author of Crossover Stardom: Male Popular Music Stars in American Cinema (Bloomsbury, 2018), co-editor with Lucy Bolton of Lasting Screen Stars: Images that Fade and Personas that Endure (2016), and has published research on stardom and musical/music films in various edited collections and in the journals, Celebrity Studies and Film/Philosophy.