The Broadway Musical in the Age of Mass Incarceration

Abstract

This dissertation examines the theme of incarceration in the Broadway musicals of the 1980s, 1990s, and early 2000s, a period during which America was haunted by the specter of violent crime and how to combat it. During the last two decades of the twentieth century, a series of bipartisan crime bills passed by congress and signed by presidents Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush led to an unprecedented spike in incarceration rates in the United States, a plague that disproportionately affected Black and Latino Americans. In this same period, Broadway musicals often depicted scenes of incarceration, with some musicals set entirely within the confines of a prison cell. In these musicals, characters (almost always white) perform musical numbers—impassioned ballads, duets with love interests, or lively dance numbers—behind bars. These prison scenes and plotlines mirror scenes in contemporaneous American films and television responding to an American political culture obsessed with crime and punishment.During the 1980s, the War on Drugs, fueled by right-wing religious conservatism, coincided with the rise of megamusicals aimed at tourists featuring heroic men of faith at odds with the law, as in Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat and Les Misérables (Chapter 1). In the 1990s, in the midst of simultaneous moral panics over the specter of child sexual abuse and the HIV/AIDS crisis, director Hal Prince mounted “serious” new musical dramas where the lead male protagonist is jailed for alleged child sexual abuse: Kiss of the Spider Woman and Parade (Chapter 2). By the early 2000s, Broadway audiences disillusioned with American politics were desperate for comedic, satirical critiques of the American criminal justice system, as reflected in the commercial success of musicals such as The Producers and Urinetown, shows that became even more relevant in the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks (Chapter 3). Despite the ubiquity of prison scenes in contemporary musicals, scholars have yet to draw this connection to these contemporaneous American political issues. Scholarship on the musicals of the late twentieth century is still a burgeoning field, and my work introduces an important cultural lens through which to view these works. Further, my research contributes to an ongoing national reckoning with the legacy of racism, policing, and mass incarceration in the United States. The Broadway musical has long been heralded as a distinct, uniquely American art form, reflecting American society and values. As such, I argue that the ubiquity of crime, policing, and incarceration in American culture has therefore enshrined those topics as fixtures of the musical genre.