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New Conventions for a New Generation: High School Musicals and Broadway in the 2010s

2021; Volume: 40; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/ths.2021.0011

2166-9953

Lindsey Mantoan,

Diverse Music Education Insights

New Conventions for a New GenerationHigh School Musicals and Broadway in the 2010s Lindsey Mantoan (bio) Scholars of musical theatre often point to midcentury musicals as constituting the so-called golden age of the art form, and the legacy of the time period looms large when studying subsequent musical genres and trends.1 In Changed for Good: A Feminist History of the Broadway Musical, Stacy Wolf offers a survey of musicals that she organizes by decade and analyzes through feminist and critical race lenses, beginning with the golden age. While gesturing to a broad range of musical styles and conventions, Wolf demonstrates that 1960s musicals often featured the Single Girl who sang and danced solo onstage but was often punished for her independence. The radical politics of the 1970s gave rise to the ensemble musical that negotiated the inward reflection of individual characters and the cohesion of communities. The megamusical dominated the 1980s, with imports from the United Kingdom such as Les Misérables and Phantom of the Opera dramatically altering musical theatre values, shifting focus from characters to scenery and spectacle. To conclude the book, Wolf spans the 1990s and the first decade of the 2000s, analyzing musicals centering women of color and mapping out "the interdependence of race, gender, and sexuality" in those musicals.2 Wolf's book, published in 2011, takes readers up to 2008's In the Heights in its study of trends and conventions in Broadway musicals. This paper extends Wolf's work into the 2010s. Here, I suggest that there is a new category that in [End Page 189] part defines musicals of the 2010s—the high school musical—and that comparing its values to those of previous eras can demonstrate the changing character of the musical form as well as changing values in US culture. If the musical is almost always about national and individual identity (see Raymond Knapp),3 these 2010s high school texts, including Bring it On: The Musical, Mean Girls, Heathers, The Prom, Dear Evan Hansen, Be More Chill, Carrie, Clueless, and Bare, signal a shiftin what constitutes a community, which individuals are valued, and what integration might truly mean. These musicals put forward body positive messages and embrace queerness and trans identities, and in so doing, they develop a new genre of US musical theatre. They dismantle the firmly entrenched social cliques of 1990s high school films through incorporating social media into the narrative and production design, foregrounding female friendship, framing identity as performative and mutable, and developing nuanced and collaborative adult characters who had previously occupied tyrannical, static positions in these types of narratives. The longer version of this project develops these ideas across multiple high school musicals. Here, I focus on the way Bring It On: The Musical revises and recuperates the figure of the "queen bee," the popular, pretty girl who sits atop the high school social pyramid and bullies the other students. Next, I examine how the musical Mean Girls celebrates social egalitarianism through performance. High school musicals on Broadway draw from a genealogy that includes 1980s John Hughes high school films and their legacy in the 1990s, along with a couple of high school musicals during earlier eras (specifically Bye, Bye Birdie [1960] and Grease [1971]), and three musicals of the 2000s: Hairspray (2003), Spring Awakening (2006), and Disney's made-for-television High School Musical (2006). Beginning with John Hughes's Sixteen Candles (1984), The Breakfast Club (1985), Ferris Bueller's Day Off (1986), and Pretty in Pink (1986), conventions of high school narratives carefully delineate the social status of archetypes such as the nerd and the jock, yet all the characters are presented as conventionally attractive, even if they wear glasses and refer to themselves as a geek or a loser. Staunchly antiauthoritarian, Hughes's films situate grown-ups as out of touch, occasionally harmless, but always a force to be overcome. Heterosexual romance is the raison d'être of these high school films; the lovers hail from different social circles, and these differences constitute part of the attraction they share. Writing about the effect Hughes's films have had on subsequent high school movies, cultural studies critic Roz Kaveney argues...