‘Waving through a window’: Nostalgia and prosthetic memory in Dear Evan Hansen

Dear Evan Hansen, a popular Broadway musical whose narrative centres on connectivity and the protagonist’s social anxiety, offers a disruptive potential to the otherwise standard nostalgic leanings of the contemporary American musical. Operating dramaturgically, nostalgia offers the audience an opportunity to recall an idealized past that imbues the musical they are witnessing with their own positive affect. Dear Evan Hansen’s use of prosthetic memory disrupts the nostalgic tradition of the contemporary musical. Using dramaturgical analysis to identify the narrative operation of nostalgia and prosthetic memory, this article situates the disruptive potential of Dear Evan Hansen as an intervention into the American musical theatre canon writ large.

The Cake Walk Photo Girl and Other Footnotes in African American Musical Theatre

On 22 August 1897, theAmerican Woman's Home Journalpublished seven photographs of “The Cake Walk as It Is Done by Genuine Negroes” in which “Williams and Walker Show How the Real Thing Is Done before the Journal Camera.” In this series, the African American stars Bert Williams, George Walker, Belle Davis, and Stella Wiley perform their popular cake walk act with situational humor in medias res before an unknown photographer in a nondescript space. Among the seven selected poses, one intriguing photograph in the lower right-hand corner depicts the encircled dancers gazing down upon an empty space in the center. The subject of their gaze becomes apparent when comparing the magazine images with the seven “Post Cards” Franz Huld published as part of his “Cake Walk/Negro Dance” series around 1901. Although the performers’ poses are the same, the postcard includes extra space between Wiley and Walker to feature a young girl of mixed racial heritage bending forward while hiking the back of her dress with her smiling face proudly held high (Fig. 1). If standing upright, she appears to be less than four feet tall and perhaps five to nine years of age. Given the obscure date and location of her photo shoot, her birth year could range anywhere from the mid-1880s to the early 1890s. Like Thomas F. DeFrantz, an African American dance theorist who gazes upon two 1920s photographs of other dancing girls, my gaze leads me to wonder about her identity, how she met and socialized with these four dancers, and whether she pursued a theatrical career.

Opera for the People

Opera for the People is an in-depth examination of a completely forgotten chapter in American social and cultural history: the love affair that middle-class Americans had with continental opera (translated into English) in the 1870s, 1880s, and 1890s. This work challenges a common stereotype that opera in nineteenth-century America was as it is in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries: elite, exclusive, expensive, and of interest to a niche market. It also demonstrates conclusively that the historiography of nineteenth-century American music (which utterly ignores English-language opera performance and reception history) is completely wrong. Based on information from music and theatre periodicals published in the United States between 1860 and 1900; letters, diaries, playbills, memoirs, librettos, scores, and other performance materials; and reviews, commentary, and other evidence of performance history in digitized newspapers, this work shows that more than one hundred different companies toured all over America, performing opera in English for heterogeneous audiences during this period, and that many of the most successful troupes were led or supported by women—prima donna/impresarios, women managers, or philanthropists who lent financial support. The book conclusively demonstrates the continued wide popularity of opera among middle-class Americans during the last three decades of the century and furthermore illustrates the important (and hitherto unsuspected) place of opera in the rich cornucopia of late-century American musical theatre, which eventually led to the emergence of American musical comedy.

Ballad Opera

Between 1728 and 1760 ballad opera transformed London’s theatre by making English song the key to commercial success for stage works. By generating the first modern popular singers, it became a prototype for present-day British and American musical theatre. The jaw-dropping success of John Gay’s Beggar’s Opera established a new genre, of which three types developed, according to venue. Licensed theatres staged sentimental, putatively native ‘operas’ tailored around star sopranos such as Kitty Clive. Non-licensed theatres accommodated ballad operas with political intent, or those of particular local interest. Finally, ballad operas written for publication, not staging, deployed song to expose court scandal or protest against the government. The appeal of ballad opera depended on its songs, which pretended to instruct by appealing to popular prejudice, particularly against women. Although the Licensing Act of 1737 discouraged new works, staples of ballad opera still flourished on the London stage throughout the century.