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Beginning with its title, Tony Kushner and Jeanine Tesori's 2004 musical Caroline, or Change encloses a dichotomy between movement and stillness. The word 'change' is associated with Caroline, the eponymous protagonist, a Black maid who defiantly resists and refuses even the smallest manifestations of turmoil that arise in Lake Charles, Louisiana. A static play, Caroline, or Change contradicts usual expectations of musical theatre's capacity to generate the hopeful and soaring movements generally associated with utopia. This article argues, however, that far from fixating the musical within monolithic representations of history and Black women, Caroline, or Change's stillness seems to offer a redefinition of utopia. Caroline explores moments of stasis as tipping points, in between mobility and immobility, that particularly highlight female performances' capacity to transform the very genre of the musical. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Musical theatre is frequently framed as connected to place and space, as terms like 'the Broadway musical' or 'the Viennese operetta' imply. National categorization, used prominently in titles of key monographs and handbooks, has turned out to be a moulding structure for the genre's historiography. The term 'American popular song form' insinuates that musical form and style may reasonably be categorized by national adjectives. This is also true for the national attribution of earlier genres, such as the supposedly British ballad opera, French opéra comique and German singspiel. Signature pieces of the genre, e.g., the musicals of Rodgers and Hammerstein, have been read as documents of national re-affirmation. Nevertheless, a major portion of the repertoire can just as well be reinterpreted as a statement for mobility, thus bringing into question the tropes of regional rootedness and national at-homeness. Starting with methodological assumptions given in Stephen Greenblatt's cultural mobility manifesto (2009), this article will examine the unquestioned frames of fixity in musical theatre scholarship and sound out alternatives that allow readings of the genre as mobile. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The research surrounding musical theater on the American operatic stage has previously focused on only a small sample of top-tier opera houses. There is a lack of comprehensive information that explicates the increasing performance of musical theater repertoire within the twenty-first century's operatic seasons. Quantitative research of American opera companies adopting such models helps increase the transparency of industry trends and their effects on opera's evolving twenty-first century programming models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hybrid voice pedagogy is increasingly well-known, but it typically applies to North American styles, genres, and techniques, such as jazz, pop, and musical theater. In this case study, the author describes their own hybrid voice pedagogy with Latin American styles and genres, using five examples from the most popular Brazilian genres: bossa nova, MPB, samba-canção, sertanejo and baião. This eight-year study was developed in a voice program that focuses on a variety of Latin-American genres and applies a cross-training pedagogy for the hybrid singer, to prepare students to sing popular genres in various professional situations. The concepts of "hybrid singer," "Latin-American cultural hybridity," and "Brazilian cultural anthropophagy," the latter from 1920s literature, and the Tropicália movement of the 1960s, are used here as the theoretical basis both technically and stylistically. The conclusion is that the voice teacher who specializes in hybrid singing must be prepared to teach the singer how to change the vocal tract and make adaptations, so the voice will have adequate style, with stamina and vocal health. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article attempts to rethink the concept of aesthetic experience, in relation to which it introduces the concept of aesthetic object in a narrow sense, that is, in the context of the problem of perception of a work of art. The main method used in the work is phenomenological analysis. The aesthetic principles of M. Starytsky-director are determined: understanding of the artistic nature of musical and dramatic theaters, features of musical-dramatic genres; ability to create a harmonious ensemble of actors on the stage; painstaking, careful work on the roles; attention to the stage design of performances; the desire to ensure the domestic and ethnographic veracity of the events reproduced on the stage, etc . It is analyzed that to assess the so-called spiritual values, a person does not need the full range of its sensory potentials. Temporary “disconnection” - in any competitive case - of one of the “channels” through which information about the world under normal conditions does not affect the quality of “information” that a person receives in the process of perception of an aesthetic object (work of art). For the first time, the article proposes the definition of aesthetic experience not in the traditional context of expanding existing experience, its enrichment, systematization etc., and as a process of filling the sensual deficit, formed in contact with a work of art – an aesthetic object. Aesthetic experience should be explored as the process of interaction of the sensory apparatus with the aesthetic object. Then both the evaluation and the reflection on the content of the object of evaluation act as secondary, derivative components. That is, the perception of an aesthetic objec should be considered in terms of the aesthetic need and its satisfaction. Thus it receives a nontrivial explanation for the precious, nonutilitarian nature of art. Further research will require a comparative analysis of such processes in different fields of art. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of the article is to reveal the features of a children's musical, created for performance by a children's team, as well as to analyse the specifics of its production on the example of the performances of the leading domestic theatres-studios of musicals. Research methodology. General scientific methods of analysis and synthesis, special artistic methods of observation, systematisation and generalisation, as well as genre and style analysis, comparative method (to identify general and specific features of children's musicals) and the method of theoretical generalisation are applied. Scientific novelty is in the introduction into scientific circulation on the example of musical productions of domestic amateur children's theatre-studios of the knowledge about the musical nature of children's musicals, caused by the interaction of music, verbal, and non-verbal means of expression that correspond to the specifics of children's perception and thinking (musicality is understood as special intonation manifestations characteristic of all means of artistic expression). Children's musicals created to be performed by a children's group were studied in terms of genre specificity; musicals staged by Kyiv amateur children's theatres were analysed; the regularities of children's musicals in the creative practice of Ukrainian theatres for children: studio-theatre «OKAY!», musical theatre «Music Hall», and others are considered. Conclusions. Children's musicals staged by domestic amateur children's groups are a unique genre variety in which various branches of artistic and creative activity are connected in the most perfect form – music, movement, dance, language, speech, acting, singing, costumes, decoration, stage lighting, and special effects. The special spectacularity, brightness, picturesqueness, and construction of this music-dramatic work as a kind of game are characteristic features that create a symbolic space in which the stage action is perceived by the audience as sincerely as possible. The children's musical is endowed with a variety of positive qualities and properties that create the prerequisites for immersing the young viewer in the imaginative world of emotions and feelings, fantasies and thoughts, while remaining as clear and easy to understand as possible thanks to the visualisation of the fairy-tale world of fiction, charm and focus of the entire palette of feelings and moods around the stage spectacle. The purpose of the article is to reveal the features of a children's musical, created for performance by a children's team, as well as to analyse the specifics of its production on the example of the performances of the leading domestic theatres-studios of musicals. Research methodology. General scientific methods of analysis and synthesis, special artistic methods of observation, systematisation and generalisation, as well as genre and style analysis, comparative method (to identify general and specific features of children's musicals) and the method of theoretical generalisation are applied. Scientific novelty is in the introduction into scientific circulation on the example of musical productions of domestic amateur children's theatre-studios of the knowledge about the musical nature of children's musicals, caused by the interaction of music, verbal, and non-verbal means of expression that correspond to the specifics of children's perception and thinking (musicality is understood as special intonation manifestations characteristic of all means of artistic expression). Children's musicals created to be performed by a children's group were studied in terms of genre specificity; musicals staged by Kyiv amateur children's theatres were analysed; the regularities of children's musicals in the creative practice of Ukrainian theatres for children: studio-theatre «OKAY!», musical theatre «Music Hall», and others are considered. Conclusions. Children's musicals staged by domestic amateur children's groups are a unique genre variety in which various branches of artistic and creative activity are connected in the most perfect form – music, movement, dance, language, speech, acting, singing, costumes, decoration, stage lighting, and special effects. The special spectacularity, brightness, picturesqueness, and construction of this music-dramatic work as a kind of game are characteristic features that create a symbolic space in which the stage action is perceived by the audience as sincerely as possible. The children's musical is endowed with a variety of positive qualities and properties that create the prerequisites for immersing the young viewer in the imaginative world of emotions and feelings, fantasies and thoughts, while remaining as clear and easy to understand as possible thanks to the visualisation of the fairy-tale world of fiction, charm and focus of the entire palette of feelings and moods around the stage spectacle. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores taste processes within a group of musical theater students and their voice teacher, the latter also acting as researcher, while working with an aesthetically broad repertoire in a higher education setting in Norway. The study is designed using an action research approach, and the collected data—students' reflection notes, the researcher's field notes, and workshop recordings—are analyzed through Antoine Hennion's theoretical framework of taste as a performance that acts, engages, transforms, and is felt, and which involves skills and sensitizing. In the social sciences, taste is commonly regarded as a matter of cultural consumption. This article argues that tastes are also part of cultural production: musicians, here musical theater performers, are to be seen as music lovers, performing tastes that stabilize or challenge established taste patterns in the form of styles, genres, or traditions. Accounting for situations where tastes are performed, tested, and negotiated, this article argues that tastes have a history but are brought into a negotiating presence, producing implications for the future; in this case, tastes form vocal behaviors and vocal behaviors form tastes. Hence, in musical theater education, taste, taste-making, and taste-testing are part of systematic and formal pedagogics and students' ongoing vocal training. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]