Introduction to the 2024 Bruce Kirle Panel

In 2024, ATHE invited conference-goers to participate collectively in “Revisioning the Story” to rehearse, reflect, revise, and reimagine our field’s histories, theories, and practices toward perhaps liberatory futures. In their conference papers, collected in revised form here, the Bruce Kirle Memorial Debut Panelists present nuanced invitations to do just this as they navigate entanglements of history, memory, aesthetics, and racialization on the musical theatre stage. These concerns are at the center of my own research, and serving as the Kirle respondent (as a Kirle Panel alumna!) has been a rich, full-circle experience. I am thrilled that readers of the newly founded journal MusicTheatreDance can engage with these emerging scholars’ provocative and timely interventions.

Frederick Miller demonstrates how appeals to nostalgia in the critical reception of Daniel Fish’s 2019 revival of Oklahoma!, particularly its national tour, reveal attachments to aesthetic values that are simultaneously attachments to whiteness. Miller unravels audiences’ and critics’ responses to this significant production, foregrounding how shifts in the production’s dramaturgies of space from its Broadway home of Circle in the Square Theatre to its proscenium roadhouses revised and reinvited dramaturgies of minoritarian exclusion in its canonical Golden Age staging. Building on interventions from Charlotte Canning, Josephine Lee, and Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Miller offers readers a careful consideration of the musical’s capacity to disrupt and reinforce what are often conservative affects of nostalgia.

Cristy Chory summons the Hamilton juggernaut’s tagline “. . . who tells your story?” to analyze how history musicals function as cultural artifacts. Chory positions musical theatre as a site for doing historiography, triangulating the “who” of Lin Manuel Miranda’s lyric with “when” and “why” to argue that history musicals offer their greatest insights into the times of their own creation and the social and political stakes of their contemporary moments, as opposed to realizing their radical potential to revise history onstage. Usefully distinguishing between period musicals, jukebox musicals, and history musicals, Chory brings readers into the generative settings—the who, why, when, where, what—of Jesus Christ Superstar, 1776, and Hamilton, offering nuanced readings of how these musicals tell a history of white supremacy in cultural production during their own times, as much as during the times of their protagonists.

[A third paper, by Alison Hyde Pascale, delivered as part of the 2024 Bruce Kirle Memorial Debut Panel will appear separately in a future issue.]