Destabilizing the Hollywood musical
music, masculinity and mayhem
By the mid-sixties, Hollywood's once conservative go-to-gal shed its tap shoes for something darker, hipper, and more in tune with the day's trends. Leaving Gene Kelly and Fred Astaire in their wake, films such as Tommy, Jesus Christ Superstar, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, and Hair reflected the times as they embraced swingers, youth rebellion, and Scorsese-esque aesthetics. Focusing mainly on the period between the genre's post- Sound of Music boom and its near-disappearance in the 1980s, Destabilizing the Hollywood Musical pushes past the idyllic world of Oklahoma! to examine emergent and socially contentious norms that defined decades of the genre and helped to form its millennial revival. Often rejecting love, marriage, and the USA, much of this later musical breed favours male stories of lust, deception, isolation, and failure wrapped in a haze of rock-n-roll, visual dynamism, and testosterone.
Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Nonfiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.
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What the reading experience may hold
A fuller profile for choosing with more confidence—not just another copy of the preview.
Nonfiction
Use these as starting points rather than limits; the most memorable books often stretch beyond their catalog labels.
Catalog signals suggest disturbing or confinement-related situations. These notes may not be complete; consult a publisher or reader-supplied guide when detailed warnings matter.
These notes are inferred from available catalog information and may not be complete. Check a publisher or reader-supplied guide if you need comprehensive warnings.
Dark tone · Steady pace
A comfortable full-length choice for steady daily reading.
A good fit if…
Readers who want a thoughtful experience and enjoy noticing the connections beneath a book’s surface story.
This book's DNA
A visual estimate based on this edition's categories, description, and length. Select a star to explore the signals.
This signal is descriptive, not a rating. It helps compare the kind of reading experience this edition may offer.
Spoiler-Free Emotional Arc
A broad estimate of the book’s emotional rhythm, shown without story events or outcomes.
This visualization is an interpretive estimate based on catalog description, categories, tone, pace, and content signals. It does not describe specific scenes.
A quick reading snapshot
Edition facts and catalog signals to help you decide whether this book fits what you want to read next.
- ISBN-13
- 978-0-2302-3049-1
- Language
- English
- Edition record
- OL25022914M
A more thoughtful way into this book
This guide uses the edition details and category signals above to help you choose deliberately. It does not replace the author's work or a full review.
A comfortable full-length choice for steady daily reading.
Begin with its place in Nonfiction, then notice where the book resists that label.
Read for connection, not completion.
Mark one passage that sharpens the book's central concern and one that complicates it. That tension often reveals more than a quick summary.
Three questions to carry with you
- Whose perspective organizes the story, and whose perspective remains outside it?
- Which sources or lived experiences carry the author’s central argument?
- How does the book change the way you understand its larger subject?
Editorial framework by Wesley Bryan, BookenDeX Founder and Editor.
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Why it fits: shares Nonfiction, a similar reading length, a similar publication era.
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Why it fits: shares Nonfiction, a similar reading length, a similar publication era.