Doing the Time Warp: Strange Temporalities and Musical Theatre

Doing the Time Warp explores how song and dance - sites of aesthetic difference in the musical - can ’warp’ time and enable marginalized and semi-marginalized fans to imagine different ways of being in the world.
While the musical is a bastion of mainstream theatrical culture, it also supports a fan culture of outsiders who dream themselves into being in the strange, liminal timespaces of its musical numbers.
Through analysing musicals of stage and screen - ranging from Rent to Ragtime, Glee to Taylor Mac’s A 24-Decade History of Popular Music - Sarah Taylor Ellis investigates how alienated subjects find moments of coherence and connection in musical theatre’s imaginaries of song and dance.
Exploring an array of archival work and live performance, such as Larry Gelbart’s papers in the UCLA Performing Arts Collections and the shadowcast performances of Los Angeles’s Sins o’ the Flesh, Doing the Time Warp probes the politics of musicals and consider show the genre’s ’strange temporalities’ can point towards new futurities for identities and communities in difference.

Sarah Taylor Ellis is a musical theatre composer and scholar. She writes music that empowers female voices and blurs the boundaries among music theatre, art song, and opera; recent projects include The Trojan Women (libretto by Ellen McLaughlin, recipient of a 2019 Opera America Discovery Grant); These Girls Have Demons (in development with Pittsburgh CLO, semi-finalist for the 2019 Eugene O’Neill National Music Theater Conference); and a steampunk Regency adaptation of Jane Austen’s Emma. Sarah is currently Senior Lecturer in Musical Theatre at University Centre Shrewsbury, where she is establishing a new undergraduate musical theatre programme.Her theatre criticism and scholarship has been published in American Theatre, L.A. Weekly, Studies in Musical Theatre, and anthologies with Palgrave and Routledge. Sarah holds a Ph.D. in Theater & Performance Studies from UCLA and a B.A. from Duke University. staylorellis.com