Blackgirl Fairy Tales on the Musical Stage

During the 1970s, feminists launched critical debates about the influence of fairy tales, positioning the promise of “happily ever after” within the larger cultural and political struggle for gender equality. Unfortunately, these studies and those that followed rarely considered fairy tales created by Black women or the socio-political meaning garnered from their works. Forsgren’s analysis of the Tony Award-winning Once on this Island (1990) and the less-studied but popular musicals The Liberation of Mother Goose (1973) and The Other Cinderella (1976) intervenes within these broader conversations, staking a claim to Blackgirl musical fairy tales as a site of transgressive possibility.

La Donna Forsgren is associate professor in the Department of Film, Television, and Theatre at Notre Dame. Global in scope and comparative and interdisciplinary in critical approach, the Notre Dame Initiative on Race and Resilience promotes multiracial collaboration, qualitative and quantitative methodologies, and inclusive pedagogy.

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