Alberto Mira’s timely volume superbly fills a gap in writing on the musical, focusing with originality, flair and thorough scholarship on a significant variant of the genre. He demonstrates how the Pop musical has taken the genre into new directions, for instance making it even more socially aware, revising its folk discourse, and exploring questions of sexual identity. In his analysis of the star qualities of Ann-Margret, the changing impact of Elvis Presley, re-appraisal of films like Bye Bye Birdie and The Rocky Horror Picture Show or, more generally, the way Pop musicals draw on and diversify the traditions of the classical musical, Mira ensures that this exciting volume will be essential reading for devotees as well as for scholars of the film musical, and the aesthetics, cultural and socio-political contexts of popular cinema.
