West End and Friedrichstrasse - a comparative study of theatre in London and Berlin 1890-1930

最近的研究表明，音乐剧是19世纪末和20世纪初最重要的流行文化之一。它代表了戏剧现代化的关键阶段，对戏剧美学产生了重大影响。以讽刺剧为例，它通过宣称自己是一种典型的现代文化形式，为保守的进步主义的“书本音乐剧”提供了具有挑战性的替代方案。它还以复杂的方式参与了关于现代世界的思想，记录和塑造了当代对阶级、性别和民族身份的态度，并与主流政治问题相结合。音乐剧是一种“娱乐”，但它绝不是一种单纯的娱乐，而是日常现代文化的重要组成部分。专注于音乐喜剧，讽刺剧和轻歌剧，这个跨学科项目使用未发表的剧本文本档案，以及摄影和音乐档案，研究这些社会，文化和政治参与在两个重要的欧洲流行剧院地点柏林和伦敦，1880-1939。主要目的是产生这些晚期现代，工业组织，娱乐的比较批判史学。

As recent research is making clear, music theatre was one of the most important popular cultures of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. It represented a key stage in the modernization of the theatre and had a major impact on theatre aesthetics. In the case of revue, it produced challenging alternatives to the conservative progressivism of the 'book musical' by making claims for itself as a characteristically modern cultural form. It also engaged in complex ways with ideas about the modern world, registering and shaping contemporary attitudes to class, gender and national identities and articulating with mainstream political issues. Musical theatre was 'entertainment', but, far from being an innocent diversion, it was a key constituent of everyday modern culture. Focusing on musical comedy, revue and operetta, this interdisciplinary project uses unpublished play-text archives, as well as photographic and music archive, to study these social, cultural and political engagements across two important European sites of popular theatreBerlin andLondon, 1880-1939. The primary aim is to produce a comparative critical historiography of these late modern, industrially organized, entertainments.