Place for us essay on the broadway musical. PLACE FOR US: Essay on the Broadway Musical. 2022-11-02
Place for us essay on the broadway musical
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"A Place for Us" is a powerful and poignant Broadway musical that explores themes of family, identity, and belonging. The show centers around the Hassan family, a group of Muslim Americans living in New York City. The family is made up of Amir, the father, who is a successful lawyer; Fatima, the mother, who is a stay-at-home mom; and their three children, Layla, Huda, and Amar.
The musical follows the lives of the Hassan family as they navigate the complexities of their cultural and religious identities in a world that often misunderstands and misrepresents them. The show touches on issues of immigration, assimilation, and discrimination, and explores the challenges that many Muslim Americans face in today's society.
One of the central themes of "A Place for Us" is the struggle to find one's place in the world. Each member of the Hassan family grapples with this issue in their own way. Layla, the eldest daughter, feels pressure to be the perfect Muslim daughter and to follow in her father's footsteps as a lawyer. Huda, the middle child, is struggling to figure out who she is and where she belongs, while Amar, the youngest, is trying to find his voice and assert his independence.
The musical also explores the relationship between Amir and Fatima and the tension that exists between them. Amir is a traditionalist who wants his children to maintain their cultural and religious traditions, while Fatima is more open to modern ideas and wants her children to have the freedom to explore and discover their own paths in life.
"A Place for Us" is a moving and thought-provoking musical that speaks to a wide audience. It offers a nuanced and honest portrayal of Muslim American life and the struggles that many families face in trying to balance their cultural and religious traditions with the demands of modern society. The show is a powerful reminder of the importance of acceptance, understanding, and the search for one's place in the world.
Place for Us: Essay on the Broadway Musical by D.A. Miller
When I asked her if she liked it, she sighed and said that as she stood on the sidewalk late at night after the show, the emotion she experienced most was exhaustion: "I'm so tired of Broadway making me feel," she said, as if she not only regretted that but was angry about her own regret. But it is easily the best thing ever written on this subject and if the reviewers below can't deal with the difficulty of the prose and ideas that's their loss. Michael Warner, author of Letters of the Republic Review Could it be that since the Broadway musical is now safely dead--record ticket sales and Disney extravaganzas notwithstanding--it's finally safe to cast a historical and critical eye on this peculiar American art form? Place for Us: Essay on the Broadway Musical. Through it all, he never gave up his dream of making it to Broadway. .
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Place for Us: Essay on the Broadway Musical.
Miller probes what all the jokes laugh off: the embarrassingly mutual affinity between a "general" cultural form and the despised "minority" that was in fact that form's implicit audience. Miller's finery will outlast the smug japes of those who refuse to see it. For me, Miller's success at recreating the experience, and at making "straight"-cultured readers feel it, is itself worth the price of the book. In a style that is in turn novelistic, memorial, autobiographical, and critical, the author restores to their historical density the main modes of reception that so many gay men developed to answer the musical's call: the early private communion with original cast albums, the later camping of show tunes in piano bars, the still later reformatting of these same songs at the post-Stonewall disco. All of which highlights the fact that at no other time has the idea of Broadway as a "place to get to" been so beside the point.
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Place for Us: Essay on the Broadway Musical by D. A. Miller (9780674003880)
The hierarchical rigidity of Broadway meant that for every entertainer who succeeded a fistful of others failed. Broadway also championed the modern woman at least some of the time and, like vaudeville and variety, placed in the same theater citizens from an array of social spheres, which would have been unthinkable a decade earlier. The flip side of Starr's perky optimism is what I think of as self-conscious slumming. I started this book in October or something? After all, not so long ago, shady business practices and outrageous cons were as common on Broadway as long-legged chores girls. Even the best of this season's revivals--Salesman, Eugene O'Neill's The Iceman Cometh and an early play by Tennessee Williams--are simultaneous hails and farewells to the genre they seek to revive. But it fails to distinguish between good shows and bad shows, good performers and bad performers. You could dismiss these memoirs as mawkish.
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Place for Us: Essay on the Broadway Musical
If, on the other hand, Broadway looks backwards, it risks becoming a museum piece or theme park. Hence his style gets the bad rap that all great gay displays receive, since it is willfully ostentatious, proud of its own capacity to desire, and as complicated in its elaboration as we imagine all of our individual desiring lives real and fantasized to be. Out Magazine - Tom Beer D. But this is too simple. Miller has written the words to an exquisite Proustian musical sung by post-Stonewall man to his own juvenile self. The analysis, exceptional for its sensitivity to both the form of the musical and the culture of its reception, culminates in a reading of Gypsy that is a tour de force if ever there was one.
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Place for us : essay on the Broadway musical
Call me a vulgarian or worse a pornographer, but a little more flesh would have been nice. To his hysterical impersonation in which he shows an ability that seems wholly at variance with his corpulent body or bald head , our hands will accord the sound that says love but our voices stick to the contrapuntal disavowals of the chorus: what mirror where? From then on, Broadway welcomed noisy sentimentality and glamorous clothes; swaggering flag-waving and elegant nightlife; brash showmen and sophisticated tunes. One of the last great infusions of energy into the American theater came from wildly inventive and irreverent gay figures like Jack Smith and Charles Ludlam, whose theater of the ridiculous gave Broadway's spectacular mingling of absurdity and sadness a downtown edge; if Miller were a poet or a playwright, a similar effect might have been achieved. In a style that is in turn novelistic, memorial, autobiographical, and critical, the author restores to their historical density the main modes of reception that so many gay men developed to answer the musical's call: the early private communion with original cast albums, the later camping of show tunes in piano bars, the still later reformatting of these same songs at the post-Stonewall disco. In a style that is in turn novelistic, memorial, autobiographical, and critical, the author restores to their historical density the main modes of reception that so many gay men developed to answer the musical's call: the early private communion with original cast albums, the later camping of show tunes in piano bars, the still later reformatting of these same songs at the post-Stonewall disco.
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PLACE FOR US: Essay on the Broadway Musical.
The fact that Broadway has lost much of its original magnetism is hardly news. . But there's more: the essay's own form and style are endlessly surprising, combining rigor with personal reflection in a way reminiscent of Barthes by Barthes or Minima Moralia. One important new text that does write about Broadway, constructions of womanhood, and lesbian subjectivity is Stacy Wolf's forthcoming A Problem Like Maria: Gender and Sexuality in the American Musical Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002. The writing is so compelling and beautiful. Because he writes about a repertoire so many readers know well, Miller need not so dominate his readers' experience.
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9780674669901: Place for Us: Essay on the Broadway Musical
Indeed, the reader of A PLACE FOR US finds himself humming the "Minuet in G" as he makes his way through this clever and tune-full read. Miller probes what all the jokes laugh off: the embarrassingly mutual affinity between a "general" cultural form and the despised "minority" that was in fact that form's implicit audience. A reviewer below -- though not as below as he deserves to be -- writes: "DA Miller is an old professor of mine, and this book is as insufferably pretentious as is the man himself. But Miller ingeniously builds his own nostalgia into a successful attempt to theorize contemporary attitudes to musical theatre. The street was a mythic destination, which was both glamorous and sentimental. Cusick is a music professor at New York University in New York City. Miller crafts his "essay" with extraordinary detail to the intricacies of his subject matter, which is evident in his clause-laden sentences, hard-to-navigate paragraphs, and oblique illustration.
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Place for Us Essay on the Broadway Musical: D A Miller: Hardcover: 9780674669901: Powell's Books
New Yorker Review Through this autobiographical-analytical meditation on what is specifically 'gay' about the Broadway musical and the pleasures of not explicitly knowing it, D. At the heart of this extended essay is the complex relationship between gay men and the Broadway show, which began in many an American basement during the 1950s and 60s, where solitary boys would perform along with their cast albums, and ends with a chorus of aging show queens singing along in a piano bar. Miller probes what all the jokes laugh off: the embarrassingly m It used to be a secret that, in its postwar heyday, the Broadway musical recruited a massive underground following of gay men. Barthes wrote with eloquent precision and clarity. This is a show tune to which I would sing along.
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