Dueling Grounds: Revolution and Revelation in the Musical Hamilton - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0190938854 ISBN 13: 9780190938857

Publisher: Oxford University Press, 2021

Synopsis

Hamilton opened on Broadway in 2015 and quickly became one of the hottest tickets the industry has ever seen. Lin-Manuel Miranda - who wrote the book, lyrics, and music, and created the title role - adapted the show from Ron Chernow's biography Alexander Hamilton. Although it seems an unlikely source for a Broadway musical, Miranda found a liminal space where the life that Hamilton led and the issues that he confronted came alive more than two centuries later while also commenting on contemporary life in the United States and how we view our nation's history. With a score largely based on rap and drawing on other aspects of hip-hop culture, and staged with actors of color playing the white Founding Fathers, Hamilton has much to say about race in the United States today and in our past, but at the same time it leaves important things insufficiently explained, such as the role of women and people of color in Hamilton's time.
Dueling Grounds: Revolution and Revelation in the Musical Hamilton is a volume that combines the work of theater scholars and practitioners, musicologists, and scholars in such fields as ethnomusicology, history, gender studies, and economics in a multi-faceted approach to the show's varied uses of liminality, looking at its creation, casting philosophy, dance and movement, costuming, staging, direction, lyrics, music, marketing, and how aspects of race, gender, and class fit into the show and its production. Demonstrating that there is much to celebrate, as well as challenging issues to confront concerning Hamilton, Dueling Grounds is an uncompromising look at one of the most important musicals of the century.

About this title

About the Author

Mary Jo Lodge is Associate Professor of Theater at Lafayette College in Pennsylvania, and a performer, director, and choreographer.

Paul R. Laird is Professor of Musicology at the University of Kansas and editor of The Cambridge Companion to the Musical (2002; 2nd edition, 2008, third edition 2017).

Edition details

• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Publication date: 2021
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0190938854
• ISBN 13: 9780190938857
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 256
• Editor: Lodge Mary Jo, Laird Paul R.