[PDF] Mormons Musical Theater And Belonging In America eBook

Author : Jake Johnson
Publisher : University of Illinois Press
Page : 224 pages
File Size : 24,69 MB
Release : 2019-06-30
Category : Music
ISBN : 025205136X

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The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints adopted the vocal and theatrical traditions of American musical theater as important theological tenets. As Church membership grew, leaders saw how the genre could help define the faith and wove musical theater into many aspects of Mormon life. Jake Johnson merges the study of belonging in America with scholarship on voice and popular music to explore the surprising yet profound link between two quintessentially American institutions. Throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, Mormons gravitated toward musicals as a common platform for transmitting political and theological ideas. Johnson sees Mormons using musical theater as a medium for theology of voice--a religious practice that suggests how vicariously voicing another person can bring one closer to godliness. This sounding, Johnson suggests, created new opportunities for living. Voice and the musical theater tradition provided a site for Mormons to negotiate their way into middle-class respectability. At the same time, musical theater became a unique expressive tool of Mormon culture.

Author : Jake Johnson
Publisher : University of Illinois Press
Page : 263 pages
File Size : 10,96 MB
Release : 2021-09-28
Category : Music
ISBN : 0252052854

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The local and regional shows staged throughout America use musical theater’s inherent power of deception to cultivate worldviews opposed to mainstream ideas. Jake Johnson reveals how musical theater between the coasts inhabits the middle spaces between professional and amateur, urban and rural, fact and fiction, fantasy and reality, and truth and falsehood. The homegrown musical provides a space to engage belief and religion—imagining a better world while creating opportunities to expand what is possible in the current one. Whether it is the Oklahoma Senior Follies or a Mormon splinter group’s production of The Sound of Music, such productions give people a chance to jolt themselves out of today’s post-truth malaise and move toward a world more in line with their desires for justice, reconciliation, and community. Vibrant and strikingly original, Lying in the Middle discovers some of the most potent musical theater taking place in the hoping, beating hearts of Americans.

Author : Jacob Vaughn Johnson
Publisher :
Page : 275 pages
File Size : 27,61 MB
Release : 2017
Category :
ISBN :

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American musical theater is often dismissed as frivolous or kitschy entertainment. But what if musicals actually mattered a great deal? What if perhaps the most innocuous musical genre in America actually defines the practices of Mormonism--America's fastest-growing religion? I address these questions in this dissertation by applying methodologies from Musicology, Voice Studies, Performance Studies, and American Studies to the unexpected yet dynamic relationship between Mormonism and American musical theater. In the introduction, I discuss how speaking on behalf of another person is rooted within both Mormonism and musical theater and argue for its critical examination. In Chapter 1, I argue that Mormonism and American musical theater are cut from the same ideological cloth and that musicals are intertwined with Mormon theology. Chapter 2 looks at the ways Mormons used musical theater as an assimilative tool during the mid-twentieth century. Chapter 3 looks at how Mormons used musical theater to "whiten" dark-skinned Polynesians and Native Americans, converting them, in essence, to Mormonism. In Chapter 4 I argue that the Mormon musical Saturday's Warrior helped Mormons bypass the strict system of order within Mormonism called Correlation. In Chapter 5, I suggest the Broadway musical Book of Mormon can be read as a critique of Correlated Mormonism. My investigation led to my conclusion that voice and vocal theatricality are deeply rooted concepts in Mormonism, to such a degree that I claim Mormons practice a theology of voice. I argue that analyzing the Mormon relationship with musicals from the mid-nineteenth century to today helps conceptualize the phenomenon of speaking on behalf of another person (or God), a process I call the vicarious voice. By closely examining voice in Mormonism and musical theater, I construct a theoretical approach to the performance of vocal vicarity. I conclude that, in an effort to become gods themselves, Mormons use the musical stage to practice transforming into someone they are not, modeling closely the theatrical qualities of Jesus and other spiritual leaders in Mormon mythology. Thus, learning to vicariously voice another person on the musical stage actually draws the faithful closer to godliness.

Author : Marc Edward Shaw
Publisher : Rowman & Littlefield
Page : 193 pages
File Size : 29,61 MB
Release : 2016-04-27
Category : Performing Arts
ISBN : 1442266775

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One of the most successful shows in Broadway history, The Book of Mormon broke box office records when it debuted in 2011 and received nine Tony awards, including Best Musical. A collaboration between Trey Parker and Matt Stone (creators of the show South Park) and Robert Lopez (Avenue Q), the show was a critical success, cited for both its religious irreverence and sendup of musical traditions. In Singing and Dancing to The Book of Mormon: Critical Essays on the Broadway Musical, Marc Edward Shaw and Holly Welker have assembled a collection that examines this cultural phenomenon from a variety of perspectives. Contributors to this volume address such questions as: What made the musical such a remarkable success? In what ways does the show utilize established musical theatre traditions and comic tropes, but still create something new? What religious and cultural buttons does the work push? What artistic and social boundaries—and the transgressions thereof—give the work its edge? Another focus in this volume is the official and unofficial Mormon reactions to the musical. Because the coeditors and several of the contributors have ties to the Mormon community, they offer unique perspectives on the musical’s finer points about Mormon doctrine. Beyond the obvious appeal to theatre devotees, Singing and Dancing to The Book of Mormon will be of interest to scholars of religion, sociology, theatre, and popular culture.

Author : David Hackett Fischer
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 981 pages
File Size : 34,51 MB
Release : 1991-03-14
Category : History
ISBN : 019974369X

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This fascinating book is the first volume in a projected cultural history of the United States, from the earliest English settlements to our own time. It is a history of American folkways as they have changed through time, and it argues a thesis about the importance for the United States of having been British in its cultural origins. While most people in the United States today have no British ancestors, they have assimilated regional cultures which were created by British colonists, even while preserving ethnic identities at the same time. In this sense, nearly all Americans are "Albion's Seed," no matter what their ethnicity may be. The concluding section of this remarkable book explores the ways that regional cultures have continued to dominate national politics from 1789 to 1988, and still help to shape attitudes toward education, government, gender, and violence, on which differences between American regions are greater than between European nations.

Author : Brian Granger
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 74 pages
File Size : 50,53 MB
Release : 2019-10-16
Category : Performing Arts
ISBN : 0429682077

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'Hasa Diga Eebowai' In 2011, a musical full of curse words and Mormon missionaries swept that year’s Tony Awards and was praised as a triumphant return of the American musical. This book explores the inherent achievements (and failures) of The Book of Mormon—one of the most ambitious, and problematic, musicals to achieve widespread success. The creative team members—Matt Parker, Trey Stone and composer Robert Lopez—were collectively known for their aggressive use of taboo subjects and crude, punchy humor. Using the metaphor of boxing, Granger explores the metaphorical punches the trio delivers and ruminates over the less-discussed ideological wounds that their style of shock absurdism might leave behind. This careful examination of where The Book of Mormon succeeds and fails is sure to challenge discussion of our understanding of musical comedy and our appreciation for this cultural landmark in theatre.

Author : Robert L. McLaughlin
Publisher : Univ. Press of Mississippi
Page : 284 pages
File Size : 13,18 MB
Release : 2016-08-11
Category : Performing Arts
ISBN : 1496808568

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From West Side Story in 1957 to Road Show in 2008, the musicals of Stephen Sondheim (1930–2021) and his collaborators have challenged the conventions of American musical theater and expanded the possibilities of what musical plays can do, how they work, and what they mean. Sondheim's brilliant array of work, including such musicals as Company, Follies, Sweeney Todd, Sunday in the Park with George, and Into the Woods, established him as the preeminent composer/lyricist of his, if not all, time. Stephen Sondheim and the Reinvention of the American Musical places Sondheim's work in two contexts: the exhaustion of the musical play and the postmodernism that, by the 1960s, deeply influenced all the American arts. Sondheim's musicals are central to the transition from the Rodgers and Hammerstein-style musical that had dominated Broadway stages for twenty years to a new postmodern musical. This new style reclaimed many of the self-aware, performative techniques of the 1930s musical comedy to develop its themes of the breakdown of narrative knowledge and the fragmentation of identity. In his most recent work, Sondheim, who was famously mentored by Oscar Hammerstein II, stretches toward a twenty-first-century musical that seeks to break out of the self-referring web of language. Stephen Sondheim and the Reinvention of the American Musical offers close readings of all of Sondheim's musicals and finds in them critiques of the operation of power, questioning of conventional systems of knowledge, and explorations of contemporary identity.

Author : Jon Krakauer
Publisher : Anchor
Page : 434 pages
File Size : 48,10 MB
Release : 2004-06-08
Category : True Crime
ISBN : 1400078997

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NATIONAL BESTSELLER • From the author of Into the Wild and Into Thin Air, this extraordinary work of investigative journalism takes readers inside America’s isolated Mormon Fundamentalist communities. • Now an acclaimed FX limited series streaming on HULU. “Fantastic.... Right up there with In Cold Blood and The Executioner’s Song.” —San Francisco Chronicle Defying both civil authorities and the Mormon establishment in Salt Lake City, the renegade leaders of these Taliban-like theocracies are zealots who answer only to God; some 40,000 people still practice polygamy in these communities. At the core of Krakauer’s book are brothers Ron and Dan Lafferty, who insist they received a commandment from God to kill a blameless woman and her baby girl. Beginning with a meticulously researched account of this appalling double murder, Krakauer constructs a multi-layered, bone-chilling narrative of messianic delusion, polygamy, savage violence, and unyielding faith. Along the way he uncovers a shadowy offshoot of America’s fastest growing religion, and raises provocative questions about the nature of religious belief.

Author : Todd Decker
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 328 pages
File Size : 44,59 MB
Release : 2015
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 0190250534

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Show Boat: Performing Race in an American Musical draws on exhaustive archival research to tell the story of how Jerome Kern, Oscar Hammerstein II, and a host of directors, choreographers, producers, and performers -- among them Paul Robeson -- made and remade the most important musical in Broadway history.

Author : Jo Lauria
Publisher : Potter Style
Page : 323 pages
File Size : 47,58 MB
Release : 2007
Category : Decorative arts
ISBN : 0307346471

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Illustrated with 200 stunning photographs and encompassing objects from furniture and ceramics to jewelry and metal, this definitive work from Jo Lauria and Steve Fenton showcases some of the greatest pieces of American crafts of the last two centuries. Potter Craft