---

This book examines the performance of ´Britishness´ on the musical stage. Covering a tumultuous period in British history, it offers a fresh look at the vitality and centrality of the musical stage, as a global phenomenon in late-Victorian popular culture and beyond. Through a re-examination of over fifty archival play-scripts, the book comprises seven interconnected stories told in two parts. Part One focuses on domestic and personal identities of ´Britishness´, and how implicit anxieties and contradictions of nationhood, class and gender were staged as part of the popular cultural condition. Broadening in scope, Part Two offers a revisionary reading of Empire and Otherness on the musical stage, and concludes with a consideration of the Great War and the interwar period, as musical theatre performed a nostalgia for a particular kind of ´Britishness´, reflecting the anxieties of a nation in decline.

---

1. The British Musical in Seven Stories. 2. Nation - Mythologies and Modernity. 3. Femininity - Cinderella´s and Caretakers. 4. Manliness - Domesticity and Defence. 5. Empire - Ornamentalism and Orientalism. 6. Conflict - Continuity and Change. 7. Peace - Nostalgia and Nationhood. 8. The English Musical in Many Stories.

---

Ben Macpherson is Senior Lecturer in Musical Theatre in the School of Media and Performing Arts at the University of Portsmouth, UK. His publications include Voice Studies: Critical Approaches to Process, Performance and Experience (co-edited with Konstantinos Thomaidis, 2015) and he has written widely on both voice studies and British identity in musical theatre.

---