Unstaged Grief: Musicals and Mourning in Midcentury America
Often dismissed as escapism, screen musicals of the 1960s in fact tapped into unspoken sadness about an America that was slipping away. Jake Johnson delves into film and television musicals of the era to examine their place in networks of grieving in America, for America, and about America.
The Golden Age of musical theater ended just as Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s On Death and Dying debuted, and Johnson uses Kübler-Ross’s five stages to frame the intertwining of musicals and grief. He analyzes films like Seven Brides for Seven Brothers and State Fair alongside paintings, poetry, and other images and texts to reveal how the musical theater engine built in the first half of the century broke down just as a new language emerged to describe the melancholy felt by people facing the end of the world they had known.
Nuanced and original, Unstaged Grief plumbs the grief, loss, and hope behind the Technicolor spectacle and rousing showstoppers.
““This is a book for all the fans—secret and not so secret—of Oklahoma!’s Jud Fry. It’s for those viewers who feel that something sad at heart lurks in feel-good American musicals. Jake Johnson writes in a clear and engaging way about what makes American musicals downbeat. Personable, witty, deeply knowledgeable, Unstaged Grief is a hopeful book, a kind and caring book.””
““Insightful and clever. Johnson makes connections that haven’t been put together before. It’s absolutely a contribution to multiple fields, but especially musical theatre studies and grief/trauma studies. His decision to exclusively use of-the-time sources—to live in the zeitgeist of the period—is an unusual and effective approach that turns the scholarship into a story that’s an absolute page-turner.””