Musicals at the Margins

But is it a musical? This question is regularly asked of films, television shows and other media objects that sit uncomfortably in the category despite evident musical connections. Musicals at the Margins argues that instead of seeking to resolve such questions, we should leave them unanswered and unsettled, proposing that there is value in examining the unstable edges of genre. This collection explores the marginal musical in a diverse range of historical and global contexts. It encompasses a range of different forms of marginality including boundary texts (films/media that are sort of/not quite musicals), musical sequences (marginalized sequences in musicals; musical sequences in non-musicals), music films, musicals of the margins (musicals produced from social, cultural, geographical, and geopolitical margins), and musicals across media (television and new media). Ultimately these essays argue that marginal genre texts tell us a great deal about the musical specifically and genre more broadly.

Martha Shearer is Assistant Professor and Ad Astra Fellow in Film Studies at University College Dublin, Ireland. She is the author of New York City and the Hollywood Musical: Dancing in the Streets (2016). Her work on the musical has also been published in Screen, The Soundtrack, and The Oxford Handbook of Musical Theatre Screen Adaptations (2019).
Julie Lobalzo Wrightis an Assistant Professor in Film and Television Studies at the University of Warwick, UK. She is the author of Crossover Stardom: Male Popular Music Stars in American Cinema (2018), co-editor with Lucy Bolton of Lasting Screen Stars: Images that Fade and Personas that Endure (2016), and has published research on stardom and musical/music films in various edited collections and in the journals Celebrity Studies and Film/Philosophy.

List of Figures
Acknowledgements
1. Introduction: Genre Panic at the Margins
Julie Lobalzo Wright and Martha Shearer
Generic boundaries
2. Danceploitation, Musical Disruption, and Synergy in Saturday Night Fever, Flashdance, and Breakin'
Jenny Oyallon-Koloski
3. Pitching Utopia: Popular Music, Community, and Neoliberalism in the Choir Film
Eleonora Sammartino
4. E-Q-U-I-T-Y: Generic Boundaries, Gender, and Real Estate in the Magic Mike Films
Martha Shearer
5. Saint-Louis Blues: From Oral Storytelling to Aural Filmmaking
Estrella Sendra Fernández
Musicals of the margins
6. The Marseille Film Operetta
Marie Cadalanu and Phil Powrie
7. Heteroglossia in the Musical Number: Song, Music Performance, and Marginalised Identity in Tony Gatlif's Swing (2002)
Tamsin Graves
8. Sexsationalist Feminism in The Devil's Carnival Project (2012, 2015)
Joana Rita Ramalho

Musical sequences
9. The On- and Off-Screen Politics of Sophia Loren's Musical Performances in Houseboat (1958) and It Started in Naples (1960)
Sarah Culhane
10. 'Just a Little Warm-Up for the Job': Harold Nicholas, the Specialty Act, and the Hollywood Song-and-Dance Man
Kate Saccone
11. A Language of its Own: Mani Ratnam's Experiments with the Song Scene
Aakshi Magazine

Music
12. Pianos, Affect and Memory
Paul Mazey and Sarah Street
13. Everybody Wants to Be a Cat: Jazz Culture and Disney Animation in the 1960s
Landon Palmer
14. Short-Form Pop Music Films in 1960s Britain
Richard Farmer
15. "Good Evening Pasadena!": Fantastical Performance Spaces in the Rock Documentary
Richard Wallace
Musicals across media
16. Live Musical Spectaculars: Eventizing Network Television in the Post-Network Age
Anthony Enns
17. Camp and the Celebration of the Popular Song in RuPaul's Drag Race "Lip Sync for Your Life"
Julie Lobalzo Wright
List of Contributors
Index