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The field of theatre studies has begun the twenty-first century as a much more inclusive discipline than it was even twenty years earlier. Yet, while scholars have paid attention to a much wider range of theatre and performance work and have done so with a far more diverse repertoire of theoretical and critical approaches, we need always to reflect on what account of contemporary theatrical experience we are entering into historical record. Notwithstanding an expanded ambit for theatre studies-itself the result of an often hard-fought battle-we have not yet provided a properly inclusive account of contemporary work insofar as we have neglected, almost entirely, a significant segment of the market. This is the segment we might simply identify as commercial theatre. Though its audiences have been large and enthusiastic, critical practice has, apparently, found it of little or no interest to our sophisticated and theoretically informed theatre historiography and dramatic criticism. Few, if any, scholars have given serious thought as to why The Mousetrap came to celebrate its twenty thousandth performance in London in November 2000, why Mamma Mia! has swelled to more than twenty productions worldwide, or why Cirque du Soleil has grown in less than twenty years from a group of Québec-based street performers to a global corporate venture with five touring and five permanent shows on stream in 2005.
The adjectives that often attach to commercial theatrical production-popular, spectacular, blockbuster, entertainment, crowd-pleaser, feel-good, lightweight-recall the emergence of other, generally pejorative descriptors in theatre criticism some hundred years or so earlier. Simon Shepherd and Peter Womack have persuasively articulated the effects of words like "sensationalist," "escapist," "hack," "stock," and "claptrap" as part of a "lexicon of theatrical scorn" devised and employed by the period's "Men of Letters" when confronted with the commercial successes of nineteenth-century English melodramas.1 As Shepherd and Womack conclude:
That time is generally understood to be one of the low points in the history of English drama. It's not that no plays were being done. Indeed there were probably more performances in more theatres seen by more people than at any other period, including the present. But next to none of it seems to be either natural or proper-as if English theatre was under occupation by an alien culture.2
The...