21st Century Gothic Musicals with Hayley Charlesworth

Romancing the Gothic is an independent online education project run by Dr Sam Hirst which offers a range of classes, courses and groups

Romancing the Gothic

21st Century Gothic Musicals: Consumerism, Virality and the Horrors of the 'I Want' Song with Hayley Charlesworth

<p>If you are able to, please support our speakers when you get your ticket. You can also support the project on a monthly basis, helping us to pay our speakers a standard honorarium - https://www.patreon.com/romancingthegothic</p><p>With intensified emotion, stylised and choreographed movement, and characters singing their internal and external dialogue, the musical has traditionally been associated with escapist flights of fancy. From the technicolour spectacle of The Wizard of Oz to the wish-fulfilment of the Disney princess, audiences have found comfort and enjoyment in stories told in a mode so detached from realism. The heightened reality of the musical has also made it a welcome bedfellow for the Gothic, particularly Gothic of the supernatural variety, with many popular musicals such as Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Phantom of the Opera and Stephen Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street adapted from classics of Gothic fiction. However, in the 21st century, a period already marked by metatextual narratives (seen in Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s musical episode “Once More With Feeling”), winking references to common tropes (as per the comic horror of Starkid Productions’ The Guy Who Didn’t Like Musicals), and nostalgic homage, the Gothic musical has become a different beast, not only embracing the comic, but using the musical’s unreality as a space to comment on contemporary societal fears. Through the analysis of Gothic musical texts across both theatre and screen, this lecture will examine how the Gothic musical comments on consumption, both in the context of capitalism and literal consumption, and how the tradition of the ‘I Want’ song, in which the hero states their primary motivation, can be used as a source of horror in a period of, to paraphrase the Grave Robber in Repo! The Genetic Opera ‘industrialisation crippling the globe’ where all we care for is ‘petty obsessions’.</p>

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21st Century Gothic Musicals with Hayley Charlesworth

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