Course Catalogue

Humanities and Social Science

1. Acquire and apply a range of critical perspectives on the analysis of musical theatre and how it works; 2. Make detailed analysis of selected musical theatre primary source material in the form of ‘text’ or performance;

Outline Syllabus:Learning Strategy [SHARED] A series of introductory lecture/seminars will cover a range of key critical perspectives relating to popular theatres/performances. It will also touch on semiotics, historiography, phenomenology and other related concepts and approaches to performance theory relevant to popular theatres/performances. [COURSE SPECIFIC] It will subsequently go on to further explore repertoire in seminar discussion, and through shared viewings as appropriate, building on students existing knowledge base and using these critical perspectives as frameworks for analysis of the work chosen. Repertoire selected will be agreed in discussion between the tutor(s) and the student cohort. It is also expected that students will utilise their own individual perspectives on specific crafts as studied in the concurrent module Musical Theatre Laboratory 1 in these seminars where appropriate. This will include research and oral presentation in seminar on a chosen subject (most likely, an individual show or specific artist/team) in preparation for the assessed written case study. Indicative content. Critical perspectives o philosophy of aesthetics and poetics – virtual and hyper-realities o authenticity and theatricality o collective and personal performance and performing identities o feminist, gender, queer theories, race and ethnicity, national and cultural definition o interdisciplinary and integrated performance, o structure and form/post-structuralism (narrative and notional approaches), o meta-theatrics o audience reception theory (including pleasure and entertainment) o key concepts of applied theatre o musicological analysis o historiography o musical theatre pedagogy Repertoire The nature of repertoire study will be determined by the background, experience and interest of each student cohort, but in particular reference will be made to current repertoire in production, both new and revived, and students will be encouraged to see as wide a range as is possible.

Module Overview:
The material in this module is paralleled by the workshop exploration of crafts in Musical Theatre so that critical theory will also be tested in practice. This module enables you to:

• acquire and apply a range of critical perspectives on the analysis of musical theatre and how it works
• make detailed analysis of selected musical theatre primary source material in the form of text or performance

Additional Information:The material in this module is paralleled by the workshop exploration of crafts in Musical Theatre Laboratory 1 so that critical theory will also be tested in practice.