Westend und Friedrichstraße: Eine vergleichende Studie des populären Theaters in London und Berlin, 1890-1930 / Westend and Friedrichstraße: a comparative study of pupular theatre in London and Berlin, 1890-1930

最近的研究表明，音乐剧是十九世纪末二十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。在时装剧方面，它通过宣称自己是一种典型的现代文化形式，产生了具有挑战性的替代方案，以取代保守的进步主义书本音乐剧。它还以复杂的方式接触关于现代世界的思想，登记和塑造当代对阶级、性别和国家认同的态度，并与主流政治问题相联系。音乐剧是“娱乐”，但它远不是一种无辜的消遣，而是日常现代文化的关键组成部分。这个跨学科的项目以音乐喜剧、时事和轻歌剧为重点，利用未出版的剧本档案以及摄影和音乐档案，研究1880-1939年欧洲两个重要的流行剧院--柏林和伦敦--的社会、文化和政治活动。其主要目的是为这些晚期的现代、工业组织的娱乐活动制作一部比较批判性的史学。

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 Focusing on musical comedy, revue and operetta, this interdisciplinary project uses unpublished play-text archives, as well as photographic and music archive, to study these social, cultural and political engagements across two important European sites of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 theatre — Berlin and London, 1880-1939. The primary aim is to produce a comparative critical historiography of these late modem, industrially organized, entertainments.