We begin our New Year at Medievally Speaking with Kevin J. Harty's take on a recent performance of the medievalist stage musical Once Upon a Mattress (based on HC Andersen's The Princess and the Pea): https://medievallyspeaking.blogspot.com/2024/02/once-upon-mattress.html
"Medievalism as stage musical is a small subgenre. There is Camelot, which may not have aged well given the short run of the recent New York revival at Lincoln Center. On the other hand, Spamalot’s current Broadway revival is doing well at the box office and has garnered generally positive reviews. Twang—the disastrous Robin Hood musical—closed shortly after it opened in London in 1965, bankrupting its backers, and seems never to have been revived. Less panned critically, but nonetheless never revived, has been the 1975 Joan of Arc musical, Goodtime Charley. Pippin, the 1972 musical about Charlemagne’s first son, continues to be a favorite among college and high school theater groups, and there was a successful 2013 Broadway revival, which I reviewed here on April 30, 2013. Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart’s A Connecticut Yankee, from the Twain novel, both had a successful initial run and has seen the occasional revival. To this short list of stage musical medievalisms, we might well add Once Upon a Mattress." READ THE FULL REVIEW HERE
Medievalism, médiévalisme, Mediävalismus, medievalismo, stage musical, Mittelalter-Rezeption