The idea of American musical theatre conjures up images of bright lights and big city, but its lifeblood is found in local and amateur productions. Wolf considers the widespread presence and persistence of musical theatre in U.S. culture, and examines it as a live, pleasurable, participatory experience. The talk will conclude with an interview featuring members of the UMBC Musical Theatre Club.

Stacy Wolf is one of America’s foremost scholars on musical theater. She is professor of theater at Princeton, director of fellowships, and director of the Program in Music Theater. She is the author of Changed for Good: A Feminist History of the Broadway Musical (Oxford University Press, 2011), A Problem Like Maria: Gender and Sexuality in the American Musical (University of Michigan Press, 2002), and the co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of the American Musical (with Raymond Knapp and Mitchell Morris, 2011). She has published articles on theater spectatorship, performance pedagogy, and musical theater in many journals including Theatre Journal, Modern Drama, and Camera Obscura, and is a former editor of Theatre Topics: A Journal of Pedagogy and Praxis. She also has experience as a director and dramaturg. Wolf is a 2017 Guggenheim Fellow.

Admission is free.

This event is sponsored by the Department of Theatre; the Center for Innovation, Research and Creativity in the Arts; and the Dresher Center for the Humanities.