The Pop Musical

Sweat, Tears, and Tarnished Utopias

Professor Alberto Mira

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English

Columbia University Press
09 November 2021

Dance & Performing arts

Series: Short Cuts

After Hollywood and Tin Pan Alley's iron grip on the movie musical began to slip in the face of pop's cultural dominance, many believed that the musical genre entered a terminal decline and finally wore itself out by the 1980s. Though the industrial model of the musical was disrupted by the emergence of pop, the Hollywood musical has not gone extinct. Many Hollywood productions from the 1960s to the present have revisited the forms and conventions of the classic musical-except instead of drawing from showtunes and jazz standards, they employ the styles and iconography of pop.

Alberto Mira offers a new account of how pop music revolutionized the Hollywood musical. He shows that while the Hollywood system ceased producing large-scale traditional musicals, different pop strains-disco, rock 'n' roll, doo-wop, glam, and hip-hop-renewed the genre, giving it a new life. While the classical musical presented a world light on conflict, defined by theatricality and where effortless talent can shine through, the introduction of pop spurred musicals to address contemporary social and political conditions. Mira traces the emergence of a new set of themes-such as the painful hard work depicted in Dirty Dancing (1987); the double-edged fandom of Velvet Goldmine (1998); and the racial politics of Dreamgirls (2006)-to explore why the Hollywood musical has found renewed relevance.

By: Professor Alberto Mira
Imprint: Columbia University Press
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions: Height: 216mm, Width: 140mm,
ISBN: 9780231191234
ISBN 10: 0231191235
Series: Short Cuts
Pages: 160
Publication Date: 09 November 2021
Audience: College/higher education , Primary
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active

Alberto Mira is reader in film studies at Oxford Brookes University. He is the editor of The Cinema of Spain and Portugal (Wallflower, 2005) and the author of the Historical Dictionary of Spanish Cinema, second edition (2019), as well as several Spanish-language books.

Reviews for The Pop Musical: Sweat, Tears, and Tarnished Utopias

Alberto Mira’s timely volume superbly fills a gap in writing on the musical, focusing with originality, flair and thorough scholarship on a significant variant of the genre. He demonstrates how the Pop musical has taken the genre into new directions, for instance making it even more socially aware, revising its folk discourse, and exploring questions of sexual identity. In his analysis of the star qualities of Ann-Margret, the changing impact of Elvis Presley, re-appraisal of films like Bye Bye Birdie and The Rocky Horror Picture Show or, more generally, the way Pop musicals draw on and diversify the traditions of the classical musical, Mira ensures that this exciting volume will be essential reading for devotees as well as for scholars of the film musical, and the aesthetics, cultural and socio-political contexts of popular cinema. -- Peter William Evans, Queen Mary University of London While much has been written on the change in the musical's cinematic language in the postclassical period, the “pop musical” itself has not been sufficiently identified, theorized, or historicized. In The Pop Musical, Alberto Mira addresses this gap, insisting that the genre’s unique relationship with pop music plays a determining role in how these films make meaning. -- Desirée Garcia, author of <i>The Movie Musical</i>