This book examines the performance of ‘Britishness’ on the musical stage. Covering a tumultuous period in British history, it offers a fresh look at the vitality and centrality of the musical stage, as a global phenomenon in late-Victorian popular culture and beyond. Through a re-examination of over fifty archival play-scripts, the book comprises seven interconnected stories told in two parts. Part One focuses on domestic and personal identities of ‘Britishness’, and how implicit anxieties...

Singing Utopia is a unique and ambitious work which asks us to listen differently to voice in musical theatre. Across fifteen case studies from Florodora to Hadestown, Ben Macpherson hears something utopian in the extraordinary, emotional, and situational directness of singing voices as they escape the confines of everyday life. Yet, as this book discovers, the very nature of utopia is paradoxical, fraught with undercurrents of nostalgia, melancholy, and the perp...