American Cinderellas on the Broadway Musical Stage

Maya Cantu is Dramaturgical Advisor at Off-Broadway's Mint Theater Company, USA. Her essays and reviews have been published in Theatre Journal, Studies in Musical Theatre, New England Theatre Journal, and as part of the New York Public Library's Musical of the Month series. She earned her DFA and MFA in Dramaturgy and Dramatic Criticism from Yale School of Drama, USA.

• Introduction: Glass Slippers and Glass Ceilings in the Twenty-First Century, or Cinderella Returns to Broadway 1. "Who Are These American Cinderellas?:" Working Girls, Chorus Girls, and American Dreams for Women in the 1920s 2. Merman Was a Lady: The 1930s Cinderella-Broad and Burlesquing the Genteel Tradition 3. "Make Up Your Mind:" Boss Ladies and Enchantresses in the 1940s Broadway Musical 4. "Twentieth-Century Fairy Tales:" Princesses, Prostitutes, and the Feminine Mystique in the Broadway Musicals of the 1950s 5. Coda: Rewriting the Broadway Cinderella Story Bibliography

“Drawing from feminist theory and theatre history, Maya Cantu argues that the Cinderella myth, an amalgamation of a rag-to-riches story and a magical marriage plot, offers a compelling matrix to negotiate theatrically the various economic, gendered, and marital expectations for working women. … American Cinderellas is a lush, captivating, and necessary addition to the fields of theatre history, women performers, and feminism in performance.” (Yasmine Marie Jahanmir, Theatre Survey, Vol. 58 (2), May, 2017)“American Cinderellas provides a compelling and detailed insight into the development of female narratives from the familiar fairy tale into a fundamental component of storytelling in American musical theatre writing. It is bound to inspire further study of the themes it discusses and will hopefully encourage further scholarly interest in the real-life women it also showcases.” (Hannah Robbins, Studies in Musical Theatre, Vol. 10 (1), 2017)“Since there are no other similar titles that offer a critical analysis of this topic, American Cinderellas on the Broadway Musical Stage is an important resource that fills a gap in the scholarly literature. Cantu’s book would fit nicely in a graduate seminar class about female characters on Broadway … . American Cinderellas on the Broadway Musical Stage examines twentieth-century American culture through the lens of female characters in theatre.” (Alicia M. Goodman, The Journal of American Culture, Vol. 40 (3), 2017)