Drawing upon Broadway musicals ranging from Irene (1919) to Gypsy (1959), Maya Cantu considers how Cinderella Broadway musicals from the 1920s through the 1950s adapted and transformed Perrault's fairy tale icon in order to address changing social and professional roles for American women.

Introduction: Glass Slippers and Glass Ceilings in the Twenty-First Century, or Cinderella Returns to Broadway
1. "Who Are These American Cinderellas?:" Working Girls, Chorus Girls, and American Dreams for Women in the 1920s
2. Merman Was a Lady: The 1930s Cinderella-Broad and Burlesquing the Genteel Tradition
3. "Make Up Your Mind:" Boss Ladies and Enchantresses in the 1940s Broadway Musical
4. "Twentieth-Century Fairy Tales:" Princesses, Prostitutes, and the Feminine Mystique in the Broadway Musicals of the 1950s
5. Coda: Rewriting the Broadway Cinderella Story
Bibliography

Maya Cantu is Dramaturgical Advisor at Off-Broadway's Mint Theater Company, USA. Her essays and reviews have been published in Theatre Journal, Studies in Musical Theatre, New England Theatre Journal, and as part of the New York Public Library's Musical of the Month series. She earned her DFA and MFA in Dramaturgy and Dramatic Criticism from Yale School of Drama, USA.