Sarah K Whitfield
Sarah is a music and theatre historian, researcher and practitioner. She uses digital humanities research methods alongside traditional archival research to challenge established narratives, focusing on uncovering the work that under-represented and minoritised figures do and have done in the arts. She most recently co-authored An Inconvenient Black History of British Musical Theatre 1900-1950 with Sean Mayes, and edited the collection Reframing the Musical: Race, Culture and Identity (2019). She works with datasets to analyse and access hidden information, most recently around the data ecosystem of music education in her work for a music education charity.
She has presented her work internationally to a variety of audiences, including at a concert at Wigmore Hall around her research, on BBC Radio 3's 'Music Matters', the New York Public Library and the British Library. As a dramaturg, she collaborates and advises on a range of musical theatre projects, with a particular focus on Queer theatre and stories about women. She has published widely across collaborative practice in music history, musical theatre, film musicals, and in Queer studies.
Sarah has previously worked in HE institutions, most recently as Reader in Musical Theatre at the University of Wolverhampton. She is on the editorial board for Studies in Musical Theatre. She has worked as a consultant for a range of institutions in the UK and the US including libraries and exam boards (ABRSM) and is on the board of MusicHE.
She has supervised PhDs and postgraduate research projects across musical theatre, music history and cultural studies, with a particular focus on digital humanities methods, Queer studies, and practice-led research.
She has presented her work internationally to a variety of audiences, including at a concert at Wigmore Hall around her research, on BBC Radio 3's 'Music Matters', the New York Public Library and the British Library. As a dramaturg, she collaborates and advises on a range of musical theatre projects, with a particular focus on Queer theatre and stories about women. She has published widely across collaborative practice in music history, musical theatre, film musicals, and in Queer studies.
Sarah has previously worked in HE institutions, most recently as Reader in Musical Theatre at the University of Wolverhampton. She is on the editorial board for Studies in Musical Theatre. She has worked as a consultant for a range of institutions in the UK and the US including libraries and exam boards (ABRSM) and is on the board of MusicHE.
She has supervised PhDs and postgraduate research projects across musical theatre, music history and cultural studies, with a particular focus on digital humanities methods, Queer studies, and practice-led research.
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Papers by Sarah K Whitfield
A distinctive selection of art pieces have been created by a wide variety of artists. Each work fits in a takeaway box and audience members who elect to take part in the performance go home with their piece of art at the end of the evening.
Bring your clothes with holes in their pockets, with buttons missing, with tears and rips for mending and repair. Bring the clothes that you owe a favour to, a pair of baby tights you can't throw away. Tell their story and Sarah will mend your beloved object. The mending is part of its story, it's not the invisible mending of professionals. The stitching is a kind of scar, left behind to mark the beginning of the next chapter of the object's story. As she mends, the work is video projected like an operating theatre's careful stitching, her own scarred hands making tiny decisions with needle and thread."
This paper will consider these incomplete archival fragments in the context of other 1930s musicals. This material analysis of external conditions of production and reception, established in contemporary performance studies, allows the reading of archival documents in a practical context, recovering documents that might otherwise be ignored. It raises questions about the interaction between the collaborative process and everything that happens outside of it, e.g. the way the project has been funded, the press attention it might receive before a note has even been written, or the contemporary expectations for casting. This approach will allow us to consider why this project was abandoned. As a methodology, it has general implications for studies of other musicals that are primarily represented in the archive. This paper will discover where this particular lost musical fits into our understanding of Weill's early years in America.
Kurt Weill's negotiation of entry into 1930s America, and the contemporary systems of production on Broadway will be used as a case study. The traces that remain of Weill’s early American collaborations will be considered within the framework of conditions of performance. This work is a specific extension of Ric Knowles’s materialist consideration of theatrical production and concurrent contexts of reception. While Knowles suggests these are a prerequisite to examining contemporary performance, this paper will extend them to consider the archive. Knowles’s methodology will be modified to consider the musical’s own conditions of performance, and the available evidence then re-contextualised.
The paper will demonstrate that by considering what is present and using the evidence of a collaborative process the archive itself can be revitalised. When considering the historic moment of performance, the fragments found in the archive are no longer static but instead active records of conditions of production.
This paper will explore the legacy of cultural valuations of opera and the musical. The classical music canon has shaped the way all music is studied, and its influence is still with us when we talk of high, low and middlebrow. What does this actually mean for the beleaguered genre? Using the critical framework of David Savran, I will attempt to suggest a way forward for considering both Weill and the musical and for taking both seriously.
(2016) Studies in Musical Theatre, 10. 2 (June): 163–76. doi:10.1386/smt.10.2.163_1
Join Mayes (a Broadway- and Toronto-based Music Director) and Whitfield (a musical theatre historian and researcher) as they take readers on a journey through a historically-inconvenient and brilliant reality that has long been overlooked. Get to know the Black theatre community in London's Roaring 20s, and hear about the secret Florence Mills memorial concert they held in 1928. Acquaint yourself with Buddy Bradley, Black tap and ballet choreographer, who reshaped dance in British musicals - often to be found at Noël Coward's apartment for late-night rehearsals, such was Bradley's importance. Meet Jack Johnson, the first African American Heavyweight Boxing Champion, who toured Britain's theatres during World War 1 and brought the sounds of Chicago to places like war-weary Dundee. Discover the most prolific Black theatre practitioner you've never heard of, William Garland, who worked for 40 years across multiple continents and championed Black British performers. Marvel at performers like cabaret star Mabel Mercer, born in Stafford in 1900, who sang and conducted theatre orchestras across the UK, as well as Black Birmingham comedian Eddie Emerson, who was Garland's partner for decades.
Many of their names and works have never been included in histories of the British musical - until now.
Timely and engaging, this is required reading for undergraduate and postgraduate students of Musical Theatre. It offers an intersectional approach which will also be invaluable for theatre practitioners.
Did Les Misérables make you miserable? Or did it inspire you? When Sarah Whitfield was a teenager, her Dad frequently embarrassed her with his love of this musical above all others. So, after he was diagnosed with late stage cancer, Whitfield set out to find out why this musical meant so much to him and to its worldwide following.
In this new book, she asked her Dad and 350 other people how they felt about this musical, exploring people’s personal connections with the show. In the middle of some of the hardest moments in family life, Whitfield explores how the musical might help us deal with some of our most difficult experiences and give us hope for when ‘tomorrow comes’.