Musicals could be considered the frosting on the cake of modern theater: sweet and fun—the provenance of chorus lines and dancing animals, from Oklahoma to The Lion King. Shakespeare and Voltaire didn’t write musicals; Arthur Miller, Eugene O’Neill, and Tennessee Williams weren’t known for them, either.

But Professor Barbara Wallace Grossman’s course The American Musical—Radical Acts and Adaptations gives musicals their cultural due. Her students contemplate them as products of a moment: excavated jewels shaped by and reflecting their time, revealing attitudes about race, gender, class, and ethnicity. 

“I hope my students walk away with a new appreciation for musical theater and with an understanding that musicals are a brilliant American art form they shouldn’t feel self-conscious about enjoying,” she says.

The class also examines the future of theater in the wake of the pandemic, when Broadway took a severe financial hit, and through the lens of politics, when censorship is on the rise and arts funding is at risk. This year’s spring semester course had a special focus on “radical acts and adaptations”: that is, musicals that pushed the envelope when they debuted and continue to as revivals.

Students examine iconoclastic works whose themes resonate across eras: West Side Story, capturing ethnic tensions through a love story originally set in 1950s New York City; Hair, the 1967 psychedelic rock musical that heralded the Flower Power era; Cabaret, a tale of doomed romance against the backdrop of rising antisemitism and fascism in 1929-1930 Germany; and Hamilton, which captivated the public imagination through a retelling of Revolutionary War history for modern times. 

Reframing musicals as entertainment and sociopolitical touchstone is important to Grossman. She started her career as an English teacher in Brookline, Massachusetts, and was plucked to run a student drama club there. She pursued graduate education in theater, joining Tufts in the early ’90s. She’s a scholar but most of all a fan, who still cries at the opening of The Lion King, when animals fill the aisles, or at the end of Hamilton. 

This unabashed enthusiasm electrifies her teaching.

“Early in my Tufts career, I was at a department retreat where one of the subjects was revamping the curriculum. One of my colleagues said, ‘Students are always clamoring for a class on musical theater, but who would want to teach that?’ I felt like the character in A Chorus Line, saying, ‘I can do that! I can do that!’ Because, at the time, there was a stigma against musical theater. It was not really considered a serious field of study,” she recalls.

This has changed. Sure, there are still star memoirs and celebrity tell-alls. But now, she says, musical theater is considered a substantive field. Grossman spotlights texts such as Changed for Good: A Feminist History of the Broadway Musical by Stacy Wolf, The American Musical and the Formation of National Identity by Raymond Knapp, and many more.

Grossman also asks students to contemplate difficult questions in classroom discussions: How are musicals products of their own cultural moments? Can they be reframed and reimagined so that they speak to ours? Whose voices are still marginalized and silenced? What new stories need to be told, and how might they be told differently or more impactfully through musicals? 

But how to do this with a generation of students who grew up with YouTube and TikTok? Grossman makes the class, which is taught through the Department of Theatre, Dance, and Performance Studies, accessible to all students—there are no prerequisites —and novel forms of creativity are embraced during projects and discussions. Assignments include things like pretending to be commissioned by the Smithsonian to create a playlist that tells the story of musical theater in American culture, or to perform a seven-minute monologue as a theatrical figure, fully in character.

“I don’t think I’ve ever taken a class before where a professor would be just as happy if you wrote a song instead of giving a PowerPoint presentation,” says Katie Spiropoulos A26, a dual major in international relations and theatre and performance studies. “In other classes, you could never go up and sing your presentation, and have it actually become a deeper form of learning, like Professor Grossman encourages us to.”

Students enter class to a famous song or an interview from that day’s musical playing on a projector; lectures are more like discussions, interspersed with videos and music. 

“I’d heard fantastic things about Professor Grossman, but I also liked the syllabus itself. I know my fair share of musicals, but I mainly know contemporary musicals, the ones most people know,” says Jake Pandina A26, a physics major. “I wanted to explore the beginnings of the American musical and how it impacts our community. You can take notes, but I don’t think it’s required. She more wants us to experience the musical and be engaged without being on our computers.”

Grossman understands that most of her students won’t go on to pursue theater careers, though some might. Mainly, she hopes to ignite or reaffirm their love of a singular art form.

“Most of our students are not focused on doing professional theater when they leave, but they love immersing themselves in it here,” she says. “They find joy and community in it: the opportunity to take risks, and to explore. They’re so imaginative.”

They’re also coming of age in a different time than when she began teaching at Tufts 30-plus years ago. Now, entertainment is everywhere, live-streamed; vintage clips from Broadway shows are on YouTube; going to the theater isn’t the ceremonious outing it once was, since anyone can stream a movie musical on Netflix. 

“Students now have the advantage that students in the early ’90s didn’t: They have so many resources instantly available, electronically, that they can just dive into the essential,” Grossman says. 

But, on the other hand, quantity can dilute quality. For Spiropoulos, Grossman’s course is a reminder of the preciousness—and precariousness—of theater as an art form.

“I love TV. I love streaming. But I think that there’s something so powerful and beautiful about live theater. And I think that the American musical course reminds us of that, and then adds layers on top of it, to show us how we’ve grown,” she says.