ABSTRACT
The second signification of the term “popular”—which I’ll refer to here as “pop” in order to distinguish it from the local and often more politically-minded theater described above-
overlaps with the mainstream to which popular theater opposes itself. As Flores notes, in the twentieth century, “popular culture” has increasingly been linked to “the domain of the mass media, the ‘mass culture’ of technical reproduction and industrial commercialization” (17). The association with the market is one reason that scholars often snub pop culture: its commercial investments are seen as compromising its aesthetic aspirations. It is often easy to identify pop cultural production in other media: pop films would be those showing at the multiplexes that proliferate all over the United States, while pop fiction is produced in cheap, easily accessible editions available at major retailers and airport bookstores. However, when we speak of pop theater, it is a bit more difficult to identify in part because theater’s entrenchment in a specific location means that it never becomes a mass cultural phenomenon with the same reach as a film or popular novel. Additionally, the site where commercialization and theater most emphatically intersect-Broadway-is also the place associated with prestige in the theater world. To act on Broadway or to have had one’s play produced on its stages is to have achieved the pinnacle of the theater arts in the United States. This is especially true for dramatic productions, which are esteemed but seen by relatively few, and run for shorter periods of time. In contrast, the Broadway musical enjoys large audiences, longer runs, and often figures prominently in the imagination of the world beyond New York City because of such marketable items as cast albums and other merchandising. Indeed, the Broadway musical is the closest thing to a pop theater that exists in the United States. As Alberto Sandoval-Sánchez declares in his study of Latina/o theater: “No other theatrical genre can better celebrate the American way of life than the Broadway musical” (9).
