Research

As a scholar, my work considers the textual and aesthetic dramaturgies of musical theatre in sites beyond the commercial site of Broadway. Following the work of musical theatre scholars Stacy Wolf, Bruce Kirle, Donatella Galella, and Bryan Vandevender, I am interested in how musicals are staged and restaged in places where profit is not a primary motivator, and how are our identities shape our responses to them.

My dissertation project, "It's Just Like Broadway: Reprisal Dramaturgies in U.S. Licensed Musical Production (2021-2026)," surveys four key sites of musical production Elsewhere: Off-Broadway, high schools, community theaters, and summer stocks. These sites are always already in dialogue with the "brand of Broadway" through practitioners relationship to titles earmarked as "Broadway musicals." Licensing companies, writers, estates, and more help to boost the ties that bind Broadway and Elsewhere, making it harder than one might think to truly look "beyond Broadway." I consider the J2 Spotlight Musical Theatre Company's practice of reviving "forgotten" works of the musical repertory alongside the writers who penned them; Cumberland Valley High School's repurposing of professional scenic designs for their annual spring musical; Theatre Harrisburg's recycling of musical titles (and volunteers); and the Pittsburgh CLO's participation in co-productions with other regional summer stock theaters across the United States.

Additionally, I am interested in how dramaturgies of the musical are further solidified and (in some cases) reimagined in Broadway musicals claiming "originality." I coin these citiational practices "reprisal dramaturgies" in my attempt to document how writers, directors, designers, and more rely upon the musical's past as a way to ensure legibility in mounting new works. I have shared excerpts of this work at Mid-America Theatre Conference, Song Stage and Screen, the Music Theatre Dance Association, and the Association for Theatre in Higher Education.

Publications
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"It's a Scandal! It's an Outrage!": Disrupting Nostalgia in Daniel Fish's Revived Oklahoma! (2019)
Music Theatre Dance Journal, June 2025

In 2019, director Daniel Fish’s provocative staging of the classic American musical Oklahoma! opened at the Circle in the Square Theatre on Broadway. Staged in a deep thrust, Fish’s version challenged audiences where Oklahoma!’s March 1943 premiere on the St. James Theatre’s proscenium stage had delighted them. In the former, Laura Jellinek’s naturalistic interior set departed from Lemuel Ayers’s embrace of the outdoor rural farmland. Circle in the Square’s inclination towards intimacy melded with Fish’s desire to push audiences to reconsider their relationship with Rodgers and Hammerstein’s canonical text. This same intentionality was not and could not be replicated in the production’s 2021 U.S. national tour, which saw the staging reconfigured for the proscenium stage common in most touring houses across the country. As the staging adapted for the road, so did the audience reception.  This article tracks the drastic change in reception of Fish’s production from its Broadway bow to its subsequent tour as it highlights the significance of dramaturgies of space in a musicals’ aesthetic realization. Lifting from Angela Sweigart-Gallagher and Aaron C. Thomas’ attention to “dramaturgies of place,” dramaturgies of space consider the relationship between a theater’s auditorium and its stage, analyzing the range of affective responses a musical may elicit. On Broadway, Fish’s Oklahoma! situated its audiences around and amid the action to entice them into reconsidering the musical’s politics; on the road, this invitation seemingly vanished, as the distance of the audience from the action left them feeling alienated.