Place for us essay on the broadway musical. Place for Us: Essay on the Broadway Musical by D. A. Miller (9780674003880) 2022-10-27
Place for us essay on the broadway musical Rating:
4,8/10
239
reviews
"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: D A Miller: Trade Paperback: 9780674003880: Powell's Books
Didn't know what to expect going into this and was pleasantly surprised. If the postwar musical may be called a "gay" genre, Miller demonstrates, this is because its regular but unpublicized work has been to indulge men in the spectacular thrills of a femininity become their own. . 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. And yet there is something tremendously engaging about the best of them.
Last August, about two months after former superagent Michael Ovitz bought Drabinsky's financially troubled production company, Livent, it emerged that Drabinsky--who engineered Ragtime, Showboat and Kiss of the Spider Woman--appeared to have juggled his books to inflate earnings. . They end as the narrator makes it, keeping you on the edge of your seat and setting you up for a possible sequel. Likewise, without the West End, we might not have Broadway at all. Though enthralled by the swirl of feathers and witty patter, I had hoped to have seen more. Retrieved Dec 30 2022 from By D. .
Place for Us: Essay on the Broadway Musical by D. A. Miller (9780674003880)
Are these a result of the street's blocked desire to revive itself and its million stories? Place for Us, with wit and not a little pain, teases out the contradictions of late twentieth-century gay male identity in relation to this 'frankly interruptive,' 'vulgar' form. . 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. Barbara Johnson, author of The Feminist Difference Synopsis Although the once silent social fact that the Broadway musical recruited a massive underground following of gay men currently spawns jokes that every sitcom viewer is presumed to be in on, it has not necessarily become better understood. 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.
Place for Us: Essay on the Broadway Musical by D.A. Miller
For women, the way you looked meant a meal ticket or none; thus Fannie Brice had her nose fixed. 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. 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 essay is a poetic, personal, idiosyncratic, erotic, and political reverie on gay men's relationship to the Broadway musical.
Place for Us: Essay on the Broadway Musical / Edition 1 by D. A. Miller
The writing is so compelling and beautiful. Cohan burst onto the scene in 1905 and sang "Give My Regards to Broadway," he was a nobody, but he sang as if he had made it. Many observers look to the "Disneyfication" of 42nd Street and Times Square and the large British presence to explain both the squeaky-clean homogenized flavor of the neighborhood and the insistent feeling that Broadway is dead. Ditto the crop of new American musicals like Parade and Fosse. I see the pair as part of a long series of "sister acts" and otherwise-paired women systematically separated by the narratives of mid-twentieth-century film musicals. 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.
Miller has written a book that is movingly personal without ever being merely so. Miller has looked long and hard into the glorious, dangerous, and falsely flattering mirror that is the Broadway musical. Because he writes about a repertoire so many readers know well, Miller need not so dominate his readers' experience. That is, Miller's critical writing offers his readers liberation from the conventional experience of having to accept or reject a monovocal construction of musical reality, insofar as his readers already share a deep knowledge of the sounds that constitute the musical's reception community: our experience, as we read and remember, allegorizes one common experience of queerness. . There is hardly a mid-twentieth-century memoir or Bildungsroman or play in which some character does not dream about the blinking lights of the biggest street in New York City.
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. Miller doesn't just 'know the words': in this brilliant and moving evocation of 'the unconsoled relations to want,' it could be said that the words know him. And got halfway through it before I was separated from my roommate's copy until pretty recently. But there is no sense of urgency, of the idea that arriving on Broadway means that here you might trade in your old life for a new one.
Barbara Johnson Place For Us. I started this book in October or something? In the Jazz Age, the Great White Way attracted reverent pilgrims like the French novelist Paul Morand, who serenely described Broadway as "a glowing Summer afternoon all night. . 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. No, what lurks behind our weariness with Broadway is a more American discontent--call it failure to suspend disbelief in the Broadway myth. All this crescendos into a soaring, extended critical analysis of Miller's favourite musical, 'Gypsy', enveloping his interpretation with poetic, self-deprecatory, incisive prose while he simultaneously dissects his own responses - including his inclination towards not merely praising the originary divas such as Ethel Merman, but wishing to be them.
Place for Us Essay on the Broadway Musical: D A Miller: Hardcover: 9780674669901: Powell's Books
Around 1904, the first electric streetlamps made lit-up Broadway the first modern thoroughfare in the city. . . I'm not trying to romanticize the old Broadway, which, after all, could be prejudiced, snobbish or cruel. Miller's other books and papers, I know "this people's got it and this people should be spreadin' it around. . Miller has written a book that is movingly personal without ever being merely so.
9780674669901: Place for Us: Essay on the Broadway Musical
They were shocked, shocked, terribly shocked. It was only then that the theater district's center began to creep uptown, pushed along by Adolph Ochs moving the New York Times into what was then known as Longacre Square. Tom Beer - Out Magazine Review Place for Us takes the protective colorations of the Broadway musical--its happy-as-the-day-is-long heterosexuality, its promise that wouldn't-it-be-loverly? Finally, Miller's meditation on the affective relationship between a medium musical or otherwise and its audience demonstrates the difficulty that any "reception study" must overcome: that is, our relationships to media are ever-shifting, such that their meanings can never be fixed or stable. Miller grounds his essay's culminating queer reading of Gypsy in full recognition that its representations of gender and sexuality were created by gay men who were completely self-aware about the extent to which the horrid mother Momma Rose, who so longed to come out from the theater's wings to claim the spotlight herself, could stand for all the gay men who had been the backstage masters of staged shows. Maybe new American stories are happening elsewhere in ways that defy and belie that myth.
.jpg/1200px-Flower_Drum_Song_(1962_poster).jpg)
