Broomsticks and barricades: Performance, empowerment, and feeling in Wicked and Les Misérables
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract In this article, I examine the act one finales of two Broadway megamusicals – ‘Defying Gravity’ from Wicked (2003) and ‘One Day More’ from Les Misérables (1987) – to query the relationship between the performance of these numbers and the generation and circulation of feelings of empowerment. As musical theatre scholar Jessica Sternfeld argues, megamusicals offer a performance where ‘emotions run high [and] the tears tend to flow both onstage and in the audience’. Both ‘Defying Gravity’ (where one character in a single song offers a performance of empowerment) and ‘One Day More’ (where an ensemble performs empowerment) have been singled out for their affective impact on audience members and their association with empowerment. Through an analysis of these two numbers, I argue that the numbers’ artistic elements intentionally emphasize the performance of empowerment’s two defining characteristics, power and change, in order to amplify characters’ feelings of empowerment. This, in turn, establishes an affective link between stage and auditorium.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.027 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".