Stacy Wolf

‘The Hills Are Alive with the Sound of Music’: Musical Theatre at Girls’ Jewish Summer Camps in Maine, USA

A hush falls over the audience as the house lights dim and a small followspot takes a moment to find its mark: a 12-year-old girl dressed in a top hat and tails, black leggings, and sneakers who stands at one corner of the arena-arranged space. A piano pings a minor key arpeggio twice and then repeats the final note twice again, offering the girl her starting pitch. She takes a breath, steps forward into the acting area, and begins to sing ‘Pure Imagination’, the first song from the Anthony Newley and Leslie Bricusse musical Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. As she moves along the edge of the space, she gains confidence. Her thin, airy voice gets louder, and she rotates her body with every line she sings, allowing the audience on all four sides to see her face as well as the long, dark ponytail down her back. The light spilling from the follow-spot reveals other actors, all 12year-old girls assembled in tableaux for the first few scenes of the musical: a grouping of ‘boys’ at a candy store where they’re buying chocolates in hopes of discovering a golden ticket; Charlie’s powder-haired grandparents under mounds of quilts, and the ‘boy’ and his parents flanking the bed. The actors sit, stand, or lie on makeshift set pieces of painted cardboard and furniture. As the narrator character moves, the spotlight crosses and catches the audience: 200 girls aged seven to 15, packed onto backless benches, wearing identical logoed t-shirts and shorts, their sunburnt faces scrubbed and alert. The building is a windowless, barnlike wooden structure, with a high ceiling and four banks of risers. Open doorways on two sides look out to a purple night sky bursting with stars above a pristine landscape, dotted with small buildings and then, toward a large lake, a row of tented structures in a neat line. Further away and out of sight are rows of tennis courts, playing fields, horse stables, and a riding ring. Along the lake’s edge, 1. This work was supported by the Starr Fellowship in Jewish Studies at Harvard University in Spring 2013 and enabled by Kay Shelemay, Sara Hutcheon (Schlesinger Library), Nancy Lewisky (Maine Jewish Archives Project), and David M. Freidenreich (Colby College). I thank Wendy Belcher, Meghan Brodie, Judah Cohen, Jill Dolan, Michelle Dvoskin, Judith Hamera, Maureen Jackson, Wendy Jacobs, Robyn Kroll, Carol Oja, Louise Packard, Marcie Pachino, Deborah Paredez, Steve Runk, Megan Sandberg-Zakian, Sara Warner, Charlotte Weisenberg, Amy Wlodarski, Joshua Wolf, and Tamsen Wolff for reading drafts and/or sharing their thoughts with me, as well as the directors and staff, campers and alumnae of Skylemar, Fernwood, Tapawingo, Walden, and Tripp Lake Camp. Previous versions were presented as talks for the Old Dominion Fellows at Princeton University; Duke University; the University of Iowa; the AHRC-funded Amateur Creativity Symposium at the University of Warwick, UK; and the Jewish Studies group of the American Musicological Society. I also want to thank the anonymous readers for CTR. Contemporary Theatre Review, 2017 Vol. 27, No. 1, 46–60, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10486801.2016.1262853

Editor's Comments: On Praxis

As Raymond Williams insists in Keywords, theory “is always in active relation to practice: an interaction between things done, things observed and (systematic) explanation of these” (317). He notes that “praxis” “is a word intended to unite theory and with the strongest sense of practical (but not conventional or customary) activity: practice as action” (William 318). Williams’s definition of “praxis” includes performance in its very terms (“things done”), and he differentiates the “practical” from the “conventional or customary.” These essays all convey how making performance and teaching and writing about it in a university can break conventions and never seem customary.

Reflections from Former Editors

As I moved into the role of coeditor this past fall, I thought that learning from my predecessors would be the wise way to approach this new position. Certainly my editor, D. J. Hopkins, has helped immensely in this endeavor. And, as I reached out to former editors, a collective history began to emerge that merited sharing with a wider audience. What follows is a formalized “discussion” with every former editor of Theatre Topics, who were all gracious enough to submit their responses to the following questions: What were the main goals of Theatre Topics during your tenure as editor? What, in your opinion, were the successes of the journal, or, conversely, how has it faced challenges over the years? How has it contributed to or even helped change the field as we have developed over the years? As we transition to our new format (of three issues per year), what do you think Theatre Topics could or should be offering to the fields of performance and theatre studies in the future? Through the individual names and responses, a genealogy of Theatre Topics unfolded. Each voice interweaves to create a living editorial tradition. And while each voice is distinct, some common themes emerge: from a rigorous culture of editing, to mentoring of new authors, to the particular relationships between the journal and its institutional sponsor. Different stages of the journal have included different formats, while other themes, such as dramaturgy, return again (and will return once again with our next issue). Most interestingly, the twenty-year-plus span of reflection suggests the ways that the changes in the field of theatre and performance have mirrored the mission of the journal to bridge theory and practice in both pedagogical and methodological ways.

Editor's Comment: On Dramaturgy

I was in New York recently and saw Imaginary Friends, a new play about the renowned animosity between Lillian Hellman and Mary McCarthy. Starring Cherry Jones as McCarthy and Swoozie Kurtz as Hellman, the play was written by Nora Ephron, with music by Marvin Hamlisch. It was an amusing historical romp that used the format of a vaudeville show to explore the lives, careers, relationships, and traumas of these two fascinating, articulate, and brilliant women.