Review of: Oscar at the Crown , Mark Mauriello and Andrew Barret Cox, directed by Shira Milikowsky, Tottenham Court Road, London, 30 November 2025
Based on the detailed study of two Catalan musicals with North American influence, Flor de Nit ( Night Flower ) (1992) and Ànima ( Soul ) (2024), this article analyses the way in which the postmodern musical invites audiences to reconsider the relationship between women and mass culture established by modernism. Flor de Nit details the story of a Catalan cuplé singer in 1929–36 Barcelona; Ànima follows the journey of an American woman aspiring to work as an animator at Disney Studios during the 1930s. Both musicals make a characteristically postmodernist critique of modernism’s marginalization of women, homosexuals, mass spectacles and modern society due to its cisheteropatriarchal structure. Both also adopt the form of historiographic metafiction, which enables them to review the most tumultuous years in the history of contemporary Catalonia ( Flor de Nit ) and the foundational values of one of the most globally influential art forms of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries ( Ànima ). In addition, since they premiered in two considerably different moments in time (1992 and 2024), the comparison of these two musicals also helps illuminate changes in Catalan postmodernism, which developed from a reconstruction of the national historical memory to an acceptance of the global audio-visual culture led by the North American industry.
The 2024 musical adaptation of S. E. Hinton’s classic novel The Outsiders (1967) drops its audiences into a version of Tulsa, Oklahoma that is unrecognizable to anyone more familiar with Rodgers and Hammerstein’s 1943 pastoral Oklahoma! However, this article builds on Raymond Knapp’s scholarship (2005) to argue that both of these musicals use rural working-class Oklahoman communities to stage national anxieties about the moral character and sociopolitical standing of the United States, especially with regard to anti-Black racism. By incorporating a broad range of musical genres broadly connected to Americana and country, the creative team of The Outsiders aimed to invoke an American ‘melting pot’ of cultures and communities within the score. Close attention to how genres rooted in Black musical traditions are incorporated into The Outsiders – especially in relation to the newly racialized character of Dallas – reveals how white racial frameworks nevertheless persist in the production. In its attempt to both honour a canonical novel and feel relevant to contemporary conversations about race, The Outsiders provides an opportunity for a historically informed assessment of racial politics on Broadway and in the United States at large.
Review of: High Spirits , Timothy Gray and Hugh Martin, directed by Jessica Stone, New York City Centre Encores!, New York, 4–15 Feburary 2026
Review of: The Baker’s Wife , Stephen Schwartz and Joseph Stein, directed by Gordon Greenberg, Classic Stage Company, New York, 25 November 2025
