The Dramaturgy Poetics of English-Speaking Musicals

Abstract

In the last twenty years there was a great increase in the number of productions of English-Speaking musicals in São Paulo. This genre created a new and big artistic field, including the opening of specialized schools for performers. This paper aims to analyze the dramaturg poetics of this genre of musical theatre, i. e., how the text of these plays is structured as convention, a theme not yet investigated in Brazilian studies, which turn themselves mostly to issues such as production, history or performing techniques, and not to how the texts of those plays are structured. For illustrative purposes, excerpts from four works are commented: Oklahoma!, from 1943; My fair lady, from 1956; Les Misérables, from 1985 and The Phantom of the Opera, from 1986. This research was developed using documents investigated in an international research fellowship in Brunel University London, during which bibliography, playwriting, and data unpublished in Brazil about the poetics and history of English-Speaking musicals were collected.