講者 Keynote Speaker : Elizabeth Wollman
職稱 Job Title: Professor, Theatre and Performance, CUNY
Elizabeth L. Wollman is a professor of music at Baruch College, CUNY, and a member of the doctoral faculty in Theater at the CUNY Graduate Center. Her research and teaching interests include the contemporary American stage musical, the commercial theater industry, canonicity, historiography, failure, and the cultural history of New York City. She is the author of numerous articles and chapters about musicals, as well as the books The Theater Will Rock: A History of the Rock Musical, From Hair to Hedwig (University of Michigan Press, 2006), Hard Times: The Adult Musical in 1970s New York City (Oxford University Press, 2012) and A Critical Companion to the American Stage Musical (Bloomsbury/Methuen Drama, 2017). With Jessica Sternfeld, she was co-editor of The Routledge Companion to the Contemporary Musical (2020) and is co-editor of the journal Studies in Musical Theatre. She is currently working on a book about the many stops and starts that resulted in the late-20th-century globalization of the Broadway-style musical.
演講主題：
Deregulation Drama and the Battle for Broadway in the 1970s and 1980s
The Walt Disney Company’s foray into theatrical production during Times Square’s redevelopment in the late 1990s has been exhaustively chronicled by journalists, historians and scholars, but earlier efforts by Hollywood film studios to establish a lasting presence on Broadway have been less well-documented, and are thus not as widely understood or contextualized. This paper will examine the ways federal deregulation in the United States in the last decades of the 20th century worked to transform Hollywood’s relationship to Broadway, and will trace how such industrial shifts had an impact both on the redevelopment of Times Square in the late 1990s and on the subsequent globalization of Broadway musicals. I consider the efforts on Broadway by numerous other film companies that competed through the 1970s and 1980s for musical theater properties that would not only succeed on Broadway, but that might also translate well to film and television. Case studies include 20th Century Fox’s The Wiz (1975), Paramount’s Platinum (1978) and My One and Only (1983); the theater producer Claire Nichtern’s oversight of Warner Bros.’ pioneering theater division in the late 1970s; and Universal’s Best Little Whorehouse in Texas (1978), Alice (1979) and I Remember Mama (1979). Extant scholarship about Times Square’s redevelopment tends both to center on and to silo Disney as a particularly innovative corporate producer, both on Broadway and beyond; this paper challenges historiography that situates Disney’s theatrical production models as especially pioneering and suggests that the company instead built on the many experiments other film studios attempted before its arrival in Times Square as a producer and theater owner in the mid-1990s.