But is it a musical? This question is regularly asked of films, television shows and other media objects that sit uncomfortably in the category despite evident musical connections. Musicals at the Margins argues that instead of seeking to resolve such questions, we should leave them unanswered and unsettled, proposing that there is value in examining the unstable edges of genre. This collection explores the marginal musical in a diverse range of historical and global contexts. It encompasses a range of different forms of marginality including boundary texts (films/media that are sort of/not quite musicals), musical sequences (marginalized sequences in musicals; musical sequences in non-musicals), music films, musicals of the margins (musicals produced from social, cultural, geographical, and geopolitical margins), and musicals across media (television and new media). Ultimately these essays argue that marginal genre texts tell us a great deal about the musical specifically and genre more broadly.
Musicals at the Margins covers a wide range of musical texts existing on the borders of the genre, expanding and complicating how musical texts make meaning as musicals. The anthology's remarkable selection of scholars examines generic outliers-like rockumentaries, dance-focused films, televised lip-synching contests, Bollywood "song picturization," and short-form pop music film-demonstrating how methodologies developed by canonical musical scholars like Rick Altman and Jane Feuer continue to inform contemporary scholarship. As the boundaries between genres, media platforms, and audiences become increasingly difficult to parse, Shearer and Wright's collection is a much-needed addition to the existing literature on the musical, and the field of genre theory as a whole.