New Books in Performing Arts

The premiere of Oklahoma! in 1943 is commonly called a
“turning point” in the history of the Broadway musical. Often
characterized as the first integrated musical―meaning that the songs and
other elements of the show are integrated into the story―James O’Leary
offers a different interpretation of Oklahoma! and other musicals at the beginning of Broadway’s Golden Age in The Middlebrow Musical: Between Broadway and Opera in 1940s America
(Oxford University Press, 2025). Contextualizing his discussion within
debates among US critics, O’Leary argues that the negotiation between
operatic and popular music, and between frothy comedy and more serious
themes mark the musicals he analyzes as examples of the middlebrow.
Through detailed archival work, O’Leary uncovers the crucial critical
networks that originally theorized a middlebrow approach to culture,
beginning in the literary circles of Van Wyck Brooks and Archibald
MacLeish, and radiating outward to major theater and music critics
including Brooks Atkinson and Olin Downes. These writers believed
American culture had splintered into factions, which in turn divided
American audiences: highbrow art, which they regarded as obscure and
elitist; folk art, which they found provincial and alienating; and
popular culture, which they considered merely commercial. Blending these
kinds of art, they argued, could draw together a fractured society into
mutual understanding (if not necessarily agreement) by situating the
most sophisticated ideas within longstanding expressive traditions,
accessible to all. O’Leary finds in Oklahoma!, Beggar’s Holiday, and Street Scene a new kind of musical comedy that embraced American politics and weighty stories in ways not seen before 1943.
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In the early twentieth century, as variety shows flooded Canadian stages, new forms of blackface, inspired by modern forms of amusements, changed the theatre. In this era marked by progressive social reforms, the stage embodied the modern ethos of imitation, mimicry, and change.

Staging Blackface in Canada: Public Amusements, Variety Shows, and Racial Acts in an Age of Imitation, 1898-1919 (Wilfrid Laurier Press, 2026) covers a moment when Canadians did not produce professional theatre, but they built amusement parks, wrote songs, and produced records. As the stage (drama), and its variants (burlesque, light opera) adapted elements from the new stages (amusement parks, social dance, and film), the modern culture popularized forms of blackface that impacted white, Anglo-Protestant, and English-speaking audiences, and drew theatrical criticism.

This book explores a twenty-year period in Canada’s history when there was no media regulation, and no mandate to promote Canadian culture. Through an examination of theatrical reviews, images, and textual records, Staging Blackface in Canada locates how the Canadian stage became a playground for ethnic jokes, racial caricature, and women’s emancipation. It also locates some of the first Black musicals and operas to appear on Canadian stages.

This episode also mentions a previous Additions to the Archive episode with assistant curator of New York City’s Poster House museum, Es-pranza Humphrey, and her exhibition “Act Black: Posters From Black American Stage & Screen.”

You can find Cheryl at her website, on Instagram, and on LinkedIn And check out her previous appearances on the Additions to the Archive podcast and Substack.

Subscribe, like, follow, and rate Additions to the Archive with Sullivan Summer on Instagram, Substack, and wherever you get your podcasts.
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Teaching Shakespeare's Theatre of the World (Cambridge University Press, 2025) engages with one of Shakespeare's greatest thought-experiments: How does one navigate the 'theatre of the world'?

It invites students to examine how Shakespeare challenges this
metaphor's vertical hierarchies in response to shifting understandings
of cosmological order.

Teachers will find rich contextual
frameworks for exploring how Shakespeare envisions 'worlds' as emerging
from dynamic variables, raising urgent questions about how identity and
justice are environmentally constructed.

Focal plays include A Midsummer Night's Dream, As You Like It, Hamlet, Henry V, The Merchant of Venice, and Othello.

Each discussion features student centered 'Explorations'.

These play-specific classroom activities can also be adapted across
Shakespeare's corpus and tailored for both secondary and
university-level students.

These exercises encourage
non-linear critical and creative thinking, inviting students to
contemplate big ideas and generate new perspectives about the shared
points of contact between Shakespeare's world and their own.
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In 1898, vaudeville actors Saint Suttle and Gertie Brown joyously embraced in a short silent film titled Something Good—Negro Kiss.
The first known film to portray African American affection, it was lost
for over a century until its rediscovery inspired contemporary
audiences with a powerful and enduring depiction of Black love. More
than a missing piece in an untold history of Black cinematic
performance, Something Good—and the magnetism of Suttle and
Brown—attests to the power of Black performance on stage and screen from
the nineteenth century to today.

In Acts of Love: Black Performance and the Kiss That Changed Film History (University of California Press, 2026), Allyson Nadia Field tells the story of Something Good
and recovers the forgotten yet fascinating lives of its performers and
their world. Drawing a vivid picture from sparse historical records, Acts of Love
examines popular culture's negotiation of blackness to reconsider the
intersections of minstrelsy, vaudeville, and cinema in ragtime America.
This book not only presents the story of Something Good, its
performers, and the drama of its rediscovery; it shows how the
rediscovery of this short early film changes our understanding of
American film history.
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More than 40 years after her death, the legend of Maria Callas, "La Divina Assoluta," remains unsurpassed. Much has been written about her sensational opera career and fraught private life, from her definitive mastery of iconic opera roles to her love affairs and tantrums. The prototype for the 20th century celebrity diva, Callas emblematizes the cliche of tormented talent - genius in the ring with catastrophe.

Her extraordinary voice, in particular, has become an object of cult-like adoration and cultural significance almost with a life of its own: as fetish object, as sophisticated sonic signifier, and most recently, as the lifeblood for a Callas hologram. Such adoration is not without consequences. When Callas is transformed into a vessel for such transcendent magic, it overshadows what is perhaps her most superhuman ability - the masterful technique she deployed to shape and craft her astounding instrument. Singing bodies are working bodies, enacting an intimate and complex form of artistic labor and cultural signification.

Using one of Callas's first recital recordings from 1954, Maria Callas's Lyric and Coloratura Arias (Bloomsbury, 2021) envisions each aria as a lens to examine various aspects of vocalization and cultural reception of the feminized voice in both classical and pop culture, from Homer's Sirens to Star Trek. With references to works by Marina Abramovic, Charles Baudelaire, Michel Chion, Wayne Koestenbaum, Greil Marcus, and Farah Jasmine Griffin, as well as films by Pier Paolo Pasolini, Jonathan Demme, and Rainer Werner Fassbinder, each chapter explores phenomena unique to the singing voice, including the operatic screaming point, the politics of listening, and the singing simulacrum.

Ginger Dellenbaugh is a musician and historian who has written and lectured on music and politics, vernacular notation systems, and the cultural history of the voice. A trained opera singer, she performed for over a decade in Europe and the United States. Ginger is currently a lecturer at The New School in New York, USA and completing a PhD in musicology at Yale University, USA. She lives in New York City and Vienna, Austria.

Ginger Dellenbaugh’s website.

Bradley Morgan is a media arts professional in Chicago and author of U2's The Joshua Tree: Planting Roots in Mythic America (Backbeat Books, 2021), Frank Zappa's America (LSU Press, 2025), and U2: Until the End of the World (Gemini Books, 2025). He manages partnerships on behalf of CHIRP Radio 107.1 FM and is the director of its music film festival.

Bradley on Facebook and Bluesky.
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