Unstaged grief : musicals and mourning in midcentury America /
"Often dismissed as escapism, screen musicals of the 1960s in fact tapped into unspoken sadness about an America that was slipping away. Jake Johnson delves into film and television musicals of the era to examine their place in networks of grieving in America, for America, and about America. Th...
| Main Author: | |
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| Format: | Book |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
Urbana [Illinois] :
University of Illinois Press,
[2025]
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| Series: | Music in American life.
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| Subjects: |
| Summary: | "Often dismissed as escapism, screen musicals of the 1960s in fact tapped into unspoken sadness about an America that was slipping away. Jake Johnson delves into film and television musicals of the era to examine their place in networks of grieving in America, for America, and about America. The Golden Age of musical theater ended just as Elisabeth Kübler-Ross's 'On death and dying' debuted, and Johnson uses Kübler-Ross's five stages to frame the intertwining of musicals and grief. He analyzes films like 'Seven brides for seven brothers' and 'State fair' alongside paintings, poetry, and other images and texts to reveal how the musical theater engine built in the first half of the century broke down just as a new language emerged to describe the melancholy felt by people facing the end of the world they had known. Nuanced and original, 'Unstaged grief' plumbs the grief, loss, and hope behind the Technicolor spectacle and rousing showstoppers."-- |
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| Physical Description: | xi, 139 pages : black and white illustrations, music ; 24 cm. |
| Bibliography: | Includes bibliographical references (pages 127-133) and index. |
| ISBN: | 9780252088407 9780252046339 0252046331 0252088409 |