Sarah is a musical theatre researcher, practitioner and academic. She writes about musical theatre history with a particular focus in uncovering the work that women do in the arts and addressing gaps in the history of the musical. She explores methodologies in archival approaches that reposition lost histories, by actively searching and re-framing established ideas about cultural production.
As a dramaturg she has collaborated and advised on a range of projects from site-specific immersive theatre to West End musicals.
You can read some of her work here:
(September 2021) Sean Mayes and Sarah Whitfield, An Inconvenient Black History of British Musical Theatre 1900-1950, Methuen Drama, Bloomsbury
(Forthcoming 2021) ‘Putting Bisexuals in ‘The Room Where it Happens’: the Hamilton fandom’s fight for bisexual+ representation’ in Theatre Fandom ed by Kirsty Sedgman, University of Iowa Press, series: Fandom & Culture series eds. Paul Booth & Kathy Larsen.
(2020) ‘A Space Has Been Made: Bisexual+ Stories in Musical Theatre’ in Theatre Topics 30.2.
(2019) Introduction: Framing and Reframing Existing Ways of Looking (2019), in Reframing the Musical: Race, Culture and Identity Red Globe (Palgrave Macmillan/Macmillan Education)
(2019) Companion Text to A/AS Level Music WJEC, Atebol Publishers (commissioned by Welsh Government) with Pwyll ap Siôn, James Lovelock, Sarah Whitfield.
(2019) ‘The Women Who Made the Musical’ [online] Available from: https://www.macmillanihe.com/blog/post/women-musical-sarah-whitfield/
(2018) Boublil and Schonberg’s Les Miserables 4THW, Routledge
(2017) – ‘For the First Time in Forever – Locating Frozen as a feminist Disney musical’ for The Disney Musical on Stage and Screen ed. by George Rodosthenous (Bloomsbury Methuen)
(2017) – ‘Jersey Boys (2014): The Contemporary Jukebox Musical and its audience’ for Twenty-First Century Musicals: From Stage to Screen ed. by George Rodosthenous (Routledge)
(2016) ‘‘Next you’re Franklin Shepard Inc.?’: Composing the Broadway musical, a study of Kurt Weill’s working practices’ Studies in Musical Theatre 10 (2), 163-176
Sarah Whitfield 