Oklahoma! : ideology and politics in the vernacular tradition of the American musical

Musicals, like all popular texts and forms of art have an explicitly reflexive relationship with the societies from which they stem. As well as reflecting the historical and cultural character of society they voice society's own sense of its life and values. They are properly analysed, therefore, in terms of what Geertz (1975) has termed the ‘thick description’ of culture, whereby their organisation, construction and meaning is treated in terms of how they are lodged in, and lodge within themselves, the cultural and social structures of the society of which they are a social expression and with which they are reflexively engaged.