New Books In Dance

Tell It to the World: The Broadway Musical Abroad (Oxford UP, 2024) offers a look at how the Broadway musical travels the world, influencing and even transforming local practices and traditions. It traces especially how the musical has been indigenized in South Korea and Germany, the commercial centers for Broadway musicals in East Asia and continental Europe. Both countries were occupied after World War II by the United States, which disseminated U.S. American popular music, jazz, movies, and musical theatre in the belief that these nations needed to rebuild their cultures in accordance with U.S. guidelines. By the 1990s, Broadway imports had become phenomenally popular in Seoul and Hamburg while home-grown musicals proliferated that adapted and transformed the prototypes that had been disseminated by the U.S. Although this book focuses on recent musicals, it also looks back through the twentieth century to plot the evolution of musical theatre in South Korea and Germany. Part One considers the key questions