Gender, Sex, and Sexuality in Musical Theatre
Gender, Sex, and Sexuality in Musical Theatre (Book)
He/She/They Could Have Danced All Night
This new collection brings together the romance, love, and lust encompassing the musical genre. Established and emergent scholars wrestle with gender, sex, and sexuality across methodologies, periods, identities, and nations as they dig into a cultural site many have framed as one of the most culturally conservative theatrical forms. 10 b&w illus.
Edition
Critics and fans alike often mistake theatrical song and dance as evoking a sweeping sense of simplicity, heteronormativity, and traditionalism. Nothing drove home this cultural misunderstanding for Kelly Kessler as when a relative insisted she watch the Clint Eastwood-Lee Marvin cinematic transfer of Paddy Chayefsky’s Paint Your Wagon (1969) with a young niece and nephew because it was a ‘sweet movie.’ In the relative’s memory, good old-fashioned singing and dancing—matched with the power of an assumed hegemonic embrace of social norms—far outweighed the whoremongering, alcoholism, wife-selling, and what appears to be narratively sanctioned polyamory.
This collection seeks to trouble such an over-idealized impression of musical theatre. Tackling Rockettes, divas, and chorus boys; hit shows such as Hamilton and Spring Awakening; and lesser-known but ground-breaking gems like Erin Markey’s A Ride on The Irish Cream and Kirsten Childs’s Bella: An American Tall Tale.
Gender, Sex and Sexuality in Musical Theatre: He/She/They Could Have Danced All Night takes a broad look at musical theatre across a range of intersecting lenses such as race, nation, form, dance, casting, marketing, pedagogy, industry, platform-specificity, stardom, politics, and so on. This collection assembles an amazing group of established and emergent musical theatre scholars to wrestle with the complexities of the gendered and sexualized musical theatre form. Gender and desire have long been at the heart of the musical, whether because ‘birds and bees’ (and educated fleas’) were doing it, a farm girl simply couldn’t ‘say no,’ or one’s ‘tits and ass’ were preventing them from landing the part.
An exciting and vibrant collection of articles from the archives of Studies in Musical Theatre, with contributions from Ryan Donovan, Michele Dvoskin, Sherrill Gow, Jiyoon Jung, David Haldane Lawrence, Stephanie Lim, Dustyn Martinich, Adrienne Gibbons Oehlers, Deborah Paredez, Alejandro Postigo, George Rodosthenous, Janet Werther, Stacy Wolf, Elizabeth L. Wollman, Bryan Vandevender and Kelly Kessler, brought together with a newly commissioned piece by Jordan Ealey. All set against the backdrop of Kelly Kessler’s scene-setting introduction.
Excellent potential for classroom and course use on undergraduate and graduate courses in theatre studies, musical studies, women’s and gender studies.
Kelly Kessler is a professor of media and cinema studies in the college of communication at DePaul University and author of the books Destabilizing the Hollywood Musical: Music, Masculinity, and Mayhem (2010) and Broadway in the Box: Television's Lasting Love Affair with the Musical (2020). Kessler’s research explores the porous borders of gender and genre, often focusing on the musical across performance platforms and the mainstreaming of lesbian identity.
List of Figures
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Belting Away at Binaries – Kelly Kessler
PART 1: EXPLORING AND EXPLODING THE GENDER BINARY ON THE MUSICAL STAGE
1. The Radio City Rockettes and the Making of a Sisterhood – Adrienne Gibbons Oehlers
2. Billy Elliot the Musical: Visual Representations of Working-Class Masculinity and the All-Singing, All-Dancing Bo[d]y – George Rodosthenous
3. Hamilton’s Women – Stacy Wolf
4. Rewriting the American West: Black Feminist (Re)Vision in Bella: An American Tall Tale – Jordan Ealey
5. A-List Drag Queens, Accidental Drag Kings and Illegible Gender Rebels: (Mis)Representations of Trans Experience in Contemporary Musicals – Janet Werther
PART 2: EMBODYING AND EXPLOITING SEX AND SEXUALITY ON AND OFF BROADWAY
6. Chorus Boys: Words, Music and Queerness (c.1900–36) – David Haldane Lawrence
7. Emancipation or Exploitation? Gender Liberation and Adult Musicals in 1970s New York – Elizabeth L. Wollman
8. A Substitute for Love: The Performance of Sex in Spring Awakening – Bryan M. Vandevender
9. If You Were Gay, That’d Be Okay: Marketing LGBTQ+ Musicals from La Cage to The Prom – Ryan Donovan
PART 3: DIVAS DON’T CARE ABOUT NOBODY’S RULES
10. Embracing Excess: The Queer Feminist Power of Musical Theatre Diva Roles – Michelle Dvoskin
11. Stepping Out of Line: (Re)Claiming the Diva for the Dancers of Broadway – Dustyn Martincich
12. Diva Relations in The Color Purple, the 2015 Broadway Revival – Deborah Paredez
13. How Can the Small Screen Contain Her? Television, Genre and the Twenty-First-Century Broadway Diva Onslaught – Kelly Kessler
PART 4: ONSTAGE, OFFSTAGE AND ONLINE: GENDER AND SEXUALITY IN PERSONAL AND PROFESSIONAL MUSICAL PRACTICE
14. The Queerness of Copla: Musical Hope for the Spanish LGBTQ – Alejandro Postigo
15. Queering Brechtian Feminism: Breaking Down Gender Binaries in Musical Theatre Pedagogical Performance Practices – Sherrill Gow
16. For Progress or Profit: The Possibilities and Limitations of Playing with Gender in Twenty-First-Century Musical Theatre – Stephanie Lim
17. The Right to See and Not Be Seen: South Korean Musicals and Young Feminist Activism – Jiyoon Jung
Notes on Contributors
'In addition to the articles published as part of Studies in Musical Theatre, Kessler has included five other articles in her book to include recent developments and shows: new pieces on Spanish musical theatre performance and fandom; historicity and musical stories told through black female authorship, gender-flipped; non binary; and trans narratives, and the negotiated marketing and queerness on Broadway”. [...] Kessler did a fabulous job and presented a technically well-founded book that is very readable. The "Studies in Musical Theater" [journal] itself is also highly recommended.'
'I particularly enjoyed the arc of essays exploring the excesses of the divas (whether stage characters like Ethel Merman’s Rose, Angela Lansbury’s Mame, and Elaine Stritch’s Joanne, or over-thetop female stage personalities like Carol Channing and Tallulah Bankhead) as commentaries on the social constraints placed on women. I appreciated Elizabeth Wollman’s analysis of the paradox that even as the adult musical of the 1960s and ’70s employed nudity and sexual frankness in the attempt to foster both Gay and Women’s Liberation, it relied so heavily on stereotypes and nudity that it devolved into mere exploitation. Likewise, the editor’s own survey of how the visibility of LGBT experience in musicals like La Cage aux Folles, Kiss of the Spider Woman, Fun Home, and The Prom was undercut by marketing campaigns that downplayed the shows’ queerness. Thus, several of this collection’s essays demonstrate just how high toward heaven the musical has allowed gays to kick. '
