Destabilizing the Hollywood Musical

By the mid-sixties, Hollywood's once conservative go-to-gal shed its tap shoes for something darker, hipper, and more in tune with the day's trends. Leaving Gene Kelly and Fred Astaire in their wake, films such as Tommy, Jesus Christ Superstar, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, and Hair reflected the times as they embraced swingers, youth rebellion, and Scorsese-esque aesthetics. Focusing mainly on the period between the genre's post- Sound of Music boom and its near-disappearance in the 1980s, Destabilizing the Hollywood Musical pushes past the idyllic world of Oklahoma! to examine emergent and socially contentious norms that defined decades of the genre and helped to form its millennial revival. Often rejecting love, marriage, and the USA, much of this later musical breed favours male stories of lust, deception, isolation, and failure wrapped in a haze of rock-n-roll, visual dynamism, and testosterone.