The American Musical and the Performance of Personal Identity

Reviews / Votes

Brainy [and] meticulous... The bedrock idea in The American Musical and the Performance of Personal Identity is that the self is, on some level, a performance--and isn't a performance incomplete when there's no audience? Other people provide the receptivity and feedback that allow one to become a certain person, rather than another. Character is--to revert to that inspiring buzzword--collaboration. -- Celia Wren American Theatre The American Musical and the Performance of Personal Identity is an insightful contribution to current scholarship on musical theatre. It integrates theoretical approaches based in both musicology and audience reception, and applies these approaches across the media of film and theatre. In so doing, it offers a transferable, revealing methodology for similarly sophisticated analyses of the role of musical theatre in American culture. -- Diana Calderazzo Theatre Journal With an engaging and accessible style, Knapp examines the ways American national and personal identity are revealed and defined through the evolving twentieth-century genres of stage and film musicals. -- Arthur Pritchard Studies in Musical Theater Raymond Knapp has an extraordinarily perceptive ear. As he surveys the history of the American musical, he hears things--important things, revelatory things--that earlier writers ... have missed. -- Edward Green Popular Music and Society Knapp's writing is lively and elegant, his knowledge and research are exceedingly wide-ranging, and his observations are incisive and on-the-mark, often very funny, and frequently astonishing in their acuity. -- Stacy Wolf Modern Drama The author offers excellent in-depth treatments of 31 shows, including stage, film, and television musicals. Choice Raymond Knapp has an extraordinarily perceptive ear. As he surveys the history of the American musical, he hears things--important things, revelatory things--that earlier writers who have attempted, systematically, to traverse this vast territory have missed. Hardly a page goes by without a 'Gee, I didn't realize that' moment... One of the loveliest features of these books is the generosity of the musical examples. Coordinated with the text are hundreds of musical excerpts which Princeton University Press has made available to readers through easy downloading from the Internet... It is clear that there is much to praise about Raymond Knapp's work, beginning with his vast knowledge of the subject and his infectious enthusiasm for it. -- Edward Green Popular Music and Society