The Hollywood musical - Jane Feuer|British Film Institute

When the first edition of this book appeared, at the beginning of the 1980s, the age of the Hollywood musical seemed to be over. Fred and Ginger had long since hung up their dancing shoes and audiences had lost their taste for the MGM extravaganzas. But since then the musical has undergone a rebirth, with the rise of teen musicals such as "Dirty Dancing" and "Flashdance". In a chapter specially written for this new edition of her book, Jane Feuer shows how this new development in the genre relates to important changes in the cinema audience itself.;More than any other form of cinema, the classic musicals epitomized the golden age of the Hollywood studio. As the author demonstrates, musicals not only showed singing and dancing; they were actually about singing and dancing, about the very idea of entertainment itself. Despite marked differences of style and tone, the teen musical depends on very much the same motifs, adapted to its target audience. The new form of musical, Jane Feuer argues, has been reconstructed from the materials of the old. She is the co-author of "MTM: Quality Television".