TH 345 Global Theatre

Overview of Course

Musical theatre is largely an American invention, shaped through the commercial and cultural influence of Broadway. In this course, we will examine how American Broadway musicals represent the countries we will visit and consider the ways these portrayals engage with questions of representation, cultural appropriation, and authenticity. By comparing Broadway depictions with the actual performance traditions of those cultures, students will investigate how American musical theatre often constructs imagined versions of other societies for Western audiences.
At the same time, the course will foreground the rich and complex musical theatre traditions that exist within the cultures themselves. For example, we will contrast the portrayal of the Vietnamese female protagonist in Miss Saigon, written by white Western creators and often criticized for its fetishization of Asian women, with Vietnam’s traditional performance form Cải lương, or “reformed theatre,” which combines music, drama, and regional storytelling traditions. Similarly, we will examine The King and I, a musical currently banned from production in Thailand, alongside traditional Thai performance forms such as Lakhon, which integrate dance, music, elaborate costumes, and masked performance. Through these comparisons, students will critically explore how cultural narratives are constructed, who has the authority to tell them, and how theatrical traditions function within their own cultural contexts.