Hip-Hop culture's explosive arrival on the art scene of New York in the boroughs of Queens and the Bronx in the 1970s began to influence all aspects of musical theater from singing to scenic design. Hip-Hop in Musical Theatre takes an intersectional standpoint to explore Hip-Hop's influence on musical theater practice and aesthetics by giving the reader a comprehensive map of musical theater productions that have been impacted by Hip-Hop music and culture.
Offering insightful briefs on musical theater productions that contain aesthetic, musical and embodied references to the global phenomenon of Hip-hop culture, this volume takes the reader through a virtual tour of Hip-Hop's influence on American musical theater. From early traces of hip-hop's rap scene in the 1970s that appeared in musicals such as Micki Grant's Tony Award nominated
Don't Bother Me I Can't Cope (1971) and Broadway smash hits such as
The Wiz (1974) to international juggernauts such as Lin-Manuel Miranda's
Hamilton (2015), this introductory book decodes the sights and sounds of Hip-Hop culture within the socio-cultural context in which the musicals are produced.
Published in the
Topics in Musical Theatre series this volume presents fact-filled and insightful summaries of musicals that give the reader a snapshot of the musical and narrative content while highlighting which aspect of the music and culture of Hip-Hop informs acting, dancing, singing, design, and music in the selected musical while offering insightful analysis on the ways that hip-hop styles and politics have changed the shape of musical theater practice.
Gordon, Robert: -
Robert Gordon is Professor of Theatre and Director of the Pinter Centre for Performance and Creative Writing at Goldsmiths, University of London, where in 2003 he introduced the first British MA in Musical Theatre for producers and writers and a new BA in Musical Theatre in 2018. He is author of The Purpose of Playing: Modern Acting Theory in Perspective (2006), Harold Pinter's Theatre of Power (2012) and, with Olaf Jubin and Millie Taylor, British Musical Theatre Since 1950 (2016). Edited collections include The Oxford Handbook of Sondheim Studies (2014) and, with Olaf Jubin, The Oxford Handbook of the British Musical (2016). He has acted and directed in South Africa, the UK, Ireland, the USA, Italy, Russia and the Czech Republic. In 2013, he directed the European première of Kander and Ebb's Steel Pier in Brno, while his musical version of Five Children
and It with composer Nick Hutson, received a professional workshop in 2015. He is currently engaged as a writer and actor of Shylock Speaks, which premiered in February 2020.
Méndez, Emilio: - Emilio Méndez is associate professor of Theatre Studies at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). He has worked as a director and translator. He has published works on the history of musical theatre in Mexico and Mexican training programmes for theatre. He received the 2015 National University Distinction for Young Academics in the field of Artistic Creation and Cultural Dissemination.
Persley, Nicole Hodges: - Nicole Hodges Persley is Professor of American Studies and African and African American Studies at the University of Kansas, USA. Her books include Sampling and Remixing Blackness in Hip-Hop Theater and Performance and Hip-Hop in Musical Theatre (Bloomsbury, 2023).
