We are pleased to invite you to the first lecture of the American Studies Colloquium Series in the 2026/27 Fall semester!
Elizabeth L. Wollman
(Baruch College, City University of New York)
“Before The Beast: Hollywood on Broadway before the Disney ‘Invasion’”.
Thursday, October 22, 2026
at 4:45 p.m.
You can get 3 OZN points for participating in this event.
Where?
Dobra 55, room 2.118
(the building features some mobility accommodations: ramp and lift)
What?
The Walt Disney Company’s move into theatrical production during Times Square’s redevelopment in the late 1990s has been exhaustively chronicled by journalists, historians and scholars, but earlier efforts by Hollywood film studios to establish a lasting presence on Broadway have been less well-documented and are thus not as widely understood. This paper examines the ways market deregulation in the United States in the late 20 th century helped transform Hollywood’s relationship to Broadway, and traces how such shifts in the entertainment market influenced both the redevelopment of Times Square and the subsequent globalization of Broadway-style musicals. I consider the efforts on Broadway of film studios that competed through the 1970s and 1980s for Broadway musicals that would translate well for film and television. Case studies include 20 th Century Fox’s The Wiz (1975), Paramount’s Platinum (1978) and My One and Only (1983); Warner Bros.’ pioneering theater division in the late 1970s; and Universal’s Best Little Whorehouse in Texas (1978), Alice (1979) and I Remember Mama (1979). Scholarship about Times Square’s redevelopment tends to center on Disney as a particularly innovative corporate producer on Broadway; this paper challenges the idea that Disney’s theatrical production model was pioneering, and suggests that Disney built on the many experiments other film studios attempted before its arrival in Times Square as a producer and theater owner in the mid-1990s.
Who?
Elizabeth L. Wollman is Professor of Music at Baruch College, City University of New York, and a member of the doctoral faculty in theatre at the CUNY Graduate Center. Her research and teaching interests include the stage musical, the commercial theater industry, canonicity, historiography, failure, sexuality and gender, and the cultural history of New York City. She is the author of numerous articles and chapters about the contemporary stage musical, as well as the books The Theater Will Rock: A History of the Rock Musical, From Hair to Hedwig (University of Michigan Press, 2006), Hard Times: The Adult Musical in 1970s New York City (Oxford University Press, 2012) and A Critical Companion to the American Stage Musical (Bloomsbury/Methuen Drama, 2017). With Jessica Sternfeld, she was co-editor of The Routledge Companion to the Contemporary Musical (2020) and is currently co-editor of the journal Studies in Musical Theatre.
