Abstract
This chapter explains how recent live television musicals such as NBC’s The Sound of Music Live! (2013), Peter Pan Live! (2014), The Wiz Live! (2015), and Hairspray Live! (2016), and Fox’s Grease Live! (2016) encourage audience participation through social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter. In these participatory events, fans, critics, producers, performers, and other actors negotiate the meanings of musical theatre and its desirable forms of liveness. Perceptions of the live are complex in a mediatized environment where the conventions of traditional theatre, television, and online social media converge. Viewers in intersecting communities and contexts, including musical theatre fandom and the Black Lives Matter movement, make meanings of these live musicals through participatory practices such as hate-watching and critical humor.
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Bunch, R. (2017). “You Can’t Stop the Tweet”: Social Media and Networks of Participation in the Live Television Musical. In: Hillman-McCord, J. (eds) iBroadway. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-64876-7_8
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