Item Detail
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31145
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1
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44
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English
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Staging the Saints : Mormonism and American Musical Theater
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Los Angeles, California
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University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA)
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Ph.D. - Philosophy in Musicology
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"American musical theater is often dismissed as frivolous or kitschy entertainment. But what if musicals actually mattered a great deal? What if perhaps the most innocuous musical genre in America actually defines the practices of Mormonism—America’s fastest-growing religion? I address these questions in this dissertation by applying methodologies from Musicology, Voice Studies, Performance Studies, and American Studies to the unexpected yet dynamic relationship between Mormonism and American musical theater. My investigation led to my conclusion that voice and vocal theatricality are deeply rooted concepts in Mormonism, to such a degree that I claim Mormons practice a theology of voice. I argue that analyzing the Mormon relationship with musicals from the mid-nineteenth century to today helps conceptualize the phenomenon of speaking on behalf of another person (or God), a process I call the vicarious voice. By closely examining voice in Mormonism and musical theater, I construct a theoretical approach to the performance of vocal vicarity. I conclude that, in an effort to become gods themselves, Mormons use the musical stage to practice transforming into someone they are not, modeling closely the theatrical qualities of Jesus and other spiritual leaders in Mormon mythology. Thus, learning to vicariously voice another person on the musical stage actually draws the faithful closer to godliness." [Author Abstract]
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A Chosen People, a Promised Land : Mormonism and Race in Hawai'i
A History and Influence of the Mormon Theatre from 1839-1869
All Abraham's Children : Changing Mormon Conceptions of Race and Lineage
A Sacred Code : Mormon Temple Dedication Prayers, 1836-2000
A Voice Crying from the Dust : The Book of Mormon as Sound
Banner of the Gospel : Wilford Woodruff
Belief, Metaphor, and Rhetoric : The Mormon Practice of Testimony Bearing
Blood of the Prophets : Brigham Young and the Massacre at Mountain Meadows
Brigham Young : American Moses
David O. McKay and the Rise of Modern Mormonism
Directions for Mormon Studies in the Twenty-First Century
Early Mormonism and the Magic World View
Early Mormon Patriarchy and the Paradoxes of Democratic Religiosity in Jacksonian America
Early Theatricals in Utah
Elder Price Superstar : The Book of Mormon, Current Broadway Musical
Evangelical America and Early Mormonism
In Heaven as It Is on Earth : Joseph Smith and the Early Mormon Conquest of Death
Language Planning in Frontier America : The Case of the Deseret Alphabet
Ministering Minstrels : Blackface Entertainment in Pioneer Utah
Mormonism : The Story of a New Religious Tradition
Mortal Messiah: From Bethlehem to Calvary
No Man Knows My History : The Life of Joseph Smith, the Mormon Prophet
'Not to be Riten' : The Mormon Temple Rite as Oral Canon
Reflections on the Mormon 'Canon'
Religion of a Different Color : Race and the Mormon Struggle for Whiteness
(Re)living the Pioneer Past : Mormon Youth Handcart Trek Re-Enactments
Sojourner in the Promised Land : Forty years among the Mormons
Spatial Transgression and the BYU Jerusalem Center Controversy
The Abridging Works : The Epic and Historic Book of Mormon Arranged in Sequence of Composition
The Angel and the Beehive : The Mormon Struggle with Assimilation
The Church as Broadcaster
The Heavens Resound : A History of the Latter-day Saints in Ohio, 1830-1838
The Inca Priest on the Mormon Stage : A Native American Melodrama and a New American Religion
The Making of a Mormon Myth : The 1844 Transfiguration of Brigham Young
The Mantle of the Prophet Joseph Smith Passes to Brother Brigham : One Hundred Twenty-one Testimonies of a Collective Spiritual Witness
The Mormon Menace : Violence and Anti-Mormonism in the Postbellum South
The Mormon People: The Making of an American Faith
The Mormons and the Theatre, or the History of Theatricals in Utah, with Reminiscences and Comments, Humorous and Critical
The Mormon Tabernacle Choir : A Biography
The Ritualization of Mormon History and Other Essays
The Theater in Mormon Life and Culture
Waiting for World's End : Diaries of Wilford Woodruff
Wilford Woodruff's 1897 Testimony