Book Idea: The Musical Theatre Experience

A super appropriate title that would probably need to be changed in order to be more catchy. But, I was hit with an idea while watching one of Joe Roach’s DeVane Lectures that there are now so many different fields of study that can be brought to bear on the question, what is happening to me when I’m attending a musical theatre performance?, that perhaps rather than try to use one, or force-combine all of them, it might be a really exciting book to spend 3-5 chapters articulating as many ways of understanding the experience of being in the musical theatre.

For example:
1-A study of the musical theatre as a resurgent performance of the myth of presence, bringing to bear presence studies from Derrida through Auslander as well as work by Carolyn Abbate, etc.

2-A study of the musical theatre as intensive ritual, and the role of music in rituals, and how the inactive audience holds the role of the community whose legitimacy is affirmed by the sacrifices made by the actors (the ritual “passengers”) onstage.

3-A study musical theatre as mid-twentieth century cultural form, built upon the cultural and philosophical assumptions of its era in American history.

4-And, I dunno, other angles? Semiotics maybe?

It’s an interesting idea! And a way to deal with the fact that you can’t come up with a Grand Unifying Theory of Musical Theatre even though you desperately want to. Maybe by putting whatever angles you have at your disposal, you’ll find a way to combine them without reducing or dishonoring them. And maybe you’ll begin toward a larger study of how to write scholarship that lacks a thesis but not theory.