Journal Details
Contemporary Theatre Review
Forthcoming Special Issues
Given the success of the ‘Catalan Theatre 1975-2006' special issue, which recently won the prestigious Premi Joan B. Cendrós Award 2008*, the 2009 issues will undoubtedly be as provocative and stimulating.
19.1 ‘The Broadway Musical: New Approaches'Guest Editors: Dominic Symonds and Dan Rebellato
The Broadway musical is one of the most popular and most derided forms of contemporary theatre. Dismissed for its alleged sentimentality and political conservatism, its dumbed-down narratives and economic imperatives, the musical has tended to be left behind by some of the debates that have swept through drama and theatre studies, performance theory, cultural studies, and musicology. Alongside the commonplaces of musical theatre production, scholarship in the area has invoked its own dominant narrative, trading on a notion of integration, and constructing its own canon of valued stage musicals from The Black Crook to Parade. Yet recent scholarship has increasingly turned to strategies for interrogating the dominant narrative. Literature has questioned some of the commonplaces shared by the musical's defenders and detractors alike: its histories, negotiation of identities, political engagement, place within popular culture, theatrical mechanisms, and formal complexities. In seeking to consolidate this trend, this issue brings some of the central critical theories to bear on some of the central canonic texts, interrogating received narratives and questioning some of the cultural assumptions made about the form. Articles in the issue interrogate the historiography of Showboat, the progressivity of Oklahoma! and the efficacy of integration; the mythos of America and the Old World is considered through the work of Lerner and Loewe, traces of Jewish liturgy are detected throughout West Side Story, and the work of forgotten female lyricists from the early twentieth century is rediscovered; the critical framework of psychoanalysis is brought to bear on Kiss Me, Kate, whilst Derridean deconstruction finds a foothold in Sunday in the Park with George.
19.2 Open Issue
This open issue brings together a series of articles on cutting-edge practitioners and companies working from the 1960s to the present: Jack Smith, Robert Lepage, the Big Art Group, and Elevator Repair Service. The Documents section continues the discussion on artistic practice featuring interviews with the late Harold Pinter and Eugenio Barba and a debate on the current state of British Asian theatre.
19.3 ‘Unsettling Shakespeare'
Guest Editors: Mark Houlahan and Elizabeth Schafer
This special issue explores the subject of Shakespeare and settlement/ resettlement/ and unsettlement. It investigates a range of theatre work which has acclimatised Shakespeare to new cultural environments whilst also asking what is and what can still be un/settling about Shakespeare's work in the theatre and elsewhere? The range of Shakespeares discussed is wide and includes Australia, New Zealand and China. The focus is deliberately away from the traditional centre of operations for Shakespeare, Stratford-upon-Avon, but there is a particular interest in settler societies and Shakespeare, and the interlacing of settler Shakespeare with the Shakespeare produced by, and for, first peoples.
This open issue continues CTR's recent focus on the work of key practitioners with treatments of Slobodan Šnajder's Croatian Faust, Jonathan Burrowes and Robert Lepage. The Shakespeare discussion continues with an article on Shakespearean productions in France and an interview with the Spanish director Adrián Daumas. Documents continues an engagement with processes of documentation and critical engagement through a performance documentation of Raumlabor's Duismülsen U(topie)18.
* Premi Joan B. Cendrós Award 2008 for the best work written in defence of the Catalan language, culture and the Catalan nation or the best contribution to the outside projection of the Catalan Countries, in any of the aspects that conform to its national and cultural reality.
