Search results for ""Author Dr. Nicole Hodges Persley""

Hip-Hop culture’s explosive arrival on the art scene of New York in the boroughs of Queens and the Bronx in the 1970s began to influence all aspects of musical theater from singing to scenic design. Hip-Hop in Musical Theatre takes an intersectional standpoint to explore Hip-Hop’s influence on musical theater practice and aesthetics by giving the reader a comprehensive map of musical theater productions that have been impacted by Hip-Hop music and culture. Offering insightful briefs on musical theater productions that contain aesthetic, musical and embodied references to the global phenomenon of Hip-hop culture, this volume takes the reader through a virtual tour of Hip-Hop’s influence on American musical theater. From early traces of hip-hop’s rap scene in the 1970s that appeared in musicals such as Micki Grant’s Tony Award nominated Don’t Bother Me I Can’t Cope (1971) and Broadway smash hits such as The Wiz (1974) to international juggernauts such as Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton (2015), this introductory book decodes the sights and sounds of Hip-Hop culture within the socio-cultural context in which the musicals are produced. Published in the Topics in Musical Theatre series this volume presents fact-filled and insightful summaries of musicals that give the reader a snapshot of the musical and narrative content while highlighting which aspect of the music and culture of Hip-Hop informs acting, dancing, singing, design, and music in the selected musical while offering insightful analysis on the ways that hip-hop styles and politics have changed the shape of musical theater practice.

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Black Matters: Lewis Morrow Plays is a play anthology that maps the impact of emotional, social, cultural, and economic forces that shape the quality of African American life in the 21st century. Focusing on the narratives of Black men and women carrying the hopes and dreams of a generation, Morrow writes stories of dreams deferred, lives incarcerated, and families broken by circumstance who strive to beat the stereotypes of Blackness. Bending time to create hyperreal poetic engagements with anti-Blackness and systemic racism, Morrow questions who has the audacity of hope while living within circumstances that anticipate premature death. Morrow’s poignant characters speak truth to power directly from their hearts as they present as unapologetically Black in a world that is indifferent to, and fatigued by, claims of racism and inequality. Baybra’s Tulips: Baybra, a recently rereleased convict, returns home to live with sister Tallulah and her husband Charles under the pretence of rehabilitation but with the objective to avenge his sister’s spousal abuse by his brother-in-law that resulted in the loss of her child. Begetters: Explores generational inheritance of trauma focusing on husband and wife, Spicer and Norma, in the twilight years of their marriage, and their descent into darkness and therapy after the loss of a family member Mother/son: A dark dramedy about a white mother who is in denial about her racist perspective and her cocaine addiction. Forced to get clean, she comes to live with her Black son (mixed race) who is reluctant to invest in her latest efforts to get clean in the converging pandemics of BLM and Covid.

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