Kimberly Eckel Beasley received a post-master's Certificate of Vocal Performance degree from Northwestern University in 2004. She teaches courses in opera history and vocal pedagogy, and she serves as chair of the department of music at Jacksonville University. She recently received an excellence in directing award from the Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival for her production of Stephen Sondheim's Into the Woods. James P. Beasley received a Ph.D. from Purdue University in 2007. He teaches courses in rhetorical history, theory, and research at the University of North Florida. He is the author of Rhetoric at the University of Chicago from Peter Lang Publishing.

• List of Figures – Acknowledgments – Introduction – Acts in Motion: Dramatism in Jason Howland’s Little Women – Scenes in Motion: Dramatism in Elton John and Tim Rice’s Aida – Agents in Motion: Dramatism in Kurt Weill’s Street Scene – Agency in Motion: Dramatism in Stephen Sondheim’s Into the Woods – Purpose in Motion: Dramatism in Stephen Schwartz’s Children of Eden – Conclusion – Index.

“Kimberly Eckel Beasley and James P. Beasley deliver rivetingly insightful approaches to Burkean Dramatism as a heuristic for creating and sustaining effective rhetorical performances. Framed within the timespan of the early days of the divisive Trump administration and concluding toward its demise, the book artfully examines how musical theater is especially capable of creating choratic spaces of potential for unity. Dramatism and Musical Theater: Experiments in Rhetorical Performance seems to be made for this moment, yet it also illuminates a return to the interdisciplinary value of writing, rhetoric, and theater pedagogy. The convergence of these scenes of rhetorical activity manifests a kairotic resacralization of the rhetorical canon of delivery.The book does more than simply explain ‘the pentad’ and imagine rhetors will know what to do with it. Instead, by sharing a sense of who Burke was and the range of his hopes, Beasley and Beasley offer Kenneth Burke’s pentadic pedagogical approach in ways that reasonably reframe both written and theatrical performances as acts. When seen as acts through the pentad, we are better able to explore motivation and situatedness from within scenes of our performances, our lives, all toward increasingly choratic, and therefore at least momentarily ‘unified,’ participation in rhetorical performances, in life.”—Dr. Bonnie Lenore Kyburz, Independent Scholar; Author of Cruel Auteurism: Affective Digital Meditations Toward Film-Composition