Biography

A dramaturg and theater historian, Cantu specializes in twentieth-century American theater. Her research focuses on Broadway musicals, plays, and the variety stage, as well as their interdisciplinary connections with film and literature. She is the author of two books. Her first, American Cinderellas on the Broadway Musical Stage: Imagining the Working Girl from Irene to Gypsy (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), explores how Broadway musicals from the 1920s through the 1950s transformed the Cinderella narrative in order to address changing social and professional roles for American women. Her second book, Greasepaint Puritan: Boston to 42nd Street in the Queer Backstage Novels of Bradford Ropes (University of Michigan Press, 2024), details the life and work of Ropes, the author of the 1932 novel 42nd Street, on which the classic film and its stage adaptation are based.

For eleven years, Cantu was Dramaturgical Advisor at Off-Broadway’s Mint Theater Company, presenting “worthy but neglected plays.” Her essays and reviews have been published in Studies in Musical Theatre, New England Theatre Journal, Theatre Journal, the New York Public Library’s “Musical of the Month” series, The Palgrave Handbook of Musical Theater Producers, and Reframing the Musical: Race, Culture and Identity (Red Globe Press/Springer Nature Ltd, 2019). For her essay in the latter, "Beyond the Rue Pigalle: Recovering Ada "Bricktop" Smith as 'Muse,' Mentor and Maker of Transatlantic Musical Theater," Cantu was selected as the 2020 recipient of the American Theatre and Drama Society's Vera Mowry Roberts Research and Publication Award. BA, James Madison University; MFA and DFA, Dramaturgy and Dramatic Criticism, Yale School of Drama. Cantu joined the Bennington faculty in Fall 2016.

Courses