Shakespeare As Jukebox Musical John R. Severn
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Shakespeare as Jukebox Musical John R. Severn A thesis in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy School of the Arts and Media Faculty of Arts and Social Science July 2015 Publications Sections of this thesis have been published in the following articles: John R. Severn, ‘Interrogating Escapism: Rethinking Kenneth Branagh’s Love’s Labour’s Lost’, Shakespeare Bulletin 31:3 (2013): 453-83. John R. Severn, ‘All Shook Up and the Unannounced Adaptation: Engaging with Twelfth Night’s Unstable Identities’. Theatre Journal 66:4 (2014): 541-57. CONTENTS Acknowledgments 4 Introduction: Shakespeare as Jukebox Musical 6 Defining terms 19 Jukebox musical 19 Existing popular songs 24 Version, adaptation, production 25 Situating the thesis in relation to the existing critical literature 28 Approaches to musical adaptations of Shakespeare 28 Themes in the critical literature on jukebox musicals 34 Nostalgia 35 Postmodernism 50 Revoicing 54 Thesis structure 59 Chapter One: Setting jukebox-musical versions of Shakespeare in their historical context: ballad operas, ‘opera’ spectacles and burlesques 63 Eighteenth-century ballad operas 67 The nineteenth century 86 Frederick Reynolds and Henry Bishop’s ‘operatic’ versions of Shakespeare 88 Nineteenth-century burlesques 107 Chapter Two: Reception, Structure and the Carnivalesque: Bell Shakespeare and the Queensland Theatre Company’s 1998 King Lear and the Works of the Troubadour Theater Company 122 King Lear 125 Production and Reception 125 Song placement in Shakespeare’s King Lear and the 1998 production: performance texture,surprise and the carnivalesque 132 Songs beyond Shakespeare’s 140 ‘My Heart Belongs to Daddy’: the Fool and the musical diva 141 A medley of Daddy songs: ambiguity and taboo 148 Late songs of self-expression: a reprise and a duet 152 1 The Troubies 154 Production and reception 154 ‘Fit’ or function? 162 Song placement 165 Managing the carnivalesque 170 Chapter Three: Interrogating Escapism: Rethinking Kenneth Branagh’s Love’s Labour’s Lost 178 The film and its critics 180 Pastiche, genre, integration and the interrogative text 189 Performance competence and escapism 211 Chapter Four: Evoking Twelfth Night’s Unstable Identities, Part One: Play On! and its Ghosts 228 Twelfth Night and the instability of identity 228 Play On! 232 Play On!’s destabilising effects 241 Play On!’s ghosts 250 Place and time in the reception of Play On! and its ghosts 261 Chapter Five: Evoking Twelfth Night’s Unstable Identities, Part Two: All Shook Up and the Unannounced Adaptation 267 All Shook Up and Twelfth Night 275 All Shook Up and other plays by Shakespeare 279 All Shook Up and Elvis Presley 281 All Shook Up as an adaptation of The Music Man and Bye Bye Birdie 283 Parallels and allusions to other works 285 All Shook Up, the unannounced adaptation and identity 288 Chapter Six: Jukebox-Musical Shakespeare in Miniature: The Scottish Falsetto Sock Puppet Theatre’s Romeo & Juliet 311 The Scottish Falsetto Sock Puppet Theatre and Shakespeare 313 Duet for sock puppets: comedy and pleasure 316 Duet and sonnet: mise en abyme in the Sock Puppets and Shakespeare 320 Further traces of existing song and mise en abyme 330 2 Recuperating a space for a non-heteronormative engagement with Romeo and Juliet 332 Engaging with Romeo and Juliet’s ambiguous genre 337 The role of mediation in receiving the Sock Puppets’ Romeo & Juliet 345 Conclusion 355 Bibliography 364 3 My first acknowledgements are to my supervisors, the late Associate Professor Richard Madeleine, Dr Meg Mumford and Associate Professor William Walker. Sadly, Richard died at the end of my first year. Bill and Meg then stepped in as joint supervisors and made a difficult time easier. Thank you for that, as well as for rigorous comments, support, enthusiasm, dedication in continuing with feedback while on leave, and an approach to working together that made joint supervision from two disciplines, English and Theatre Studies, a stimulating pleasure. I would also like to acknowledge Associate Professor Dorottya Fabian, the Postgraduate Co-ordinator for the School of the Arts and Media for most of my candidature, who oversaw the change and who provided a welcoming forum for postgraduate research. The preparation for a PhD begins well before the thesis proposal takes shape, so thanks is due to my tutors at Rose Bruford College and the University of Birmingham’s Shakespeare Institute for providing me with the training to embark on this research, and for encouraging me to take my studies further. In particular I would like to thank my thesis supervisors at these two institutions, Dr Carol Morley at Rose Bruford and Dr Jaq Bessell at the Shakespeare Institute, not only for their excellent supervision but also for providing a model with their enthusiasm for academic approaches to musical and operatic adaptations of Shakespeare. Scripts, scores, promptbooks and recordings of jukebox musicals and their historical forebears are not easy to track down, and local print reviews, programmes and other ephemera are often difficult to find, but I have benefited from library assistance from a number of institutions in my searches. Firstly, I would like to thank the librarians at the University of New South Wales, particularly the Interlibrary Loans team. I am also grateful for the assistance and access to resources provided by the Fisher Library and the library of the Conservatorium of Music at the University of Sydney; the State Library of New South Wales; Burbank Public Library, Los Angeles; the Harvard Theatre Collection at the Houghton Library, Harvard University; the New York Library for the Performing Arts (especially its Billy Rose Theatre Division and Theatre on Film and Tape Archive); the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust; the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin; and the British Library. I would also like to thank Bell Shakespeare for giving me access to their recordings of King Lear, and Charmaine Sleishman for organising viewings. I would not have been able to complete this thesis without the Australian Postgraduate Award. UNSW also provided me with a travel grant which allowed me to travel to the United States for archival research and to attend performances of A Midsummer Saturday Night’s Fever Dream by the Troubadour Theater Company in Burbank, Los Angeles. My research has also grown in the welcoming atmosphere of the Australia and New Zealand Shakespeare Association at their conferences in Toowoomba and Perth. ANZSA helped cover my costs of attending the Toowoomba conference with a postgraduate grant, and UNSW did the same for the Perth conference. I benefited from feedback on a paper based on Chapter Five’s study of All Shook Up in Perth, and from discussions on jukebox-musical and operatic versions of Shakespeare among participants of the newly formed Shakespeare and Music group at Toowoomba. I would also like to thank Dr Michael Hooper from UNSW for inviting me to present a research paper in the Musicology Research Seminar series, and Dorottya Fabian and my fellow postgraduates at a fortnightly research workshop who provided feedback on a draft 4 presentation on All Shook Up. In addition, I benefited from a postgraduate workshop on queer description run by Associate Professor Lee Wallace of the University of Sydney and Professor Heather Love, University of Pennsylvania, where I was able to discuss passages from Chapter Four, on Play On! I have published journal articles based on work from this thesis on Love’s Labour’s Lost in Shakespeare Bulletin and on All Shook Up in Theatre Journal. As well as thanking the anonymous reviewers for their constructive feedback, I particularly want to thank Pascale Aebischer, editor of Shakespeare Bulletin, and Joanne Tompkins, editor of Theatre Journal, for seeing the articles through the publication process so efficiently and encouraging me to refine the arguments in them, and, as a result, also in the thesis. One of the themes in the thesis is the pleasure that comes from collaborative reception. I am lucky to have had a posse of willing collaborators who have made life as well as theatrical reception a pleasure. I have enjoyed years of discussions of musicals, operas, plays and films with Colin Brodie-Smith, Craig Cross, Caroline Dale- Risk, Craig Ferguson, Kenneth Hogg, Johannes Lüdecke, Joan Mackay, Helen McIntosh, Gillian Wallace, Anna Williams and Neill Yeoman, which have all fed into how I think and feel about performance. Helen unwittingly set off a whole chapter by introducing me to the Scottish Falsetto Sock Puppet Theatre while pre-PhD thoughts were brewing. Thanks also to Beth Drumm for mutually supportive lunches throughout the PhD process. A special thanks to James Dinsmore and Alison York, who first got me back on stage (only slightly against our will, papa!), which then led to Bunbury & Co., among other life-shaping adventures. As a result, I have been able to experience performing and producing burlesques and jukebox-musical adaptations (avant la lettre), as well as viewing them. In particular, producing and performing in James’ and Tim Tricker’s Gilbert & Sullivan Go Wilde, or The Importance of Being Constant in 1997 set off thinking on allusions, adaptations, structure, localism and topicality, and the destabilising effects on identity that jukebox-musical adaptations can provide that eventually developed into this thesis. James’ and Alison’s knowledge of the highways and backstreets of musical theatre and popular culture and our shared delight in ‘airy persiflage’ have allowed me to experience the special quality and intensity of collaborative reception of burlesques and jukebox musicals. In their company, not fully grasping a performance dense with allusion can be a pleasure when anticipating the conversations to follow. My family have been extremely supportive of my studies in a whole range of ways, both practical and emotional, all of which are very much appreciated.