The cover of Warren Hoffman's The Great White Way: Race and the Broadway Musical (Second Edition) featurings a scene from 42nd Street with a white man in a white tuxedo flanked by a number of mostly white women.

Maxamoo Book Club: The Great White Way – Race and the Broadway Musical

Jose and PennyMaria are joined by author Warren Hoffman to discuss the newly published second edition of his book The Great White Way: Race and the Broadway Musical. Their conversation includes a closer look at West Side Story, both historically and through the lens of the revival Ivo Von Hove directed for Broadway this season.

The Great White Way: Race and the Broadway Musical (second edition) is available wherever books are sold, including from Rutgers University Press or your local independent bookstore.

If you’d like to hear the couple of songs cut from West Side Story during its development that we discuss, you can find them in this YouTube video.

This is our first episode recorded with all the participants in different spaces – yay social distancing! – and while it’s pretty good, there are some moments of roughness in the audio. Please bear with us as we adapt to our new circumstances. We’re learning as we go! It was produced by David, so if you have helpful advice, feel free to reach out to him.

Incidentally, if you are a theater artist with creative approaches to making work or caring for other theater artists during this time, and you’d like to chat about it on a future episode, please slide into our DMs or email us at podcast@maxamoo.com (but if you can slide into our DMs, we’ll see that faster).


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