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The Routledge Companion to the Contemporary Musical is dedicated to the musical’s evolving relationship to American cult

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The Routledge Companion to the Contemporary Musical
 1138684619, 9781138684614

Table of contents :
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction • Jessica Sternfeld and Elizabeth L. Wollman
Part 1: Setting the Stage: An Introduction to Analyzing the Musical Theater
1 Musical Theater Reception Theory, or What Happens When You See a Show? • Katie Welsh and Stacy Wolf
2 “[Title of Chapter]” • Millie Taylor
Part 2: Starting with the ‘70s
3 They’re Playing My Song: The American Musical in the Me-Decade • Bryan M. Vandevender
4 “My Corner of the Sky”: Adolescence and Coming of Age in the Musicals of Stephen Schwartz • Ryan Bunch
5 Style as Star: Bob Fosse and Sixty Seconds That Changed Broadway • Ryan Donovan
6 Recreating the Ephemeral: Broadway Revivals since 1971 • James Lovensheimer
Part 3: Aesthetic Transformations
7 Sing: Musical Theater Voices from Superstar to Hamilton • Ben Macpherson
8 Amplifying Broadway after the Golden Age • Arreanna Rostosky
9 Starlight Expression and Phantom Operatics: Technology, Performance, and the Megamusical’s Aesthetic of the Voice • Dominic Symonds
10 The Sung and the Spoken in Michael John LaChiusa’s Musicals • Alex Bádue
11 The New “Sounds of Broadway”: Orchestrating Electronic Instruments in Contemporary Musicals • Michael M. Kennedy
12 Chart-Toppers to Showstoppers: Pop Artists Scoring the Broadway Stage • Matthew Lockitt
13 Scenographic Aesthetics and Automated Technologies in Broadway Musicals • Christin Essin
Part 4: Reading the Musical through Gender
14 Do-Re-#MeToo: Women, Work, and Representation in the Broadway Musical • Mary Jo Lodge
15 It’s Still Working: Collaborating to Perform the Stories of Everyday Americans, Then and Now • Trudi Wright
16 The Pink Elephant in the Room • Aaron C. Thomas
17 “A Little More Mascara”: Drag and the Broadway Musical from La Cage aux Folles to Kinky Boots • John M. Clum
Part 5: Reading the Musical through Race and Ethnicity
18 The Multiracial Musical Metropolis: Casting and Race after A Chorus Line • Todd Decker
19 “Before the Parade Passes By”: All-Black and All-Asian Hello, Dolly! as Celebration of Difference • Sissi Liu
20 Race and the City: Racial Formation in Avenue Q • Stefanie A. Jones
21 Can We “Leave Behind the World We Know”?: Exploring Race and Ethnicity in the Musicals of Lin-Manuel Miranda • Elizabeth Titrington Craft
22 Falsettos and Indecent in the Shadow of Fiddler on the Roof: Reconsidering Jewish Identity on Broadway in the New Millennium • Raymond Knapp and Zelda Knapp
Part 6: Reading the Musical through Dance
23 What Makes a Musical?: Contact (2000) and Debates about Genre at the Dawn of the Twenty-First Century • Joanna Dee Das
24 Dance in Musical Theater Revival and Adaptation: Engaging with the Past While Creating Dances for the Present • Liza Gennaro
25 The Convergence of Dance Styles in Hamilton: An American Musical • Phoebe Rumsey
Part 7: Reading the Musical through Interdisciplinary Lenses
26 Post-Secular Musicals in a Post-Truth World • Jake Johnson
27 Let’s Do the Time Warp Again: Performing Time, Genre, and Spectatorship • Sarah Taylor Ellis
28 The Eye of the Storm: Reading Next to Normal with Psychoanalysis • Aleksei Grinenko
29 Parent/Child Relationships in the Musicals of Stephen Schwartz • Paul R. Laird
30 John Kander: The First Ninety-Two Years • James Leve
31 Unlikely Subjects: The Critical Reception of History Musicals • Elissa Harbert
Part 8: Beyond Broadway: New Media and Fan Studies
32 Worshipping Lin-Manuel Miranda: Fans and Totems in the Digital Age • Jessica Hillman-McCord
33 “Trash Talk and Virtual Protests”: The Musical Genre’s Personal and Political Interactivity in the Age of Social Media • Kelly Kessler
34 The Great Generational Divide: Stage-to-Screen Hollywood Musical Adaptations and the Enactment of Fandom • Holley Replogle-Wong
35 Play It Again (and Again, and Again): The Superfan and Musical Theater • James Deaville
36 Joss Whedon and the Geek Musical • Renée Camus
37 “YouTube! Musicals! YouTubesicals!”: Cultivating Theater Fandom through New Media • Aya Esther Hayashi
38 Dual-Focus Strategy in a Serial Narrative: Smash, Nashville, and the Television Musical Series • Robynn Stilwell
Part 9: Growth and Expansion: Across the Country and Around the World
39 Sharon McQueen and Milwaukee’s Alternative Regional Musical Theater • Amanda McQueen
40 Musicals in the Regional Theater • Jeffrey Ullom
41 Big River: A New Road to Broadway • Steven Adler
42 The Third Biggest Market: Musical Theater in Germany since 1990 • Frédéric Döhl
43 The Korean Self/American Other: Korean Musical Theater in the Context of National Cultural Development • Hyunjung Lee
44 The Lion King: An International History • Susan Bennett
Author Biographies
Index

Citation preview

THE ROUTLEDGE COMPANION TO THE CONTEMPORARY MUSICAL

The Routledge Companion to the Contemporary Musical is dedicated to the musical’s evolving ­relationship to American culture in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. In the past decade-and-a-half, international scholars from an ever-widening number of disciplines and specializations have been actively contributing to the interdisciplinary field of musical theater studies. Musicals have served not only to mirror the sociopolitical, economic, and cultural tenor of the times, but have helped shape and influence it, in America and across the globe: a genre that may seem, at first glance, light-hearted and escapist serves also as a bold commentary on society. Forty-four essays examine the contemporary musical as an ever-shifting product of an ­ever-changing culture. This volume sheds new light on the American musical as a thriving, contemporary performing arts genre, one that could have died out in the post-Tin Pan Alley era but instead has managed to remain culturally viable and influential, in part by newly embracing a series of complex contradictions. At present, the American musical is a live, localized, old-fashioned genre that has simultaneously developed into an increasingly globalized, tech-savvy, intensely mediated mass entertainment form. Similarly, as it has become increasingly international in its scope and appeal, the stage musical has also become more firmly rooted to Broadway—the idea, if not the place—and thus branded as a quintessentially American entertainment. Jessica Sternfeld is Associate Professor of Music and Director of the BA in Music at Chapman University. Elizabeth L. Wollman is Professor of Music at Baruch College, CUNY, and a member of the doctoral faculty in the theater department at the CUNY Graduate Center.

ROUTLEDGE MUSIC COMPA NIONS

Routledge Music Companions offer thorough, high-quality surveys and assessments of major topics in the study of music. All entries in each companion are specially commissioned and written by leading scholars in the field. Clear, accessible, and cutting-edge, these companions are the ideal resource for advanced undergraduates, postgraduate students, and researchers alike. THE ROUTLEDGE COMPANION TO THE CONTEMPORARY MUSICAL Edited by Jessica Sternfeld and Elizabeth L. Wollman THE ROUTLEDGE COMPANION TO POPULAR MUSIC AND HUMOR Edited by Thomas M. Kitts and Nick Baxter-Moore THE ROUTLEDGE COMPANION TO MUSIC, MIND, AND WELL-BEING Edited by Penelope Gouk, James Kennaway, Jacomien Prins, and Wiebke Thormählen THE ROUTLEDGE COMPANION TO JAZZ STUDIES Edited by Nicholas Gebhardt, Nichole Rustin-Paschal, and Tony Whyton THE ROUTLEDGE COMPANION TO POPULAR MUSIC ANALYSIS: EXPANDING APPROACHES Edited by Ciro Scotto, Kenneth Smith, and John Brackett THE ROUTLEDGE COMPANION TO THE STUDY OF LOCAL MUSICKING Edited by Suzel A. Reily and Katherine Brucher THE ROUTLEDGE COMPANION TO MUSIC COGNITION Edited by Richard Ashley and Renee Timmers THE ROUTLEDGE COMPANION TO SCREEN MUSIC AND SOUND Edited by Miguel Mera, Ronald Sadoff, and Ben Winters THE ROUTLEDGE COMPANION TO EMBODIED MUSIC INTERACTION Edited by Micheline Lesaffre, Pieter-Jan Maes, and Marc Leman THE ROUTLEDGE COMPANION TO MUSIC, TECHNOLOGY, AND EDUCATION Edited by Andrew King, Evangelos Himonides, and S. Alex Ruthmann For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge​.com

THE ROUTLEDGE COMPANION TO THE CONTEMPORARY MUSICAL

Edited by Jessica Sternfeld chapman university, usa and Elizabeth L. Wollman baruch college, usa

First published 2020 by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2020 Taylor & Francis The right of Jessica Sternfeld and Elizabeth L. Wollman to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Sternfeld, Jessica, 1971– editor. | Wollman, Elizabeth L., 1969– editor. Title: The Routledge companion to the contemporary musical / edited by Jessica Sternfeld and Elizabeth L. Wollman. Description: New York; London: Routledge, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2019012064 (print) | LCCN 2019014455 (ebook) | ISBN 9781315543703 (ebook) | ISBN 9781138684614 (hardback) Subjects: LCSH: Musicals—History and criticism. Classification: LCC ML2054 (ebook) | LCC ML2054 .R68 2019 (print) | DDC 792.60973—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019012064 ISBN: 978-1-138-68461-4 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-54370-3 (ebk) Typeset in Bembo by codeMantra

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments x Introduction 1 Jessica Sternfeld and Elizabeth L. Wollman PART 1

Setting the Stage: An Introduction to Analyzing the Musical Theater 5 1 Musical Theater Reception Theory, or What Happens When You See a Show? 6 Katie Welsh and Stacy Wolf 2 “[Title of Chapter]” 17 Millie Taylor PART 2

Starting with the ‘70s 27 3 They’re Playing My Song: The American Musical in the Me-Decade 29 Bryan M. Vandevender 4 “My Corner of the Sky”: Adolescence and Coming of Age in the Musicals of Stephen Schwartz 39 Ryan Bunch 5 Style as Star: Bob Fosse and Sixty Seconds That Changed Broadway 48 Ryan Donovan

v

Contents

6 Recreating the Ephemeral: Broadway Revivals since 1971 58 James Lovensheimer PART 3

Aesthetic Transformations 67 7 Sing: Musical Theater Voices from Superstar to Hamilton Ben Macpherson

69

8 Amplifying Broadway after the Golden Age 78 Arreanna Rostosky 9 Starlight Expression and Phantom Operatics: Technology, Performance, and the Megamusical’s Aesthetic of the Voice 87 Dominic Symonds 10 The Sung and the Spoken in Michael John LaChiusa’s Musicals 97 Alex Bádue 11 The New “Sounds of Broadway”: Orchestrating Electronic Instruments in Contemporary Musicals 106 Michael M. Kennedy 12 Chart-Toppers to Showstoppers: Pop Artists Scoring the Broadway Stage 120 Matthew Lockitt 13 Scenographic Aesthetics and Automated Technologies in Broadway Musicals 130 Christin Essin PART 4

Reading the Musical through Gender 141 14 Do-Re-#MeToo: Women, Work, and Representation in the Broadway Musical 143 Mary Jo Lodge 15 It’s Still Working: Collaborating to Perform the Stories of Everyday Americans, Then and Now 152 Trudi Wright 16 The Pink Elephant in the Room 163 Aaron C. Thomas

vi

Contents

17 “A Little More Mascara”: Drag and the Broadway Musical from La Cage aux Folles to Kinky Boots John M. Clum

173

PART 5

Reading the Musical through Race and Ethnicity 183 18 The Multiracial Musical Metropolis: Casting and Race after A Chorus Line Todd Decker

185

19 “Before the Parade Passes By”: All-Black and All-Asian Hello, Dolly! as Celebration of Difference 196 Sissi Liu 20 Race and the City: Racial Formation in Avenue Q Stefanie A. Jones

206

21 Can We “Leave Behind the World We Know”?: Exploring Race and Ethnicity in the Musicals of Lin-Manuel Miranda 216 Elizabeth Titrington Craft 22 Falsettos and Indecent in the Shadow of Fiddler on the Roof: Reconsidering Jewish Identity on Broadway in the New Millennium 226 Raymond Knapp and Zelda Knapp PART 6

Reading the Musical through Dance 235 23 What Makes a Musical?: Contact (2000) and Debates about Genre at the Dawn of the Twenty-First Century 236 Joanna Dee Das 24 Dance in Musical Theater Revival and Adaptation: Engaging with the Past While Creating Dances for the Present 246 Liza Gennaro 25 The Convergence of Dance Styles in Hamilton: An American Musical 255 Phoebe Rumsey

vii

Contents PART 7

Reading the Musical through Interdisciplinary Lenses 263 26 Post-Secular Musicals in a Post-Truth World 265 Jake Johnson 27 Let’s Do the Time Warp Again: Performing Time, Genre, and Spectatorship 273 Sarah Taylor Ellis 28 The Eye of the Storm: Reading Next to Normal with Psychoanalysis 283 Aleksei Grinenko 29 Parent/Child Relationships in the Musicals of Stephen Schwartz 294 Paul R. Laird 30 John Kander: The First Ninety-Two Years 302 James Leve 31 Unlikely Subjects: The Critical Reception of History Musicals 312 Elissa Harbert PART 8

Beyond Broadway: New Media and Fan Studies 323 32 Worshipping Lin-Manuel Miranda: Fans and Totems in the Digital Age 325 Jessica Hillman-McCord 33 “Trash Talk and Virtual Protests”: The Musical Genre’s Personal and Political Interactivity in the Age of Social Media 335 Kelly Kessler 34 The Great Generational Divide: Stage-to-Screen Hollywood Musical Adaptations and the Enactment of Fandom 345 Holley Replogle-Wong 35 Play It Again (and Again, and Again): The Superfan and Musical Theater 355 James Deaville 36 Joss Whedon and the Geek Musical 364 Renée Camus 37 “YouTube! Musicals! YouTubesicals!”: Cultivating Theater Fandom through New Media 374 Aya Esther Hayashi

viii

Contents

38 Dual-Focus Strategy in a Serial Narrative: Smash, Nashville, and the Television Musical Series 384 Robynn Stilwell PART 9

Growth and Expansion: Across the Country and Around the World 395 39 Sharon McQueen And Milwaukee’s Alternative Regional Musical Theater 397 Amanda McQueen 40 Musicals in the Regional Theater 408 Jeffrey Ullom 41 Big River: A New Road to Broadway 418 Steven Adler 42 The Third Biggest Market: Musical Theater in Germany since 1990 427 Frédéric Döhl 43 The Korean Self/American Other: Korean Musical Theater in the Context of National Cultural Development 437 Hyunjung Lee 44 The Lion King: An International History 445 Susan Bennett Author Biographies 455 Index 465

ix

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We are grateful to Constance Ditzel and Peter Sheehy at Routledge, not only for giving us the opportunity to put together this collection, but for their support, patience, and good humor throughout the process. Our biggest, most heartfelt, most humble thanks go to the authors in this volume. We are honored that you were willing to join and contribute to this project, and we are grateful for your insights, perspectives, and dedication not only to this collection but also to musical theater ­scholarship in general. We are proud to be the means by which students and scholars get to experience your work, and are honored to be part of such a vibrant, dedicated scholarly community. We’d like to thank our families, friends, and colleagues for their ongoing support and ­w illingness to put up with us. And we’d also like to thank one another for being each other’s dream collaborator, wonder-twin, dear friend, and academic sister. To the next project, and then to the one after that. Jessica Sternfeld Elizabeth L. Wollman

x

Introduction Jessica Sternfeld and Elizabeth L. Wollman

It’s a moment that holds everyone’s attention: a friend (or enemy?) shoots another man, and the stage is washed in shadowy spotlights. A female dancer carries the “bullet” in slow motion across the stage. The shooting victim raps, spitting rhymes and crying. Bodies glide in and out of the light, collapsing and stretching. The stage revolves, and the music kicks in—electronic sounds no human can produce. The moment is about early American history, but it’s also about today: it’s about the founding ideals of a country, but also about gun violence and racism in contemporary American culture. It’s about rap music, dance, and narrative. It’s about a historical figure, but also about an extraordinarily famous composer-lyricist-performer who happens to have a particular gift for using Twitter. It’s the climactic moment of Hamilton, and the world went crazy for it in the early twenty-first century. A musical, of all things, dominated popular culture and captured its imagination. All popular entertainment—no matter the genre, style, or medium—can draw from, mirror, comment upon, and even help influence its place and time. Since their inception, for example, American stage musicals—which grew from a huge tangle of earlier entertainments including operetta, British pantomime, blackface minstrelsy, burlesque, and vaudeville at the dawn of the twentieth century—can narrate, educate, frustrate, ameliorate, invigorate, and probably a lot more “ates” we haven’t thought to include here. Like virtually all popular entertainment forms, musicals don’t merely reflect the world; they can help shape it, change it, and make it a happier, more livable place for fans worldwide. A genre that may seem at first glance to be light-hearted, escapist, frivolous, and even embarrassingly corny can in fact serve as bold commentary on aspects of society. It can improve the lives of those who connect with it, or even function as a force for change. Despite its power, vitality, and importance as an influential and (at least initially) uniquely American art form, the musical has been, until fairly recently, dismissed as a genre worthy of scholarly study. For generations, and with a few highbrow exceptions, musicals were summarily dismissed by academics as too frivolous, too middlebrow, too populist, and too commercial to be taken seriously. Yet scholarship has changed in recent decades, we think for the better, and certainly for the more inclusive. Commercial entertainments, after all, help make the world go ‘round; who, then, is to say that they aren’t important? Certainly not the scholars from various disciplines who love musicals and are not afraid to show it by making them a focus for academic inquiry. Following the gradual appearance at around the turn of the twenty-first century of groundbreaking works like 1

Jessica Sternfeld and Elizabeth L. Wollman

Gerald Mast’s Can’t Help Singin’: The American Musical on Stage and Screen (1987), Allen Woll’s Black Musical Theater from Coontown to Dreamgirls (1989), D.A. Miller’s Place for Us [Essay on the Broadway Musical] (1998), Stacy Wolf ’s A Problem Like Maria: Gender and Sexuality in the American Musical (2002), and Andrea Most’s Making Americans: Jews and the Broadway Musical (2004), the American musical has rapidly become a subject of fascination for scholars from a wide range of specializations. These include musicology, ethnomusicology, composition, and music theory; performance, dance, Jewish, gender, film, and American studies; philosophy, anthropology, psychology, economics, and mathematics. In a fairly short period of time, then, international scholars from an ever-widening number of disciplines have been actively contributing to the ever-­g rowing, delightfully interdisciplinary field of musical theater studies. As this field has grown, musical theater scholars have written a lot of books and articles, founded a scholarly journal, formed countless interest groups within larger intellectual societies, and established an annual international conference about musicals so we can all get together to share research, discuss and tend to the field, and eat together at a lot of fair to middling restaurants. The increased focus on the musical as a genre rich in possibilities for academic study has resulted, as well, in a significant growth in interest among young scholars. More classes on the genre are now offered at more colleges and universities, and several textbooks, primers, and handbooks have been published to meet the growing demand. And what with new scholars joining our ranks by expressing their own love for musicals and their desire to study it in increasingly varied and interesting new ways, we are positively giddy to know that the field will grow, prosper, and thrive—we hope for many generations to come. We are incredibly lucky in that we have both worked primarily in musical theater studies for most of our careers; a few generations ago, such a direction would have been frowned upon or actively discouraged in the academy. We’re especially pleased that sometimes we can even team up and work together on projects that will help further develop this field, which we both love so much and are proud to consider ourselves a part of. When we were first given the opportunity to collaborate on this edited volume, we decided that we wanted to accomplish two things: first, we wanted to include as many voices—both established and new—from our field as possible; second, in doing so, we wanted to continue to push the field in new directions. We noticed, when we first started discussing what kind of collection we wanted to co-edit, that there was no volume of essays dedicated in its entirety to the stage musical’s changing, evolving relationship to American culture in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Because our interests tend to lie in the contemporary realm of musical theater production and performance, we decided that such a handbook, especially if it were to include an array of scholars ranging from deeply established to just starting out in the field, would be an important contribution in a number of ways. As it has developed, the field of musical theater studies has broadened in scope, approach, and ­ merican perspective, but it nevertheless remains deeply rooted in the so-called “golden age” of A stage musicals, even as scholars disagree about when, specifically, this golden age began and ended. A few, including the two of us, find such an age to be so vaguely defined that we’ve even questioned the very idea of it.1 Yet despite its vagueness, the term is frequently applied to a period beginning around the premiere of Show Boat (in 1927) or Oklahoma! (in 1943), and ending with the slow decline of Tin Pan Alley (anywhere between the mid-1950s and the early 1970s). While this long, rich, if somewhat nebulous period is without question important and worthy of scholarly study, we are always quick to argue that the contemporary American musical since the decline of this purported golden age is just as rich and fascinating; after all, who is to say that Rent or Wicked or Hamilton are inherently better or worse than Anything Goes or Oklahoma! or Guys and Dolls? At least at present, however, more contemporary musicals, stylistic trends, and industry adaptations are less represented in the extant literature on the genre. When scholars do turn their 2

Introduction

attention to the contemporary musical, it is too often only to compare it unfairly, hurriedly, or negatively with earlier works. Much too frequently, in both the scholarly literature and in historical surveys, post-1970s musicals are dismissed as the less artistically exacting, more crassly commercialized, less intelligently conceived stepchildren of comparatively brilliant, inspired works by the Gershwins, Cole Porter, Rodgers and Hammerstein, or Stephen Sondheim. We’re here to tell you, in case you were concerned, that while musicals—along with the theater industry and the whole wide world around it—have changed a great deal since the days of ­Rodgers and ­Hammerstein, they remain alive, well, and thriving: even though doomsday prophets have loudly lamented every purportedly corrupting influence to come along—rock music, Andrew Lloyd Webber, Disney—nothing has yet to destroy Broadway; we can probably safely presume that nothing will, at the very least by the time this book is published. The musical, whether on stage or on television or on your favorite streaming service, is alive, well, and serving the needs of an ever-changing, ever-growing audience base. And we’re thrilled to be documenting the growth and the change as they happen. Since late in the second half of the twentieth century, many aspects of the commercial A ­ merican stage musical have changed rapidly, significantly, and sometimes even drastically. Its visual and sonic aesthetics are certainly not what they once were, nor is its relationship to its audience, to technology, or to the mass media. Its once-central position in American mass entertainment has shifted, as have the commercial theater industry’s approaches to its creation, production, and dissemination on an increasingly international level. But none of this makes musicals any better or worse than they ever were; none of this makes us love them any less. The essays in this handbook mostly focus, then, on ways the stage musical (in the United States and abroad) has changed, adapted, and developed to negotiate the monumental social, cultural, political, technological, and economic shifts of the past 50 or 60 years. Other chapters focus on the musical in new media and new contexts; in the digital era, the musical thrives on screens large and small. Essays herein, we hope, will educate, inform, and shed new light on the American musical as a thriving, contemporary performing arts genre that easily could have died away with the advent of film, or television, or the internet, but instead has managed to remain not only culturally viable, but newly influential and interesting to new generations of fans all over the world. The concept of jazz hands might have been born on a Broadway stage, after all, but it’s hardly uncommon at this point for people the world over to give in to the urge to hunch their shoulders, splay their fingers, and strike poses that once only Bob Fosse could get away with.

What You’ll Find in This Book We have organized the chapters of this collection by theme, putting authors with similar preoccupations, approaches, or methodologies together into subsections. Each section begins with some introductory remarks from us, wherein we point out the chapter’s common threads and central questions, and summarize each chapter’s approaches and goals. The first section, “What It Means To Go To (or Think About) the Musical Theater,” explores the essence of seeing a musical, presenting a kind of meta-view of the genre and the process. The chapters therein are meant to serve as jumping-off points for musical theater initiates, while at the same time providing new insights for more experienced fans, audience members, and musical theater scholars. Subsequent sections gather authors who explore the contemporary musical via lenses such as gender studies, or dance/ bodies, or aesthetic and technical developments, or economics and marketing, and so on, each illuminating a different aspect of this layered, ever-changing field. While the layout of the book is in no way chronological, we conclude with a group of essays on the ways the industry has changed since the 1970s, as the musical has grown from a distinctly American, and localized art form, to one that has spread across the world. 3

Jessica Sternfeld and Elizabeth L. Wollman

Note 1 This edited collection owes a nod of gratitude to the one Raymond Knapp, Mitchell Morris, and Stacy Wolf put together and released in 2011. The Oxford Handbook of the American Musical, in which we have an article about the so-called golden age. See Web. 16 Nov. 2018.

4

PART 1

Setting the Stage An Introduction to Analyzing the Musical Theater

What happens when you go to see a musical? Yes, sure, at least on the surface, it’s pretty obvious: you sit in a seat and watch a bunch of people sing and dance for you, and then you leave the theater when the show ends. But what really happens? What about the thousands upon thousands of small, seemingly obvious actions—cultural rituals, all of them—that one enacts when attending a live performance? What do they all mean, and how do they all work together to create a collective experience? Similarly, what happens when you want to write about a musical? Again, sure, you record your impressions for others to read—but what else is there to it? Both seeing a show and writing about it may seem very straightforward, but they’re a lot more complex and detailed than they first appear. In what we think is the perfect starting point for this collection, we present a small section with only two essays, both of which analyze in detail actions that initially seem simple and mundane enough not to think too deeply about: viewing and writing about the musical theater. Katie Welsh and Stacy Wolf ’s essay takes as its subject for analysis the very act of attending a theatrical production. Theatergoing is a joyful activity, of course, but as Welsh and Wolf remind us, that doesn’t mean it’s not also loaded with meaning. They draw from reception theory, sociology, and anthropology to analyze the many working parts that combine into the experience of seeing a live production. Their lively, descriptive essay makes clear that the seemingly passive act of being a spectator at a theater is in fact enormously complex and detailed. Appropriately enough, their essay itself seems simple and straightforward–but it, too, is much more complex than it initially seems. Millie Taylor’s essay, which focuses on and plays off the title of the 2006 Off-Broadway musical [title of show], is similar in this respect: the essay is friendly, welcoming, and straightforward, but Taylor uses [title of show] as a springboard to introduce readers to several central concepts of postmodernism as they relate to the musical theater in general. In doing so, Taylor describes seemingly mundane actions—reflecting back on a beloved musical, pondering a topic about which to write, sitting down at the keyboard to organize the essay, and so on—that turn out to be far more complex and detailed than they initially might seem. This makes sense, really, and these two essays serve as fitting examples for the rest of this volume: there are as many ways of looking at and writing about musicals as there are musicals themselves.

1 MUSICAL THEATER RECEPTION THEORY, OR WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU SEE A SHOW? Katie Welsh and Stacy Wolf

What is a musical? Is it the script from which the actors learn their lines? Is it the music, notated as an orchestrated score or recorded as a cast album? Is it the production, with the theatrical elements of set, lights, and costumes, plus performers and musicians? Or is it the performance’s interaction with the audience, which varies each night? Yes, and much more: a musical encompasses the spectator’s entire experience with a show, from their first acquaintance until it fades f rom memory. This is a reception theory approach to musical theater. Within that broad framework, we can examine a more circumscribed chunk of the experience, what Performance Studies scholar Richard Schechner calls “the whole performance sequence.”1 In Schechner’s schema, a limited number of people undertake a series of actions in a concentrated area during a scheduled period of time. In this chapter, we walk you through the audience’s performance sequence at a contemporary Broadway musical in New York City.2 We rely on Schechner’s phases of Training, Warm-Up, Performance, Cool-Down, and Aftermath, and add one of our own: Intermission.3 Rather than focus on the “performance” as it is traditionally understood in musical theater— the singing, dancing, and acting that happens between the first and last chords of the show— we examine everything that takes place around it. We’ve organized this experience by way of 11  junctures. At each one, the audience crosses a physical, mental, or emotional threshold and moves from one physical, mental, or emotional state to another. In the end, we hope to answer this question: what really happens when you see a show?

Before the Day of the Show: Training, or Assembling Your Horizon of Expectations Your spectatorial experience begins before you enter the theater, before you purchase a ticket, before you even know the show is happening. Once you learn of a musical’s existence, your decision to see it is dictated by a lifetime of acquired knowledge. You might know, for example, the musical’s title, the story or topic it explores, the production’s cast and creative team, or critics’ or audience reviews. You might have familiarity with other Broadway shows, other music genres, other performance forms like dance or nonmusical theater, or visual arts, literature, radio, film, television, or other media. Your experience is also shaped by your identity: your gender, race, ethnicity, sexuality, class, region, culture, politics, religion, age, education, health, family, friends, and other factors that inform who you are. Together, these influences and experiences make up 6

Musical Theater Reception Theory

your “horizon of expectations,” a term coined by Hans Robert Jauss in Toward an Aesthetic of Reception (1982). Jauss argues that a text (in this case, a musical) is not “a monument that monologically reveals its timeless essence,” but is “like an orchestration that strikes ever new resonances among its readers.”4 In other words, a text’s meaning is fluid, not fixed, because everyone approaches it from a unique perspective. Theater scholars Marvin Carlson and Susan Bennett consider Jauss’ theories about the ­reader-text relationship in their analyses of the audience-show relationship. Carlson argues that the audience “brings to the theater…expectations, assumptions, and strategies which will creatively interact with the stimuli,” and Bennett agrees that the audience’s horizons of expectation “are bound to interact with every aspect of the theatrical event.”5 Musical theater reception is an active process, a negotiation between what the show is doing and what you expect it to do. Producers and creative teams behind Broadway musicals use their understanding of these expectations to market the show.6 A Bronx Tale (2017), for example, was advertised as “a mix of Jersey Boys and West Side Story” to capitalize on the reputation of the two popular titles. Broadway producers and marketers try to strike a balance between meeting expectations (comfort, familiarity) and disrupting them (risk, uncertainty). Many productions, especially revivals, promise to present something audiences know but with a twist, thus blending the familiar with the new. For example, the poster for the Deaf West revival of Spring Awakening (2015), which featured Deaf performers in the lead roles, read, “The Tony Award-Winning Musical Returns in a New Production Unlike Anything You’ve Ever Seen Heard Imagined,” overtly marking how the new concept revised what audiences already knew about the show. Audiences not only have access to the show’s officially sanctioned marketing materials but also to independent reviews. The New York Times remains the paper of record and arbiter of taste in the world of Broadway. In fact, before the 1980s, its reviews used to make or break a show. But with the incursion of British-based megamusicals to Broadway, audiences ignored first-string reviewer Frank Rich’s opinions and began flocking to Cats and The Phantom of the Opera, which journalists like him had panned. Audience independence has persisted and even expanded since the late 1990s, when we all gained access to regular spectators’—that is, each other’s—opinions on blogs, chat rooms, and social media. Public access to production excerpts has also increased over time. Since the mid-twentieth century, audiences have been able to see Broadway stars perform on talk shows, news programs, and PBS specials, and these preview segments have served to entice potential ticket buyers. As of the mid-2000s, one can view extensive performance footage on YouTube. Over the years, more opportunities have become available for audiences to judge a show for themselves before they have even bought a ticket. All of these influences comprise the audience’s off-site “training” and become part of their horizon of expectations going into the show. Going forward, think of us as your tour guides. You won’t necessarily experience everything we mention in one trip, but we’ll highlight the many things you can see, hear, smell, taste, and do at a Broadway musical.

Day of the Show: Warm-Up, the Preshow Sidewalk We begin 45 minutes before curtain, in what Schechner calls the “Warm-Up” stage. By this point, you have traveled by car, plane, train, bus, taxi, bicycle, or foot to New York City’s theater district, and traversed Times Square to arrive on the street where your Broadway musical lives— likely somewhere between 43rd and 50th streets.7 You’ll spot the large sign bearing the name of the show and the theater, and maybe the name of the star. As you proceed toward it, your attention zooms in on the show, and your sense of a larger New York City fades.8 Your first juncture is this shift in focus from big city to narrow sidewalk outside the theater. 7

Katie Welsh and Stacy Wolf

When you arrive, you first encounter the building’s façade, which is typically covered in critics’ quotes, award announcements, and production photos. For example, in 1976, A Chorus Line was “Dynamite!” and in 1998, Ragtime boasted “State-of-the-Art Theater Craftsmanship.” Spamalot (2005) was “A Musical of the Highest Excaliber!” The Book of Mormon (2011) is “The Best Musical of This Century!” You may read these statements and get even more excited about the show. Or maybe you usually disagree with the critics and the Tony Awards committee, so nothing here impresses you. The words and images on the façade might confirm what brought you to the theater in the first place, or they might surprise you: Wow, I knew Chita Rivera would display her dancing prowess in Chicago (1975)—look at that picture of her striking a pose! Oh, that picture doesn’t even look like Donna Murphy; she really transformed herself to play Fosca (Passion 1994). Occasionally, shows opt for three-dimensional décor on the façade, which immerses audiences in the world of the show before they enter the building. During Into the Woods (1987), a 75-foot inflatable leg, its foot fitted in a boot, dangled from the roof of the Martin Beck Theatre, which “created the illusion that a giant had crashed through the top of the theater.”9 In preparation for Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2017), the Lunt-Fontanne Theatre façade was redesigned to look like a factory, which meant covering it with tubing, lights, interactive buttons, and creative “Restricted Access: Entrance for Oompa-Loompas Only” signs. As you stare at the façade, lines form around you. If you already purchased your ticket, you stand in the ticketholder line. You will also see a Will Call line for those who need to pick up their tickets, a Cancellations line for those who hope to get the seats of people who return their tickets at the last minute, and a Future Performances line for those who want to buy tickets for a different day. All lines begin in the box office lobby, but they usually overflow onto the sidewalk, creating lots of confusion. Your immediate soundscape is a cacophony of questions: “Which line is this?” “Is this the end of the line?” “Where’s the Cancellations line?” If you already attended this show or are a frequent theatergoer, you might easily find your line; sometimes, though, this can be a challenging activity. Your preshow sidewalk experience might begin more than 45 minutes before show time because you might want to enter one of the two special lines that form earlier. The Rush line forms in the morning for people hoping to get $35–$40 unsold seats for the same day’s show. Sometimes, a show offers “student rush” tickets restricted to high school and college students. These go on sale when the box office opens, often around 10:00 a.m. Or you might arrive two-and-a-half hours before curtain to stand in the lottery line in the hope of winning $10–$40 first- or second-row orchestra seats to the same day’s performance. You can’t forget to bring your driver’s license and the ticket price in cash, since you must present both if you win. Both discount and student rush tickets existed before Rent (1996), but that musical pioneered their popularity.10 Twenty years later, rush policies and lotteries had become standard.11 Some lotteries went digital, and as more do, your preshow sidewalk experience might become less crowded. Hamilton (2015) did anything but make the lottery less crowded. Before its lottery went digital in August 2016, creator and then-leading man, Lin-Manuel Miranda, hosted Ham4Ham, a weekly concert that he started to entertain the people in the lottery line. This event broke every rule in the book. As Carlson explains, ordinarily, before the cast and audience meet in the theater, they prepare in separate areas: the actors in “‘backstage’ spaces which surround the actors’ space and which are traditionally unseen by and off-limits to the spectators” and the audience in “various ‘public’ spaces, such as foyers, bars, and lobbies contiguous to the auditorium, where actors traditionally are not to be seen.”12 Miranda and Hamilton’s cast’s decision to perform in a public space before the show started—breaking the fourth wall before it had even been established—was unprecedented. Ultimately, any preshow sidewalk experience, whether it involves reading quotes, looking at photographs, admiring a giant prop, pressing a button on the façade, or watching a mini-concert with your favorite stars, establishes an early, intimate connection between show and audience. 8

Musical Theater Reception Theory

Day of the Show: Warm-Up, Preshow Lobby About 30 minutes before curtain, your line begins to move. You reach the inner doors and present your ticket, engaging in a ritual that ensures you have permission to enter the building. The attendant rips or scans the ticket. Since 2001, a security guard may search your bag. You reach the second juncture when you cross the threshold from sidewalk to lobby, which Christopher Small calls a “transitional space through which we pass in the progression from the outer everyday world to the inner world of the performance.”13 The lobby typically features three main stations of activity: the concession stand, the souvenir kiosk, and the restrooms. The concession stand usually offers snacks and drinks. Beginning in the late 1990s, many shows began customizing their menus, so you could order Trekki’s Porn Star Martini at Avenue Q (2004), Argentinian wine at Evita (2012 revival), or the “Lost Romanov” cocktail at A ­ nastasia (2017).14 Until the early 2000s, you had to consume these concessions outside the auditorium, but then most theaters started permitting drinks in the house, so long as you buy them in ­logo-branded souvenir cups; some shows even sell food in the house. According to Nederlander Vice President Jim Boese, this policy is “a reflection of changing audience habits” and “part of a broader attempt to enhance the audience experience.”15 However, many believe it only disrupts the experience. Patti LuPone broke character to stop a popcorn war in the theater.16 Food on Broadway is a controversial topic. Now it’s time to visit the souvenir kiosk. Producer Cameron Mackintosh and the megamusical— beginning with Cats in 1981—brought about an era of unprecedented Broadway merchandising during which souvenir options expanded from cast albums and glossy programs to logo-covered apparel, key chains, magnets, mugs, buttons, posters, snow globes, beach towels, specialty items (Elphaba’s school bag from Wicked (2003), for example), and more.17 Since the 1980s, Broadway producers have made millions by tapping into the audience’s desire for tangible mementos. At some point, you will likely experience what New York Times’ writer Michael Paulson calls Broadway’s “chronic inconvenience”: the bathroom line, famous for “clogging lobbies and snaking down stairwells.” There’s no denying “Broadway’s Bathroom Problem.”18 The lobby is clearly primarily a functional space, but occasionally musicals have used it to immerse audiences in the world of the show. The Majestic Theatre’s lobby was redecorated “to replicate a Victorian opera house” for The Phantom of the Opera (1987).19 Waitress (2016), set in a diner, scents the lobby with pie smell, highlighting the second juncture by creating a stark contrast between the stinky scent-scape of the city and the sweet-smelling one of the Brooks-Atkinson Theatre. Paulson calls the scent an “olfactory extension to the show’s set.” Some even characterize it as a performer; his headline reads, “Fresh-Baked Pie Has Aromatic Role in ‘Waitress’ ­Musical,”20 and on Eater.com, “Broadway’s New Big Star: Pie Smell.”21 Just as Into the Woods, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and Hamilton made the sidewalk a site of performance, Phantom and Waitress made the lobby a site of performance. Ultimately, the lobby is a highly sensory place where you experience sights, sounds, tastes, and even smells that prepare you for the show. By drinking a cocktail, buying a T-shirt, or powdering your nose, you are transitioning from everything else in the world to this show, this moment.

Day of the Show: Warm-Up, Preshow Auditorium You experience juncture three when you leave the lobby and enter the auditorium, what Small calls the “sacred space.”22 The house lights are usually “up” so you can see where you are going. An usher reads your ticket, hands you a Playbill, and escorts you to your seat. Once there, you might remove your coat, read your Playbill, stand up for people coming into your row, chat with friends, check e-mail, take selfies, or drink your Sprite.23 There’s inevitably the buzz of excitement, an 9

Katie Welsh and Stacy Wolf

electric feeling of anticipation in the room.24 This fairly mundane readiness is usually the extent of your preshow auditorium experience.25 Some musicals, however, invest in interior decorating in an attempt to immerse you in the world of the show before it begins. The auditorium was included in the Victorian opera house design for Phantom, for example, to immediately place the audience in the musical’s actual theater setting. When you enter the Dear Evan Hansen (2016) auditorium, video projections of “live” Facebook and Twitter feeds bombard you from the stage, introducing audiences to the “backdrop or the ninth character” of the show they’re about to see: social media.26 Just as Hamilton played with audience-performer boundaries during the preshow sidewalk experience, some shows play with those boundaries during the preshow auditorium experience. Rock musicals like Hair (1968) found ways to “connect with audiences” in special preshow interactions.27 When the Rent cast walked onstage to take their places, they waved to the audience. Several contemporary shows have pushed the boundaries even further. In Once (2012), actors brought “audiences, and drinks, into the action” by inviting spectators to “go onstage, buy beer and wine, and hang out.”28 At Natasha, Pierre, and the Great Comet of 1812 (2016), you could drink and interact with the actors, engaging in an experience that highlighted the “non-boundary” between audience and performer.29 Whether you have been drinking with the actors or sitting alone at your seat, you eventually engage in juncture four, the transition from the auditorium experience to Act I. This juncture has up to three phases: the preshow announcement, the overture, and the light cue when the house goes dark and the stage lights come up. This juncture shifts your focus from your Playbill, snacks, and c­ onversations—­everything that characterizes the preshow experience—to what is happening onstage. 30 The New York Times’ Steven McElroy calls the preshow announcement the real “Act I, Scene 1” of a show.31 It is typically prerecorded and played over the loud speakers, and over the years, musicals have put creative twists on it. For example, Hairspray (2002) reminded audiences that the show “takes place in Baltimore in 1962, a time before there were cellular phones and beepers, and we hope that we can travel back to that time where there would be none heard during a performance.”32 As Caroline Heim explains, these announcements are now “ritualized as…standard, pre-­performance discourse;” in fact, as she argues, “The mobile phone announcement has emerged as a performance in itself.”33 If the announcement is funny, laughter may erupt throughout the theater. The chatter dies down. The house lights fade.34 If you are seeing a show written after 1975, you likely won’t hear an overture.35 But if you are seeing a revival or one of a handful of original shows like The Producers (2001), Spamalot (2005), or The Color Purple (2005), you will. Maybe you play the tuba, so you are completely engaged in the overture, carefully watching the conductor and listening to the tuba line. (As Schechner explains, your enjoyment increases when you feel “in” on the “details” of the show.36) Or maybe you find the overture boring—I mean, yes, the accompanying light show on the curtain is nice, thank goodness there’s something to look at—and you just continue whispering to your friend. While the overture is indisputably part of the show, many see it as a continuation of the preshow experience, or at most, a transitional bridge between preshow and show. As the New York Times’ Jesse Green writes of the overture, “Practically, it provide[s] a buffer for latecomers; dramatically, it help[s] to effect a mood transition from the outer world of commerce and cabs to the imaginary world about to be created onstage.”37 The orchestra plays its final chord of the overture. You clap. The conductor bows. The curtain rises. 10

Musical Theater Reception Theory

Day of the Show: Performance Act 1 Lights up onstage. The musical begins. Final chord of Act 1. Lights out onstage. You clap.

Day of the Show: Intermission The house lights come up, and you engage in the fifth juncture, a transition from Act 1 to ­intermission. During this break, you might talk to your friend about the first act, stand and stretch, wait in the bathroom line, or wander out to the lobby for a drink. You might realize how much you love the score and buy the cast album. You might reread the actors’ bios now that you’ve seen them sing and dance. All in all, you participate in activities in your backstage area. And traditionally, the actors follow suit, retreating to their backstage to rest and hydrate, not to be seen until the top of Act 2. But plenty of shows have broken with this tradition over the years. In Godspell (1971), the actors remained in the theater for part of intermission and invited audiences to take “communion.” Here, the intermission was not a parting of ways for the two groups, but rather a time to mingle and participate in a shared ritual. In Cats (1982), Old Deuteronomy sat on his throne during intermission, so audiences often flooded the stage to take pictures and get his autograph. 38 In 2012, another intermission ritual emerged: Saturday Intermission Pics (SIP). Newsies star Andrew Keenan-Bolger invited his colleagues to upload backstage photos to Twitter with the hashtag, #SIP. 39 Broadway actors now regularly participate. They usually upload the pictures immediately, so while you sit in the house or stand in the lobby, you can view, in real time, pictures of the cast striking funny poses backstage and “like” and comment on them. Because the actors are stepping out of character, you shift from a symbolic level of communication, when you suspend disbelief and are lost in the fiction of the show, to the artistic level of communication, when you can perceive a distance between the talented actor and his role.40 Even though the cast and audience still physically retreat to their backstage areas, they can now mingle ­v irtually through #SIP.41 A five-minute warning bell rings, and you participate in the sixth juncture, during which you transition from the intermission to Act 2. You return to your seat with drink in hand. You turn off electronic devices. House lights dim. The entr’acte takes place, if there is one. Again, some spectators treat it as the start of Act 2 and sit silently, while others consider it transitional background noise over which they talk. The orchestra plays the final chord. You clap. The conductor bows. The curtain rises.

Day of the Show: Performance Act 2 Lights up onstage. Act 2 of the musical begins. Final chord of Act 2. Lights out onstage. You clap. 11

Katie Welsh and Stacy Wolf

Day of the Show: Curtain Call The last chord is played and sung, the last pose struck. The curtain falls, lights fade to black and, usually, thunderous applause commences as you enter the seventh juncture, the transition from Act 2 to curtain call, a time when you share your opinion of the show.42 This can involve clapping, whistling, cheering, or silence. First, chorus members bow, then featured actors, then leads. ­Finally, the company bows together. Rock and jukebox musical casts often perform an encore during curtain call and invite the audience to sing, dance, and clap with them.43 During Hair, everyone rocked to “Let the Sun Shine In.” In Saturday Night Fever (1999), the cast jived to “Stayin’ Alive,” “Boogie Shoes,” and “Disco Inferno.” At Mamma Mia (2002), everyone partied to “Mamma Mia,” “Dancing Queen,” and “Waterloo.”44 In Beautiful (2014), everyone grooved to “I Feel the Earth Move.”

Day of the Show: Cool-Down, Postshow Auditorium Once the curtain call ends and the actors exit, audiences enter what Schechner calls the “CoolDown” stage and engage in the eighth juncture, transitioning from curtain call back to the auditorium. When the house lights come up, you are probably still applauding. If you attended the show with others, you’ll likely share opinions with them as you prepare to leave. You grab your purse and bag of souvenirs, pack your Playbill away or leave it on the floor, put on your coat, and down what’s left of the soda in your Lion King (1997) cup. Once you have everything, you begin your journey out of the theater.45 As you file out of your row, the orchestra might play its final chord. You might applaud or you might be too busy talking to notice. Before you leave the auditorium, you might look back at the stage, maybe to comment on the set, maybe to relive your favorite number, or maybe just to soak in this moment one last time.

Day of the Show: Cool-Down, Postshow Lobby You step into the lobby—the ninth juncture. You might go to the restroom or visit the merchandise stand. Items like the “Caption” Fun Home (2015) tee or the “Hell No!” Color Purple shirt, which might not have made sense to you before the show, resonate now that you’ve seen it. You might take pictures in the lobby. You might pass the box office, see people buying tickets, and think about how much they’re going to love it (or not).

Day of the Show: Cool-Down, Postshow Sidewalk You exit the lobby and reenter the sidewalk—your tenth juncture. Sometimes a show highlights this transition. When you leave Wicked, for example, you encounter three signs, “You are now leaving Oz. Reality Straight Ahead. Please Drive (or Fly) Safely,” which reaffirm this turning point from inside to outside, from Oz to NYC, from fiction to reality. If you exit through the front entrance, you will encounter the quotes and photos on the façade again, but now you’ve formed your own opinions of the show, and the images trigger vivid memories of a live experience. Finally, you might take pictures outside to capture the moment of being in this place, with these people, at this time, perhaps even to mark the end of an unforgettable experience. 12

Musical Theater Reception Theory

Day of the Show: Cool-Down, Postshow Sidewalk: Stage Door Ritual For many Broadway fans, filing onto the sidewalk is not the end of the experience. Up next? The stage door ritual.46 Like many subcultural practices, this one is unofficial, unadvertised, and highly regularized.47 You find the stage door, move behind the security barriers, claim a spot in the crowd, and stand at the ready, clutching your Playbill in one hand, your phone in the other hand. As you wait, you might chat with the people around you, some of whom will be superfans who brag about the number of times they have “stage doored” this particular star. Yes, stage door is both a noun and a verb in the Broadway community.48 The stage door is an opportunity for the cast to “continue the performance to some level,” costumed not in glitz and glamor but in comfortable, underwhelming garments; actors perform their everyday selves here.49 At the stage door for The Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess (2012), for example, Audra McDonald sometimes wore a blue bandana in her hair, and at the stage door for If/Then (2014), Idina Menzel wore a hoodie. When the performer participates in this ritual, she crosses a spatial boundary from the actors’ backstage to the audience’s backstage, and her identity is liminal. As Schechner explains, she is “not” her character but also “not not” her character; she is neither herself nor her role.50 When Kelli O’Hara greets you at the stage door after South Pacific (2008), she is no longer Nellie but also “not not” Nellie. Your exchange with this Kelli/Nellie might last 30 seconds. You might congratulate her on the show; she might thank you for coming, autograph your Playbill, take a photo, and walk away. This fleeting moment can mean so much. Why? Because the theater is a space where boundaries are usually honored. Distance is typically maintained; performer and audience occupy separate spheres. A majority of the audience at any performance is too far back or high up to get a clear view of an actor’s face, and on a daily basis, we live under the illusion that actors don’t inhabit public spaces. So this intimate experience is special.

Day of the Show and Beyond: Aftermath, Transformations, and Memories After the stage door experience, you enter the last stage of the performance sequence, what Schechner calls the “Aftermath.” You might walk or take a cab, bus, subway, or train to go home, return to your hotel, or get a meal. Here, you engage in the eleventh and final juncture, a transition in focus and location from the sidewalk to New York City. You leave the theater a changed person and bring your experience with you into the world. On the ride home from seeing Phantom, for instance, you might listen to the album (which you’ve heard dozens of times) and find new pleasure in knowing that the chandelier falls on that particular chord in the “All I Ask of You” reprise, or that the Phantom and Christine cross a smoky stage during the title song. These moments play out in your mind while you listen; what was once a purely aural experience becomes an audiovisual one. Maybe you go home and watch YouTube videos of Elphaba getting “greenified.” Maybe you post on Instagram about the show. Maybe you bring “Memory” to your next voice lesson, in the hopes that you can sing it with as much power as Betty Buckley or Leona Lewis. Maybe you wear your T-shirt to class and tell your friends about the experience. Maybe you re-watch the film or reread the book on which the show was based. Maybe you listen to the original Carole King albums. Maybe you buy tickets to see the show again. 13

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Notes 1 Richard Schechner. Between Theater and Anthropology. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1985. 16. 2 Caroline Heim analyzes the twenty-first century audience’s experience as a performance, using terms typically reserved for describing the actions of the actors onstage, in Audience as Performer. New York: Routledge, 2016. 27–28. Christopher Small walks through the audience experience at symphonic concerts in Musicking: The Meanings of Performing and Listening. Middletown: Wesleyan UP, 1998. 3 Schechner, Between Theater and Anthropology, 16. For more about each sequence stage, see Schechner. Performance Studies: An Introduction. 3rd ed. New York: Routledge, 2013. 225–249. Schechner includes spectators’ preparations in the “deep structures” of performance, including “deciding to attend, dressing, going, settling in, waiting,” in Performance Theory. New York: Routledge, 1988. xviii. 4 Hans Robert Jauss. Toward an Aesthetic of Reception. Translated by Timothy Bahti. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1982. 21. 5 Marvin Carlson. Theatre Semiotics: Signs of Life. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1990. 24. Susan Bennett. Theatre Audiences: A Theory of Production and Reception. 2nd ed. New York: Routledge, 1997. 98. Also see Bennett, pp. 20, 46–52. 6 Broadway producers like Ken Davenport use surveys, focus groups, and new technologies to learn more about the audience. See Campbell Robertson. “Nielson Brings a New Marketing Strategy to Broadway.” New York Times. 1 Aug. 2006. . See also Patrick Healy. “Dialing Up a Hit? Influence over Musical Is in the Crowd’s Hands.” New York Times. 25 June 2013. . 7 The trip to the theater is also part of the “Warm-Up.” For more about travel, locale, and urban space, see Marvin Carlson. Theatre Semiotics and Places of Performance: The Semiotics of Theatre Architecture. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1989. For more on Times Square, see Heim, Audience, 139–143. On the specific site of Broadway, see Carlson, Places of Performance, 123–124. 8 Carlson, Places, 121–125. 9 Brooke Pierce. “Broadhurst Theatre Booted.” Theatermania. 10 June 2002. . 10 Logan Culwell-Block. “From Sleeping on the Streets to Swiping on the Screen: The Evolution of Rush Tickets from Rent to Digital Lotteries.” Playbill. 7 Sept. 2015. . 11 Ruthie Fierberg and Gabriella Steinberg. “Broadway Rush, Lottery, and Standing Room Only Policies.”  Playbill. 16 May 2017. . 12 Carlson, Theatre Semiotics, 44. 13 Small, Musicking, 23. 14 Gordon Cox. “Mixology for Musicals: Broadway Cocktails Raise the Bar.” Variety. 13 Nov. 2014. . 15 Qtd. in Cara Joy David. “Noises Off: Playgoers Sip, Munch, and Crunch.” New York Times. 5 Jan. 2007. . 16 Ibid. Patti LuPone also famously confiscated a cell phone; see Erik Piepenburg. “Hold the Phone, It’s Patti LuPone.” New York Times. 9 July 2015. . 17 See Michael Riedel. “Thanks to ‘Cats,’ Theater Souvenirs are Now and Forever!” New York Post. 2 Aug. 2016. ; Zachary Pincus-Roth. “Ask PLAYBILL.COM: Merchandise.” Playbill. 30 May 2008. ; Peter Marks. “Saw the Show? Buy the Trinket.” New York Times. 4 Dec. 1994. ; and Heim, Audience, 132. Heim also discusses the “branded costumes” for sale (25–27). 18 Michael Paulson. “Broadway’s Bathroom Problem: Have to Go? Hurry Up, or Hold It.” New York Times. 7 Feb. 2017. . 19 Carlson, Places of Performance, 199–200.

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Musical Theater Reception Theory 20 Paulson. “Fresh-Baked Pie has Aromatic Role in ‘Waitress’ Musical.” New York Times. 26 Apr. 2016. . 21 Chris Fuhrmeister. “Broadway’s New Big Star: Pie Smell.” Eater.com. 26 Apr. 2016. . 22 Small, Musicking, 24. 23 On the social aspect of theatergoing, see Heim, Audience, 114–116. 24 Ibid., 146–147. 25 See Ibid., 119–120, for more on the ways in which audience behaviors in the auditorium have changed over time. 26 Eric Johnson. “How ‘Dear Evan Hansen’ Brought Social Media to Broadway.” Recode. 1 May 2017. . 27 Elizabeth Wollman. The Theater Will Rock: A History of the Rock Musical, from Hair to Hedwig. Ann ­A rbor: U of Michigan P, 2006. 70. 28 See Heim’s description of her bus trip to see Once, Audience, 128–130. 29 Mark Blankenship. “Creating the Wild World of ‘Natasha, Pierre, and the Great Comet of 1812.’” TDF Stages. 11 Nov. 2016. . 30 As Heim writes, “Audience members may read their programme or share what they know of the forthcoming production all in preparation for that moment when the lights dim in the auditorium and the illuminated stage becomes a microcosm of soon-to-be-realised imaginings” (Audience, 27). 31 Steven McElroy. “Act I, Scene I: The Cellphone Must Not Go On.” New York Times. 17 Feb. 2010. . 32 Michael Buckley. “The Battle Against Cell Phones.” Playbill. 11 June 2007. . 33 Heim, Audience, 37–38. 34 In Audience as Performer, Heim writes, “The dimming of lights always signals change of some description” (65). In The Theater Will Rock, Wollman writes that the “advent of electric light at the end of the century, which led to the tradition of slowly dimming the houselights to signal the onset of a performance, helped to further suppress the audience” (68). 35 Jesse Green. “Whatever Happened to the Overture?” New York Times. 1 Oct. 2006. . 36 Schechner, Between Theater and Anthropology, 143. 37 Green, “Whatever Happened to the Overture?” 38 John Beaufort. “A Broadway Musical Hit Offering Light-and-Sound Pyrotechnics; Concerning ‘Cats,’ There Are Few Moderates.” Christian Science Monitor. 2 Dec. 1982. . 39 “Photo Flash: New Saturday Intermission Pics—How to Succeed, Newsies, Book of Mormon, and More!” Broadway World. 19 May 2012. . 40 Willmar Sauter. The Theatrical Event: Dynamics of Performance and Perception. Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 2000. 6–9. 41 See more about #SIP in Heim, Audience, 102. 42 Heim writes, “Applause at the conclusion of a contemporary performance is the last bastion of the audience critic. In the past, this percussive gesture spelt the success or demise of productions… Applause credibility is, however, slowly diminishing with the rise of the now obligatory standing ovation practiced after every performance on Broadway” (Audience, 31). 43 Heim explains, “Singing is an almost obligatory audience performance at all juke-box musicals” (Audience, 159). 4 4 Wollman, The Theater Will Rock, 221–222. 45 Or perhaps you attend what the New York Times’ Patrick Healy calls “Broadway’s New Finale”: the postshow talkback. In 2009, Chicago started a “Talkback Tuesday” series. See Patrick Healy. “Broadway’s New Finales: Talk-Backs and More.” New York Times. 9 Oct. 2009. . 46 Heim describes the “matinee girl” who “visit[s] stage doors after performances to chat with her idol, stroke his costume or procure an autograph” as a type that dates back at least to the early nineteenth

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47 48 49 50

century (Audience, 72–73). Heim adds that with the dawn of the Internet, and especially Twitter, “Online access to actors is a virtual stage door” (115). For more on ritual, see Victor Turner. The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1967. See also Turner. The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure. New Brunswick: Aldine Transaction, 1969. For more on Broadway fan culture and the stage door ritual, see Stacy Wolf. “Wicked Divas, Musical Theater, and Internet Girl Fans.” Camera Obscura 65 22.2 (2007): 39–71. Qtd. in Heim, Audience, 94. For more on celebrity personae, see Richard Dyer. Stars. London: BFI Publishing, 1998. See also Dyer. Heavenly Bodies: Film Stars and Society. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1986. Schechner, Between Theater and Anthropology, 121–124.

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2 “[TITLE OF CHAPTER]” Millie Taylor

It is great to be asked to write a chapter in this collection; a collection about musical theater that focuses on contemporary developments in New York. And here I sit, a British scholar at home in my English country village thinking back over the last 20 or so years and wondering what I can contribute with the benefit of distance and hindsight. There’s a big, empty computer screen in front of me, and before it a keyboard waiting for fingers to touch keys. What should I write about? Should I reflect on the state of musical theater performances? Perhaps I should discuss the historical development of contemporary musical theater? Or should I say something about recent developments in theorizing musical theater in the United Kingdom and United States? All these topics are possible—and all demonstrate a progress narrative and sense of continuity: there’s a story to be told. But what is my story? The title of this chapter makes a sneaky reference to [title of show], so you know what the case study for the chapter will be, but the fact that I’m speaking to you directly rather than introducing the show might give you a clue that this chapter is about something more than that musical, something thematic that is exemplified in that work. One thing that excites me about contemporary work is the way writers construct relationships with audiences that simultaneously reveal the creative process and empower the reader. Can I do something similar in writing about contemporary musicals? Can I explore that theoretical idea in practice? Now, that’s a crazy thought. I could reveal myself in this writing rather than hiding my identity, so that you have more agency in deciding what this chapter is about. I’m excited by that thought, I hope you are too. A new philosophy for the way we read and understand texts of all sorts emerged in literary theory in the 1960s and 1970s. It allows us to think about musicals in new ways, and led to new styles of writing. These theories allow us, from our vantage point in the future, to look with fresh eyes at earlier works. We can see new lines of progression and disruption in musical theater dramaturgy, and understand the many different ways texts are read by audiences. Instead of perceiving a single plot in a work, we might now propose that audiences playfully interpret the performance as a diverse text, a play of ideas and images, a conglomeration of references. The show might still tell a story, but its plot, its linear narrative, might be composed of songs and dances created from diverse and clashing elements, incorporating awareness of the friction between song and scene that Scott McMillin so ably describes to the extent that chronology becomes less important.1 One of the features of the word “post” is that it simultaneously pulls in two directions: it reacts against its predecessor (conforming to our understanding of the word “post,” meaning “after”) and yet it still contains its predecessor. The “post” in postmodernism, postdramatic and 17

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post-integration signals a past that is simultaneously present; these terms contain the modernist, the dramatic, and the integrated, as well as their liberated twins. A post-integrated musical incorporates intertextual references and explores the playful interactions of continuity and innovation; its signifiers explode from the event in blissful excess outside chronological time while still containing a plot. Just like this chapter in which there is a story for you to discover—but is it the one about the show or the one about postmodernism? Or is it the one about me writing this article— written as though you are here with me now in the past, watching me type? As a result of thinking from this new standpoint, we begin to see that the important task of interpretation is highly individualized—that audiences or members of audiences might be more detached. We can’t assume that a monolithic group, “the audience,” will agree on a single view of a work, or that themes can only be interpreted in one way. As Norman Lebrecht noted in 2005, referring to Urinetown, Bat Boy, Hedwig and the Angry Inch, and The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee: “The music in each of these shows amplifies this element of separation, licensing us to stand apart from what we are seeing and enter a third dimension where each of us can individually decide whether to take the plot literally or sardonically, whether to take offense or simply collapse in giggles.”2 So now, to develop some of these themes further, I must move on to my example: the messy, playful, excessive [title of show]. [title of show] by Jeff Bowen (music and lyrics) and Hunter Bell (book) contains an overarching narrative about writing a musical that is assembled from many playful, self-referential, reflexive moments.3 Using this show will give me the opportunity to talk about the postmodern and to include my favorite quotation by Roland Barthes—but that’s for later.

The Background Having arrived at a decision, I now need to begin addressing this empty page. What might I include in preparation for a discussion of this work? Perhaps I should describe how Bowen and Bell met as actors in a Virginia Beach production of Good News in 1995, and became firm friends. Years later, they and Susan Blackwell (one of the original performers in [title of show] who contributed to its development) were performing in “crazy, avant-garde theater” where Blackwell was one of a duo called “The New Wondertwins” and Bell was a “Sparklevision dancer.”4 In this context Bowen and Bell wrote a few Broadway-style numbers that were unexpected partly because of the experimental works they sat beside. Their songs were so site-, time- and place-specific that they would incorporate audience members’ names or refer to the lighting, the stage manager, or whatever was happening at the time. They called these works “Ice Sculptures” because they were so dependent on particular audiences, events, and moments that they couldn’t be performed again in the same way. Such self-referential, site-specific work, characteristic of experimental performance art of the time, became the starting point for [title of show], a work often called a postmodern musical. The writers also remarked on the influence of television shows on their work. Both Bowen and Bell grew up in the 1970s and 1980s watching television shows with postmodern elements, like The Mary Tyler Moore Show (1970–1977), The Bob Newhart Show (1972–1978), and Seinfeld (1989–1998). To begin with the earliest, chronologically: Mary Richards isn’t Mary Tyler Moore—Richards is clearly a character but the character appeared to be an extension of the actor herself rather than a differently named “other” persona. Both Newhart and Seinfeld extended the level of overlap between actor and character by performing versions of themselves on their shows. More recently both Adam West and James Woods have appeared as themselves on Family Guy (1999–present). By the time Bowen and Bell were exploring these ideas, they were not new per se. Still, this level of self-reference—the confusion between real and performed, actor and character—was unique in the musical theater. 18

“[Title of Chapter]”

However, there was no concrete plan to create something postmodern or experimental. When Bowen and Bell sat down to create a show, they found themselves incorporating ideas from their shared cultural backgrounds and professional experience: “what we were writing about was us writing, and we were tickled by it.”5 They simply wrote “something that we want[ed] to say” using influences they both loved.6 The questions they were asking were whether the characters could “just have conversations about their lives and their interests in a musical? Can we accept that, or do we need to break out into tap? And does it need to be heightened or super dramatic?” 7 The overarching idea they were exploring was one plumbed in their beloved Seinfeld: of taking the ­mundane—­creating the appearance that the show was about “nothing”—and musicalizing it, a process they later referred to as “autobiofictionography.”8 This term denoted for them the process of mixing their stories and creating characters from biographical and fictional material—a post-­ integrated musical, perhaps? But now I’ve got ahead of myself; I need to explain the plot of the show.

The Story In [title of show], Bowen and Bell play “two struggling writers [who] hear about a new musical theater festival. However, the deadline for submissions is a mere three weeks away. With nothing to lose, the pair decides to try to create something new with the help of their friends, Susan, Heidi, and Larry on lady eighty-eights” (the piano).9 In the idea to document the creation of the show itself (“a musical about two guys writing a musical about two guys writing a musical”)10 lies the seed of a circularity that raises questions about the real and hyperreal, of simulation and ideology. Is this a document of a real process or a simulation of something that never existed? Baudrillard might use that question to explore issues of power and truth, while Barthes might ask about the function of the sign in the explosion of referentiality. All this potential theory, some of which we’ll get to later, arises because two performers chose to put “themselves” into a musical. The plot of [title of show] recounts the process of collaborative creation through which musical theater is produced. As such, it has a linear narrative, from which the musical’s songs certainly flow: at the opening of “Two Nobodies in New York,” the lyrics begin with the question, “What if this dialogue were set to music? / What if what we’re saying could be said in a song? / Hey, that’s not a bad idea. Perhaps we could use it / Music in a musical, how can we go wrong?”11 which, counterintuitively, is sung. The show proceeds in a linear fashion from the idea of writing a show, through the early stages of getting ideas on paper, the addition of two friends to help develop and try out the material, the growing friendships and uncertainties of the participants, and, finally, the successful performance at the festival. Further material that continued to document that show’s own development was added as [title of show] was extended for an Off-Broadway and later a Broadway run. The title of [title of show] is explained as follows: since the deadline for filling in the festival form has arrived and the team can’t think of a title, they leave that line blank, after which [title of show] becomes the default title. As with all the devices in this show, though, the thinking is hardly haphazard. The show’s reflexivity, its reference to the process of its own collaborative creation, demonstrates continuity with musical theater history: it is the twenty-first-century equivalent of the backstage “let’s put on a show” musical, exemplified repeatedly from 42nd Street (1933 film, 1980 stage) and A Chorus Line (1975 stage, 1985 film),12 to Something Rotten (2015) and Shuffle Along, or, the Making of the Musical Sensation of 1921 and All That Followed (2016). What’s new, exciting, and disruptive about [title of show] is that rather than simply telling the story of a fictional creative process, the creators deliberately blur the line between fiction and reality by playing “themselves.” Jeff Bowen remarked that “there was an extra added element when the actual people who wrote the show were playing those parts. All it really was was an extra special layer of ‘meta’, but with that layer removed it’s still a meta-musical; it still ends up being a story about four friends who put on a show.”13 So the first layer of reflexivity is the show-within-a-show plotline. 19

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Not only does the show depict the creation of a work of musical theater—reflexive in its own right—but it does so while exploring the borderline between real and fictional by including characters who look and behave like the writers. The show has been performed by many other actors since its original run; even during its early productions, when Bowen and Bell played “themselves,” not all audience members were aware of the conceit. Through this second layer of reflexivity, where the authors appear to use themselves, their stories, and their names, there arises a confusion of fact and fiction, verbatim document, and original creation. One of the themes the show explores is the layering of characters and personae in a way that has become a feature of experimental postmodern forms. All the characters in the original production had the same names as the performers; those involved in the New York performances were involved in the creative process, but not exactly in the ways documented in the performance. Although the writers discussed their lives in the musical, their stories were sometimes fashioned into someone else’s character during the show’s development with director Michael Berresse. In the production, Hunter was the “big dreamer,” Jeff was responsible for “grounding everyone,” Susan was always “pushing envelopes,” and Heidi was the new kid with whom the audience was intended to identify.14 By changing the affiliation of some stories, the writers could keep the structure going “so that no-one was crossing out of their range, like you would with any play, like you would with any character in a play.”15 So, even as the show uses real-life stories and challenges conceptions of what is real, it also has a well-crafted, integrated structure that allows audiences to understand and empathize with characters. However, in a further exploration of this facet of reflexivity, Bowen and Bell persuaded several Broadway stars to lend their voices to a recurring plot device: by the time [title of show] reached Broadway, recorded phone messages had been included, made by stars including Idina Menzel, Christine Ebersole, and Patti LuPone, all rejecting the opportunity to appear in the show. There are many ideas being explored here: the presence of these recognizable voices highlights the absence of their physical presence in the musical; yet their presence as voices subverts the narrative fiction of their unwillingness to be present: clearly, they agreed to their recorded voices as comic additions to the show. The idea that there is such a thing as “reality” or “truth” is challenged by the voices of these “real” people, Broadway stars, refusing to participate in a show they are ultimately taking part in. Through this level of reflexivity, and the reference to the musical theater world itself, attention is drawn to issues of labor, processes of rehearsal and production in creating musical theater, and the relative value of the text when set against the importance of finding “stars.” It raises questions as well about the separation of life and art, and the “business” and materiality of musical theater. Breaking with the idea that an actor should be entirely subsumed within a character in the narrative of a well-made play has long been challenged, especially in the experimental performance arena where Bowen and Bell were working. Hans Thies Lehmann notes, “the actor of postdramatic theater is often no longer the actor of a role but a performer offering his/her presence on stage for contemplation.”16 We have only barely begun thinking about how such ideas might apply to the musical theater, but [title of show] actively explores the presence of actors and performers in layered personas. The processes of production, the labor of writing, rehearsal, and casting, and the notion of celebrity are explored so that the interpretation of this performance has potential resonances for audiences that flow beyond attending to the story. The plot is only one element in the way the show might be perceived. The development of my story of writing this chapter mirrors this practice: like Bowen and Bell, I am encouraging you to think about the act of writing as another performance whose processes involve labor and whose meanings are subject to your interpretation. I hope that by now you can understand why I revealed my presence to you as the writer of this chapter in an academic book. While the chapter may be about [title of show], the argument it contains is not presented in a linear fashion but is composed of asides and deviations, references to myself and my writing, and interruptions to your focus on the musical…A post-linear, postmodern, 20

“[Title of Chapter]”

post-integrated twenty-first-century musical is being documented in a post-linear, postmodern chapter. But before we get carried away, I’ll recall what Little Sally advises in ­Urinetown (another reflexive twenty-first-century musical): “you don’t want to overload them with too much exposition.”17 So before I get too theoretical, I’ll interrupt myself and introduce some examples from [title of show].

The Examples According to Jeff Bowen, the music and lyrics are an amalgam of old-school Broadway styles including “happy music like Jerry Herman shows”18 that have lots of brass, major chords and “70 people onstage screaming high notes,” 1970s musicals like Company, and “80s synthpop.”19 The writers didn’t want to do a satire of musical theater, so the music was “completely legitimate” although some of the lyrics are “spoofy,” with recognizable feeling, tones, chords, and tempos that derive from musical theater idioms.20 This strategy is designed to give the work integrity and heart, but also leads to the creator’s nightmare, described by Susan in the number “Die Vampire, Die!” The Vampires are the voices in one’s head that undermine confidence by telling creators that other people “Did it before you and better than you,” or “Your song is repetitive / Your song makes me tired.”21 Tension is established between the need for continuity with familiar musical genres, styles, and traditions and the urge to innovate. This tension provides material for a character in the narrative (Susan), but also encourages us to think about processes of creation, writing, and communication. In linguistic communication we rely on words, phrases, references, and grammar in well-­ established ways to be understood, and yet each sentence is simultaneously particular, idiosyncratic, and unique. This essay contains sentences constructed from words and phrases you know, which together present new ideas, references to wider reading, and examples from the show. The combination that results, then, is unique. In the same way, the lyrics of “Die Vampire, Die!” rely on conventional words, phrases, and patterns that can be easily understood, but use them to express something original. The lyrics demonstrate the psychological fear of the character as a creative individual; they have narrative content but also raise thematic issues about the writing process. The same is true of the use of recognizable musical styles that are made simultaneously original and unexpected. This pattern occurs throughout the musical, as for example in “Untitled Opening Number,” when the performers sing “we’ll explore the latest trends and avoid them … trying hard not to duplicate what we’ve seen and heard before.”22 The writers seek to maintain continuity with the past while simultaneously making ironic commentary about the state of musical theater and the difficulty of being innovative in the present. Incorporating known forms, styles, and quotations resonates for readers and listeners, resulting in unexpected associations or ironic commentary. In “Monkeys and Playbills,” the writers create a postmodern bricolage as they reference shows—Golden Apple, Golden Rainbow, Golden Boy, and Goldilocks,23 among others—overtly incorporating the referential power of language to resonate playfully in the minds of audiences. But it is not only through direct reference to other productions that the musical theater form is made present in this show. Issues of labor and the work of musical theater resurface in dialogue about the reality of being a performer. Lines about “paychecks” and “unemployment,” “ducking out before the show’s finale,” or wanting to “throw the towel in” but deciding instead to “just start over again” are contained in the song “Part of it All.”24 Heidi comments, “not a chance for my career to advance / and there’s no straight guys here for me to romance, / I guess I’ll swallow my pride and make the best of the rest of this spree…Stuck in a show where I am playing me.”25 Some of the “significant questions”26 this show poses, since the fiction proposes that what is onstage is “real,” are what art is, what is real, and what constitutes performance. 21

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The Theory Over the last 45 years, many musicals have moved away from being predominantly focused on telling a story. We might begin such a trend with Andrew Lloyd Webber, who wrote Cats and Starlight Express, or earlier with Stephen Sondheim works like Company, Merrily We Roll Along, Assassins, and Follies, or with Kander and Ebb’s Cabaret, The Rink, Chicago, or Kiss of the Spiderwoman. All these works engage with structures other than linear narratives (though we can read linear narratives in them), and instead explore formal innovation, reflexivity, and intertextuality. It doesn’t strike me as remotely surprising that this development began at the same time postmodernism was promoting an interest in surface features, formal innovation, and the juxtapositions of high and popular culture in contemporary life. Even the rise of the jukebox musical and film revisical might be explained in part by such an interaction between art forms, which promoted ways of looking and listening that focus less on a continuous story and more on the disruptive interplay between texts and media. Such interactions are referred to as “intertextual” or “intermedial” ones. Intertextual works refer to other texts and incorporate quotations from other sources; intermedial texts create resonances and references between media. Since the 1960s, literary theorists have challenged the idea that texts are stable in theories of intertextuality (Kristeva and Barthes), postmodernism (Lyotard), deconstruction and différance (Derrida). Following such theories, we understand that words are combined within sentences that are understood through their relations with objects, processes, and experiences in the world—not as universal truths. You can understand my writing because you have expectations of this type of academic text, but you might also be aware that it’s slightly unusual in the way it addresses you, though you might anticipate having to negotiate its mélange of examples and quotations, alongside references to musical theater history and philosophy. The discussion of [title of show] relies not just on what I’m telling you but on your knowledge of the history of musical theater and your awareness of that show. In the end, what you make of the ideas in this chapter relies on how you “deconstruct” the materials I’ve gathered here, and interpret them within your own experience and context. “What is she talking about?” you may ask. My response is, “I’m talking about whatever you think I’m talking about.” You might understand the examples from the show or the information about its history immediately, and only later, on rereading this chapter after seminar discussion or when gathering research for your own writing, become aware of the theoretical writings underpinning it. Each time you read the essay or see the show, you might focus on something different. Similarly, each reader or audience member might respond to different parts of the text, relating those issues to their own lives and experiences. Here we are, finally, at my favorite quotation. Barthes wrote, in 1977, “We now know that the text is not a line of words releasing a single ‘theological’ meaning (the ‘message’ of the ­Author-God) but a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash.”27 Isn’t that lovely? I like the idea of a text (or performance) as a multidimensional space containing a morass of images and ideas blending, clashing, and resonating with each other. Once you think of it this way, it’s easy to see that interdisciplinary, ephemeral performance texts containing many disciplines or subtexts—music, dance, voice, body, speech, or design, all of which generate their own blend of clashing imagery—must be among the most unstable of texts. If a written sentence is characterized by a plurality of ideas, how much more unstable is a complex, interdisciplinary performance? It has multiple meanings produced from an explosive, irreducible plethora of images. As we’ve seen in [title of show], there is a clear narrative that is funny and easy to understand, but the references, reflexivity, and resonances to other texts challenge the idea that this show has only one meaning. Instead, it is open to interpretation. Barthes suggests that “the plural of the text depends…not on the ambiguity of its content but on what might be called the stereographic plurality of its weave of signifiers.”28 The individual words

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“[Title of Chapter]”

and ideas, musical phrases or genres are not necessarily ambiguous or complicated; the complexity arises from the many references and resonances embedded in the simplest text. When Barthes noted that language is “woven entirely with citations, references, echoes, cultural languages… which cut across it through and through in a vast stereophony,”29 he could have been describing the song “Monkeys and Playbills” with all its musical theater references. How much more explosive, irreducible, or ambiguous is the combination of imagery in this multidisciplinary performance text that includes the writers discussing the ragtime of “I Am Playing Me,” or the choice of a Dixon Ticonderoga for an “Untitled Opening Number”? The performance of [title of show] is playful, and the audience plays twice over in following the plot and exploring the multitude of images and ideas that explode in the mind as it is considered and reconsidered. But in one final step Barthes also suggests that we, the readers or spectators, produce the text in our own mimetic brains, actually creating the joy of the performance and its clashing, disruptive, explosive potential inwardly and outwardly. Rather than focusing only on the story, which is itself comic and playful, the additional requirement that we interpret references, identify sources, and recognize connections energizes our brains. Barthes argues that texts with such potential are “bound to jouissance, that is to a pleasure without separation…the text is that space where no language has a hold over any other, where language circulates.”30 It seems to me that [title of show] gives us pleasure through its referentiality, reflexivity, and the intellectual questions it stimulates for each of us to discover in our own ways. Its explosion of references, associations, and citations allows readers the pleasure of enjoying an overarching continuous narrative and the joy of recognizing deeper, disruptive thematic questions that the work poses. It allows each of us to interpret those aspects of the text we choose. Academic writing about musical theater, like this chapter you’re reading, tends to discuss shows that are already past. As such, reflection and critical writing are often a response to history: referencing, revising, and assuming the form of shows we’ve seen or heard. As Lehmann describes it, “This present is not a reified point of time but, as a perpetual disappearing of this point, it is already a transition and simultaneously a caesura between the past and the future.”31 This piece of writing, like the performance it documents, can be understood as an ever-changing moment linking past performances with future interpretations. But since this essay relies on each of your interpretations, and each reading marks a new transition between the past viewing of a show in an uncertain context and an unknown future, the essay’s meanings are always in the process of development. Each interpretation of the show and the reading might produce a new combination of ideas. This is the moment between the past and the future in which every interpretation is correct. What I might propose, then, is that the idea that a narrative is constructed from clashing, referential symbols can be the basis for understanding how a sentence is constructed, but is also the basis for understanding this chapter, [title of show], other musicals or, indeed, the scholarship contained in this collection. In a similar way, we might combine ideas of history and time, writing and originality, using a musical theater example and the process of writing a chapter about it. Perhaps trying to combine these ideas into what might appear to be a universalizing narrative is simplistic, but such a strategy allows for the simultaneous presence of overarching narratives alongside the disruption of those narratives, continuity with the past and innovation. This paradox allows gaps to appear for interpretation.

Some Other Examples To further exemplify some of these ideas, we might look at the award-winning Easter Bonnet presentation by the cast of Hamilton.32 In the presentation the cast pay homage to Sondheim by narrating the story of Sweeney Todd to the music and in the style of the opening of Hamilton. The parody relies on us recognizing the story of Sweeney Todd, the music and style of Hamilton, and more. Perhaps we

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know something of the history of the story of Sweeney Todd as it developed from a penny dreadful to a Christopher Bond play, further adapted by Hugh Wheeler with music and lyrics by Sondheim. Perhaps we recognize references to “The Ballad of Sweeney Todd,” “Greenfinch and Linnet Bird,” or the end of “Epiphany” where “the world waits, I’m alive at last, and I’m full of joy.”33 Here are references that invoke memories through verbal associations magnified by musical and visual stimulation. What pleasure there is in recognizing those musical and verbal quotations in new settings! I recognize Sweeney Todd but also note the rap style, reference to other musicals, Miranda’s love of Sondheim, and Miranda himself. Judging by the cheers that greet various entrances, many cast members, too, are known to the audience, but I’m from the United Kingdom and haven’t yet seen Hamilton. I don’t know any of the other performers, and the story of Hamilton isn’t part of my national history. I had to google the show to find out what it’s all about. The Civil War: where UK and US histories diverge. Because scholars and audiences from different countries see and hear things from our own perspectives, we talk about works that “others” may not know, and reflect on the importance of context to our understanding not only of narrative but also of aesthetics, style, and dramaturgy. The way we understand the development of musical theater arises from our own perspectives. So, for example, Showboat via South Pacific to Pacific Overtures perhaps speaks of an American national identity and dramaturgical development. But is an American identity really so unified? Doesn’t it encompass the multiplicity of interactions with other musics and musical theaters that have influenced the form? What about community practices around the country? Off-Broadway and nonprofit developments? Regional styles and differences? Haven’t they influenced the mainstream? What about interactions with the United Kingdom and the rest of the world, and all the different versions of musical theater in different nations and communities, and the identities they reflect or promote? History can thus be seen as both continuous and chaotic, messy, nonlinear with disruptions, eruptions, and tangents that contribute to the development of what can also be framed as a unified progress narrative. And since one of the features of musical theater is reflexivity, or self-referential camp, the diversity of that history becomes important: musical theater in different communities reflects on different pasts. Past, present, and future are linked in an event stream that spawns diverse, unpredictable occurrences: our past is rewritten for the future by the importance given to it in the present. What you have read in this chapter is a series of examples from which your understanding and continuing history will be constructed, but one that contains the excitement and provocation of difference. Or is this too utopian? Perhaps I should argue that musical theater is hopelessly utopian in many of its narratives, but more tellingly in its spectacle, its music and dance, and sense of ­community—that is, in its performance. But that’s never the whole story. Little Sally asks, “What kind of musical is this? The good guys finally take over and then everything starts falling apart?!”34 Let’s hope that isn’t what happens to you reading this chapter. With my utopian hat firmly on, I’ll note that Little Sally continues, “But the music’s so happy.” So let’s enjoy the utopian idea that difference, or the friction between song and scene, produces the excitement, the pearl in the oyster that arises from the continuity of several thoughts, histories, theories, and practices, and that ultimately becomes a disrupted, deconstructed narrative. That was my chapter. While you think about what you’ve read, why not listen to the closing number “A Way Back to Then” from [title of show]? It points back to a simpler time, and perhaps a more “integrated”35 understanding of narrative construction. Happy listening.

Notes 1 Scott McMillin. The Musical as Drama. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2006. 2 Scott Miller. Sex, Drugs, Rock’n’roll and Musical Theater, 2006. Web. 13 Jan. 2017. .

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“[Title of Chapter]” 3 Full details of all productions—and of the YouTube series of documentary/sitcoms about the process of getting to Broadway—are on Wikipedia. The show was originally presented by Bridge Club Productions at the 2004 New York Musical Theatre Festival. It had several performances in Connecticut and six Off-Off Broadway performances at Ars Nova. It ran Off Broadway at the Vineyard, for which it won Obie awards for Bowen and Bell. It arrived on Broadway at the Lyceum in 2008; Bell was nominated for a Tony. 4 All this information and subsequent facts and quotations are drawn from an interview with Jeff Bowen on June 25, 2016. I’m grateful for his support in developing this chapter. 5 Interview with Bowen, 2016. 6 Ibid. 7 Ibid. 8 A term coined by a mentor of Susan Blackwell and Hunter Bell that Bowen spoke about. 9 Hunter Bell. ‘Synopsis’ [title of show] Original cast recording (Ghostlight Records, 2006). 10 Jeff Bowen. 2006. [title of show]. Piano/Vocal Selections. Hal Leonard, 24. 11 Ibid., 13. 12 The creative process that generated material for A Chorus Line has many similarities with this process, though the show itself, self-reflexive though it may be, does not contain the same level of postmodern innovation in its exploration of the real and fictional. However, A Chorus Line could certainly be theorized as a predecessor to [title of show]. 13 Interview with Bowen, 2016. 14 Ibid. 15 Ibid. 16 Hans-Thies Lehmann. Postdramatic Theater. London and New York: Routledge, 2006. 135. 17 Greg Kotis and Mark Hollman. Urinetown: The Musical. London: Nick Hern Books, 2003. 18 Interview with Bowen, 2016. 19 Ibid. 20 Ibid. 21 Bowen, 2006, 68. 22 Bell, 2006 [Title of Show], n.p. 23 Bowen, 2006, 29. 24 Ibid., [title of show], 41–50. 25 Ibid., 54–55. 26 In ‘Two Nobodies in New York’ (Bowen 2006, [Title of Show]) the phrase is used repeatedly. On pages 14, 16, and 20 Jeff and Hunter’s refrain includes the lines “We could ask significant questions, we could get important points across, like ‘Are we writing for art?’ And ‘Is art a springboard for fame’.” 27 Roland Barthes. “The Death of the Author.” Image Music Text. [Essays selected and translated by Stephen Heath] London: Fontana Press, 1977. 146. 28 Roland Barthes. “From Work to Text.” Image Music Text. [Essays selected and translated by Stephen Heath] London: Fontana Press, 1977. 159. 29 Ibid., 159–160. 30 Ibid., 164. 31 Lehmann 2006, Postdramatic, 144. Barthes “The Death of the Author” also speaks about “the author as the past of his own book” introducing a similar interest in temporality (1977, 145). 32 The Easter Bonnet competition is an annual event that raises money for Broadway Cares / Equity Fights Aids. Performers from Broadway, Off-Broadway, and national touring companies perform original skits, songs, dances, and bonnet designs. Awards are given for the best presentation, best bonnet design, and top fundraisers. The parody that won the award for best presentation in 2016 is available at: www.playbill.com/article/watch-hamilton-39-s-award-winning-easter-bonnet-presentation. . 33 Stephen Sondheim and Wheeler Hugh. Sweeney Todd Vocal Score. New York: Revelation Music Publishing and Rilting Music, 1981. 179. 34 Kotis, Urinetown, 99. 35 The term “integrated” refers suggestively to the golden age musicals in which songs and dances were assumed to progress the plot. This is a term and an idea that has been challenged and debated in recent years by scholars including Stacy Wolf, Raymond Knapp, Dan Rebellato, Dominic Symonds, and myself.

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PART 2

Starting with the ‘70s

The 1970s in America are often dismissed as dark, dirty, and depressing, especially in comparison with the gloried, storied ‘60s. During that earlier decade, people rose up and fought collectively against the Vietnam War overseas, and institutionalized racism, poverty, and inequality at home. Teenagers and young adults experimented with drugs, sex, religion, and domestic life and seemed, especially in retrospect, to have an absolutely wonderful time doing so. But the 1970s saw the national mood grow darker, edgier, and less optimistic. The war plodded on, as did sociocultural injustices on the domestic front. The counterculture dissipated, drugs grew harder, and people who had turned on started tuning out—or at least away from collective action. Unprecedented political crises, economic problems, and rising international tensions gripped the nation, and a collective gloom set in that, we are told, did not lift until the Reagan landslide ushered in the prosperous 1980s. Of course, historiography flattens history, and the countless nuances that occur in each historical decade get lost as the significant eras recede into the past. No one decade is ever entirely joyous or entirely miserable. Just as the 1960s saw its fair share of devastating lows amid as many thrilling highs, the 1970s was hardly relentlessly terrible. Enormous strides continued to be made in the struggle for civil rights; the fight for gender equality took hold as well, as both the women’s and the gay and lesbian liberation movements gained steam and national attention. And popular culture began to reflect these important cultural strides, with entertainments that took shifting societal norms into consideration and helped mainstream American diversity. The musical theater was no exception. In New York City and beyond, musicals reflected the nation’s ideals and concerns, growing more introspective, varied, and nuanced as they did. The four essays that make up this section are not the only ones that touch on musicals in the 1970s—there are plenty that consider at least some aspect of that decade throughout the collection. But the four herein focus specifically on musicals during that time period, or on influential trends that began in that era, and that continue to resonate and shape the musical theater as we understand it today. In the first essay, Bryan Vandevender gives us a brief historical overview of the 1970s and explains why the era in America became known as “the me-decade.” He then examines the way the period influenced the Broadway musical, using a few popular productions as examples. It’s no accident that many 1970s musicals featured characters who were markedly more moody complex than prototypical musical-comedy types; mass entertainment, after all, frequently emulates the

Starting with the ‘70s

world around it. Next, Ryan Bunch examines adolescence in contemporary entertainment as it has influenced the American composer and lyricist Stephen Schwartz. Schwartz, who is considered in several essays throughout this book, rose to prominence in musical theater circles in the 1970s with hits like Godspell and Pippin; Bunch points out that while Schwartz’s style and aesthetic have changed a bit with the times, his approach to adolescence has remained comparatively unchanged; his interest in and respect for young people helped Broadway win over and retain young audiences, not just during the 1970s but ever since. While Ryan Donovan also considers Pippin in his essay, he doesn’t focus on Schwartz. Instead, he examines the way a televised advertisement—one of the first for Broadway—not only extended the musical’s run and influenced the commercial theater industry but also cemented the legacy of Pippin’s iconic choreographer and director Bob Fosse. And finally, James Lovensheimer considers the various ways that collective nostalgia for an easier, more innocent past—whether such ease and innocence were real or imagined—has driven Broadway musical revivals since the early 1970s.

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3 THEY’RE PLAYING MY SONG The American Musical in the Me-Decade Bryan M. Vandevender

In August 1976, 15 months after the fall of Saigon, journalist Tom Wolfe christened the 1970s “The Me-Decade” in a polemic for New York Magazine. He argued that the communitarian ethic once pervading American culture had given way to a new era of self-regard. By his charge, ­A mericans had abjured the notion of serial mortality—living and working for the future benefit of family, city, or nation—in favor of personal improvement and introspection, resulting in a widespread obsession with egoism and the individual. Wolfe’s description of this cultural phenomenon suggests that Americans had come to view self-scrutiny as an exceedingly worthwhile endeavor, and also believed identity to be malleable and perfectible: “The old alchemical dream was changing base metals into gold. The new alchemical dream is: changing one’s personality—remaking, remodeling, elevating, and polishing one’s very self…and observing, studying, and doting on it.”1 Wolfe went on to compare America’s fascination with individualism to the great religious awakenings of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and credited the economic prosperity and geopolitical supremacy that the United States had enjoyed since the end of World War II as contributing to ethos of the era. Social critic and historian Christopher Lasch expanded on Wolfe’s claims three years later in his assessment of American self-interest, The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations. Here, he cited a series of divisive national events occurring just before or at the start of the 1970s—the Vietnam War, the shootings at Kent State University, the Watergate scandal, and the resignation of Richard Nixon—as root causes of Americans’ narcissism.2 Lasch argued that following these events, the American public knowingly abandoned the utilitarian rhetoric that had supported American discourse throughout the first half of the twentieth century. Having lost their faith in the government, trust in institutions of authority and power, and concern for the nation’s well-being, Americans instead turned to their own self-preservation. Throughout the 1970s, the American musical frequently reflected Me-Decade values by dramatizing the lives of inner-directed characters. Some of these characters experienced crises of identity and actively searched for self-actualization. Others demonstrated the need to reveal their personal histories or proclaim their singularity. These figures and the works introducing them stood counter to musicals of previous eras, which more frequently idealized narratives about the creation or transformation of communities, the preservation of biological families, the construction of surrogate families, and heterosexual romantic pairings. By contrast, many 1970s musicals centered on lone figures, and traded in the cynicism that Lasch described and historian ­David Frum claims was endemic to American life throughout the decade.3 Musical theater 29

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scholar Barbara Means Fraser contends that the musical theater’s newfound misanthropy bred a series of works featuring disillusioned characters for whom idealism and dreams—particularly the ­A merican dream—had failed: “The images of the shattered dream are reflected in a world lacking family warmth, security, and societal loyalty. Past American Dreams such as family and marriage and community come under attack while innocence and beauty are raped or disfigured. The individual competes for survival in a selfish world where it is difficult to know whom to trust.”4 The result of this tonal shift was a spate of musicals in which characters freely revealed their anxieties, secrets, fantasies, shame, and painful histories in song. This particular use of music may not have seemed especially novel to 1970s audiences. For much of the twentieth century, the musical rested upon the conceit that song provided characters with a means to express feelings that exceeded language. Many musicals of the Me-Decade, however, exhibited an elevated degree of candor, and broadened the repertoire of subjects about which characters could sing. Several titles broke with the established narrative tradition of previous eras, in which songs emerged naturally from a libretto, and instead advanced new storytelling models that often resulted in new methods of presenting songs. This chapter examines the dramaturgy— particularly the use of song—for the 1970s musicals Company (1970), Follies (1971), A Chorus Line (1975), and I’m Getting My Act Together and Taking It on the Road (1978), and demonstrates how librettists and composers musicalized the Me-Decade ethos.

Challenging Institutions and Searching for Self-Actualization: Company Preoccupation with the individual is evident in one of the Me-Decade’s first musicals: George Furth and Stephen Sondheim’s Company. A collection of loosely connected scenes and songs set against the backdrop of Manhattan’s Upper East Side circa 1970, Company centers on Robert, a 35-year-old bachelor, and chronicles his interactions with five couples—his “good and crazy friends”—and three paramours. Furth’s book eschews a linear plot and fully developed characters in favor of a fractured narrative and 14 broadly drawn character sketches. Company’s otherwise unrelated episodes are bound together by the notion of marriage, with each couple representing a different view of or approach to the institution. Most scenes depict Robert calling upon a couple and bearing witness to the various bargains, compromises, or sacrifices they have made in the name of married life. During these visits, the couples question Robert’s single status or entreat him to find a woman with whom he can enjoy a sustained relationship. Robert, however, remains single for the duration of the musical. A perennial bachelor, he dates multiple women simultaneously, engages in casual sex, and actively avoids commitment. While most of Company’s characters regard Robert’s playboy behavior with fascination, his bachelorhood reflects a skepticism of cultural institutions that pervaded the Me-Decade. According to historian Stephanie Coontz, the onset of the sexual revolution in the early 1960s gave rise to a pronounced singles culture that undermined postwar imperatives for wedlock and child-rearing.5 Remaining unattached represented a progressive break from tradition, as singles prioritized their personal aspirations or sexual desires over cultural precedent. Robert’s compatriots (with the exception of twice-divorced Joanne) routinely characterize him as a curiosity, and in so doing, traffic in rhetoric from the 1950s—the decade in which they presumably married—that deemed singles of a certain age aberrant, ill, or wanton.6 Their repeated concern over his lack of female partner perhaps accounts for why several critics and scholars have perceived Robert as a closeted gay man.7 Company further challenges marriage as a postwar ideal by presenting couples who express marital dissatisfaction. Sondheim’s songs frequently highlight the fissures within these partnerships. “The Little Things You Do Together” allows the ensemble to purge their frustrations by 30

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offering a Brechtian critique of married life writ large. Amy describes the drawbacks of commitment in the frantic patter song “Getting Married Today.” In “Sorry-Grateful,” Harry confesses that married life is full of regret and self-doubt, if ultimately preferable to solitude. These songs describe marriage as a deterrent to individual desires and ambitions, and their cynicism arguably confirms historian Edward D. Berkowitz’s claim that marriage started losing its cultural clout in the 1970s.8 While Robert serves as Company’s central figure, he does little to propel the musical’s action. He is a passive, bemused observer who watches his friends negotiate the tribulations of wedlock. His detached demeanor, unacknowledged backstory, and unexplained resistance to partnership have prompted several critics to deride the character as a cipher. Further contributing to the character’s lack of development is the shape of Company’s libretto. Critic Martin Gottfried contends that Company “is like a large, revolving sculpture with the character’s life looked at from every angle: one complete rotation.”9 This metaphor is particularly apt as Robert’s journey is circular in nature. He investigates marriage from multiple perspectives at a removed distance. As musical theater scholar Joanne Gordon states, “We are presented with fragments of Robert’s life…the audience can perceive the cumulative effect of his experiences, but never has the sense of inevitable progression and growth that would suggest the gradual enlightenment hero.”10 Company ends in the same place it begins: Robert’s apartment on the eve of his thirty-fifth birthday. Sondheim establishes Company’s protagonist and the shape of its narrative in the opening number, a song in which the five couples sing a dizzy succession of endearments: “Bobby Baby, Bobby Bubi, Robert Darling.” Both mawkish and insistent, the sequence is both a love letter to Robert and a demand for his attention. Sondheim returns to motifs established in the opening number six times before the final curtain, making Company’s infectious theme a haunting refrain that follows Robert on his circular journey.11 Despite its lack of linear causality and dynamic protagonist, Company presents a character ­odyssey. The last moments of the musical, in which Robert articulates his own desires for the first time, suggest that his ethnographic study of marriage has prepared him to construct an individualized model for partnership. He enumerates the features of his ideal relationship in Company’s finale, “Being Alive.” The song’s title and central metaphor allude to the notion of self-actualization—a concept popularized by psychologist Abraham Harold Maslow that refers to an individual’s mastery of needs and realization of their potential.12 Robert professes a vision of partnership that makes him feel alive, and by extension, gives him a sense of purpose. Company’s fragmented libretto then serves as an important dramaturgical tool: each episode moves Robert closer to understanding the type of relationship he needs. The totality of these scenes represents a search for self-actualization; by the musical’s end, Robert has attained self-knowledge that he did not possess previously. Other Me-Decade musicals, including Stephen Schwartz and Roger O. Hirson’s Pippin (1972) and William Finn’s In Trousers (1979), similarly present a single character’s search for self-­ actualization and identity. Pippin depicts an idealistic young man’s episodic quest to fulfill his perceived destiny of being extraordinary. A series of unfulfilling experiences with the military, casual sex, and politics leads to profound disillusionment, and he briefly considers suicide in a moment of existential crisis before committing to domestic life with a young widow and her son. By the musical’s end, Pippin begins the process of cultivating an identity, not in relationship to his supposed exceptionalism, but in relationship to his new surrogate family. In contrast, Marvin, the protagonist of In Trousers, abandons his wife and child in an effort to explore his identity as a gay man.13 Having accepted his sexual desire for men, Marvin recalls key moments of his life and reflects on his relationships with women including his wife, high-school sweetheart, and English teacher. This process of introspection also occurs in a series of vignettes and concludes with Marvin (allegedly) having attained greater understanding of his past behavior and various neuroses. 31

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Performing Memory and Interiority: Follies Sondheim further challenges the postwar institution of marriage using a fragmented narrative in Follies, a collaboration with librettist James Goldman. Set in 1971, the plot unfolds in the dilapidated Weismann Theater, former home to the fictional Weismann Follies, where a cadre of onetime Weismann performers reunites prior to the building’s demolition. The main action follows former chorus girls Sally Durant and Phyllis Rogers, and their respective husbands, Buddy ­Plummer and Ben Stone. The couples, friends in the early 1940s, began married life with hopeful idealism. Thirty years later, their partnerships demonstrate significant strain. Sally still pines for Ben, with whom she once had an affair. Aware of her true affections, Buddy keeps a mistress. ­Phyllis resents the material comforts that Ben’s dogged pursuit of career advancement has provided. Ben’s obsession with status results in a spurious persona and emotional distance from Phyllis. Throughout Follies, the characters’ younger selves materialize as ghosts to reenact scenes from the past alongside exchanges in the present. These moments of embodied memory prompt introspection and force reunion attendees to confront the aspirations, compromises, and transgressions of their youth, as well as disappointment over their current circumstances. They also provide somewhat dubious narrative exposition, since the episodes frequently represent an individual’s potentially biased recollection of events. Gordon describes the dramaturgical function of memory in Follies by noting, “Reality and memory are so interwoven and deliberately ambiguous that absolute truth and judgment are emphatically repudiated.”14 As a result, remembrances frequently ensnare characters and hinder their ability to discern the current moment from yesteryear or actuality from fantasy. Memory’s decisive role throughout Follies reflects a societal preoccupation with the past that several historians identify as a defining feature of the Me-Decade. Douglas Miller and Marion Nowak claim the same cultural catastrophes that triggered American narcissism also inspired a collective yearning for the comparative simplicity of previous decades.15 This nostalgia spread throughout American life and, according to Andreas Killen, became the dominant aesthetic force in 1970s American culture.16 Sondheim’s score capitalizes on this preoccupation with the past in representing a pastiche of early twentieth-century musical idioms: many of the songs reflect numbers the characters once performed in the Weismann Follies.17 Throughout Follies, members of the supporting cast interrupt the central narrative to revive their original Weismann routines. In the vaudeville tradition, these diegetic specialty songs—“Beautiful Girls,” “The Rain on the Roof,” “Ah! Paris!,” “Broadway Baby,” “Who’s That Woman?,” “Bolero d’Amour,” and “One More Kiss”—allow the performers to showcase their singular talents. The lighthearted, flirtatious, optimistic, romantic tones of these pastiche numbers contrast the 1970s cynicism undergirding the musical, providing moments of escapism. Continued efforts to restage the past help foreground nostalgia as endemic to the musical’s narrative, particularly when the ghosts appear to perform in tandem with their present-day counterparts. One such moment occurs early in the first act during the song “Waiting for the Girls Upstairs.” This number is an extended musical memory, during which the central couples recount socializing after Weismann performances, and in so doing, recall their former naiveté, idealism, and thrift. Buddy and Ben begin by describing the sights and sounds they encountered backstage at the Weismann Theater; Phyllis and Sally remember preparing for a night on the town. For the first three verses, the characters utilize past tense to mark the span of time between their youth and the present. At the song’s midpoint, however, they recite dialogue from the past using the present tense, suggesting that they are now reliving previous events and performing their memories. This conjugational shift summons the ghosts of their younger selves, who take possession of the song and leave the older characters to watch the rest of the scene (in which they bicker over an evening’s plans) play out like a film. When the ghosts disappear, the original quartet moves beyond the act of

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collective reminiscing and begins to assess the past, claiming that their present circumstances are preferable to the intensity and uncertainty of their youth. “Waiting for the Girls Upstairs” differs from other Follies songs in that it emerges somewhat naturally from the central narrative. Further, the performance of memory that occurs prompts characters to interrogate their lives, thus paving the way for later non-diegetic book songs like “The Road You Didn’t Take,” “The Right Girl,” and “Could I Leave You?” in which the characters vent repressed anger, discontent, regret, and confusion. Sondheim’s dual approaches to songwriting—diegetic pastiche numbers and non-diegetic songs of introspection—combine at Follies’ end with the “Loveland Sequence,” a series of F ­ ollies-style numbers in which the central characters express their emotional states, thereby utilizing past musical idioms to perform current interior pain.18 As Gordon explains, “It is a vaudevillification of their own benighted circumstances.”19 The sequence devolves with Ben’s nervous breakdown, and the couples leave the reunion in various states of affective stability. Goldman’s libretto, however, suggests that these songs grant each character a recognition of their own self-interest and a catharsis that allows them to return to their lives changed for the better. This relatively hopeful ending stands counter to the melancholy typifying the Me-Decade, but attests to the transformative power of performing interiority as the characters seem to evolve after purging their internal angst in song. Other musicals of the decade employed dramaturgical structures and approaches to song that recall Follies. In John Kander and Fred Ebb’s The Act (1977), actress Michelle Craig relives a series of personal and professional trials while performing a nightclub act meant to resurrect her faded film career. Her diegetic songs, performed for a Las Vegas audience, transition to book scenes in which she reenacts significant moments from her past: her first film audition, marriage to a ­Hollywood producer, rise of her celebrity, birth and baptism of her children, an extramarital affair, the dissolution of her marriage, and the decline of her career. Thus, the musical’s production numbers occur in real time while its narrative episodes emerge from song as performed memories. They’re Playing Our Song (1979), a whimsical love story modeled on the partnership of the musical’s composer and lyricist, Marvin Hamlisch and Carole Bayer Sager, offers a playful model for performing interiority. Throughout the musical, straitlaced composer Vernon Gersch struggles to maintain a professional and romantic relationship with free-spirited lyricist Sonia Walsk, who seeks guidance from voices in her head during moments of uncertainty. These voices take physical form as a female trio who sing alongside the character, providing harmony or backup vocals when they support her choices and stealing the melody when they question them. Sonia’s reliance on the voices as part of her creative process prompts Vernon to access his own interior voices, which manifest as three male singers. Unlike the ghosts of Follies, these materializations of interiority are lighthearted, encouraging, and intent on moving the central couple toward happiness.

Asserting Singularity within the Aggregate: A Chorus Line Three notable musicals of the decade took inspiration from nonfiction sources and lived experience. Grounded in memoir, these works trade in candor and authenticity by presenting real people (or slightly fictionalized surrogates) who profess the significance of their life stories through spoken or sung testimonials. The Me Nobody Knows (1970) began in 1968 as a collection of poetry and prose written by children aged seven to eighteen from New York City’s most impoverished neighborhoods. Edited by Stephen M. Joseph, a public school teacher, the anthology contains autobiographical writing representing fragments of thought related to parents, teachers, money, crime, violence, drugs, sex, faith, and loneliness. The musical’s cast of adolescent characters similarly individuates themselves through anecdote. The musical’s book and lyrics utilize much of the original publication’s language. Furthermore, characters address the audience directly, suggesting

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that the musical functions as a means of asserting identity. Desire for recognition is evident in the finale, “Let Me Come In,” when the company unites to articulate feelings of isolation and demand inclusion within the larger society. Working (1978), an adaptation of Studs Terkel’s 1974 oral history of American labor, presents an array of predominately blue-collar laborers, including a steelworker, parking lot a­ ttendant, teacher, postal worker, truck driver, prostitute, waitress, telephone operator, and firefighter. ­Characters relate the joys and challenges of their occupations in a series of direct-address monologues and songs. Numbers like “Lovin’ Al,” “Neat to Be a Newsboy,” “The Mason,” and “It’s an Art” introduce characters who derive a sense of self from their jobs. In other songs, characters express dissatisfaction and fears of irrelevance (“Nobody Tells Me How”), lack of recognition (“Just a Housewife”), and tedium (“Millwork”). The most successful musical of the decade employs personal narratives and shares the objective of illuminating personal history, but presents stories within a slightly fictionalized context that provides the semblance of a narrative. Conceived, directed, and choreographed by Michael Bennett, A Chorus Line depicts 17 veteran Broadway dancers as they audition for a new, unnamed Broadway musical. The setting is a final callback, during which a director/choreographer named Zach seeks to hire four men and four women for his dancing corps. After testing the dancers’ talent and training through rigorous jazz and ballet combinations, Zach positions the gypsies on a line across the stage and asks each one to step forward and introduce themselves. The director’s interest in their personal lives prompts him to inquire about their childhood, adolescence, and the challenges they face as adults. The exchanges that follow constitute most of the musical’s content. Rather than charting the journey of a single protagonist, A Chorus Line presents several characters in pursuit of the same goal: a place in Zach’s ensemble. To this end, the gypsies work to satiate the director’s curiosity by presenting personal narratives of varying lengths. Mike Costa recalls observing and eventually joining his sister’s dance class at age four. Sheila Bryant, Bebe ­Benzenheimer, and Maggie Winslow tell of how ballet training helped them escape the unhappiness of their respective childhoods. Diana Morales describes how her dreams of becoming an actor were challenged by a draconian instructor at New York City’s High School for the P ­ erforming Arts. Valerie Clark reveals how cosmetic surgery revitalized her dance career. During the musical’s longest monologue, Paul San Marco discloses the sexual abuse he endured as a child, and comes to terms with his homosexuality and his parents’ discovery of his secret life as a female impersonator. A Chorus Line’s libretto, a collection of these anecdotes and other reminiscences, is more collage than causal. The action unfolds in real time—two hours sans intermission—and alternates between the world of Zach’s callback and a dreamscape where dancers perform their respective memories, anxieties, and private thoughts for the audience. When the harsh white of the theater’s work lights dim and give way to softer lavender hues, various members of the ensemble share their inner monologues. This frequent interchange between reality and the dancers’ minds further subdivides A Chorus Line’s plot into a series of distinct interludes. Three months prior to the end of A Chorus Line’s 6,137-performance Broadway run, Lloyd Rose of Connoisseur Magazine suggested that its remarkable success resulted from how its staged testimonials aligned with the American zeitgeist: If ever there was a show for the ‘Me-Decade,’ A Chorus Line is it. For fifteen years, it has been packing in audiences and submitting them to confession after confession, as the dancers take their turns in the spotlight and reveal how much they suffer. Playwrights have always satirized the egotism, pettiness, self-pity, and self-importance of show people. A Chorus Line’s stroke of dread genius was to take it all seriously.20

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Rose’s suggestion that A Chorus Line reflected the Me-Decade ethos was astute, as egoism fuels the musical’s monologues and score. Songs like “I Can Do That,” “At the Ballet,” “Sing,” “Nothing,” “Dance: Ten; Looks: Three,” and “The Music and the Mirror” afford characters the opportunity to distinguish themselves, however temporarily, from the other dancers on Zach’s line. Marvin Hamlisch’s score employs a variety of musical genres that are idiosyncratic to specific characters. Consequently, most of A Chorus Line’s characters receive their own musical themes in the form of solo numbers, individual passages throughout a montage, or personalized underscoring accompanying monologues, making the work’s individualistic bent both dramaturgical and musical. A Chorus Line’s fictional audition further represents a Me-Decade fantasy as most of the musical’s stories are based on the lives of its original cast. Compiled by Bennett and later adapted by book writers James Kirkwood and Nicholas Dante and lyricist Edward Kleban, these narratives were first shared during a mythologized—and recorded—overnight gathering of two dozen professional dancers at Manhattan’s Nickolaus Exercise Center. The tapes became the raw material for A Chorus Line, which was developed over six months of workshops at Joseph Papp’s Public ­Theater.21 The dancers’ personal histories combined with their eventual public presentation follow the 1970s trend of encounter groups—a form of communal sensitivity training in which participants eschew social politeness and articulate their true feelings—and reflect the decade’s imperative to “let it all hang out.” As Frum suggests, “the public display of one’s suffering, one’s wrongs, one’s pitiableness, one’s misfortunes, which would have seemed shameful, ignoble, even disgusting before World War II, became in the 1970s the distinctive American national style.”22 A Chorus Line proved remarkably on trend as the recounting of personal narratives transforms Zach’s audition into group therapy. While A Chorus Line celebrates individualism, it also advocates assimilation and reflects a cultural impulse toward conformity.23 Zach’s audition requires the dancers to establish themselves as special, but their reward is a place in the chorus, where the need for uniformity strips them of individuality. The finale depicts group identification through song, dance, and an undeniable image of assimilation. For the ironically titled “One,” the characters trade their personal dance attire—the most potent visual signifier of their individuality—for matching gold tuxedos. Forming a unified corps and dancing in perfect unison, individual members of the company become virtually indistinguishable. The number represents the apotheosis of Bennett’s primary objective for A Chorus Line, which was to individuate Broadway dancers before erasing their identity and sending them back to the chorus as hardworking unknowns.24 Accordingly, the musical ends not with a traditional curtain call, but with the cast vigorously high-kicking as the lights dim. This final image suggests that the recompense for the dancers’ hard work and frankness was not stardom, but anonymity.

Metatheatrical Autobiography: I’m Getting My Act Together and Taking It on the Road The Me-Decade’s influence on musical theater reached something of a peak with Gretchen Cryer and Nancy Ford’s I’m Getting My Act Together and Taking It on the Road. The musical vaguely resembles The Act in featuring a female protagonist examining her life through diegetic music during a bid for a career comeback. Its action unfolds in real time as Heather Jones, a 39-year-old soap opera actor and former pop singer, auditions a new collection of original songs and short sketches for her manager and sometime lover, Joe. Heather has composed this material in an attempt to redefine herself for audiences; the songs showcase her point of view and lived experience, particularly the process by which she shed the postwar gender norms of her youth and embraced her raised consciousness. Her songs address topics including her childhood (“Smile”), divorce (“Dear Tom”), male companionship (“Old Friend”), show-business commodification (“Put in a Package and Sold”), and

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feminism (“Strong Woman Number”). While Joe dismisses the new content as maudlin, overly personal, and excessively feminist, Heather defends it and insists on removing all contrivance from her stage persona so that audiences might see her most authentic self. She describes the various ways in which she has suppressed or altered her true identity to win the approval of family, lovers, and the entertainment industry, and professes an urgent need for candor and recognition. Creating the act was an act of self-expression; presenting it will be an act of self-proclamation. The musical concludes with the dissolution of Heather and Joe’s professional relationship, an event that further empowers the protagonist by giving her complete creative freedom. Her final song, “Happy B ­ irthday,” celebrates her agency and independence, lived experience, and bright future. Most of Heather’s songs address landmark moments in her life—significant realizations, decisions, junctures, or transitions. The act in its entirety represents a performative autobiography. Heather’s use of performance to recount her life story gives I’m Getting My Act Together a metatheatrical quality that appears in other 1970s musicals like Follies, Pippin, and The Act. Heather’s chosen performance aesthetics prove ideal for the project of self-declaration. Her creation and presentation of songs recall other female singer-songwriters of the 1970s, like Carole King, Janis Ian, Joni Mitchell, Roberta Flack, and Carly Simon. Musical theater scholar Elizabeth Wollman confirms the efficacy of this musical style: A particularly apt choice for this musical, the singer-songwriter genre focuses on the singer and emphasizes emotionally raw or confessional lyrics. These qualities allowed the style to become one of the few in the rock realm that was associated with both female musicians and authenticity. As early as 1970 singer-songwriters helped to introduce a comparatively ­introspective, intimate quality into rock music.25 Similarly, Cultural Studies scholar Lynda Goldstein identifies the 1970s as a fruitful period for autobiographical solo performances created by women that aimed to politicize personal experience, cultivate empathy, and eliminate boundaries that traditionally separate performers and spectators.26 In using music and performance to assert her identity, Heather can reveal herself to multiple spectators. Joe serves as her primary audience within the context of the musical. Presumably, Heather will present her act to fans after the musical’s close, and in so doing will attempt to alter their false impressions. Her chief observers, however, are the musical’s audiences. The original production of I’m Getting My Act Together and Taking It on the Road enjoyed a six-month run at the Public Theater, followed by a nearly three-year residency at the Circle in the Square in which theatergoers celebrated Heather and her songs of empowerment for the remainder of the decade. In addition to representing a metatheatrical autobiography, I’m Getting My Act Together utilizes all the other dramaturgical methods outlined in this chapter. Heather’s act recounts her search for identity and self-actualization. It also challenges a patriarchal entertainment industry and its attempts to reify the status quo. Music allows Heather to perform her memories and disclose interior desires, anxieties, and frustrations. It provides her with a means to distinguish herself from other entertainers and demand recognition from the public. Moreover, Cryer and Ford based Heather’s personal history and several of the musical’s exchanges on their own experiences and conversations with show business executives.27 Because the expression of individuality undergirds the musical so significantly, I’m Getting My Act Together and Taking It on the Road arguably represents the apotheosis of the Me-Decade musical.

Conclusion In providing a range of new approaches to narrative and song, the architects of 1970s musicals developed a dramaturgy that was rich, varied, provocative, and reflective of the prevailing American 36

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zeitgeist. Together, they translated the anger, anxiety, and ennui of the populace into characters who demonstrated a need for recognition, affirmation, and individuation. Most musicals addressed in this chapter featured present-day settings, which meant that the works of this period not only traded in Me-Decade ideology but also mirrored the era’s aesthetics and values. The result of this temporal alignment was a collection of musicals that were strikingly contemporary. Despite their rootedness in 1970s American culture, the dramaturgical advancements of the Me-Decade have continued to influence American and British musicals into the present. A single character’s search for identity and meaning motivates musicals like Nine (1982), Song and Dance (1982), Falsettos (1992), Violet (1997), Legally Blonde (2007), Passing Strange (2007), Hamilton (2015), and Dear Evan Hansen (2016). Reconsideration of the past and the performance of memory or interiority are central to the dramaturgy of Merrily We Roll Along (1981), Kiss of the Spider Woman (1993), Fun Home (2013), and The Visit (2015). The need to differentiate oneself within the aggregate is explored in Cats (1981), Starlight Express (1984), The Twenty-Fifth Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee (2004), and Come from Away (2017). A metatheatrical approach to autobiography provides the conceptual frame for The Will Rogers Follies (1991), Jelly’s Last Jam (1992), The Boy from Oz (2003), Title of Show (2006), Fela! (2008), Beautiful: The Carole King Musical (2014), and Summer: The Donna Summer Musical (2018). The Me-Decade’s continued influence on musical theater suggests that a fascination with egoism remains strong, and that characters will continue to sing songs of the self for years to come.

Notes 1 Tom Wolfe. “The Me-Decade and the Third Great Awakening.” Mauve Gloves and Madmen, Clutter and Vine, and Other Stories, Sketches, and Essays. New York: Viking, 1976. 143. 2 Christopher Lasch. The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectation. New York: W.W. Norton, 1979. 34–33. 3 David Frum. How We Got Here: The 70s – The Decade that Brought You Modern Life – For Better or Worse. New York: Basic Books, 2000. 64. 4 Barbara Means Fraser. “The Dream Shattered: America’s Seventies Musicals.” Journal of American Culture 12.2 (1989): 37. 5 Stephanie Coontz. The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap. New York: Basic Books, 1992. 197. 6 Ibid., 186. 7 See, for example, Bruce Kirle. Unfinished Show Business: Broadway Musicals as Works-in-Process. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 2005. 179–183. 8 Edward D. Berkowitz. Something Happened: A Political and Cultural Overview of the Seventies. New York: Columbia UP, 2006. 232. 9 Martin Gottfried. Sondheim. New York: H.N. Abrams, 1993. 78. 10 Joanne Gordon. Art Isn’t Easy: The Achievement of Stephen Sondheim. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1990. 42. 11 The central melody opens each birthday party and appears in “You Could Drive a Person Crazy,” “Have I Got a Girl for You,” and “Poor Baby.” 12 For a more detailed explanation of self-actualization, see Abraham Henry Maslow. Motivation and Personality. New York: Harper, 1954. 13 In Trousers is the first musical in Finn’s Marvin Trilogy. The composer later combined the subsequent works, March of the Falsettos (1981) and Falsettoland (1990), to form Falsettos (1992). 14 Gordon, 82. 15 Douglas T. Miller and Marion Nowak. The Fifties: The Way We Really Were. New York: Doubleday, 1977. 5. 16 Andreas Killen. 1973, Nervous Breakdown: Watergate, Warhol, and the Birth of Post-Sixties America. New York: Bloomsbury, 2006. 177. 17 For a thorough analysis of Sondheim’s musical influences for Follies, see Steve Swayne. How Sondheim Found His Sound. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2005. 18 In the original Broadway production of Follies, the “Loveland Sequence” included “You’re Gonna Love Tomorrow,” “The God-Why-Don’t-You-Love-Me Blues,” “Losing My Mind,” “The Story of Lucy and

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19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27

Jessie,” and “Live, Laugh, Love.” This sequence, like much of the book and score, has been revised for subsequent revivals. Gordon, 109. Lloyd Rose. “Connoisseur’s World,” Connoisseur Magazine, Feb. 1990. 30. Robert Viagas, Baayork Lee, and Thommie Walsh. On the Line: The Creation of A Chorus Line. New York: William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1990. 24–38. Frum, 99. Kirle, 151. Ken Mandelbaum. A Chorus Line and the Musicals of Michael Bennett. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989. 170–171. Elizabeth L. Wollman. Hard Times: The Adult Musical in 1970s New York City. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2013. 124. Lynda Goldstein. “Raging in Tongues: Confession and Performance Art.” Confessional Politics: Women’s Sexual Self-Representations in Life Writing and Popular Media. Ed. Irene Gammel. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1999. 105. Kenneth Turan and Joseph Papp. Free for All: The Public, and the Greatest Theater Story Ever Told. New York: Anchor Books, 2009. 450–451.

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4 “MY CORNER OF THE SKY” Adolescence and Coming of Age in the Musicals of Stephen Schwartz Ryan Bunch

In “The Wizard and I,” her first song in the Broadway musical Wicked (2003), Elphaba, the future Wicked Witch of the West, sings about her desire to find her place in the world despite the differences that cause her to be the object of ridicule by other students at university—her green skin, her studious personality, her sense of social justice, and her unusual magical powers. Standing at the front of the stage, facing the audience in a posture and theatrical convention that tell us she is sharing her sincerest emotions, she belts passionately about her dream of vindication by becoming apprentice to the Wizard of Oz. This kind of emotionally powerful performance by a young person who is special and misunderstood happens repeatedly in stage and screen musicals about adolescents and young adults. Long the creator of musicals that focus on adolescents and wrestle with coming-of-age stories, Wicked’s composer and lyricist, Stephen Schwartz, is one example of a musical theater writer who has consistently appealed to youth audiences. Musicals often tell stories of youth; yet, while musicals have been studied for their relationships to race, gender, sexuality, and class, scholars have only recently begun to take seriously the relationship between musicals and young people.1 Schwartz is not unique in being tuned in to adolescent stories, but because his musicals span a range of musical styles and epochs, they provide a convenient sampling of youth sensibilities in the musical since the early 1970s. Because of his adaptable style, Schwartz’s musicals show the durability of adolescent themes amid trends and changes in musical theater, from his early shows that embrace the counterculture sensibilities to those of recent decades that form part of a corporate culture. In collaboration with others, Schwartz has tended in his musicals to adhere to certain basic themes and tropes of adolescent stories found in various media from literature to film. Adolescence, a term popularized in the early twentieth century by the psychologist G. Stanley Hall, describes life stage between childhood and adulthood and is often used to refer to a range of ages spanning from tweens to teenagers to young adults.2 It is commonly viewed as a time of emotional and physical turmoil, rebellion, and even dangerous instability in the life of a young person who is emerging into adulthood. Scholars who study stories for and about young adults have identified certain themes that reinforce these associations: typically, stories about young people looking for their place in the world recount details about self-discovery, the restless search for identity, a desire to rebel, experimentation with sexuality, drug and alcohol use, and the first experiences with romantic love. Adolescent stories often take the form of a Bildungsroman, or “novel of education,” which was originally the name for a German genre of literature but which, over time, has come to refer to 39

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a broader range of stories about young people, especially those on journeys of self-discovery. In discussing the Bildungsroman as a basis for much young adult literature, literary scholar Roberta Seelinger Trites describes adolescent stories as negotiations of power by young people with social institutions, parents, and their own maturing bodies.3 Adolescent stories also often involve the struggle for political justice and social redemption, as well as the longing for individual autonomy and independence from adult control. Parents are often the representatives of the existing social order, or an obstacle to romance and independence. Literary critic Michael Minden notes that many Bildungsroman heroes are artists—sensitive and creative types who see the world differently from others.4 Schwartz, a musical prodigy and something of a social outsider in his youth, has noted his attraction to stories about misfit characters.5 Perhaps this relationship between the coming-of-age story and the artist helps to account for how well the American musical seems to fit with stories about adolescents: in the musical, singing is often used as an outlet for characters to express their most intense feelings consciously. Performance practices like bursting into song can also resonate with the feelings and experiences common to adolescence. When characters in musicals begin to sing and dance, after all, they transform. These transformations—the expanding power and expression of the voice as it goes from speaking to singing, and of the body as it moves from rest or pedestrian states to dancing—resemble the changing abilities, desires, and urges of bodies in adolescence. The musical theater song type known as the “I want” song, in which characters sing of their deepest motivating desires, as Elphaba does in “The Wizard and I,” is a primary way in which Schwartz and other musical theater writers give voice to the aspirations of characters whose special power is to be able to sing their way through adversity. The relationship between musicals and adolescence has taken particular forms since the 1960s, with the emergence of subgenres like the rock musical and the megamusical, both of which have proven to have a special resonance with youth audiences. These musical genres, with their intense coming-of-age stories featuring young protagonists with big dreams and a strong sense of self, coincided with a distinct flourishing of youth culture, which, in turn, was sparked by the baby boom following World War II and has since developed into an increasingly fine-tuned and variegated multi-billion-dollar industry.6 The influence of this youth culture began reflecting itself in musical theater with the critically and commercially successful Broadway musical Hair in 1968.7 More musicals about young people and their concerns followed in the 1970s; those on Broadway included Schwartz’s Pippin (1972) and Godspell (1976). By the 1980s, youth content and themes were central to megamusicals like Les Misérables (1985) and Phantom of the Opera (1986), which featured impassioned expressions of young love and sociopolitical idealism. Disney stage and screen productions of the 1990s were, in turn, influenced by megamusicals and other contemporary styles of musical theater. Although Disney films are often associated with preadolescence, their themes typically reflect adolescent concerns about romance, identity, social pressures, and the struggle for autonomy, as exemplified in The Little Mermaid (1989, Broadway 2008), Beauty and the Beast (1991, Broadway 1994), Aladdin (1992, Broadway 2014), and The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1996, German stage production 1999). Through his career, Schwartz has succeeded in developing musicals that connect with young people even if, as in the case of Children of Eden (1991), not always with mass audiences. Arriving on the scene at the same time as the birth of the rock musical, he has managed to stay current through the eras of the megamusical and Disneyfication by developing his style and continuing to collaborate with other writers, composers, and production companies that cater to a youth audience. His attraction to stories about adolescence has become the basis for a repertoire of musicals that address the tastes and social concerns of young audiences even as they change from one historical moment to the next and one generation to the next—from the counterculture vibes of Godspell and Pippin to more contemporary concerns with diversity, difference, and acceptance as expressed in Wicked. 40

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Prodigious Youth and the Early Shows: Godspell and Pippin In Schwartz’s childhood and youth, as recounted by his biographer Carol de Giere, he was often misunderstood by both peers and adults.8 He was academically advanced, starting kindergarten a year early and later skipping a grade to graduate from high school at 16. He showed musical aptitude at an early age, took piano lessons, and began composing songs and creating musical puppet shows at home. He participated in school musicals, and while still in high school, he began studying piano and composition at Juilliard’s Preparatory Division for young musicians. He was sometimes bullied and treated as a misfit, but his musical talent and drive continued into adulthood: as musicologist Paul Laird notes, by the age of 26, he had three successful shows running simultaneously: Pippin (1972) and The Magic Show (1974) on Broadway and Godspell (1971) off-Broadway.9 While Schwartz’s music is often sophisticated in construction, the emotional directness derived from the pop influences in his songs is a fortuitous fit for the intense feelings of the adolescent stories he tends to tell. Before finding success on Broadway, Schwartz worked in the artists and repertoire department at RCA, where he was steeped in the sounds of contemporary popular music. The musical styles he absorbed while doing this work quickly found their way into his songs for the stage, which he began writing just at the time when musical theater was turning to contemporary sounds. When working on the score of his first professional musical, Godspell, for example, he took specific pop songs as models for incorporating a range of styles from vaudeville to gospel and folk rock.10 The recording of “Day by Day” from this show, featuring the off-Broadway cast, reached number 13 on the Billboard Hot 100 in July 1972, and Holly Sherwood’s cover version achieved some success the same year, demonstrating the crossover appeal of Schwartz’s songs in the popular music market beyond Broadway.11 Godspell, like Schwartz’s other early show, Pippin, developed against the backdrop of sociocultural turbulence of the late 1960s and early 1970s. The ideals of youth activism circulated on college campuses like Carnegie Mellon University, where Schwartz had been a student, and where both Godspell and Pippin were first conceived, while rock, soul, and urban folk music created the soundtrack for youthful idealism at Woodstock (1969) and other music festivals. Godspell (1971) applies the idealism of youth culture to its retelling of the Parables of Jesus and displays a contemporary sensibility through music and costumes. It was first performed at Carnegie Mellon University as a play with music composed by student Duane Bollick.12 The original script by student John-Michael Tebelak was inspired by his experience of being hassled for his hippie-like appearance by a police officer at the end of a church service he attended.13 He wanted to create something that restored a closer relationship between religion and the people. When the show was subsequently performed off-Broadway with many of the students still in the cast, Schwartz contributed new songs. Dressed in clown makeup and costumes that evoked 1970s youth culture, the characters’ personalities reflected those of the young actors who played them. Schwartz’s score for Godspell draws on folk-rock, gospel, and other music that had by this time become associated with politics of youth. Critic Jeffrey Tallmer of the Post described the musical, appropriately enough, as having “youthjoy.”14 With lyrics combining Schwartz’s words and traditional hymns of the Episcopal church, Godspell emphasizes the democratic aspects of Christianity, in accordance with social justice and artistic movements of its time. In “God Save the People,” for example, the cast pleads with God to save the common people, as opposed to “kings and thrones.” The people are described as flowers, evoking the frequent use of floral motifs and the term “flower children” in the counterculture. Sung by Jesus, the song is accompanied at first by solo guitar in syncopated rhythm, evoking the singer-songwriter and folk-rock trends of the 1960s. The song’s hook, “God save the people,” is emphasized by a pause in the guitar accompaniment with the solo voice punctuated by light chords from the instrument. Shortly after Jesus sings that songs will replace the sound of sighs,

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the singing increases in volume, and the rhythm takes on a harder rocking rhythm with the addition of piano and percussion. The cast joins in an empowered a cappella statement of the chorus, as common people collectively raising their voices in natural, unaccompanied expression. Their plea for justice echoes the protest sounds of politically and artistically engaged young people of the time, who felt that social institutions, parents, and politicians were constraints on individual freedom and the collective good. Themes of youth are even more explicit in Pippin. Schwartz had begun working on Pippin in his college days at Carnegie Mellon University and had been hoping to bring it to Broadway since before he became involved in Godspell. The show finally caught the interest of producer Stuart Ostrow, who was looking for something that would appeal to young audiences and was impressed by the youthful quality of Pippen’s “I want” song, “Corner of the Sky.”15 In Pippin, the title character is a young prince, the son of Charlemagne, who first desires his father’s approval, and later rebels against him. The show is staged as a play within a play, in which a fictional group of performers play the roles of Pippin and other characters in the story. The actor playing Pippin is new to the troupe. Much like many young people who rebel against their parents or the institutions that define their worlds, he keeps deviating from the script. Musicologist Paul Laird explains the enduring appeal of Pippin as a result of its universal theme of “youthful exploration.” Such themes remained fresh despite director Bob Fosse’s cynical staging and choreography, which were meant to stand in ironic juxtaposition to the idealistic songs.16 Pippin sings “Corner of the Sky” near the beginning of the show to express his desire for autonomy and to find his place in the world. Declaring that everything has its season and time, “Corner of the Sky” echoes the biblical Book of Ecclesiastes, which reads, “To every thing there is a season, and time to every purpose under heaven; A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, a time to reap that which is planted.”17 These words had been adapted by folk singer Pete Seeger for the song “Turn! Turn! Turn!” which was covered and made most popular by the folkrock group the Byrds in 1965. It had become a touchstone of the folk-rock movement and peace protests during the late 1960s. The lyrical similarity between this song and “Corner of the Sky” reinforces a connection between Pippin and the counterculture. However, the words take on an individualistic meaning in Pippin’s coming of age story. Pippin’s lyrics make clear his restless sense that everything seems to have its time and place except for him. He longs to fit somewhere, like cats on a windowsill or children in the snow. At the same time, he lacks the freedom to roam. Pippin’s dream of an extraordinary life beyond the constraints of his current situation, where he can both belong and be free, resonates with many baby boomers’ belief that they could achieve something special with the right opportunities and their unique characters.18 The music of “Corner of the Sky” expresses the fervency of Pippin’s desire and the excitement of his anticipation. Pippin’s singing is accompanied at first by solo piano, which conventionally reflects the inner self and individuality. Hints of gospel music point toward the spiritual nature of the song and the heavenly lofts to which it will climb. As the song progresses, strings are added to the piano, then percussion, and a flute solo that floats above the texture as Pippin aspires to new heights. The effect builds in a 1970s pop sound, pleasurable and exhilarating in its sonorities.19 The verse is searching, moving to unexpected chords with a restless, spinning stream of steady eighth notes, evoking the rambling rivers of the lyric and expressing the adolescent desire to leave home, travel, and discover oneself. Paradoxically, however, the river lyric lands on the beginning of the chorus, where the agitated, searching accompaniment turns to rhythmically steady block chords, as Pippin finally succeeds in articulating his core desire: to find his corner of the sky. “Corner of the Sky” evokes the expressive values of popular music in the rock era. As E ­ lizabeth Wollman has noted, rock music, with its folk roots, is constructed as an authentic form of expression, and during the time that the rock musical was emerging, that authenticity’s emphasis was switching from collective to individual modes of expression in conformity with the star 42

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system and marketing culture of the popular music industry. The individual singer-songwriter was believed to offer the listener a deeply personal artistic and emotional expression.20 “Corner of the Sky” might function primarily as a musical theater “I Want” song, but it is also very much in keeping with the singer-songwriter tradition, a synthesis made possible by shared emphasis on heartfelt, “authentic” expression. The performance of the song evokes the kind of self-narration that takes place both when characters in musicals burst into song. In a typical production, “Corner of the Sky” is sung like many “I want” songs are: facing the audience and delivered as an inspired soliloquy expressing the protagonist’s deepest desires. Pippin stands alone, baring his private thoughts, performing only through his own body, voice, and facial expressions. Through a style of self-presentation in the performance, Pippin shows self-awareness in his search for identity and in the narration of his own story. This theatrical presentation is made possible not only by the form of the musical but also, in this case, by the fact that even within the show Pippin is an actor portraying the life of his character. This ambiguity and blurring of the lines between actor and character make the song register as both metacommentary and authentic expression.21 Musicals influenced by rock and pop aesthetics from the time of Pippin to the present continue to emphasize this authenticated individual expression through song, which can be found in shows like A Chorus Line (1975), Rent (1996), Spring Awakening (2006), and Hamilton (2015). Pippin and Godspell both remain popular, alongside these newer shows, with student, community, and youth theater groups.

Megamusicals and Disneyfication: Children of Eden, Pocahontas, and The Hunchback of Notre Dame Many musical theater writers and composers lose steam or see their work go out of style with the passage of time, but Schwartz has managed to keep working and keep his work fresh. By the 1990s, Schwartz’s musicals shared qualities and concerns with the megamusical and Disneyfication. The aspirations of young people are at the center of these shows, as are their complex relationships with parents, lovers, and friends. Megamusicals and Disney-style musicals share with rock musicals of the late 1960s and 1970s their sympathies for young people, but with more of a corporatist than countercultural bent. As described by Jessica Sternfeld, megamusicals employ spectacular sets, immersive music, overwhelming technical apparatus, and global marketing strategies to capture the enthusiasm of their audiences.22 It is notable that Schwartz has found himself as comfortable in these more recent styles of musicals as in his early work. Although it never played on Broadway or became quite as commercially successful as Les Misérables and Phantom of the Opera, Schwartz’s Children of Eden (1991) shows many influences of the megamusical, with epic themes and a high proportion of singing to dialog. Another musical based on biblical sources, it is adapted from the stories of Adam and Eve and of Noah in the Book of Genesis. Like Godspell, it was originally created for young people, in this case, high school students attending a religious camp called Youth Sing Praise at the National Shrine of Our Lady of the Snows in Bellevue, Illinois. Schwartz wrote the songs for this production in 1986 and then continued to develop the show for a decade. It ran only briefly on London’s West End in 1991, but Children of Eden has become popular with community theaters and is often performed by youth groups, in part because it can be staged by either a large or small cast, with separate roles in each act that can be played by the same actors. The Old Testament themes also make Children of Eden a popular choice for churches, synagogues, and religious schools.23 The musical portrays humans as the wiser children of an authoritarian father figure. Father (God) creates “children” (Adam and Eve) to fill a void and worship him. He gives them the perfect Garden of Eden as their home but forbids them to eat from the Tree of Knowledge. He discourages them from asking questions, insisting that as a parent he knows best. Thus, in keeping with 43

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a common theme in Schwartz’s musicals, Children of Eden is much concerned with the struggles of Father’s children against the constraints He has placed on them. Schwartz has remarked that the show “had themes I’ve always liked: personal freedom versus authority, the quest for self-­ definition in a universe without definition, and parent-child relationships, in particular those between father and son.”24 Eve—who, in a twist from the Bible, becomes the hero of the first act due to her curiosity— feels urges that Father has forbidden, which she sings about in her “I want” song, “The Spark of Creation.” Here, she ruminates on the word “beyond,” which makes her realize there is a world outside the garden. Her desire to know more than her immediate surroundings is manifest in physical sensations in her body as she sings: itching fingertips, a roiling in her brain, and burning hunger. She describes the “spark of creation,” a flame that Father must have left inside her when he created her pulsing veins, which now is flaring up. The same force that created the heavens and earth makes Eve want to climb mountains, explore the world, and invent new things. The music of “The Spark of Creation” is appropriately restless and syncopated, reinforcing Eve’s excited singing with rapid, spinning notes. This is the feeling, expressed in song, which ultimately leads Eve to defy Father and eat the forbidden fruit. Instead of leading to the downfall of humanity as in biblical tradition, however, here Eve’s act ultimately forces Father to recognize the intelligence, creativity, compassion, abilities, and independence of His children. Youthful expectation is also characteristic of Schwartz’s lyrics for animated films, which shows the affinity of his work with the Disney style of musical and the work of his Disney collaborator, composer Alan Menken. In Pocahontas (1995), for example, his empathy with young people’s aspirations is evident in “Just Around the River Bend,” which is reminiscent of both “Corner of the Sky” and “Spark of Creation.” Pocahontas feels confined by the future her father, Chief Powhatan, sees as stable and appropriate to her role in the community: to marry the warrior Kocoum. Like Pippin, Pocahontas dreams of something around the river bend that represents an unknown and exciting future. For her, the river is never steady and unchanging, as her father claims, but always changing and moving, like a person growing into herself. Menken’s music supports Schwartz’s lyric by evoking constant motion and change in both the melody sung by Pocahontas and in the instrumental accompaniment. Schwartz’s next project as a Disney lyricist, The Hunchback of Notre Dame is especially evocative of the political and romantic idealism and the musical style of Les Misérables. In “Out There,” Quasimodo sings longingly in expansive vocal phrases of being free from his oppressive guardian while swinging from the turrets of Notre Dame Cathedral, which literally confines him within its walls. Similarly, Esmeralda’s “God Help the Outcasts” draws connections between youthful feelings of difference and the plea for social justice for oppressed ethnic and minority groups.

The Twenty-First Century Musical: Wicked Schwartz’s most recent hit musical, Wicked is based on Gregory Maguire’s novel Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West—which retells the story of The Wizard of Oz (the 1900 novel by L. Frank Baum) from the Wicked Witch’s perspective. Schwartz has said he was drawn to musicalizing Maguire’s novel because he immediately recognized it as his “kind of material”: a story about young people who feel different, and who strive to make sense of their world and their place in it.25 While attending Shiz University, Elphaba encounters many of the same problems and pressures one would in high school or college. She is a misfit, both in her family and at school, because of her green complexion, odd personality, and eerie powers. Glinda, the popular girl, unexpectedly becomes her best friend despite their differences, their initial loathing for each other, and their falling in love with the same boy. Wicked combines elements of the megamusical with musical comedy and mixes heightened emotions with self-aware irony in its contemporary 44

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approach to a story of young women and their negotiations of relationships and political power structures.26 Wicked’s reputation as a show that is extraordinarily popular with young musical theater fans is well-established. Its appeal is understood to result partly from the ability of its collaborators to empathize with the concerns of young people, especially girls and young women. Winnie Holzman, the show’s book writer, was known for her realistic and sympathetic depiction of adolescents from her work on the short-lived but highly acclaimed television series My ­S o-Called Life (1994–1995). Working closely with Schwartz, she steered the story in a direction that placed the primary emphasis on the complex friendship between Elphaba and Glinda, helping to assure its popularity with young, especially female, audiences.27 The musical’s appeal to this demographic is confirmed by Stacy Wolf ’s research with girls and young women who discussed their fandom for Wicked in online message boards during the early months of the show’s run.28 Wolf found that these fans identified strongly with both Elphaba and Glinda, as well as the singing actors who have played them, beginning with Idina Menzel and Kristin Chenoweth in the original Broadway cast. Like Pippin and other musical theater protagonists before her, Elphaba’s understanding of herself as different, even special, resonates with adolescent storytelling tropes. Her mysterious powers, green skin, and principled intelligence make her both remarkable and misunderstood. Suggesting the extent to which these feelings are integral to music and theater, Schwartz connects them specifically with the idea of the socially marginalized artist: Anyone who is an artist in our society is going to identify with Elphaba. Anyone who is of an ethnic minority, who is black or Jewish or gay, or a woman feeling she grew up in a man’s world, or anyone who grew up feeling a dissonance between who they are inside and the world around them, will identify with Elphaba. Since that’s so many of us, I think there will be a lot of people who will.29 Here, Schwartz, both as a person telling his own story and as a person writing about adolescents, takes on the role of the Bildungsroman hero described by Minden as an artist with a sensitive, unique personality and an ability to see the world differently.30 Moreover, he makes an explicit link between artistic difference and the marginalization of social groups based on race, gender, and other categories of identity that are the basis of Wicked’s social justice concerns. Elphaba’s “I want” song, “The Wizard and I,” expresses her feelings of marginalization, but also makes it clear that she knows she is special. Elphaba can hardly believe what has happened when the college’s headmistress, Madame Morrible, accepts her as a student in sorcery, which will prepare her to be the assistant of the Wizard of Oz. In the song’s introductory verse, Elphaba sings that her differences may open doors for her to do something good. She imagines meeting the Wizard, who won’t judge her by her appearance as others have, but will see her for who she is and demonstrate confidence in her. She imagines the two of them as a team and hopes that, when she’s with the Wizard, people will no longer treat her as an outcast. Reflecting the emphasis on emotion that is part of the “I want” song tradition, she declares that, on meeting the Wizard, she will experience feelings like she’s never felt before. As she asserts that there are no limits to what she can do, she sings the word unlimited to a melodic phrase that slyly references “Over the Rainbow” from The Wizard of Oz (the 1939 film adaptation), one of the most famous “I want” songs ever sung by a young female protagonist.31 Although the rhythm is different enough to disguise the reference, the first several notes of the phrase match those at the beginning of “Over the Rainbow.” The musical accompaniment is propulsive, and Elphaba belts the song with an emotional intensity that is all the more effective because it is the first time the audience hears her sing, immediately following a scene in which people have been ridiculing her. In this moment, singing 45

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is the embodied expression of her special powers, and these powers are, in part, in the potency of her singing voice and the “magic” it is capable of producing.32 The feeling of being different expressed in this song reverberates through other adolescent story tropes in Wicked. Elphaba’s outrage at the prejudice against talking Animals in Oz leads her to a commitment to social justice that evokes similar themes to those in Godspell, Pippin, and The Hunchback of Notre Dame. When she meets the Wizard and learns that he has been behind these injustices, she becomes “Wicked” in choosing to oppose the Wizard’s discriminatory practices. Elphaba’s difference motivates her political idealism, which leads, dramatically and musically, to her claiming of her own powers, both in the act one finale, “Defying Gravity,” and throughout act two. Elphaba’s friendship with Glinda is the classic story of the outcast and the popular girl. Their friendship is complicated, first by Glinda’s inability to see past Elphaba’s green color, then by their falling for the same boy, and, finally, by Glinda’s inability to join Elphaba in opposing authority, which would jeopardize her social position and political ambitions. Glinda gives Elphaba a makeover during the song “Popular,” which, according to Schwartz, was inspired by makeover scenes in teen movies like Clueless (1995).33 Schwartz again positions himself in empathy with misfits when he is quoted as saying, “I wrote ‘Popular’ for all of us who weren’t the most popular in school. It’s sort of my revenge!”34 The song shows the new friends bonding, and its teen orientation is furthered by its musical influence from 1960s bubblegum pop.35 In the end, despite the different paths they choose, Glinda and Elphaba remain friends. When Schwartz was writing their final duet, sung when they part ways at the end of the musical, he sought inspiration from his daughter by asking her what she would want to say to her childhood best friend if they were never going to see each other again. The result is a song in which Elphaba and Glinda acknowledge that they have changed each other “For Good.”36 While the contexts and types of shows have changed over time, the themes of adolescent storytelling remain recognizable over Schwartz’s career. Schwartz entered the musical theater scene, fortuitously, at a time when Broadway was beginning to embrace the kinds of pop music sounds he was absorbing into his compositional style, but his ability to keep pace with the changes of the next several decades has kept his work relevant and appealing. From do-it-yourself college shows about collectivity and counterculture to the corporate, globalist commodity that is Wicked—a lucratively branded show produced by Universal Pictures and marketed internationally through replica productions—Schwartz’s output provides a window onto the ability of musicals to tell empowering stories of adolescence.

Notes 1 See, for example, Stacy Wolf. “Not Only on Broadway: Disney JR. and Disney KIDS Across the USA.” The Disney Musical on Stage and Screen: Critical Approaches from Snow White to Frozen. Ed. George ­Rodosthenous. London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2017. 133–153; James Leve and Donelle Ruwe, eds. Children, Childhood and Musical Theater. Abingdon: Routledge, forthcoming; Samuel Baltimore. “‘Do It Again’: Comic Repetition, Participatory Reception and Gendered Identity on Musical Comedy’s ­Margins.” PhD diss., UCLA, 2013. 2 Granville Stanley Hall. Adolescence: Its Psychology and Its Relations to Physiology, Anthropology, Sociology, Sex, Crime, Religion and Education, Vols. 1 and 2. New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1904. In this chapter, I use the terms Adolescents, Young Adults, and Young People more or less interchangeably. 3 Roberta Seelinger Trites. “The Harry Potter Novels as a Test Case for Adolescent Literature.” Style 35.3 (2001): 472–485. See also Michael Cart. Young Adult Literature: From Romance to Realism. Chicago: American Library Association, 2017; Maria Nikolajeva and Mary Hilton, eds. Contemporary Adolescent Literature and Culture: The Emergent Adult. Abingdon: Routledge, 2016. 4 Michael Minden. The German Bildungsroman: Incest and Inheritance. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997. 3–4.

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“My Corner of the Sky” 5 Carol de Giere. Defying Gravity: The Creative Career of Stephen Schwartz, from Godspell to Wicked. New York: Applause Theater & Cinema, 2008. 10–12. 6 Steven Mintz. Huck’s Raft: A History of American Childhood. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2004 describes the 1960s as a time when “the youth culture flourished as never before,” (309), reflecting the widely held view that, although youth culture existed and was economically influential before the baby boom, its expansion and influence during this time were unprecedented. 7 Elizabeth Wollman. The Theater Will Rock: A History of the Rock Musical, from Hair to Hedwig. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2009. 1, 9. 8 De Giere, 3–13. 9 Paul R. Laird. The Musical Theater of Stephen Schwartz: From Godspell to Wicked and Beyond. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2014. 6. 10 Laird, The Musical Theater of Stephen Schwartz, 29. 11 “Billboard Hot 100,” Billboard, 29 July 1972, 52. 12 De Giere, 47. 13 Laird, The Musical Theater of Stephen Schwartz, 15. 14 Ibid., 24–25. 15 Ibid., 57–58. 16 Ibid., 55–61. 17 Ecclesiastes 3:1. 18 In the words of Stephen Mintz, youth in the 1960s were “making public their needs and desires …Their parents’ concern for their well-being became translated in to their own search for personal fulfillment,” 312–313. 19 On the pleasures of “cheesy” 1970s popular music, see Mitchell Morris. The Persistence of Sentiment: ­D isplay and Feeling in Popular Music of the 1970s. Berkeley: U of California P, 2013. 20 Wollman, 24–27. 21 On this doubleness of characters in musicals, see Raymond Knapp. The American Musical and the ­Formation of National Identity. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2005. 12–13; Knapp, Personal Identity, 6–7; Scott McMillin. The Musical as Drama. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2006. 20–21. 22 Jessica Sternfeld. The Megamusical. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2006. 1–4. 23 Laird, The Musical Theater of Stephen Schwartz, 173. 24 De Giere, 205. 25 David Cote. Wicked: The Grimmerie. New York: Hyperion, 2005. 20; de Giere, 273–275. 26 Sternfeld, 349–350. 27 Cote, 21–23, 35, 71; de Giere, 296; Laird. Wicked: A Musical Biography. Lanham: Scarecrow Press, 2011. 258. 28 Stacy Wolf. Changed for Good: A Feminist History of the Broadway Musical. New York: Oxford UP, 2011. 219–236. 29 De Giere, 275. 30 Minden, 5–6. 31 De Giere, 304–305. 32 Paul Laird asserts that “‘The Wizard and I’ reaches out to all young women who believe that their dream and popularity are only around the corner, and it might be magically found if they could sing like that and desire something with such intensity” in Wicked, 195. 33 Cote, 78–79; de Giere, 310. 34 De Giere, 309–310. 35 Laird, Wicked, 140; Cote, 78. 36 Cote, 87; De Giere, 326.

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5 STYLE AS STAR Bob Fosse and Sixty Seconds That Changed Broadway Ryan Donovan

“Here’s a free minute from Pippin, Broadway’s musical comedy sensation, directed by Bob Fosse.”

An unseen announcer speaks these words as a trio of dancers appears on the television screen. After viewing one minute of a sly, sinister dance, viewers are informed, “You can see the other 119 minutes of Pippin, live, at the Imperial Theater without commercial interruption.”1 This 1973 television commercial for Pippin sparked a sea-change for Broadway musicals: not only did it change the nature of advertising Broadway shows, it also cemented a version of Bob Fosse’s style in 60 seconds. His aesthetic, not the traditional stars of a musical—the actors, was sold as the star of the production. The commercial cannily sold Fosse as auteur at the same time it sold Pippin. Producer Stuart ­Ostrow explains that the commercial “was the first of its kind, and a minute of lightning in a bottle.”2 Pippin’s commercial perfectly captured the economics of Fosse’s choreographic style, inciting a new approach to advertising and marketing for Broadway: repeat viewings of the commercial certainly helped lodge Pippin in the consciousness of potential audience members. It aired every Monday night (traditionally the night Broadway shows do not perform) during the WABC-TV 11:00 p.m. news broadcast in the summer of 1973.3 This commercial is notable because it was the first to use a filmed live performance to market a Broadway musical to television audiences, a practice that would go on to become standard. Prior to Pippin, television commercials for Broadway featured static images, usually of the show’s logo with a voiceover reading of ad-copy. What has come to signify Fosse’s choreographic style is on full display in the ad, from the sensuousness, slinkiness, and unadorned economy of the movement to his frequent use of hats and impish sense of humor. The ad’s success was part of an exceptional year for the auteur: Fosse’s biggest impact on mass culture was made in 1972 and 1973, during which he cemented his choreographic style and directorial vision across film, television, and theater. His use of filmic techniques on television to advertise his theatrical productions sold those productions, but also himself, to the point that Fosse’s name itself came to denote a specific choreographic and visual style. The phrase “Fosse style” is now part of the lexicon; there is even an instructional manual devoted to it (The Fosse Style by Debra McWaters). This essay first examines Fosse’s style before describing how his musicals were advertised pre-Pippin; it concludes with a discussion of Pippin’s commercial.

Fosse: Style and/or Substance? What defines style? Is it like pornography, in that we only know it when we see it? Fosse devised the choreography most synonymous with style in Broadway’s history. Pippin star Ben Vereen 48

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describes how “Fosse” has become “a signature style that is recognized worldwide.”4 The visual hallmarks of Fosse’s style include isolations (moving just one part of the body in isolation from the rest), turned-in legs (as opposed to classical ballet’s emphasis on turned-out legs), jazz hands, and the use of props ranging from bowler hats to canes. Chita Rivera summarizes Fosse’s style in her musical memoir The Dancer’s Life: Bobby’s is probably the most easily recognizable style. A flick of the wrist; a tilt of the pelvis; a gesture with a brim of a hat—pure Fosse. A Fosse move is small, tight, and very, very precise. You’re looking at the human body with a microscope. The Fosse style was very much like Fosse the man. Bobby himself was short, kind of turned in. He didn’t look at all like a dancer. His teachers were the vaudeville houses he hung out in as a kid and his great idol was Bill Bojangles Robinson. Bobby created a most unique style.5 Though his body and lack of ballet training limited his development as a dancer, they ultimately determined his style. However, it is as much his directorial sensibility and emphasis on acting as it is choreography that made his style so striking. Fosse’s choreography depended upon contributions from individual dancers no matter whether they were stars or chorus dancers. In Pippin, Fosse wanted each chorus dancer to have an individual character that he or she played over the course of the musical. This was, if not exactly an innovation at that point, still not common practice among Broadway choreographers ( Jerome Robbins’s approach to West Side Story being the notable exception). His approach here is important to consider in relation to his style because subtext always supports the movement and gives dancers motivation for each phrase, hence the problems of restaging his choreography without his accompanying direction. This combination gives depth to the choreography in a way that merely learning steps by rote cannot. In a handwritten note to the Pippin cast, Fosse asks them to “review what you should be playing under the text…and razzle-dazzle and show biz stuff.”6 Fosse’s style is style as substance, made manifest in the tension between the surface and the interior. Fosse was alternately hailed and criticized throughout his career for prioritizing, as biographer Sam Wasson puts it, “Style over substance.” 7 This line of argument misunderstands the function of style, which Fosse sometimes used as a tool to cover flaws in a musical’s writing, but more often to reveal character and display its own substance through style: the movement was the meaning and vice versa. Indeed, his staging often overshadowed the contributions of his collaborators; this was especially true of Pippin, and critic Douglas Watt’s claim that Pippin is “a musical of enormous style” was typical of its reception.8 The musicals that Fosse worked on have not necessarily been canonized in the same way his choreography for them has; those revived since his death in 1987 have only been critically or commercially successful when they have used his original choreography or offered new dances made “in the style of ” Fosse. For example, the long-running 1996 revival of Chicago credits Ann Reinking with choreography “in the style of Bob Fosse,” which is precisely how Pippin’s 2013 revival billed choreographer Chet Walker. Fosse’s style is so influential, then, that it gets its own Broadway credit. This style, however, was not static over the course of Fosse’s career. Fosse choreographed on Broadway for over 30 years, beginning with The Pajama Game (1954; co-directed by Jerome Robbins and George Abbott) through Big Deal (1986). Though his style evolved, its trademarks were already evident in The Pajama Game and Damn Yankees (1956). One need only view filmed versions of “Steam Heat” or “Whatever Lola Wants” to glimpse Fosse’s distinctiveness. There is a sly sense of humor at the center of these dances, especially in the winking come-on of Yankee’s Lola as embodied by Gwen Verdon, Fosse’s muse. His early works embody an essentially sunny, optimistic worldview even when they were satirical, as in his dances for How to Succeed in Business without Really Trying (1961). His early film work, like “From This Moment On,” from the film Kiss 49

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Me, Kate (1953), contains many of his recognizable movement signatures (syncopated struts and finger snaps, the contrast between tight and expansive gestures and movements) but is markedly different in tone than his later work. While the humor and playfulness in his early works contrast with the darker worldview evinced in his later period (from Pippin until his death), Sweet Charity (1966) can nevertheless be understood as the musical that bridges the gap between the two periods. Its showstopper, “Big Spender,” is at once one of his funniest, darkest, and most minimal dances, in which the isolated, circular movements of one dancer’s index finger become the most important action on stage for a few seconds, drawing the viewer’s gaze to the dancer’s extremities. Though Fosse’s style is often discussed in terms of the intricacy and smallness of the movements, shows such as Sweet Charity and Dancin’ also feature expansive, space-devouring movements. In dances like Charity’s “I’m a Brass Band” and Dancin’s “Sing, Sing, Sing,” the choreography makes full use of the stage space as dancers run, jump, and strut across it. Fosse’s choreography often swells and contracts between large and small movements, even when at its most expansive. Indeed, the contrast between minimal and maximal dances gives them each power; yet the energy required to control the body in Fosse’s choreography is even greater when his style is at its most minimal. No dancer ever embodied the complexities of Fosse’s choreography more vividly than Verdon.

Selling Fosse’s Shows before Pippin: Gwen Verdon as Muse Before Fosse’s name became synonymous with style, it was associated with his then-wife Verdon, who was among Broadway’s biggest dancing stars in the 1950s and 1960s. It was Verdon’s image, not Fosse’s name, that was initially used to sell the productions. Dancing bodies have long been central to selling live performance, from burlesque to The Black Crook (1866) to the “postcard girls” of de Mille’s dream ballet in Oklahoma!, and the Fosse/Verdon musicals continued in this tradition. In Fosse’s first four shows, Verdon was the star attraction, having burst to prominence on Broadway in Can-Can (1953), choreographed by Michael Kidd. Verdon’s image was always used to advertise her collaborations with Fosse, beginning with Damn Yankees (1955) and continuing through New Girl in Town (1957) and Redhead (1959). These last two musicals utilized drawings of Verdon and her famous red hair. Images of her body were typical selling points. Damn Yankees even went so far as to completely revamp its artwork post-opening, from a rather chaste image of Verdon in a baseball uniform to a more provocative photograph of her as Lola in a strapless black bustier, tights held up with a garter belt, hands on hips. Sweet Charity, both on film and onstage, foreshadows the dark worldview of his later works, while its visual identity heralds the use of a Fosse-styled body to market his shows. Charity was Fosse’s last show explicitly in the traditional musical comedy mode, centered on a single leading lady. Four of Broadway’s biggest female dancing stars (Verdon, Chita Rivera, Reinking, and Donna McKechnie) performed the role onstage at one point or another, under Fosse’s direction (Debbie Allen starred in the 1986 Broadway revival also directed by Fosse). The dancer playing the title role is traditionally used to sell the show, and thus each star was prominently featured in the marketing for their respective productions, typically depicted in Charity’s opening pose from the musical: one hand on one hip, one foot flexed, saucily looking back over her shoulder at the camera and thus the audience, daring spectators to look at her and to try to look away. On March 5, 1967, Verdon performed two numbers from Charity on The Ed Sullivan Show: “I’m a Brass Band” and “If They Could See Me Now.” The Tony Awards were not broadcast on national television for the first time until later in 1967, so at the time, The Ed Sullivan Show was one of the few mass media outlets for live Broadway performance. Sunday night was the time and place for Broadway to enter American living rooms. Performances on Ed Sullivan functioned as de facto television commercials for Broadway musicals, much like the Tony Awards do today. 50

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This was Verdon and Fosse’s fourth Broadway musical together, and for a time they were quite a power couple on Broadway. Pippin would test Fosse’s appeal without Verdon’s presence onstage to sell tickets. Would Fosse’s work still work without Verdon?

The Triple Crown Season: Fosse’s 1972–1973 The shrewd use of different media to circulate his choreographic style that is what made Fosse’s style a star in its own right; this is because the filmed versions capture his choreographic and directorial points of view. Dance critic Joan Acocella argues that Fosse’s “imprint is easier to trace in the mass culture [than in theater]—in those music videos and night-club shows, and in dance movies.”9 This imprint has only become more apparent as time has elapsed and, as this essay argues, Fosse must have known that broadcasting his work in different filmed media would capture his work in ways the ephemeral nature of live theater could not, and hence, would ensure his legacy in a more material way. No single year was more important to cementing this visual and aesthetic legacy than 1972. In that year, Fosse’s film adaptation of Cabaret opened on February 13, Liza with a Z was filmed before a live audience at Broadway’s Lyceum Theater on May 31 and broadcast on television on September 10, and Pippin opened on Broadway on October 23. Mass media enabled Fosse to make his style a product used to sell his work, but also to brand himself; indeed, the Fosse name became so synonymous with style precisely because he mastered so many different media. Biographer Martin Gottfried notes that Fosse’s direction of the 1972 television special Liza with a Z succeeds because “Fosse and [Fred] Ebb had agreed to make the Minnelli television show in three mediums so that it would be a theater event as captured cinematically for presentation on television.”10 The following year’s award season saw Fosse winning the so-called “triple crown”: an Emmy for ­d irecting Liza with a Z, an Academy Award for directing Cabaret, and two Tony Awards for ­Pippin’s direction and choreography. This unprecedented feat remains unmatched to date. One would be hard-pressed to name another living director who has made a mark across these different media while also retaining a signature style across all of them. Fosse’s works from 1972 represent the apotheosis of what has come to define his late style. While these dances bear traces of his earlier trademarks, they demonstrate a new authorial presence and autonomy not present in his earlier work, as he was now both director and choreographer. 1972 was also the first year that Fosse truly found success outside of the theater as a director. His prior film, the 1969 film adaptation of Sweet Charity starring Shirley MacLaine, monumentally flopped critically and commercially. Critic Vincent Canby describes it as “a dim imitation of its source material.”11 Despite Charity’s failure, Fosse became the rare director-choreographer of his generation to make a successful leap from stage to film when Cabaret proved a smash. The terrific success of Liza with a Z and Cabaret also individuated Fosse apart from his long association with Verdon. One of Liza with a Z’s biggest achievements was to make theatrical dances “pop” on ­television—it is hard not to imagine that this gave Fosse the notion that a commercial for a musical could apply some of the same techniques.

Selling Broadway on Television Commodifying Fosse’s style, circulating it, and making it stick were exactly what the commercial for Pippin achieved in 1973. Through recurring exposure, advertising worms its way into consumers’ consciousness. In the case of Pippin, the novelty of a one-minute-long spot for a Broadway musical created a sense of anticipation to see the dance featured in the commercial. John ­Rubinstein, Broadway’s first Pippin, recalls, “That made us a hit. That commercial made people go crazy. They said, ‘What is that? We gotta go see that.’”12 The commercial also brought Fosse’s 51

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aesthetic vision (and direction of viewers’ focus via the camera) repeatedly into living rooms in ways that an appearance on Ed Sullivan or even the Tony Awards could not. Pippin was just the second Broadway musical Fosse directed and choreographed that did not star Gwen Verdon (Little Me was the first in 1962, which he co-directed with Cy Feuer). There could thus be no pin-up image of Verdon to sell Pippin, which did not include well-known names in its original cast. Its only nominal star was Irene Ryan, late of Beverly Hillbillies fame, though she would hardly have been a big box office draw. Vereen was fresh from starring as Judas in Jesus Christ Superstar, but sales of that show were driven by the phenomenal success of the double-LP of Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice’s rock opera released in anticipation of its Broadway debut—another notable use of existing technology being used in a new way to sell a Broadway musical. Writing before that show’s opening, Mel Gussow called it “probably… the most presold musical in Broadway history.”13 If record albums could create buzz and sell tickets, then why not a television commercial? There was a certain irony in theater turning to television to help fill seats in a theater, especially given the rapid changes in the consumption of entertainment in the United States over the course of the twentieth century. Legitimate theaters found themselves usurped by the rise of motion pictures through the Depression era; film, in turn, was challenged by the introduction of the television set to the living rooms of American homes in the 1950s. New technology has historically changed the ways culture is consumed and who has access to it. While television was certainly not a new medium in the early 1970s, and though Broadway stars often made appearances on talk and variety shows to perform numbers from their musicals, advertising on it held then-untapped potential for Broadway. Through the 1960s and 1970s, Broadway producers relied on The New York Times’ paid, alphabetical listings of shows playing on and off Broadway, and increasingly on radio advertising. “Broadway producers have in a sense eyed television as a competitor rather than as a possible ally for selling theater,” notes reporter Charlotte Harmon.14 New York magazine advertising columnist Bernice Kanner felt that producers in the 1970s believed that television commercials were too expensive and a waste of resources given their assumptions that television viewers were not interested in live theater.15 By filming a short dance with only three performers in front of a black backdrop, Pippin was able to subvert some of the costs of making a commercial, and its dramatic success in boosting ticket sales disproved the disinterested TV viewer thesis. The 1970s were a time of significant technological advances in the Broadway industry, and “between 1972 and 1978 Broadway had introduced itself to the credit card market, the computerized ticketing system, telephone reservations, modern television advertising and, by way of the ‘I Love New York’ commercial, the rest of the country.”16 These advances paved the way for rapidly rising ticket prices over the next few decades while television helped create more demand for Broadway tickets. As Fred Golden, the executive vice president of advertising agency Blaine-Thompson explains, “Television has opened up a whole new market. It works beautifully with musicals, the results are miraculous.”17 Pippin capitalized on this new market. Pippin, while a box office success, was nevertheless not a bona fide Broadway sensation after its opening. Its television commercial, however, eventually turned it into one. Pippin opened to largely positive reviews in October 1972; yet just after its opening Variety reported that it had “failed to sell out and reportedly has drawn a good but not great mail order volume. It seems a probable hit, though to what extent is not yet indicated.”18 It would be erroneously reported years later that “the producers of Pippin, in near-desperation, hit on the idea” for a commercial and that within “three weeks, Pippin was playing to capacity crowds.”19 Reviewing the production’s reported sales figures, however, tells a different story. According to Variety, between its opening in 1972 and the end of 1973, the grosses dipped below $80,000 only once—but the production was never in serious financial danger. Most weeks the show did fine at the box office, and had even returned a profit of 52

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$100,000 to its investors by May 1973. By the next month—the month the commercial began airing—profits returned to investors had shot up to $450,000. The Tony Awards gave the box office a notable boost from a $96,661 average for the four weeks before the broadcast to a $109,963 average for the five weeks following the cast’s televised performance of “Magic to Do.”20 Clearly, appearing on television provided a demonstrable bump to the show’s bottom line. Pippin’s advertising executive Peter LeDonne came up with the idea to do a television commercial, which he presented to Ostrow and Fosse. They agreed to make the commercial in hopes of extending Pippin’s run. Though the commercial began airing in June 1973, its box office impact truly became clear in the first week of 1974, when there was a truly sizeable jump in sales: from $72,370 during the last week of December 1973 to $112,568 the following week, typically a time of slow sales on Broadway.21 Six months later, Variety anointed Pippin “the most impressive hit of the 1973–1974 season” due to its “potent television spot campaign, using the brilliant staging by Bob Fosse.”22 And yet without Fosse’s direction of the commercial, it likely would not have had the same impact. Variety explains, “Other Broadway musicals have used tv spot coverage, but have had lesser response, presumably because the tele spots themselves are less effective.”23 This commercial’s particular innovation was to film a live performance of a dance from the show from several angles and then cut them together in postproduction. Choosing the right material for the commercial turned out to be a key decision. Pippin dancer Pamela Sousa remembers, “The airing of our commercial took everyone by storm. It was simple, direct, a little sexy […] You didn’t have to hear a big ‘sell,’ you could just watch a terrific dance. There were evenings the audience would clap as we started the dance. It must have been in recognition of the commercial and their excitement of seeing us live.”24

Sixty Seconds of Pippin Pippin’s commercial offered television viewers “a free minute” of the dance known by the company as the “Manson Trio,” which was danced by Vereen, Candy Brown, and Sousa.25 Even more so than in his choreography onstage, Fosse controls the television viewer’s perspective through his direction of the camera. With the camera, he is able to take viewers above, behind, and beside the dancers. Fosse’s visual signifiers are all immediately visible: hats, canes, and the idiosyncratic combination of isolated body movements and fluidity. The dance is performed by a trio—one of Fosse’s favorite combinations, as demonstrated in The Pajama Game’s “Steam Heat,” Liza with a Z’s “I Gotcha,” and Sweet Charity’s “There’s Gotta Be Something Better Than This,” among others. The choreography juxtaposes rigid, militaristic movements and more fluid, relaxed ones; each shift in the choreography’s tone is accompanied by a change in the direction of the dancers’ movements. The dancers move as a perfectly synced unit throughout. The dance contracts and expands between small, tight isolated movements and larger, more fluid ones. At times, the dancers stretch their limbs as if moving their bodies through water; at other times, they appear rigid and inflexible. Regardless of its angle, the camera nearly always captures the dancers’ entire bodies in the frame, allowing viewers a complete sense of the choreography. The intricacy and movement economy of Fosse’s choreography make this dance the perfect fit for television (Figure 5.1). The commercial tellingly provides absolutely no context for what Pippin is actually about, and effectively sells the show through a snippet of an essentially plotless dance. Onstage, but not in the commercial, the Manson Trio emerges from the “Glory” sequence, in which the Leading Player is heard in voiceover announcing the number of dead and wounded in wars ranging from the War of the Roses to World War II. In this sense, the Manson Trio is less a narrative dance than one that comments on the narrative, which made it more easily divorced from its narrative context. “You have to understand that the impact this dance had on the audience was that Fosse wanted to show them how in the time of war with horrific killings, slaughters, etc., (which were mimed in the background) at home there was still laughter, smiles, fun. The unawareness or 53

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Figure 5.1  C  andy Brown, Ben Vereen, and Pamela Sousa in a scene from the Broadway musical Pippin (New York). Photo by Martha Swope ©Billy Rose Theater Division, The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts.

caring of the ‘real’ world events was, hopefully, gut-wrenching,” explains Sousa.26 In the Manson Trio, then, dance becomes a distraction from atrocity. In this vein, especially because the commercial aired during late-night news broadcasts during 1973, the commercial potentially served to distract from the horrors of the Vietnam War for viewers at home. Critics noted the power of this juxtaposition as well. Edwin Wilson calls the Manson Trio “quite possibly the most original and telling anti-war number the American musical has produced,”27 while T.E. Kalem describes how “the sight of the people dancing makes playgoers see the people who are dying with a disconcerting clarity.”28 The dancers wear smiles on their white-painted faces as the killings occur upstage. However, all that viewers at home saw in the commercial was purely dance and pure Fosse. This move is a classic vaudevillian bait and switch, where something is promised but something else is delivered; Pippin’s commercial gave next to nothing away about the musical itself and when spectators recognized the dance from the commercial while seeing the musical at the Imperial, their feelings of recognition were likely unsettled by the killings happening upstage. This paradoxical reaction reflects the social critique embodied in Fosse’s late style: that it is easier to be distracted by surface and/or style than it is to pay attention to what is actually going on behind it. Fosse realized the potential of advertising his shows on television as both an artistic and commercial opportunity—after all, Broadway musicals need to run to be profitable. Though Pippin’s commercial helped the show become a long-running success, Ostrow ultimately had mixed feelings about its impact on the theater industry as a whole. He explains, “it never occurred to me that it would change the way theater was to be produced. From that moment on, hucksters could sell musicals as soap, so long as their spot had glitter and hype.”29 In other words, for Ostrow, Broadway became just another commodity to be sold the same way other products were sold. Yet Fosse elevated the very act of selling into an art of its own. What was a paradigm shift in the Broadway industry quickly became standard practice and continues to this day, albeit arguably without auteurs like Fosse directing their own commercials. Broadway musicals have long existed at the intersection of art and commerce; what made Pippin’s commercial innovative was that it found a new way to capitalize on this relationship and set a rapidly emulated trend.

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Conclusion: Keeping Fosse Commercial Fosse went on to make commercials with LeDonne for all of his subsequent Broadway shows. They produced a second commercial for Pippin in 1975 featuring a shirtless Michael Rupert and two scantily clad female dancers in an excerpt of “With You.” This spot explicitly sold Pippin’s comedic/erotic sexual experimentation with two women. Once again, a threesome was used to sell Pippin on television. In this commercial, the first words the viewer hears are, “Pippin is a musical comedy directed by Bob Fosse.”30 Unlike the first commercial, this one displays the more lyrical side of Fosse’s style by highlighting the sensuality of the dancers’ movements. Unlike the first commercial, this one manages to alert the viewer to the fact that the musical does have a plot via voiceover though choreography that gives little away about it. Most tellingly, it names Fosse as auteur right at its onset, as did the first spot; both commercials fail to mention the musical’s composer and lyricist, Stephen Schwartz. “Bob Fosse” was marketed as much as Pippin. In his commercials for Broadway, Fosse successfully divorced his choreography from its narrative context in order to lure audiences. Wasson notes that by the mid-1970s, “[c]utting his own commercials had become an essential part of Fosse’s promotional outreach. Though his approach to the Pippin spot had been straightforward and theatrical, a single-number amuse-bouche, his concepts [turned into] “short films” that were “expressly cinematic.”31 Here again, Fosse cannily mixed techniques from one medium into another. These spots were intended to tease audiences and pique curiosity about the rest of the show and to seem revealing but actually reveal very little except the dancers’ bodies. Fosse’s commercials eschewed relying on stars to sell the musical even when its stars could have sold them. His Broadway follow-up after Pippin, Chicago (1975), starred big Broadway names—Verdon, Rivera, and Jerry Orbach—yet its commercial featured none of them. Instead, the commercial walks a line between the theatrical and the filmic, as lithe chorines sensuously slither over an arrangement of “All That Jazz” sung not by Rivera, as in the musical, but by the female chorus. In this respect, the commercial further emphasizes the idea that Fosse’s style was the true star and selling point of his musical. The Chicago ad was Fosse’s most explicitly erotic, and this helped solidify the often-misunderstood relationship between style and sex in his later work. In the commercial for Chicago, as well as in Pippin’s second ad, Fosse hints at the comedic side of sensuality as much as its erotic side. Sex is comic and sexy while comedy itself becomes sexy. Fosse understood that sex was a potent force in advertising; it sells, as the saying goes. Fosse’s ad for his all-singing, all-dancing, plotless revue Dancin’ (1978) takes a different tack altogether. It repeats the show’s title five times in the course of 60 seconds to percussive accompaniment, while the bodies of Dancin’s dancers sail through the air in slow motion. The dancers’ bodies are highlighted more than Fosse’s choreography, which is not recognizably his. The movements here are all recognizable as turns, leaps, and jumps—a stark change from the highly stylized dancing in his other commercials. Fosse’s name is not spoken until the very last seconds of the commercial, when the announcer quickly says, “directed by Bob Fosse.” Though the show’s title indicates its content (dance), it is Fosse’s direction named not his choreography. Fosse’s final original Broadway show, Big Deal (1986), was a flop that even a television commercial could not make commercially successful. Though he died in 1987 at age 60, his style lives on, especially in pop music videos spanning decades (e.g. Paula Abdul’s “Cold Hearted” (1988) and Beyoncé’s “Single Ladies” (2008)). The 2019 FX series “Fosse/Verdon” further circulates Fosse’s style by mixing mediums: a television program about the creation of Broadway musicals and films. Fittingly, in 2012 the United States Postal Service immortalized Fosse on a “Forever” stamp issued in honor of National Dance Day, yet another way that his style has been kept in literal circulation. The stamp depicts Fosse’s unique blend of high and low forms: he is dressed casually but wears a top hat and holds cane, ever the showman. The press release announcing the stamp describes Fosse as “one of the 20th century’s great choreographers. As an artist, Fosse was known

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for his thoroughly modern style, a signature one could never mistake for anyone else’s.”32 There is something ironic in Fosse being reduced to stamp size; yet there is also a certain justice in the reduction: as his choreography often directs dancers to move with small, subtle, and precise isolations, Fosse’s style retains its visual economy and impact even on something a small as a postage stamp. Rivera succinctly elucidates this contradiction: “Bob Fosse, who else? A minimalist. Less is more Fosse.”33 Pippin’s first commercial distills his style powerfully in just 60 seconds. Style itself is the substance of his work, expressed in the tension between the appearance and the meaning of a movement. Style was used to lure spectators in so that they could grasp its actual import. Bob Fosse’s work across multiple media embodies how far style can be stretched, how it can be sold, how it was the star, and how it became “Fosse.”

Notes 1 FilmArchivesNYC. “Pippin TV Commercial (stock footage / archival footage),” filmed 1973, YouTube video, 0:59, posted September 2011. . 2 Stuart Ostrow. Letter to the editor, New York Times. 17 Sept. 2006. 3 Blaine Thompson Company Media Schedule Memo, 13 June 1973, Box 25A, Bob Fosse and Gwen Verdon collection, Library of Congress, Washington, DC. 4 Ben Vereen. Foreword to The Fosse Style by Debra McWaters. Gainesville: UP of Florida, 2008. ix. 5 Lynn Ahrens, Terrence McNally and Stephen Flaherty. Chita Rivera: The Dancer’s Life, unpublished typescript, Billy Rose Theater Division, Theater on Film and Tape Archive, The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, 2006. ­ ongress, 6 Bob Fosse to Pippin cast, no date, Box 25A, Bob Fosse and Gwen Verdon collection, Library of C Washington, DC. 7 Sam Wasson. Fosse. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013, 322. 8 Douglas Watt. Review of Pippin, Daily News (New York). 24 Oct. 1972. 9 Joan Acocella. “Bob Fosse: Dancing and the Dark.” Reading Dance: A Gathering of Memoirs, Reportage, Criticism, Profiles, Interviews, and Some Uncategorizable Extras. Ed. Robert Gottlieb. New York: Pantheon, 2008. 1096. 10 Martin Gottfried. All His Jazz: The Life and Death of Bob Fosse. New York: Bantam, 1990. 228. 11 Vincent Canby. Review of Sweet Charity film, New York Times. 2 Apr. 1969. 12 Andrea Simakis. “John Rubenstein, the original Pippin, remembers Bob Fosse, Broadway’s first TV ad and Irene Ryan bringing down the house.” The Plain Dealer (Cleveland). 30 Jan. 2015. 13 Mel Gussow. “‘Superstar’ a Hit before Opening.” New York Times. 12 Oct. 1971. 14 Charlotte Harmon. “New Sales Methods for Broadway.” Backstage (New York). 16 Aug. 1974. 15 Bernice Kanner. “Selling the Great White Way.” New York. 28 Dec. 1981. 16 Ostrow. New York Times. 17 Sept. 2006. 17 Philip H. Dougherty. “Advertising” column, New York Times. 1 July 1975. 18 “B’Way Ebbs. But ‘Pippin’ Big $93,153.” Variety. 1 Nov. 1972. If a patron did not wish to either go to or call the box office to buy tickets, they could fill out a form requesting tickets and mail it with a check to the box office. Mail order instructions were often in newspaper ads as well as in direct mail pieces received at one’s home. 19 Kanner, New York, 28 Dec. 1981. 20 Variety, 30 May 1973. 21 Variety, 2 Jan. 1974. 22 “Theater is Now a National Invalid.” Variety, 5 June 1974. 23 “TV-Hypoes, ‘Pippin’ Roars On; Profit Payoff Reaches 1,188%.” Variety, 17 Apr. 1974. 24 Pamela Sousa. E-mail message to author, 24 Feb. 2017. 25 The dance’s sinister title refers to in the multiple murders committed by members of the Manson Family in 1969. The staging of the Manson Trio calls attention to the fact that everyday life goes on amid atrocities. The dangerous charisma of Pippin’s Leading Player makes him the Charles Manson-like leader of the cult-like Players, who follow him and do his bidding. 26 Sousa. E-mail. 27 Edwin Wilson. Review of Pippin, Wall Street Journal. 24 Oct. 1972. 28 T.E. Kalem. Review of Pippin, Time. 6 Nov. 1972.

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Style as Star 29 Ostrow. New York Times, 17 Sept. 2006. 30 Michael Rupert. “Michael Rupert as Pippin (1975 Commercial),” filmed 1975, YouTube video, 1:00, posted Mar. 2012. . 31 Wasson (2013), 575. 32 United States Postal Service Postal News, 2012, “New Stamps Debut on the National Stage.” United States Postal Service. Web. 19 Feb. 2017. . 33 McNally et al. (2006), 2:8.

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6 RECREATING THE EPHEMERAL Broadway Revivals since 1971 James Lovensheimer

Although revivals of Broadway musicals began in the late nineteenth century—The Black Crook (1866) had its first revival in 1870—it was the commercially and critically successful 1946 revival of Oscar Hammerstein II and Jerome Kern’s 1927 musical Show Boat that marked the beginning of the current era of revivals. This revival was directed by Hammerstein, as was the original 1927 production and the first revival in 1932. The first revival was virtually a replication of the original production; it even retained much of the original cast, although it contained minor changes, which the original creators thought improved the overall show.1 The 1946 revival of Show Boat, however, came 19 years after the original and thus could not rely on the audience’s familiarity with the original production. As Hammerstein noted, “Our present production had to be built to match the enhanced glamor of the public’s memory of Zieg feld’s original production.”2

Nostalgia Inside and Outside the Theater Hammerstein’s comment reveals an exploitation of nostalgia, which was not a common element in American musical comedies of the 1920s and 1930s. Indeed, musicologist Katherine Axtell wrote of the first revival that “the 1932 Show Boat revival more nearly resembles a final bid for maintenance of the status quo than an exercise in nostalgia.”3 Nostalgia was, however, a quality that had become an important part of the American musical not long before the 1946 revival. In addition to the many other creative breakthroughs Hammerstein, along with Richard Rodgers, made in 1943 with Oklahoma!, that important work manufactured nostalgia for an earlier, less sophisticated, less troubled time in American life—a nostalgia that was particularly relevant in the midst of a devastating world war. Moreover, the creation of this nostalgia in the subsequent revival of Show Boat involved altering the concept of the work itself in order to preserve an imagined quality that the original never really had. For example, what the theater historian Miles Kreuger called the “understated” costumes and sets for the original production were redesigned to create “a more decorative look” that the public had by this point come to expect. The revival, he noted, “was intentionally theatrical and artificial” and dramatically softened to de-emphasize the racial aspects of the story.4 In his book on Show Boat, musicologist Todd Decker called this production “the first Broadway revisal [a combination of a revival and a revision of the original]” and noted that it was also the first example of a revival in which a classic show was reconceived in accordance with contemporary Broadway standards, while retaining enough older sensibilities to satisfy the nostalgic tendency.5 58

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Hammerstein’s balancing of these old sensibilities with up-to-date audience expectations was perpetuated in subsequent revivals of other musicals like those that became popular at New York’s City Center in the mid-twentieth century.6 At the same time, and although the nostalgia effect was certainly at work with these productions, they tended to be more faithful to their sources than the Show Boat revival—perhaps because many of them were of more recent vintage. The next influential revival did not appear for several decades. In 1971, tapping into a powerful resurgence of nostalgia in the socially and politically turbulent 1970s, the director Burt Shevelove, along with his musical staff and set and costume designer Raoul Pène du Bois, created a revival of the 1925 musical No, No, Nanette that became the biggest Broadway hit of the season. This production marked the beginning of a new era of commercially important, often highly reenvisioned revivals that were frequently characterized by their exploitation of the kind of nostalgia first put forth by Hammerstein in 1946. Several aspects of the 1971 No, No, Nanette production had built-in nostalgic appeal. For instance, it starred the 60-year-old movie musical star Ruby Keeler, who had not worked professionally in almost 40 years. It was originally to have been directed and choreographed by the long-retired Busby Berkeley, a director of classic 1930s Hollywood musicals. However, the lasting effects of Berkeley’s ongoing drinking problem and his overall poor health forced the producers to reconsider his active involvement in the production; he retained consultant status, mostly to keep his name and past glories connected to the production. Finally, the score contained the classic songs “Tea for Two” and “I Want to Be Happy,” among other evocative period songs. But the opulent sets and costumes beautifully evoked an imaginary 1920s, and the lush orchestrations were decidedly more 1971 than 1925— the original orchestrations, had they still existed, would have sounded thin to ears already used to amplification. Nevertheless, the production stayed fairly close to the original score in content, and while the book was somewhat rewritten, it was “all innocence and warmth, the way most people remember the Twenties to have been.” 7 Or at least how they thought they remembered them. In his book about the revival of No, No, Nanette, Don Dunn describes this phenomenon as it occurred at the production’s first preview in Boston. During Ruby Keeler’s tap dance in the number “I Want to Be Happy,” the audience, mostly made up of “aging Boston matrons…might as well have closed their eyes while they watched Ruby dance, for they did not see what was on the stage. They saw what their memories and minds and hearts wanted them to see. They saw their own youth, alive once more.”8 The musical theater historian Ethan Mordden aptly described the revival as “a fresh antique”: an up-to-date production that did not want to be taken seriously as a contemporary musical but as “something of the 1920s for the 1970s.” Mordden added that “No, No, Nanette reinstituted the kind of musical one meant by the word ‘musical.’”9 That “reinstitution,” in turn, satisfied an increased nostalgia for a lighthearted kind of musical and the imagined insouciant attitude of its era. As the 1970s grew increasingly dark and troubled due to the ongoing war in Vietnam, ­Watergate, inflation, and other social, political, and economic calamities, the taste for nostalgic revivals increased. By the end of the decade, more than 30 older musicals had been revived on Broadway. Revivals of carefree musical comedies from the 1920s, like Whoopee and Irene, were popular, although the contemporaneous social and political humor of those shows demanded various amounts of rewriting to make them accessible to later audiences. In some cases, as with Irene, entire scripts, if not always storylines, were jettisoned and new ones were created. Other Broadway revivals, which became increasingly prominent in the 1970s and have continued to appear regularly on Broadway through the turn of the century, were integrated shows from the more recent past, like Oklahoma! and The King and I. These, like the earlier City Center revivals, were generally unchanged beyond small cuts and slightly reimagined staging.10 By the end of the 1993–1994 Broadway season, revivals outnumbered new musicals seven to six.11 That same season, a separate Tony Award for Best Revival of a Musical was first awarded, and in 1994, 59

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New  York City Center launched Encores!, its series of semi-staged, lesser-known revivals with limited runs. Several of these productions transferred to Broadway; one of them, Chicago, is to date the ­longest-running revival in Broadway history.12 By the second decade of the twenty-first century, revivals had become an established, often highly anticipated and, in some cases, highly lucrative factor of each new season. The sources for revivals continue to be far-reaching, from 1921s Shuffle Along to the 1980s Cats and Les Misérables, among others. Not all these revivals exploit nostalgia. Some seek to create entirely different experiences of the works being revived. Nonetheless, new versions of earlier shows tend to offer familiar, safe experiences for audiences, as the writer Gerald Clarke observed in his 1971 Time article on nostalgia, which appeared five months after the revival of No, No, Nanette opened. Nostalgia, he wrote, “selects only what is agreeable, and even that it distorts or turns into myth.”13 Nostalgia is nearly always for something ephemeral, which is subsequently remembered but intangible. Performances of earlier musicals fall into this category. How revivals of ephemeral works exploit and manipulate audiences’ connection to, and enjoyment of, nostalgia for them is the principal focus of what follows.

Revivals Up Close To better understand how revivals relate to or exploit nostalgia, we should explore each type in more detail. The first kind of revival is a new production of a show that is as literal a reproduction of the original as possible, sometimes even replicating the original sets, costumes, and staging. Changes to script and score are minimal in these revivals. In the second type, the score and the book are unaltered while the sets, staging, and directorial concept are altered, sometimes drastically, as we shall see. The third type is the revisal, mentioned earlier: the balance between old and new material changes the original while retaining enough of it to be identifiable to the audience. The fourth type uses the original work more as a springboard for something new than a work to be revived. New books are written, numbers from other shows are interpolated, and plots are sometimes reconstructed. Some examples of this type, noted later, even change the original show’s title. Further, an increasing number of new shows are now based on collections of nonmusical theater songs that already have a quality of nostalgia to them. This last kind of musical marks the emergence of a fifth type, which can achieve the effect of a revival without actually being one. This may well be one of the most interesting recent developments in the American musical, and in how we think about revivals and the purposes they serve. Before its fifth definition of the word—“a new production of an old play or motion picture”— Webster’s Encyclopedic Unabridged Dictionary of the English Language defines the word “revival” as either (definition three) a “restoration to life, consciousness, vigor, strength, etc.” or (definition four) “restoration to use, acceptance or currency.”14 Definitions three and four imply that what is revived is something that has died, either literally or figuratively, from lack of current use. Regarding musicals of the 1920s and 1930s, this is appropriate: shows like No, No, Nanette and Girl Crazy (revised and revived in 1992 as Crazy for You) were dead to theater audiences and were indeed restored to “acceptance” and “currency” in long-running revivals. Then again, when they were revived, or brought back to life, their physically identifying characteristics were changed. Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett notes that the contemporary idea of revival “speaks to a rupture of cultural transmission in postwar America,”15 suggesting that the temporal rift of World War II—in our terms, the pre-Oklahoma! musical and the post-Oklahoma! musical—is a very real consideration when it comes to what shows from what part of the past are revived and how. Since older shows were ephemeral creations meant to be enjoyed specifically in their own time and then forgotten, any solid sense of historical textual authenticity is difficult, if not impossible to recreate. Among other reasons, the dramatic, or written, texts from 1920s and 60

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1930s musicals are often incomplete, orchestrations and, less often, the written music itself were sometimes not saved, copies of original scripts are hard to find, and humor was usually topical and contemporaneous. Due to the increased availability of dramatic texts from postwar musicals, however, revivals of those shows are more apt to be minimally altered. While important exceptions abound, this nevertheless allows for more far-ranging explorations of extant performance texts to be realized in production. Kirshenblatt-Gimblett’s observations suggest further that the actual revival of a pre-World War II musical in its original form is rendered impossible by ruptured cultural transmission. The best we can expect, in other words, is an example of what she calls “heritage music,” the word “heritage” here implying “a mode of cultural production that gives the disappearing and gone a second life as an exhibit of itself.”16 Thus Crazy for You becomes an “exhibit” of Girl Crazy, or at least of what we think it might have been; revivals of No, No, Nanette become exhibits of what we think, or want to think, 1920s musicals were like, because exact replications are impossible. This observation, in turn, leads to another one: the revival of an ephemeral genre such as the 1920s musical is itself, by nature of its being a live performance, ephemeral. In 1927, the year the original production of Show Boat premiered, the folklorist Benjamin Botkin wrote almost presciently of future revivals of that and other prewar works: “Every revival contains within itself the seed not only of its own destruction…but also of the new revivals.”17 The ongoing revivals of Show Boat, as well as the ongoing restaging of classic works by Rodgers and Hammerstein, suggest the validity of this observation.

Type One Revivals such as director William Hammerstein’s 1979 Broadway production of Oklahoma!— or, especially, one at North Carolina School for the Arts, which in 2011 attempted to recreate every detail of that show’s original production—demonstrate this type. The latter, while not a Broadway revival, is notable for the exactness of its details.18 Perhaps most revelatory was the bold brightness of the original costumes, which recall Kreuger’s comments about the decorative look of the post-Oklahoma! revival of Show Boat. Director Bartlett Sher’s recent revivals of South Pacific (2008) and The King and I (2015) at ­Lincoln Center also exemplify this first type, although the revival of South Pacific restored dialogue and one song cut from the original production. Still, as New York Times critic Ben Brantley commented, Sher “is no strong-armed revisionist. He works from within vintage material, coaxing strong emotional depths to churn up a surface that might otherwise seem shiny and sleek.”19 In other words, the nostalgia of Sher’s revival was not always completely comfortable. Although younger audiences may have found the length of these classics off-putting—ushers at the revival of South Pacific, in particular, were known to warn audiences about the length of the first act—many older audience members surely experienced the sense of returning to a familiar place.

Type Two Revivals of the second type consist of virtually unchanged dramatic texts that are reinterpreted through new staging concepts and directorial approaches. An excellent example was the 1993 revival of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Carousel. This production, which came to Broadway by way of a successful run in London, was directed by British director Nicholas Hytner as a complete rethinking of an American classic. Even writers critical of the musical praised Hytner’s vision of the work. The critic Robert Brustein, no fan of Oscar Hammerstein’s, referred to ­Carousel as “American skimmed milk of the postwar variety,” but allowed that “Nicholas Hytner’s p­ roduction serves up the pabulum with extraordinary energy and verve and even some edge to an obviously delighted audience.”20 61

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Hytner’s fresh vision of the show can perhaps in part be explained by his having come to it from outside the Broadway tradition. Although Carousel is set in nineteenth-century New England, the director used nontraditional and color-blind casting for characters who, since the original 1945 production, had always been played by white actors. He encouraged grittier, more complex portrayals of the principal characters, and created an almost surreal visual concept that suggested the work itself had grown beyond the realistic theatrical conventions of the 1940s. The opening number, for example, was completely reconceived. Instead of taking place entirely within the single set of a carnival, as described in the script, Hytner opened the sequence up to begin in a textile mill where the principal female characters worked. When work was over, the set turned as the women left to meet male companions, who escorted them to the carnival. This set change sequence was imaginatively cinematic.21 Hytner succeeded in conceptually contemporizing Carousel without changing its nineteenthcentury setting. His production was an example of a subtextually reconceived but virtually unaltered dramatic text, which defamiliarized the original material and reinvested it with new meanings. Revivals of this stripe provide a new frame of experience for the already-known. ­Nevertheless, it is often the nostalgia for whatever is already known that draws audiences to these types of revivals in the first place; if that nostalgia is disrupted too much by new production concepts, popular reception can be problematic. Two other examples of this kind of revival are worth noting, in part because they resulted in such different theatrical experiences. Diane Paulus’s 2013 revival of Pippin reconceived ­d irector-choreographer Bob Fosse’s rather dark original production. Fosse used exaggerated makeup for the ensemble, which recalled commedia dell’arte; the costumes and sets, too, often suggested the story’s setting in the middle ages. Fosse’s distinctive choreography informed all the staging.22 ­Paulus instead used a bright circus motif and appropriately acrobatic choreography.23 Audiences who remembered Fosse’s pizazz more than his cynicism were delighted; those eager to see a replication of his cynicism—and his chorography—were not pleased at all. Eight years earlier, John Doyle took Sweeney Todd, one of the darkest musicals in the repertory, to an even darker place with his revival. This musical tells the harrowing story of a barber’s search for revenge, which involves many slashed throats and victims who are then ground up and baked into meat pies by the barber’s female accomplice. Embedded within that story, which oddly enough is often quite amusing, is a powerful criticism of class and power. Stripped of the original huge set and lush orchestrations, and using a greatly reduced cast—the members of which played the sparse accompaniment on various instruments, often while singing—Doyle’s revival was played on a single, small set that created a disturbing sense of claustrophobia. It also stuck close to the source material—cuts were minimal—yet managed to create a stunning minimalist intensification of it. In his review in The New York Times, Brantley suggested, “Surely no previous production of ‘Sweeney Todd’ has had such a high quotient of truly unsettling horror or such a low quotient of conventional stage spectacle.”24

Type Three The third type of revival—the “revisal”—retains varying amounts of the original text but also incorporates substantial textual and conceptual changes, often by the original creators or a new director. The startlingly dark 1998 revival of Cabaret exemplified this approach. The fundamental idea of the show remained the same: the linear story about cabaret singer Sally Bowles and writer Cliff Bradshaw in Berlin during the rise of Nazism is juxtaposed with increasingly decadent musical numbers performed by a depraved emcee and the ensemble in the Kit Kat Klub. Both elements crash into each other with Sally’s performance of the title number late in the show. The revival was undertaken with the full cooperation of the original creators. Composer John Kander noted, 62

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“What Fred [Ebb, the lyricist] and I have learned…is that if you’re going to revive a piece, you need to reinvent it. To just do it the same way doesn’t often work.”25 (A little-noticed first-type revival of the show in 1986 seems to have proven his point.) The book for Cabaret was rewritten by original author Joe Masteroff and British director Sam Mendes. Rewrites involved interpolations of musical numbers from the film version and reinsertions of numbers cut from the original production. Instead of a big production like the original one, the revival was small. It opened at the intimate Henry Miller Theater, which had been refashioned as a nightclub, and then moved to Studio 54, where, musicologist Jessica Sternfeld noted, it mixed “its mood of sleazy debauchery with that space’s own lurid past.”26 Both spaces were carefully designed to create a claustrophobic atmosphere. The choreographer Rob Marshall remarked, “There’s a No Exit atmosphere…At the beginning it’s very seductive. Then, halfway through, you kind of feel the doors lock…”27 Indeed, the production allowed the audience to ­experience how seductive Nazism was by more intimately surrounding them with it. While the original production of Cabaret also represented Germany’s moral decay through increasingly perverse cabaret entertainments, it was big and shiny, and the title number became an irony-free popular song in the mid-1960s. All this was completely subverted by the 1998 revival, in which even the title song was recast as dark, angry, and ironic. A comparative viewing of the original opening number and that of the Mendes production provides an effective demonstration of their differences.28 “I don’t think of this as a 30-year-old musical that’s getting a revival,” Kander observed. “It’s more like a work in progress.”29 Mendes’ staging supported Kander’s observation. The 2015 revival of the musical The Color Purple, directed by John Doyle, also demonstrated this approach. Based on Alice Walker’s 1982 Pulitzer Prize winning novel of the same name, the musical tells the story of Celie, one of the most downtrodden characters ever represented in a musical. Her story contains multiple incidents of male violence to women, including rape, incest, and accounts of female genital mutilation. While the original 2005 production was commercially successful, it was not well received by many critics, most of whom found it overproduced and too heavy-handed in its sentimentality of a story that, despite a somewhat upbeat ending, was not at all sentimental. Doyle drastically trimmed 30 minutes from the show and greatly simplified the production concept. The overall result was a completely reimagined musical that aimed to strip away any sense of sentimentality in exchange for raw emotion.

Type Four In revivals of the fourth type, works are mostly or even completely rewritten, songs are interpolated from other shows and, sometimes, even the title is changed. The 1992 production Crazy for You was a highly successful example of this type. Outfitted with a new book by the playwright Ken Ludwig, Crazy for You bores only a vague relation to the original Girl Crazy by Guy Bolton, John McGowan, and George and Ira Gershwin, but was nonetheless a beautifully crafted farce that used only six of the twenty-three numbers from the original show. Discarded numbers were replaced with other, more lasting and still-recognizable songs by the Gershwins, and Crazy for You was billed as “the new Gershwin musical comedy.” Most of the interpolated numbers were standards from various sources, inserted for nostalgic, dramatic, or comic effect. This approach has repeatedly proven successful in revivals, and shows with scores by George and Ira Gershwin have been especially popular for the treatment. In 2012, Nice Work if You Can Get It, a 1920s Prohibition musical that bore a distant relation to the earlier hit Oh, Kay (1926), again reframed a collection of Gershwin tunes. Although some critics thought the show lacked the carefree ambience of the original, it was a modest hit due in most part to the popularity of its stars, the successful staging, and the continued allure of the Gershwin songs. 63

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Type Five The fifth and most recently developed type is not literally a revival, but is nonetheless essential to any discussion of the genre. This type is most often demonstrated by so-called “jukebox musicals,” shows that assume a familiarity with, and often nostalgia for, songs that did not originate in the musical theater but that are turned into scores for new book shows. These shows often feel like revivals of shows that never existed, even when nostalgia is not a key element. Although not technically revivals, jukebox musicals, like the four types of revivals mentioned earlier, suggest a complex interweaving of nostalgia, intertextuality, and popular music. The overall effects of this fifth type clearly relate to the effects of the other four types, especially in terms of the nostalgia they can and often do generate; all five types thus belong in any consideration of revivals. The highly successful Beautiful: The Carole King Musical (2014) is a jukebox musical that operates as both a bittersweet biography of King and a nostalgic replication of the original performances of her songs by well-known artists. The appearances of the songs within the biography work as plot devices; the musical demonstrates how the well-known songs were created, and the personal and emotional connections they had to the characters. But at the same time, they often turn into recreations of performances by the artists who recorded the songs. For instance, when songwriter Barry Mann is struggling with sight-reading his writing partner Cynthia Weil’s song “You’ve Lost that Loving Feeling,” the stage is taken over by actors playing the Righteous Brothers, who sing their famous version of the song. This technique lifts many of the songs in the show out of the realm of biography and into the realm of the audience’s previous experiences with them. The performance re-creations within the biographical musical are sentimental and often highly entertaining revivals of pop music performances, but they are nonetheless only slightly related to the book. Most of the performers—the Drifters, the Shirelles, the Righteous Brothers, and so on—have no identity or established relationship to the characters in the musical, apart from performing their songs. So although Beautiful is not literally a revival, the nostalgia evoked by its many inserted performances makes it feel like one, as does the audience’s familiarity with King’s and other Brill Building songs. This two-tiered use of songs both within and outside the book is typical of jukebox musicals, whether the result has audiences dancing in the aisles to decades-old ABBA hits at performances of Mama Mia!—in which the original contexts and meanings of the songs are incidental to the newly created plot—or singing along to hits by Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons at performances of Jersey Boys—which, like Beautiful, is as much nostalgic performance of the songs as it is biography of the characters who created and sang them. In all such shows, then, some kind of performance or memory of performance is being revived via replications that satisfy audiences’ craving for nostalgia, even if the vehicle for doing so is not a revival of a preexistent musical.

Hybrids In 2016, a curious musical came along that challenged categorization within any of the types already mentioned. Early in his review of Shuffle Along, or The Making of the Musical Sensation of 1921 and All That Followed, the drama critic Ben Brantley noted that the show had been “suffering from an identity crisis.” He explained, “It shares its name and most of its song list with a landmark ­musical from 1921, which means this production should qualify as a revival, right?” Not necessarily: the show was also a newly written backstage musical about the creation of Shuffle Along, and what happened to its creative team and cast after its initial legendary success. Most of the critics agreed that the “revival” sections drawn directly from the original production were far more successful than the newly created material. The producers of Shuffle Along wanted it to be nominated for a 2016 Tony Award as a revival, probably to avoid competing with the megahit Hamilton for the Best Musical award. Nonetheless, it was nominated as an original musical—and lost to Hamilton.

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Recreating the Ephemeral

Shuffle Along worked in some respects like a jukebox musical. Many songs were retained from the actual musical, a few scenes of which were reconstructed within the new show, which focused on the making of the original production. Additional songs by Noble Sissle and Eubie Blake were also incorporated. In terms of typology, then, the contemporary version of Shuffle Along was rather dizzying. But the combination of genres, along with a feeling of nostalgia for the original Shuffle Along and its songs that the revival somehow generated despite its having been virtually forgotten by nearly everyone except theater historians, is perhaps indicative of where some future revivals might go. The 2017–2018 Broadway season demonstrated other hybrid possibilities. The 1937 London hit Me and My Girl was revived virtually unchanged in the West End in 1954. In 1984, with a revised book and some additional music, it was again revived in London and subsequently on Broadway, where it was again highly successful. In his New York Times review, Mel Gussow called the 1984 revival “a nosegay of nostalgia, reminding one of the salad days of more innocent musicals.”30 And in May of 2018, it was again revived in New York as part of the Encores! series with cuts and revisions characteristic of many Encores! productions. The old show seems to still be a work in progress. In the same season, Escape to Margaritaville, developed at the La Jolla Playhouse, combined several characteristics mentioned earlier. This was, ostensibly, a jukebox musical featuring classic tunes by songwriter and performer Jimmy Buffett, as well as a few songs expressly by Buffett for the new book. Further, at least one review suggested another aspect of the work: James Herbert of the San Diego Tribune wrote that the book’s “sly wit and…disarming way of winking at musical theater conventions help the whole thing go down.”31 The easy nature of the classic songs encouraged ample nostalgia, and the new material padded the score. The show received negative reviews, however, and Buffett’s fans could only keep it alive for 124 performances.

Conclusion The tradition of revivals, in all their current forms and probably some new ones to come, remains a strong element of the contemporary musical theater. This tradition began in the immediate post-World War II years in which Americans experienced their lives moving faster and increasingly beyond their control, and it is reflective of the importance of nostalgia to each subsequent generation. Reviving and resuscitating something ephemeral that has been lost in time gives power to the memory of experiences long since past, and that memory reinforces beliefs that are often challenged by the complexities of American life in and since the postwar era. Revivals can be comforting and empowering, since nostalgia suggests that what is intangible or lost might still be expressible, and even those too young to feel nostalgia for certain eras and their music can still enjoy the product of that nostalgia. It is highly unlikely that anyone who was not at least in their twenties in the 1970s could be nostalgic for ABBA’s songs, for example, but that does not render audiences incapable of experiencing the irresistible exuberant expression of nostalgia created by Mama Mia. Shuffle Along achieved a similar effect. Revivals live comfortably and often profitably alongside new works, and both continue to stimulate audiences. And today’s new shows provide experiences soon lost, only to be regained and reframed by their future revivals.

Notes 1 The principal cast change was that of Paul Robeson as Joe, originally played by Jules Bledsoe. Robeson, for whom the role was written, had triumphed in the 1928 London production and was a formidable box office draw. Dennis King also took over the role of Gaylord Ravenal, the romantic lead, previously played by Howard Marsh. The most obvious alteration to the book was the moving of the final scene from 1927 to 1932. This allowed Norma Terris (Magnolia) to keep her impersonations, which were featured in the show, up to date. Todd Decker. Show Boat: Performing Race in an American Musical. New York: Oxford UP, 2013. 140.

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James Lovensheimer 2 Oscar Hammerstein II, liner notes, Show Boat, 1946 Broadway revival recording, Columbia Records ML/OL 4958. Emphasis added. It should be noted that composer Jerome Kern had nothing to do with this revival as he died in November of 1945. 3 Katherine Axtell. “Maiden Voyage: The Genesis and Reception of Show Boat, 1926–1932.” PhD diss., U of Rochester, 2009. 317. 4 Miles Kreuger. Show Boat: The History of a Classic American Musical. New York: Oxford UP, 1977. 158. 5 Todd Decker, Show Boat, 169. Decker discusses the 1946 revival at length. 169–179. 6 These mid-century revivals at City Center should not be confused with the Encores! series of semi-staged revivals at City Center that began in the 1990s. 7 Don Dunn. The Making of No, No, Nanette. Citadel: Secaucus, 1972. 13. 8 Dunn, Nanette, 275, 280–281. 9 Ethan Mordden. One More Kiss: The Broadway Musical in the 1970s. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. 141, 142. 10 Julian Mates. America’s Musical Stage: Two Hundred Years of Musical Theatre. Westport: Greenwood Press, 1985. 197. 11 Paula Span. “Another Openin’, Another ‘Show Boat’: How to Update a Classic for the ‘90s!” The Washington Post. Sunday Show Section. 2 Oct. 1994, final edition, G1. 12 Seven other Encores! productions besides Chicago reached Broadway: Wonderful Town (2003); The Apple Tree (2006); Gypsy (2008); Finian’s Rainbow (2009); On the Town (2014); Violet (2014); and Sunday in the Park with George (2017). Web. 17 July 2018. . 13 Gerald Clarke. “The Meaning of Nostalgia.” Time. 3 May 1971, 77. 14 “Revival.” Webster’s Encyclopedic Unabridged Dictionary of the English Language. New York: Gramercy Books, 1994. 1227. 15 Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett. “Sounds of Sensibility.” Judaism 7.1 (1998): 51. 16 Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, “Sounds,” 52. 17 Benjamin Botkin. “The Folksong Revival: Cult or Culture.” The American Folk Scene: Dimensions of the Folksong Revival. Ed. David A. DeTurk and A. Poulin, JR. New York: Dell, 1927, 99. 18 The entire North Carolina School of the Arts revival is available on YouTube. Act 1 is at . Act 2 is at . 19 Ben Brantley, “The ‘King and I’ Is Back on Broadway.” The New York Times. 17 Apr. 2015. . 20 Robert Brustein, “Theater Review.” The New Republic vol. 208 (March 1, 1993): 27. 21 The contrast between the two concepts of the opening is easily observed by comparing the film version which is a fairly literal, if somewhat cut down, reproduction of the original (www.youtube.com/ watch?v=oyEOm0RIcWo&t=95s) and a video of the opening of Hytner’s London production (www. youtube.com/watch?v=VUVqEwsXnZ0). 22 For a replication of the original production, see www.youtube.com/watch?v=5xBxeCN1K18. 23 For a slightly shortened version of Paulus’s opening number, see . 24 Ben Brantley. “Grand Guignol, Spare and Stark.” The New York Times. 4 Nov. 2005. . To compare the opening numbers of each production, see, for the original Broadway production,  https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=KmAIB-Kf_Ew&list=PL4SuB4V-60xEJeuW8DAeptf TB1L-wtqYr&index=1,  and, for the Doyle revival, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XNCXLbK744k. 25 Quoted in Everett Evans. “‘Chicago’ Seemed Locked Away for Good, but a Simple Sexy Revival Changed All That.” The Houston Chronicle. Zest section, 2 Aug. 1998. 8. 26 Jessica Sternfeld. “Revisiting Classic Musicals: Revivals, Films, Television and Recordings.” The ­Cambridge Companion to the Musical, 2nd ed., Ed. William A. Everett and Paul R. Laird. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge UP, 2008. 326. 27 Quoted in Hilary Ostlere. “Dancetheater: Wilkommen.” Dance Magazine, vol. 72 (March 1998): 102, 103. 28 For the original staging of the opening number, see , see . 29 In Gerard Raymond, “Weimar Wonderland.” American Theater. Feb. 1998: 4. 30 Mel Gussow. “‘Me and My Girl’ Is a Nosegay of Nostalgia.” New York Times. 17 Aug. 1986. . 31 James Herbert. “Broadway-Bound Escape to Margaritaville at La Jolla Playhouse.” 6/8/2017. Quoted at .

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PART 3

Aesthetic Transformations

If an entertainment form doesn’t change with the times, it becomes just like the proverbial shark that stops moving: dead in the water. Just like movies, television shows, music, and websites, the live musical needs to be in a state of constant transformation, or audiences will take their ­interest—and their ticket-buying dollars—elsewhere. Music and dance styles, fashion trends, vocal techniques, and technology all change and develop with time, so the theater industry must adapt accordingly. Otherwise, musicals won’t be interesting or appealing to new audiences. Stage musicals must constantly negotiate tensions between tradition and change: enough of the ingredients that make live musicals continue to feel like live musicals need to be blended with trends that make them seem contemporary and exciting and fresh—not old-fashioned or stale. When it comes to viewing the increasingly distant past, such adaptations seem comparatively obvious. For example, early-twentieth-century advances in lighting lent themselves very well to the theater, and it make perfect sense that theaters across the world would quickly swap candles for oil lamps, gas for oil, and electricity for gas as quickly as they possibly could. Each option, after all, was cleaner, more efficient, more practical, less smelly and, most importantly, much safer than the one that came before it. More recent adaptations, however, are not always quite as clear-cut or advantageous, and have not always been immediately embraced. This is especially the case since technology has developed in the second half of the twentieth century at such a dizzying rate that audiences can barely get used to one new trend before two or three others come along to compete with or replace it. New technologies are not only hard to keep up with, they are also often deemed counter to the sense of liveness that is so central to the theater experience in the first place. Nevertheless, despite complaints from purists who resist modernization at every step, the stage musical as a genre has, for the most part, managed to retain its liveness, its traditions, and its connections to its past, all the while embracing new styles, trends, approaches, and technologies. The number of essays in this section is perhaps indicative of just how important technology has been to the changing aesthetics of the contemporary stage musical, whether in terms of its aural and visual components or its approaches to casting and to appealing to increasingly tech-savvy audiences. You’ll get no protesting purists here: the contributors in this section, all clear-eyed scholars, present a collectively well-balanced take on what can often be a hotbed of debate. There are no opinion pieces on whether or not stage microphones have destroyed the stage musical, or how awful it is that scenery is no longer made the way it was in 1954. The contributors to this section are thus here to explain various ways the musical theater has developed and adapted in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

Aesthetic Transformations

To start, three different scholars focus in on contemporary vocal styles and their relationship to technology. The human voice is, after all, central to the stage musical’s very survival, and the ways amplification has influenced it are thus of enormous importance. Ben Macpherson considers the birth of several vocal styles that stem from the advent of microphones, and that have become increasingly recognizable in contemporary productions. The development of microphones themselves is the subject of Arreanna Rostosky’s essay, while Dominic Symonds focuses in on one of the more influential—and amplified—contemporary trends to take place on Broadway in his essay about megamusicals, the overall aesthetics of which continue to influence ever-larger and more amplified productions to date. In his article about musicals by the composer Michael John LaChiusa, Alex Bádue doesn’t discuss changing technology so much as he does LaChiusa’s signature style. Nevertheless, his profile of the composer considers the same kind of balance theater artisans must strike in working with technological advances: LaChiusa, it is clear, has forged an aesthetic that is simultaneously uniquely contemporary and inspired by cherished musical theater creators of generations past. Michael Kennedy’s study also focuses on innovations in sound. His article offers case studies that together reflect challenges contemporary musicals face when incorporating new kinds of sounds and new kinds of instruments into the live theater. Matthew Lockitt’s piece focuses on broader changes in the theater industry, with emphasis on the increasingly close relationship between Broadway and more mass-mediated entertainment forms. This results in large part from the stage musical’s need to work with more powerful entertainment conglomerates in order to survive, in large part by inviting film, television, and pop stars—often with enormous international reach—to take part in musical theater development and thus to help sell tickets to new productions. Finally, Christin Essin looks at the ways stagecraft has changed with the tech boom, in an essay devoted to detailing the various kinds of labor performed behind the scenes of live musical productions. Taken as a whole, these essays offer a few ways that Broadway has evolved from the days when candle chandeliers dripped hot grease on spectators below, beefy stagehands threw their weight against manual turntables, and belters strained their voices to reach the rear balconies.

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7 SING Musical Theater Voices from Superstar to Hamilton Ben Macpherson

In 1995, the New York Times arts journalist Laurence O’Toole published an article entitled “­Musical Theater Is Discovering a New Voice.” The article charted the rise of throat and head microphones for musical theater performers, and contained the following quote from composer John Kander: “My memory is that when I did the dance music for ‘Gypsy’ on the road, one day Jule Styne turned on the foot mikes without telling Ethel Merman. I say it’s been downhill all the way from that moment.”1 There are those, like Kander, who believe the introduction of microphone amplification was a descent downhill, and those who see the use of technology as an inevitable progression of cultural spaces like the musical stage. Both sides offer logical arguments. For example, Philip Auslander has suggested that technology in live performance is now necessary because audiences are used to watching things on a screen, offering actors a much greater range of expressive possibilities.2 Conversely, Jill Dolan provides a more visceral perspective, arguing that live performance is always an intensely human experience offering a glimpse of the utopian. In this case, technology takes away from the very real intimacy of the “liveness,” distancing spectators, and even devaluing the skills and vocal training of the performers themselves.3 Journalist Ellen Gamerman succinctly concludes that “the theater world is divided.”4 While this debate offers context, it is not the basis for this chapter, which takes as a truism that over the last half-century the musical stage has embraced the use of technology, influenced by the need to keep pace with changing audience expectations as recorded sound and televisual media became ubiquitous in popular culture. Taking this shift as a given, this chapter considers the ways in which audience-driven production values have impacted the aesthetic of the contemporary musical. The performance aesthetic of the contemporary musical has, in turn, impacted and challenged audiences themselves. In A History of Singing, John Potter and Neil Sorrell note that technology had a “liberating effect” on Broadway, extending its sonic and aural palette beyond the traditional “legit” sound that tends toward either a more operatic vocal quality or the nasal belt of stars such as Ethel Merman.5 Principal characters no longer had to “present” their songs across an orchestra and up into the balcony; rather, “it became possible to sing in an intimate, conversational manner and still be heard by the largest audiences,” which was “genuinely revolutionary.”6 Yet, this liberating effect was not a one-off shift in style or technique. Between 1970 and the present day we might identify four emergent voices in the performance aesthetic of musical theater. First, the Rock Voice, which began in the late 1960s with Hair (1967), continuing with Jesus Christ Superstar (1971), and still heard 69

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in musicals like Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson (2010) and School of Rock: The Musical (2015). Second, the Poperetta Voice, which began in the mid-1980s and is embodied in the sounds of productions like Les Misérables (1986). Third, the New Broadway Voice, which encompasses the bright twang of musicals spanning A Chorus Line (1975) through works like The Book of Mormon (2011). Finally, the Verismo Voice, which relates to realism and includes the complicated character-led performance style of much of Stephen Sondheim’s work, but may also include the folk-pop of Next to Normal (2009) or Once (2011). Starting with the Rock Voice, this chapter will consider each, in turn, focusing on the performance aesthetic in context, the production values, and, importantly, audience expectations of what a musical theater voice is, can, or could be.

The Rock Voice Often associated with “urban rebellion and a working class aesthetic,” the Rock Voice departs from the legit vocal sound of Broadway’s Golden Age. It is “rougher, less controlled, and less practised,” embodying a raw, direct, and expressive sound that might contain rasps, “gravelly” textures, or “catches and sobs or broken sounds to represent deep emotion.” 7 When this Rock Voice began to feature in Broadway musicals, it fundamentally reimagined what musical theater could sound like. One of the musicals that pioneered the Rock Voice was the 1971 musical Jesus Christ Superstar; focusing briefly on the Rock Voice in this show will offer a framework for the rest of the chapter. Jesus Christ Superstar gave rise to two specific developments that helped shape the Rock Voice in musical theater. Both developments are related to rock music’s primal, rebellious, emotional quality—“the rock sound” that popular music theorists have considered with regard to the idea of “authenticity” in performance.8 Because of its urban, raw quality, rock music is often thought of as sounding “real,” “original,” and “of undisputed origin, genuine.”9 This connection between the rebellious and raspy aesthetic of the Rock Voice and ideas of authenticity can be understood with reference to the work of musicologist Peter Kivy. In Authenticities: Philosophical Reflections on Musical Performance, Kivy considers two types of authenticity. Sonic authenticity is the “genuine” and “real” sound of the performance, while sensible authenticity refers to the way audience members may understand a performance to be real or authentic.10 Using these two terms, we can map the pioneering developments seen in Jesus Christ Superstar to better understand the Rock Voice and the other voices in this discussion. When Jesus Christ Superstar first opened on Broadway on October 12, 1971, it came via a concept album released as an LP and marketed by a record company. The recording was a litmus test used to help sell the idea of the work as a musical. After all, even in the increasingly secularized 1970s, a musical that chronicled events in the last few days of Jesus Christ’s life on earth, told from the human perspective of his betrayer, Judas Iscariot, was a hard sell to many commercial theatrical producers. Superstar has often been described as a “rock opera,” a term that suggests it juxtaposes two competing modes: the grand, high-art and virtuosic qualities of opera, and the raw, rebellious low form of rock music. Indeed, scholars have explored the ways Lloyd Webber draws upon operatic structures in his writing.11 While in reality the musical draws on a range of styles, using rock as a frame for the performance in its orchestrations and vocal palette, Superstar explicitly used a rock sound, departing from traditional boundaries of sonic authenticity in musical theater.12 Conventionally, male leads (tenors) would sing in their chest voices in order to sound “masculine,” while romantic heroines would usually be cast with sopranos to sound particularly “feminine.” This is not the case in ­Superstar. Mary Magdalene, the closest thing to a romantic heroine, is a mezzo-soprano who belts from her chest voice. Jesus and Judas are both tenors, who at times use high rock tenor voices and access their falsetto, for example in “Gethsemane” ( Jesus) and “Damned for All Time” ( Judas). 70

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To hear Jesus singing with a full-throated falsetto, and for his betrayer Judas to employ a vocal cry when he commits suicide or a gravelly rasp when he decorates the melody of the mocking title song, marked a foundational shift in the vocal landscape of musical theater.13 Yet how does this relate to ideas of sonic authenticity? At the time Superstar opened, rock music—a more mature outgrowth of 1950s rock’n’roll—was already established as a countercultural alternative, and then a mainstream contrast, to the pop of the 1960s. As noted earlier, it sold itself as the music of “urban rebellion” for a new generation.14 This youthful sound expressed emotion through distorted guitars, pulsating rhythms, and earthy vocal properties. Taken together, these aesthetics are seen by cultural theorist Simon Frith and music historian Richard Middleton to indicate the primary idea in the rock music sound: authenticity.15 In fact, Middleton observes that the myth of authenticity dominates rock vocality, where voices sound like they are sincere and etched with “real experience.”16 For a subject as emotive, contentious, and universally engrained in Western culture as the death of Jesus Christ, the Rock Voice as a contemporary, emotional, raw, urban sound shot through with “real experience” was a fitting aesthetic to convey the sonic authenticity of both the era and subject matter. How, then, does this relate to the sensible authenticity of the Rock Voice as experienced by audience members in Superstar? As Peter Wicke and Rachel Fogg note in their book Rock Music: Culture, Aesthetics and Sociology, the primal drive of the Rock Voice implied that technology had become an important part of the process, seen in the use of handheld microphones on stage in Superstar.17 The Rock Voice was of the time, and the use of microphones and amplification enabled musical theater to emulate the sonic properties of the concept album on stage, meaning that for audience members familiar with the LP or title song (released as a single in the United States in 1969 and then again in 1971), the musical would sound like the record (even if this was more of an ideal than a reality).18 In this sense, the attribution of authenticity in Superstar as “real,” “genuine,” and “original” in its sonic aesthetic could also be applied to the sensible authenticity, as audience members may have been preconditioned to the technologically amplified sounds of the musical before seeing the production.19 Likewise, for those who attended the musical without first hearing the recording, this new sonic palette would have pushed their sense of what of musical theater production could sound like beyond their prior experience. Since the Rock Voice enabled the tribe in Hair to sing about free love, and gave Jesus and Judas contemporary voices in the 1970s, it has featured in numerous musicals—either as the dominant sound, or as part of the palette of voices, including Godspell (1970), Grease (1971), The Rocky Horror Show (1973), Starlight Express (1984), Rent (1996), Spring Awakening (2008), Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson (2008), and Spider Man: Turn off the Dark (2011). Aspects of the vocal setup that is used to achieve the Rock Voice, through crying or sobbing sounds, feature as part of many megamusicals as well.

The Poperetta Voice While other discussions of musical theater tend to focus on differences between a pop/rock sound and a “traditional” musical theater voice,20 few studies separate the vocal style associated with the megamusicals of the 1980s and 1990s. With regard to both sonic and sensible authenticity, however, there is something to be said here. As a subset of the musical theater form, the “megamusical” is associated with the productions of Andrew Lloyd Webber, Cameron Mackintosh, and Disney. As its name suggests, everything in the megamusical is on a grand scale, from the sets, costumes, and performances to the hugely iconic marketing campaigns for Cats (1980), Les Misérables (1985), The Phantom of the Opera (1986), Miss Saigon (1989), The Lion King (1997), and even Wicked (2003). As Jessica Sternfeld has noted, “the plots of megamusicals are big in scope: they are epic, sweeping 71

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tales of romance, war, religion, redemption, life and death […] and other lofty sentiments.” In this they share common thematic concerns and a sense of musical grandeur in their use of recitative, choruses and arias with traditions of grand opera, allied closely to their commercial appeal and product placement.21 Within this epic scope, megamusicals tend to envelop the audience in sweeping, cinematic, often through-sung sound worlds, which has led to the colloquial term “poperettas.”22 This portmanteau of “pop” and “operetta” echoes the competing imperatives of “rock” and “opera,” and certain operatic and popular vocal sounds can therefore be heard in the Poperetta Voice in a way that is also culturally significant. Notwithstanding moments of operatic parody in The Phantom of the Opera, the Poperetta Voice employs a range of voice qualities that might be best explained using methods popularized by American voice trainer Jo Estill.23 While a full explanation is not possible in a chapter of this length, the Estill Method (as applied to musical theater) categorizes voice production into six “qualities” for performance, all present in some form in the Poperetta Voice. The first is speech quality, seen in the recitative passages in through-sung megamusicals like Les Misérables, wherein a breathy, conversational tone replaces spoken dialogue. The second is falsetto—already noted in Jesus Christ Superstar, and heard in “The Music of the Night” (Phantom) and “Bring Him Home” (Les Misérables). The third quality is sob, a crying setup heard in the Rock Voice, but also employed frequently by Valjean in Act One of Les Misérables, and in songs including “Why God Why?” (Miss Saigon). The fourth and fifth voice qualities drawn from Estill are twang (often misunderstood as purely a nasal setup, producing a bright, clear sound) and belt, which, when mixed together, produce a brilliant, bright sound, akin to Ethel Merman’s de facto performance style mentioned earlier. In the megamusical, twang can be heard as a stylized sound in characterizing the Thénardiers in Les Misérables, or in lending the precocity to Glinda in “Popular” (Wicked). The final quality, opera quality, can be heard in the Priest’s song in Les Misérables, in “Stars” (also in Les Misérables), and perhaps most specifically on the original cast recording of Sunset Boulevard (1993) in Judy Kuhn’s performance of Betty Shafer or George Hearn’s performance of Max Von Meyerling. When mixed with twang and belt, the Poperetta Voice therefore evokes operatic sensibilities of full-throated, serious vocal production, combined with “more of a ‘pop’ or commercial sound.”24 It is this combination that typifies the Poperetta Voice, even though a brief consideration here suggests that in its breadth of stylistic features and sounds, it offers what might be seen as a universalizing effect; these musicals can be, or can sound, all things to everyone in their vocal evocation of “sweeping tales” and “lofty sentiments.”25 Perhaps this all-encompassing expectation is one reason why the Poperetta Voice has not yet received sustained scholarly attention, even though, as vocal coach Mary Hammond states, singers now “need to be able to sing in many different styles.”26 Developing in London, the combination of bombast and pretension in the Poperetta sound is explicitly not Broadway; yet in the broad combination of vocal qualities forged together, its sonic authenticity sounds like the time period in which these productions were first successful: during the heyday of global capitalism, typified by free-market economics and the grand narratives of aspiration espoused by Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government and Ronald Reagan’s administration, and catalyzed by the early boom years of computing and technology.27 Combining pop-culture, speech quality, and opera quality (along with many character-specific variations from show to show), the Poperetta Voice drew from mass culture and high-culture in a manner that might have fulfilled the aspirations of a newly monied, suburban, middle-class couple who felt The Phantom of the Opera was “highbrow” (operatic) enough to impress, but “middlebrow” (commercially accessible) enough to enjoy. This combination is seen in the megamusical’s production values and storylines, but importantly, it lies also in the sonic authenticity of the characters. In tandem with the social product-placement of these musicals, the excess of the 1980s is seen in the scale of these works. With the all-encompassing cats’ junkyard, falling chandelier, ­helicopter on stage and barricades, technological wizardry made these musicals ever-more cinematic in their 72

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sweep. Vocal delivery had to match the grandeur of the production values, and this was achieved with a strong, brilliant belt quality underpinned with stylistic nods to the operatic, even despite the fact that the works themselves are not operas. In other words, the sonic authenticity—of grand vocal gestures, in a mixture of speech quality and legato, vibrato and coloratura that nodded to the operatic—was an aural representation of the sensible authenticity of its audience. As Dan Rebellato and Susan Russell have noted, the production techniques popularized (if not pioneered) by Cameron Mackintosh were also typical of the age: each production would look and sound the same in a phenomenon mockingly called “McTheater” (after the franchise nature of the McDonald’s fast food chain), which saw productions in London, New York, Tokyo, Berlin, and elsewhere attempt to evoke a uniform sonic authenticity in a performance of cultural globalization.28 Yet, alongside this Identikit sonic aesthetic of grandeur and social aspiration, other types of voice have also emerged since the 1970s in contemporary musical theater.29 While microphone amplification has become standard on Broadway and in the West End, the New Broadway Voice and the Verismo Voice both focus on something other than technological wizardry in their performance aesthetic.

The New Broadway Voice If John Kander’s memory of the moment Ethel Merman sang with amplification was a turning point in musical theater, this moment laid the foundations for the development of what might be called the New Broadway Voice. This has neither the pretension of the Poperetta Voice nor the raw sonic authenticity of the Rock Voice (associated with a particular sensible authenticity in and of itself ). Rather, it might be understood as a tamer version of Merman’s muscular, direct twang—a slight retreating behind the orchestra that nevertheless remains confident in its ability to reach an audience via amplification. This voice tends to be less florid than the Poperetta Voice, with Tracey Moore and Allison Bergman noting it “has less melisma than contemporary pop” (meaning it does not overly decorate the melody with vocal gymnastics), and relies on solid technique that does not produce a “breathy voice” also often found in pop music.30 In other words (and at the risk of oversimplification) the New Broadway Voice might be Merman with the volume turned down. Examples of the New Broadway Voice can be found in a whole range of Broadway musicals, from the bright and bitter energy of “I Hope I Get It” in A Chorus Line (1975) or the throaty brashness of Chita Rivera or Liza Minnelli in The Rink (1984), to the Gershwin musical Crazy for You (1992), the bright exuberance of “Jimmy” in Thoroughly Modern Millie (2002), the nasality of “It Sucks to Be Me” (Avenue Q, 2003) or “Hello” from The Book of Mormon (2011). While the vocal setup for these may differ, the direct confidence of this New Broadway Voice contrasts with the Poperetta Voice in its clean, crisp attack, amplified by microphones but with a sonic authenticity that is culturally specific to New York. It is not ponderous or indulgent in its performance style, and exudes a confidence and brilliance in its sound that accords with the sensible authenticity of its existence on Broadway. Indeed, it is so culturally specific that it struggles to transfer or transpose into other contexts or places. Yet while the New Broadway Voice might be seen as an outgrowth of Merman—on a continuum of sonic authenticity that is inextricably linked to a place and an art form—Moore and Bergman have noted that the increasing number of theatergoers “more familiar with MTV [or YouTube] than Rodgers and Hammerstein” has led to the New Broadway Voice making “technical and artistic adjustments,” embracing pop sounds in a way the Rock Voice and the Poperetta Voice do not.31 For example, there is no influence of African-American music on the Poperetta Voice, and yet the New Broadway Voice includes soul and gospel idioms in its sonic authenticity, 73

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from the vocal slides heard in “I Am Changing” (Dreamgirls, 1981) and “The Schuyler Sisters” (Hamilton, 2015) to the “riffing” in “Seasons of Love” (Rent, 1996). Importantly, musicals such as Parade (1998) employ a range of vocal setups, from opera quality, belt and twang, to the influence of blues and gospel in its vocal colors, as voice increasingly plays a key part in the aesthetic of musicals and in the genre’s ability to characterize time, place, and people. Indeed, this ability to draw on a range of styles is perhaps what most typifies the New Broadway Voice in a way it did not when Merman was at the height of her fame. Voice coach Penny Harvey-Piper points to the need for musical theater performers to “make different quality sounds,” while Elizabeth Howard sees musical theater as “heading back towards specialization” in its vocal demands.32 In this case, the sonic authenticity is no longer about making a voice heard across an orchestra, but rather making a character authentic in telling a story. Once more, the impact of technology is clear as singers “no longer needed to call upon a generic singing technique to project into large spaces.”33 This is not to imply that more traditional Broadway styles in any way suffered because of a sense of the “generic” (some might even argue that the influence of pop music on Broadway’s vocal styles has led to an increased sense of a generic aesthetic), but simply that the palette from which a singer may now create sounds is much the greater for amplification, from which two primary changes have occurred.34 First, musical theater now draws from a range of sounds in its vocal arsenal. Second, musical theater performers can use what might be called the Verismo Voice.

The Verismo Voice “Verismo” is a term that relates to realism, and might be understood with reference to naturalness. In this respect, the Verismo Voice is peculiar in musical theater. While the Rock Voice might draw attention to its means of amplification in order to perform a sense of authenticity, and the Poperetta Voice needs amplification to be heard across the mass of synthesizers, strings, and sets, the Verismo Voice uses electronic amplification by pretending that it is not there. It is a voice that asks the audience to come closer, to forget that they are in a theater watching someone act, sing and (possibly) dance in a stylized, fantastical medium. It is a voice in which performers “sing in an intimate, conversational manner” and, understood in this way, the Verismo Voice is the closest thing to speech in musical theater singing.35 Because of this, the Verismo Voice has a sonic authenticity that may be altogether more complex. Gillyanne Kayes suggests that the Verismo Voice is present in Les Misérables as a characteristic of the recitative, enabling the sonic textures of a through-sung musical to shift from “heightened speech” to full-throated song, a sonic dynamic seen again in other megamusicals that tend toward the operatic.36 Yet the overriding sonic authenticity of the megamusical is not one of verismo but rather grand gesture; the use of Verismo Voice simply allowed for a dynamic shape in the sound world of these musicals. However, in other cases the Verismo Voice indicates a character’s emotional or psychological state in a way that fundamentally differs from that of the other voices considered here. With its airy quality created by a breathy onset, the Verismo Voice allows for a sonic authenticity that is prosodic, intimate, sincere, or vulnerable, often combining these in intense or emotionally ambiguous moments. It allows for conversational address that moves beyond the standard book (or “integrated”) musical aesthetic. If Scott McMillin is correct to suggest that songs stop the action of a traditional musical to enlarge moments of emotion in singing—what he sees as performative “spaces of vulnerability”37—then the Verismo Voice challenges such a distinction by blurring the boundaries between speech and song, suggesting a sonic aesthetic that does not overtly enlarge, but pushes the sonic authenticity of musical theater toward that of straight plays. If this is the case—and received wisdom suggests that singing in musical theater is often seen to give voice to “the subtext 74

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of our lives” through heightened emotional expression—then the sonic authenticity of the Verismo Voice might suggest more than just the use of technology to support “singing quietly.”38 Rather, this voice is seen in musicals whose characters do not express clearly defined emotions or attitudes. It can be heard in conversational songs that grow out of dialogue, or that directly seek to mimic talking in a manner that transcends the speech-to-song aesthetic. For example, in Adam Guettel and Craig Lucas’s Floyd Collins (1994), Homer and Floyd’s “The Riddle Song” uses the Verismo Voice extensively in its verses, and the surviving townsfolk of Into the Woods (1984) argue with the Witch in “Your Fault” using a breathy, staccato delivery to accentuate the conflict of the moment. In both cases, no characters are willing to admit their true emotions: Homer is keeping Floyd distracted from the fact that he is stuck down a cave; the Baker, Jack, Little Red Riding Hood, and Cinderella are displacing their sense of loss, hopelessness, and anger by directing it at each other. It is precisely because these characters do not give full-throated voice to their situation that the sensible authenticity is experienced as ambiguous, complicated, real. Notably, this sense of emotional disconnect or denial is given voice routinely in the canon of Stephen Sondheim musicals: Glynis Johns’s performance of “Send in the Clowns” from A Little Night Music (1973) depicts Desiree Armfeldt as regretful, embarrassed, and frustrated, while Elaine Stritch’s performance of “Ladies Who Lunch” from Company (1971) draws upon the Verismo sound because the subtext of embittered disillusion would not be possible if they sounded any other way. Importantly, in each of the cases mentioned earlier, these characters all share one specific emotion: vulnerability, the very emotion McMillin suggests songs contain.39 Perhaps the Verismo Voice would be better called the Vulnerable Voice, as the sonic authenticity it offers also allows for George to be alone and “miss a lot” as Mandy Patinkin sits softly in his falsetto during “Lesson #8” in the final scene of Sunday in the Park with George (1986), or when Molly sings “With You” to Sam in Ghost (2011). If the Verismo Voice gives space to the complex ambiguities of vulnerable emotions, this must have a particular consequence on the sensible authenticity of audience members.40 As Scott ­McMillin notes, rather than the universal or utopian emotional ideals often (if not always) present in Golden Age musical theater, creative teams in the second half of the twentieth century—­ including Stephen Sondheim and his collaborators, John Kander and Fred Ebb, Michael Bennett and Bob Fosse—created dramas of “difference,” that dealt with irony and anger in works that are “complex” and “multiple” in their ideas and ideals.41 Irony, anger, complexity, and ambivalence are all present in the Verismo Voice—a contradictory, psychological sonic aesthetic that offers audiences a sound that they are familiar with: their own. The Verismo Voice does not sing at us, but rather of us, for us, and even with us. Provocatively, McMillin concludes his consideration of musical theater by suggesting that when “African-American and Latino-American composers, writers, and performers” join the pantheon of musical theater giants, then musical theater will have truly reached its goal, as a form whose overriding sensibility is to mirror the ideals of everyone: “a social life worth aiming for.”42 A little under a decade after McMillin wrote this, Hamilton premiered Off-Broadway at the Public Theater on January 20, 2015. Perhaps it is telling that the sonic aesthetic of this musical is one almost entirely dependent on the Verismo Voice, through its use of rap and hip-hop as primary musical languages. As with In the Heights (2008), the composer, writer, and performer Lin-Manuel Miranda led a multiracial company in a musical that tells the story of Alexander Hamilton and the Founding Generation through the lens of race and immigration. In this case, Hamilton performs the complex range of emotions felt by minority and immigrant communities as they try to integrate or wrestle with their identities in the political turbulence of contemporary America. This use of a contemporary sonic authenticity bears no little parallel with Jesus Christ Superstar and its use of the Rock Voice four decades earlier. For a younger musical theater audience, ­Hamilton likewise offers a contemporary sonic authenticity that may be new to musical theater, but which reflects the sensibility of the era, and, in turn, extends what musical theater can do. 75

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Conclusion Since the 1970s, musical theater voice has developed and progressed beyond a traditional Broadway style, even though this is still seen in numerous revivals and in some more recent works as well. However, in each case—whether it is the Rock Voice, with its raw and emotional sense of sonic authenticity; the Poperetta Voice, with its bombast and aesthetic that draws upon operatic styles in a popular context; the New Broadway Voice, as a bold and assertive development of “the Broadway sound”43 whose sensible authenticity is inextricably linked to Broadway and New York; or the Verismo Voice, with its breathy sincerity, vulnerability, or performance of emotional ­d isconnect—every voice type has developed through an explicit connection to the technologies of amplification, and in response to changes in audience expectation and sensibilities. These voices can lay claim to an authenticity that transcends their performance, and that can sing of particular times, places, and cultural conditions. Voice, therefore, is responsive, animate, and dynamic; a “junction point for multiple encodings of experience to be negotiated and understood.”44 Given the continuing advances in technology and audio-visual design, and the possibilities on offer in using contemporary performance styles to tell historical narratives, it is reasonable to conclude that musical theater will continue to develop, and, in its negotiation of sensible and sonic authenticities, that musical theater will continue to discover new and exciting voices.

Notes 1 Lawrence O’Toole. “Musical Theater Is Discovering a New Voice.” The New York Times. 22 Jan. 1995. Web. 3 Jan. 2017. . 2 Philip Auslander. Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture. 2nd ed. New York and Oxford: ­Routledge, 2008. 3 Jill Dolan. Utopia in Performance: Finding Hope at the Theater. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2005. 4 Ellen Gamerman. “Broadway Turns Up the Volume.” Wall Street Journal. 23 Oct. 2009. Web. 14 Jan. 2017. . 5 John Potter and Neil Sorrell. A History of Singing. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge UP, 2012. 252. 6 Potter and Sorrell, A History, 245. 7 Millie Taylor. Musical Theater, Realism and Entertainment. Basingstoke: Ashgate, 2012. 50, 51. 8 Richard Middleton. “Rock Singing.” The Cambridge Companion to Singing. Ed. John Potter. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001; Simon Frith. The Sociology of Rock. Edinburgh: Constable, 1978. 9 Peter Kivy. Authenticities: Philosophical Reflections on Musical Performance. Cornell: Cornell UP, 1995. 3. 10 Ibid., 3. 11 Joseph P. Swain. The Broadway Musical: A Critical and Musical Survey. 2nd ed. Lanham: Scarecrow, 2002. 315–332. 12 Andrew Lloyd Webber cited in Stephen Citron. Sondheim and Lloyd Webber: The New Musical. Oxford and New York: Oxford UP, 2001. 148. 13 See Taylor, Realism and Entertainment. 14 Ibid., 51. 15 Middleton, “Rock Singing”; Frith, Sociology of Rock. 16 Middleton, “Rock Singing,” 38. 17 Peter Wicke and Rachel Fogg. Rock Music: Culture, Aesthetics and Sociology. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge UP, 1990. 4–23. 18 The complications of microphone usage and the problems of a sonic shift from recorded album to the stage are referenced by Jessica Sternfeld in relation to the original production of Superstar. See Sternfeld. The Megamusical. Indiana: Indiana UP, 2006. 25. 19 It is, of course, also worth acknowledging that the moment electronic guitars featured in a pit band for a musical, electronic amplification of voice became an aesthetic feature borne of necessity. 20 See Kathryn Green et al., “Trends in Musical Theatre Voice: An Analysis of Audition Requirements for Singers.” Journal of Voice 28:3 (2014): 324–327. 21 Sternfeld, Megamusical, 2.

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Sing 22 Ben Brantley. “A Tutor, a Triangle and Hearts that Sing.” The New York Times. 18 Nov. 2005. Web. 21 Dec. 2016. . 23 See . 24 Joan Melton. Singing in Musical Theatre: The Training of Singers and Actors. New York: Allworth, 2007. 99–100. 25 Sternfeld, Megamusical, 2. 26 Melton, Singing, 76. 27 Dan Rebellato. Theatre and Globalisation. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2009. 41. 28 Rebellato, Globalisation, 39; Susan Russell. “The Performance of Discipline on Broadway,” Studies in Musical Theatre 1:1 (2007): 97–108. 29 The idea of voices or sonic sound worlds being “Identikit” is a fallacy; each voice is, of course, individual and unique to the person speaking or singing. Yet, the intention to unify and standardize the productions of megamusicals may well have stretched to “standardizing” voices, through technology. 30 Tracey Moore and Allison Bergman. Acting the Song: Performance Skills for the Musical Theatre. New York: Allworth, 2008. 7. 31 Ibid., 6. 32 Melton, Singing, 84, 6. 33 Potter and Sorrell, A History, 245. 34 Ibid., 252. 35 Potter and Sorrell, A History, 245. 36 Melton, Singing, 99. 37 Scott McMillin. The Musical as Drama. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton UP, 2007. 39. 38 John Mortimer in David Henson and Kenneth Pickering. Musical Theatre: A Workbook. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2013. 50. 39 McMillin, Musical as Drama, 39. 40 In several studies, the use of non-singing actors in musical theater has been linked to the performance of characters who are closed, insecure, arrogant, or unwilling to let themselves be fully emotionally open, including Rex Harrison’s performance of Henry Higgins in My Fair Lady (1956). See Ben ­Macpherson. “Eliza, Where the Devil Are My Songs? Negotiating Voice, Text and Performance Analysis in Rex ­Harrison’s Henry Higgins.” Studies in Musical Theatre 2.3 (2008): 235–244. The Verismo Voice is ­d ifferent—and it is a halfway point between this and full-throated song. 41 McMillin, Musical as Drama, 210. 42 Ibid., 211. 43 See Green et al., “Trends”; Robert Edwin. “A Broader Broadway.” Journal of Singing 59:5 (2003): 431–432. 4 4 Konstantinos Thomaidis and Ben Macpherson. “Introduction: Voice(s) as a Method and an In-between.” Voice Studies: Critical Approaches to Process, Performance and Experience. Ed. Konstantinos Thomaidis and Ben Macpherson. London and New York: Routledge, 2015. 4.

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8 AMPLIFYING BROADWAY AFTER THE GOLDEN AGE Arreanna Rostosky

Sound designers and Broadway have a complicated relationship. Although electronic amplification has been in use on Broadway in some capacity since at least the late 1930s, the Tony Awards did not recognize sound design as a competitive category until 2008.1 The field’s acknowledgment was short-lived. In June 2014, the Tony Awards Administration Committee shocked the theater community with their announcement that sound design would no longer be a competitive category. News outlets reported that the decision was made because Tony voters felt they did not know enough about the field to appropriately assess the quality of a production’s sound design. Subsequently, the Tony Committee withdrew sound design as an award category, though it reserved the right to recognize outstanding work with a special Tony.2 The announcement drew the ire of sound designers frustrated by the continued disregard the Tony committee apparently held for their field. On the decision, Tony Award-winning sound designer Brian Ronan surmised, “It’s the lack of tangibility in sound that led to the Tony’s decision to eliminate us from the ceremony. Our craft is at its highest when the audience is unaware of our presence, when the sound complements and moves the audience without drawing attention to itself.”3 Only a few years later, however, the committee reversed its decision and reinstated the category for best sound design in April 2017, following a period of reevaluation regarding voting practices.4 The sudden elimination and subsequent restoration of the categories for “Best Sound Design of a Play” and “Best Sound Design of a Musical” reignited debates about the value of sound design: what is it? Is it really a creative art? Does it even matter? Of course it does! Sound design has been an integral part of the Broadway soundscape since its introduction several decades ago. Advancements in the field have had enormous ramifications for how musicals are designed, directed, and heard. Electronic amplification has allowed a more diverse range of voice types to be heard over an orchestra. New musical styles and electric instruments can be featured more regularly on Broadway. Staging practices have changed, as the use of wireless microphones grant performers greater flexibility in moving about the stage while still being audible. And more recent advances in sound technology have brought better sound quality and the finely tuned mixing capabilities of Hollywood films to Broadway houses. This chapter offers a brief historical overview of the introduction of amplification on ­Broadway in the Golden Age (often defined as 1943–1964), followed by a more in-depth discussion of the numerous changes amplification brought to the sound of Broadway after 1970. I outline how amplification changed the sound of Broadway by bringing different vocal and musical styles to the stage, how the process of amplifying the Broadway stage has developed dramatically since the 78

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1970s, and the aesthetic changes amplification has had on productions in the new millennium. I then conclude the chapter with a series of case studies of recent Broadway musicals and their sound designs, offering “close listenings” of musical numbers to reveal the kind of information contemporary sound design is now capable of conveying. These examples demonstrate just how much sound design shapes our experience of musical theater—mirroring a character’s emotional state or enveloping us in the soundscape of a show’s environment—sometimes without our being consciously aware of it.

Early Days of Electronic Amplification on Broadway Electronic amplification (also called sound reinforcement) in Broadway houses during the Golden Age was limited. Although radio and film both relied on the same basic sound technology as was available for use on Broadway, using microphones (mics) to capture sound and then relay it through speakers to an audience was more complicated for live theater. The biggest problem plaguing early sound designers was the issue of directionality. With unamplified performances, such as opera, the sound produced onstage is directional. In other words, if a performer moves from one side of the stage to the other, or turns away from the audience, spectators hear the sound travel and change accordingly. The physical reality of how sound travels from an unamplified performer means that certain staging and performance practices are employed to ensure that singers can always be heard clearly. “Cheating out” is one of the most basic examples of how performers cope with the need to direct their voices toward the audience. When performers are cheating out, their characters may be interacting with each other onstage, as in a love duet, but their bodies are turned slightly outward toward the audience, rather than facing each other. Early amplification technology similarly required performers to direct their voices toward the microphones onstage. Foot mics—microphones placed along the front, or apron, of the stage near the footlights—were initially used to provide basic sound reinforcement, particularly for ensembles. The mics were useful for large group settings, but ineffective as a reliable way to transmit spoken dialogue or solo singing, since the sound was lost whenever performers turned away from them. Although using microphones onstage was meant to alleviate issues of unclear dialogue and singing while providing more freedom in terms of staging, the earliest uses of the technology were bound to the same limitations of directionality as unamplified performances. Most criticism of early sound reinforcement centered on issues of volume and lack of clarity.5 Reviewers found little purpose for amplification in musicals, except perhaps as a sign that audiences had grown lazy in their listening skills thanks to radio and, even more to blame, the cinema. Press interviews with composers and producers about the use of sound reinforcement in their shows reveal that the general opinion about the transition from non-amplified to amplified performance was to blame for the theatergoers’ worsening listening habits. Richard Rodgers, in discussing the use of amplification in The Sound of Music (1959), remarked that audiences a decade and a half earlier at the non-amplified Carousel (1945) could hear everything “in the last row of the balcony because [they] listened, really listened. Today, we’d get killed if we went into the Majestic [Theatre] without amplification. The movies have gotten people accustomed to a big screen and a big sound.”6 Creative teams and producers eventually attributed the demand for amplification on ­Broadway to changes in audience taste and the rise in popularity of rock music. Through the mid-1960s, theater sound systems remained spotty, and many reviews for shows using amplification mention unintelligible lyrics or dialogue due to distorted sound or blasting speakers. By the end of the decade, a greater number of shows featured amplified instruments and pop or rock scores, necessitating the need for mic’d actors. The sound design for Burt Bacharach and Hal David’s Promises, Promises (1968), created by recording engineer Phil Ramone, was notable 79

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for its attempt to replicate the quality of a studio album in real time for a live performance. ­R amone, longtime engineer for Bacharach and David, used common studio recording practices when configuring the musicians, arranging microphones, and installing soundproofing in the pit, all with the goal of approximating the quality of a pop music recording.7 His approach for mic’ing and mixing the show anticipated later generations of sound design on Broadway, which similarly sought to reproduce the aural experience of carefully mixed studio albums and films in shows like Mamma Mia! (2001), Rock of Ages (2006), American Idiot (2010), Newsies (2011), Once (2011), Aladdin (2014), Holler If Ya Hear Me (2014), and On Your Feet! (2015), among many others.

Changes to Musical and Performance Styles in the Age of the Microphone Technology was changing the sound of popular music well before the microphone reached ­Broadway. “Crooning” was a style of singing that gained popularity in the 1920s and 1930s with singers such as Bing Crosby and Rudy Vallée. The vocal style was characterized by soft, low singing that, in an unamplified setting, could never have been heard over a full orchestra. The use of microphones permanently changed the relationship between the vocal performer and orchestra: the orchestra no longer had to take into consideration the need for an unamplified performer to be heard, while crooners could enjoy regular employment with minimal vocal strain.8 Prior to the use of microphones on Broadway, performers ideally needed to have voices that could carry to the last seats of the theater. Because of the vocal stamina required to sing in eight shows a week over an orchestra, many Broadway performers were either classically trained, like Julie Andrews, or “belters,” like Ethel Merman and Mary Martin, with naturally resonant, brassy, resilient voices. Beyond a singer’s own physical ability, her or his voice was supported, to some extent, by the acoustic design of Broadway theaters. Preferably, a musical’s orchestrations also reinforced the unamplified voice without overpowering it. A solo number for a soprano, for ­example, might avoid any doubling of the vocal line with instruments that sound in a similar range, like upper strings and winds, and instead feature lower-sounding instruments so the singer’s voice could cut through the texture more easily. To ensure the clear audibility of dialogue, the use of any substantial orchestral underscoring during spoken (book) scenes in Golden Age musicals was uncommon. Much in the way microphones transformed the popular music scene, the introduction of microphones on Broadway made it possible for more unconventional vocal types, along with new musical styles (crooning, folk, pop, rock), to be heard onstage. The wider range of vocal styles now feasible in the theater provided creative teams with a more diverse musical palette from which to draw. Following the Golden Age, many new musicals featured scores influenced by folk music, like Pippin (1972) and Godspell (1976), and rock, like Hair (1968), Jesus Christ Superstar (1971), Grease (1972), Rent (1996), Rock of Ages, Passing Strange (2008), and American Idiot. In recent years, hip-hop and rap have also come to Broadway in shows like In the Heights (2008), Holler If Ya Hear Me, and Hamilton (2015). Amplification was especially important for megamusicals like Cats (1982), Les Misérables (1987), and The Phantom of the Opera (1988), whose scores often feature a mix of rock and operatic styles. The sung-through, recitative-like construction of the vocal lines is accompanied by a range of electric instruments, including synthesizers, guitars, and bass, making it imperative that performers be mic’d to be heard. Orchestration practices also changed for these shows. Instrument-voice doublings that were previously imprudent, such as the strings/winds/soprano example given earlier, were newly possible (and quickly became ubiquitous) in numbers like “I Dreamed a Dream” from Les Misérables and “Think of Me” from The Phantom of the Opera. 80

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Issues in Sound Design Post-1970 Not everyone was pleased about the fact that microphones and other amplification technology fundamentally changed the sound of Broadway musicals. By the 1970s, speaker systems were becoming more reliable and most lead performers began wearing radio mics (small microphones worn on the body), which helped address complaints about spotty audio quality. Critics of the newly amplified Broadway began targeting shows’ increased volume levels and lack of nuanced, nondirectional sound. Some performers even questioned whether mics helped or harmed the emotionality they put into their performances.9 Such criticism persisted through the late 1990s, as sound designers waited for technology to catch up to their aesthetic desires for more control over a show’s aural experience.10 Early on, sound designers and sound board operators were able to mimic the directionality of unamplified performances in a rudimentary way by manually adjusting volume levels from the sound board (“riding the faders”) to compensate for the otherwise “flat” sound coming through the speakers. Sound designers came to rely on the Haas Effect (sometimes called the precedence effect) to determine where they should place speakers and how they should adjust the audio input from the mics before the sound is sent back through those speakers.11 The general guiding principle behind the Haas Effect involves adjusting volume levels and signal delays among different speakers around the theater. The result is an artificial recreation of directional sound, with an amplification system otherwise incapable of replicating that signature characteristic of unamplified performance. The Haas Effect only got sound designers so far, however; mixing in real time at the sound board remained an unpredictable venture that was not easily repeated night after night. The quest was on for technology that could assist in automating the mixing process for live performances. Imagining the future of sound design on Broadway in 1995, sound designer Tony Meola predicted, “One day we’ll be able to tell a computer to make a voice a certain number of decibels. It will revolutionize sound and take it out of the operator’s hands. Mikes [sic] will get even smaller.”12 Twenty years later, Meola’s vision was becoming reality.

The “Sound” of Broadway in the Post-Millennium (I): The Phantom of the Opera in Las Vegas and Aladdin on Broadway By the start of the new millennium, sound designers were working toward creating an even more “naturalized” sound on Broadway stages. Of course, one must keep in mind that electronic amplification is not natural in a traditional sense. Rather, in this context, a “naturalized” soundscape relates to the ways in which contemporary theatrical sound design emulates the typical audio mixing style of film and television, where the sonic space is artificially generated but often grounded in realistic sound. “The ideal of theatrical sound,” sound designer John Sibley explains, “is a totally transparent design where one can hear everything but can’t tell that the material is amplified.”13 The act of amplifying the performers, instrumentalists, and sound effects ensures that each element can first be heard. But creating a more realistic directionality to the sound is what effectively “hides” the musical’s amplified state from the audience. Technology that was both more reliable and cheaper made it easier and more feasible for sound designers to create the directional, “cinematic” sound many Broadway theaters now employ every night. This specific style of mixing, made possible by faster computer processing speeds, is called source-oriented reinforcement (SOR). Like sound design created using the Haas Effect, SOR provides the audience with a sense of directional sound by adjusting signal delays to the speaker arrays. The process is now accomplished and managed through specific software. SOR as implemented by the TiMax tracking system automates the mixing process by establishing specific “zones” on the stage through virtual imaging. The software then adjusts the decibel and panning 81

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levels for a performer’s mic as she moves around the stage between different zones. A radar tag worn by the performer tracks her movement onstage and relays her position to the mixing console. The aesthetic effect of SOR more closely replicates the directionality of an unamplified performance as the software regulates volume levels in real time. The granular level of control allows sound designers to turn the sound design in Broadway shows into a tool that is as dramatic as it is practical. Reporting on the sound technology for Broadway’s Aladdin, Alan Hardiman wrote, “Hooray for the design that conveys a full range of dynamics and can take the audience on a ­journey from a sly whisper to an excited triple-forte climax.”14 The flexibility and dramatic range afforded by these new tracking systems are especially useful for shows like The Phantom of the Opera (Las Vegas, 2006–2012) and Aladdin (2014), which feature plots and music that are epic in scale. Both mega shows boast sprawling casts, large orchestras, and elaborate set changes that move quickly and fluidly between intimate moments and large production numbers. High-powered mixing consoles make it possible for the sound team to achieve seamless transitions between different scenes and spaces with minimal modification during a performance. So what does it mean for a show to feature cinematic mixing styles? Take, for example, the Las Vegas production of Phantom. Sound designer Mick Potter was tasked with enhancing the sonic world created in the original productions on Broadway and in the West End. In practice, this meant that Potter had to determine how best to navigate the transitions between lush, heavily orchestrated moments and book scenes without the sound ever being too jarring for the audience.15 The number “Think of Me” poses this exact problem of needing to move deftly between several distinct aural spaces. In the musical, the show’s protagonist, Christine Daaé, steps in to perform in the place of the Opéra Populaire’s resident diva, Carlotta. We first see Christine rehearse the number in front of the cast, accompanied simply by piano. She is nervous and unable to support her singing properly, which translates into a meek vocal performance. The sound design is accordingly small and emanates from Christine’s location on stage, featuring a dry mix free of reverb for both Christine and the piano in the pit. As Christine gains confidence and the number transitions into the evening’s performance, the small sound of the piano grows until the full orchestra takes over. The sound design concurrently changes from the location-specific sound of the rehearsal to a lush, sweeping sound for the fully orchestrated portion of the number. The shift to the surround-sound mix is masked by the orchestration change, which, in turn, helps naturalize the suddenly full quality of the orchestral mix. The sophistication of Potter’s design does not end there. Later in “Think of Me,” we hear briefly from Christine’s childhood friend, Raoul, who is seated in a box located stage left where he watches her performance.16 His singing in the scene is not performative (in other words, his singing is not diegetic, while Christine’s is) and is mixed accordingly to represent his singing as internal commentary. No reverb is applied, and his voice originates from the stage left speakers where he is located. The smaller, drier sound from Raoul contrasts greatly with Christine’s when the audio focus returns to her once more. For her finale, the orchestra’s sound fully immerses the audience and heavy reverb is added to her vocals, giving the illusion that Christine’s performance is in a much larger space than the Las Vegas Venetian Theatre. The continual “zooming in and out” from the performers to the full orchestra throughout Phantom points to how modern sound design can bridge the gap between the aesthetic desire for the “unamplified” sound and the practical need for amplification. Contemporary mixing practices imitate the Golden Age method of balancing voice and orchestra, in which the sung voice takes priority despite contemporary orchestrations and vocal writing not adhering to such rules. The attempt to create directional, “natural” sound for Phantom is supported by the immersive set design for the Las Vegas production. The interior design of the Venetian Theatre was fashioned to look like the interior of the Palais Garnier opera house,17 which necessitated hiding the 82

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production’s speaker stacks from view. Camouflaging the speaker system removed one of the two most obvious markers of electric amplification (the second being forehead mounted mics) and further created the illusion that the show was taking place inside an actual opera house, perhaps encouraging the audience to accept the audio as non-amplified.18 Turning back to Broadway, Disney Theatrical Group’s production of Aladdin uses one of the most sophisticated contemporary sound designs of the new millennium. The musical is a staged adaptation of the 1992 animated film of the same name. Because the source material was the filmed musical, the cinematic-style mixing capabilities made possible by a system like the TiMax tracking software proved to be a useful tool to evoke the aural dynamism of film. Ken Travis’s sound design for the stage musical relies on the TiMax tracking software to track and adjust the performers’ vocal levels in real time.19 Using the software system on its own produces a basic degree of SOR, but Aladdin’s cinematic sound also owes its nuanced quality to the special speaker arrays installed in the New Amsterdam Theatre. The main issue with mixing using the Haas Effect, or even more basic SOR practices, is that only a select range of seats—typically, those in the center of the orchestra section—ever hear the “ideal” mix of the show, where the sound seems to originate appropriately from the performer’s location on stage. The mezzanine and balcony sections typically experience more distorted sound, with less robust audio systems that provide few if any specific speakers for the patrons in those locations. Travis solved the issue of uneven distribution of sound by having several series of redundant speakers installed throughout the theater to unify the mix for the entire orchestra section. He similarly had full speaker arrays installed for the mezzanine and balcony sections of the theater, so audience members sitting in those levels would have the same sonic experience as those in the orchestra seats.20 Such a complex sound system might imply that the experience of watching Aladdin would be overwhelming, but in fact the higher number of speakers ends up displacing the amplification “load,” so loud moments in the show sound powerful without being physically painful to the ear. Like the system developed for Phantom in Las Vegas, the extensive amount of gear used for Aladdin provided Travis with enormous flexibility to create complex sonic worlds, ranging from water-logged dungeons to the bustling streets of Agrabah. Beyond being able to produce and manage the expansive aural demands of such ensemble-centric showstoppers as “Friend Like Me” and “Prince Ali,” the intricacies of Aladdin’s sound design also create delicate, intimate ambiance for the musical’s smaller moments. These include Aladdin’s Act One monologue, “Proud of Your Boy,” and the show’s famous love duet in Act Two, “A Whole New World.” In “A Whole New World,” lead characters Aladdin and Princess Jasmine tour the world on a flying carpet. The song features prominently in the film and is one of the most anticipated moments in the stage show, as many audience members are eager to see how Disney is going to make the carpet “fly.” The number is staged relatively simply with Aladdin and Jasmine on the carpet, which moves gracefully through the night sky with the couple illuminated by the full moon as they travel. Travis’s design for the sequence complements the simple staging, the actors’ voices moving in the soundscape as they fly about the stage. Such tracking is not just about their voices moving from speakers on stage right or left; the amplification technology creates the illusion of distance and depth, too. As the couple flies toward the audience, their voices sound closer and are moved forward in the audio mix. Likewise, as the carpet moves Aladdin and Jasmine upstage away from the audience, their voices become more obscured in the mix. Like the decision to “hide” the speakers for Phantom in Las Vegas, Travis insists that the actors’ mics not be visible to the audience. Redundant mics are sewn into costumes and headwear while performers are responsible for ensuring their mics are well-hidden by their hair lines. Because the Genie is bald in the show, his mic is hidden in a prosthetic beard piece. While Travis’s requests for invisible mic’ing might seem unwieldy to some, the effect contributes to the overall “magical” 83

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atmosphere of the production, where obvious stage mechanics would be out of place. Hiding the mics so carefully helps keep the focus of the world onstage on the genies and magic carpets, not on the mechanism behind the magic.

The “Sound” of Broadway in the Post-Millennium (II): Once on Broadway Most discussions that address sound design on Broadway (this chapter included) focus on the aesthetic and technological accomplishments of sound design that manages the herculean task of balancing the demands of electrified scores while masking noisy stage technology. Less frequently discussed are the Broadway shows whose sound designs go virtually unnoticed, as though no electronic amplification is even used. The more intimate quality of these types of shows—most often singer-songwriter musicals—provides a very different listening experience for the audience when compared with the sound designs for mega shows. The musical Once (2012) is a useful case study of the “barely there” sound design. Musicals, by the very nature of their construction, consist of a series of musical performances, but rarely is our attention drawn to them as actual performances where the actual process of ­music-making is the focus, save in jukebox or backstage musicals that feature diegetic numbers. With Once, the story focuses on the budding relationship between two individuals, Guy and Girl, and their shared love of music. Music-making features prominently throughout the show in the form of jam sessions that serve as scene transitions, and performances set in pubs and recording studios. The cast doubles as the orchestra, which keeps the typically hidden process of music-making fully visible throughout the show. Unlike many Broadway musicals where the overture or an opening scene of some kind signals the start of the show, Once begins with a brief jam session featuring the entire cast (except the two leads) playing a mix of Irish drinking songs and Czech folk songs; the audience is invited to come up onstage for a drink and to watch the performances up close. The atmosphere is akin to a cèilidh, a rousing social gathering common in many Gaelic regions that features music and dancing. From the very beginning, the audience is invited to observe, even participate in, the show’s communal music-making experience, an ideal that is reflected in both Clive Goodwin’s sound design and Bob Crowley’s set design. It is no coincidence that Crowley’s simple set is of a beautifully grimy, well-loved pub, its large mirrored walls reflecting the cast and the audience simultaneously throughout the show. The instrumentation in Once also accentuates the intensely intimate nature of the production. Plucked and bowed string instruments and piano are the dominant instrument groups we hear throughout the musical, while accordion and harmonica are brought in to provide additional musical texture. The production lacks what Goodwin calls “the instruments of war – drum and horns;” however, the show still packs quite a percussive punch with the tambourine, cajon, stomping, and clapping.21 Acoustic guitar and piano are the instruments of choice for Guy and Girl, respectively, and are featured regularly throughout the show. Without amplification, acoustic guitar and an upright piano stand little chance of carrying very far in a Broadway house, so ­Goodwin’s sound design focused on supporting the delicate sound profile of plucked guitar strings, for instance, without distorting it. The relatively acoustic quality of the orchestral ensemble immediately set Once apart from other shows on Broadway that season, including the more traditional scoring found in Newsies (2012) and the heavily rock inspired score of Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark (2011). Goodwin creates the illusion of a non-amplified performance through a combination of adjusting speaker arrangements and sound delays, carefully equalizing outputs, and counteracting the theater’s resonating frequency to create a flatter sound overall.22 Flattening the sound space of 84

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the theater might seem counterintuitive, but remember that sound design in recent years focuses as much attention on creating nontheatrical soundscapes as it does on amplifying the performers. As noted with The Phantom of the Opera and Aladdin, the shows themselves are huge musically and technologically, but the sound design for each production focuses on emulating a range of locations from the intimate to the cavernous. The process of flattening the theater’s acoustics provided Goodwin with a blank canvas on which to build and develop the sound of a small pub gathering. A key technique in achieving the dry quality of a pub performance was the manner in which the performers and their instruments were mic’d. Each performer and their instruments had separate mics, but Goodwin was selective about when to use one or both mics. While larger musical numbers required that both individual and instrumental mics be used, thus allowing greater clarity of vocal and instrumental timbres to come out of the texture as needed, Goodwin chose to use only the performer’s mic to pick up their voice and instrument during more intimate moments. The result is a distinct aural experience, where the voice comes across as more prominent in the mix while the instrument sounds more distant. The effect imitates the experience of sitting in a small performance venue just a few feet from a performer where the speakers pipe out the vocals faster than our ears might hear the accompanying instrument. Using this technique repeatedly throughout the show not only reinforces the intimate soundscape Goodwin wanted to create, but it demonstrates the diverse capabilities of contemporary sound design. While Once might at first appear to be a rather unremarkable show technologically, it is in fact the careful ministrations of Goodwin, his team, and the technology at their disposal that effectively transformed the Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre into a local Irish pub.

The State of the (Amplified) Art Contemporary sound design on Broadway in the new millennium represents the culmination of the past several decades of experiments and implementation of electronic amplification onstage. There is a wide range of performance styles now available on Broadway, ranging from ­singer-songwriter musicals like Beautiful: The Carole King Story (2014) and Waitress (2016) to ­operettas like A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder (2014) to more traditional Broadway fare like revivals of South Pacific (2009), Anything Goes (2011), and The King and I (2015). Advances in amplification technology continue to push the boundaries of how “natural” a show can sound if the material calls for it while, on the other hand, shows like Hedwig and the Angry Inch (2014) or American Idiot can play up the rock aesthetic. Heavily athletic shows like Cats and Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark, which require performers to be especially mobile while singing over a rock orchestra, are now possible. Ultimately, sound design is as much an artistic endeavor as a technical feat. It helps tell a story along with the dozens of other elements that come together in each show. The past several decades have shown just how important a dramatic tool sound design can be; one can only imagine what the future will bring.

Notes 1 The UK-equivalent to the Tony Awards, the Olivier Awards, first awarded an Olivier for sound design in 2004. 2 Patrick Healy. “Tony Committee Decision to Drop Sound Design Awards Prompts Noisy Outcry.” The New York Times. 12 June 2014. 3 Quoted in Healy, “Tony Committee Decision to Drop Design Awards.” 4 “Tony Awards to Reinstate Sound Design Categories.” American Theater. 24 Apr. 2017. . 5 The reviewer of Let Freedom Sing (1942) remarked, “[The a]mplification system used was so loud everybody seemed to shout for the first half hour or so.” “Plays on Broadway – Let Freedom Sing.” Daily Variety. 7 Oct. 1942, 82.

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Arreanna Rostosky 6 Rodgers quoted in John S. Wilson. “Sound of Sound.” The New York Times. 18 Nov. 1962. 7 John S. Wilson. “The New Sound Of Promises.” The New York Times. 16 Feb. 1969. 8 For more on crooning, see Allison McCraken. Real Men Don’t Sing: Crooning in American Culture. Durham: Duke UP, 2015. 9 Lawrence O’Toole. “Music Theater Is Discovering a New Voice.” The New York Times. 22 Jan. 1995. 10 For an argument against amplification, see Harold C. Schonberg’s article on the 1980–1981 Broadway season, “The Surrender of Broadway to Amplified Sound.” The New York Times. 15 Mar. 1981, D1. For an argument in favor of amplification, see John Sibley, “Hooray for Amplification: An Opinionated ­Diatribe on Augmentation as Advancement to the Art of Musical Theater.” Entertainment Design: The Art and Technology of Show Business 37.8 (Sept. 2003): 28. 11 For more on how the Haas Effect is achieved, see R. Craig Wolf and Dick Block. Scene Design and Stage Lighting. 10th ed. Boston: Wadsworth Publishing, 2013. 570. 12 Quoted in O’Toole, “Music Theater Is Discovering a New Voice.” 13 Sibley, “Hooray for Amplification,” 28. 14 Ibid. 15 Potter explains, “It’s a very dynamic show, which is how Andrew [Lloyd Webber] likes to work […N]ew technology is allowing us to get closer to what we want to hear.” Quoted in David Barbour, “Phantom Lighting and Sound.” Lighting & Sound America, Oct. 2006. 69. 16 Stage left is the right side of the stage from the audience’s perspective. 17 The musical’s setting in the fictional Opéra Populaire is based loosely on the Palais Garnier in Paris. 18 The success of Potter’s updated design led to the complete overhaul of the sound systems in 2008 for both the West End and Broadway productions of Phantom. Kenneth Jones. “Broadway’s Phantom to Shut Down Aug. 24–27 for Installation of New Sound System.” Playbill.com. 16 July 2008. . 19 “When performers travel from extreme right to extreme left, there’s about a 3dB [decibel] difference, but the time shifts 14ms [milliseconds].” Ken Travis quoted in Alan Hardiman, “A Whole New Audio World: Sound Design for Disney’s Aladdin.” Lighting & Sound America, Aug. 2014. 69. 20 Hardiman, “A Whole New Audio World,” 69–70. 21 Clive Goodwin quoted in Halliday. “Theater: Once.” Lighting & Sound International, June 2013. 61. 22 Halliday, “Theater: Once,” 60–61.

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9 STARLIGHT EXPRESSION AND PHANTOM OPERATICS Technology, Performance, and the Megamusical’s Aesthetic of the Voice Dominic Symonds It’s a striking acoustic opening, not in terms of music, but in terms of affect. From silence, the crack of a gavel hitting its block, and the assertive announcement of an auctioneer: “Sold!,” the voice cries into the void. It’s a voice audibly enhanced by technology—reverb and amplification— far too much for the scenario (the empty stage of an opera house), and certainly for the period setting (1911). Yet the acoustic magnification of this opening to The Phantom of the Opera is important: it tells the audience that the affect of sound—sound’s visceral impact on our performance experience—has special significance in the show. In this chapter I explore this significance. I will consider the affect of sound, the way developing technologies have enabled increasingly versatile uses of sound in the theater, and the way the megamusical form derived a particular acoustic ­aesthetic from dramaturgically exploiting sound possibilities. My approach to this topic, 30 years after the megamusical’s heyday, turns to recent perspectives on performance through which we can understand the megamusical in a new light. Specifically, I’ll use the work of Jonathan Burston on sound technology,1 and David Roesner on musicality2 as a creative concept for “scoring” performance. I’ll consider Jesus Christ Superstar (1971), Starlight Express (1984), and The Phantom of the Opera (1986) as case studies, and will inform my analysis through a discussion with Sir Richard Stilgoe, lyricist-librettist for Starlight and Phantom, whom I interviewed in February 2017. The megamusical aesthetic significantly developed the sophistication with which sound could be used dramaturgically in the theater. I counter accusations that megamusicals are simply poor imitations of opera that have reduced musical theater to a commodity—claims that are often ­a ssumed,3 and that are perpetuated by the common description of megamusicals as “McTheater.”4 I also counter the derogatory associations that the appellation “McTheater” conveys. Instead, I suggest that megamusicals have contributed important aesthetic innovations to the stage.

Jesus Christ Superstar (1971) To understand the genesis of the megamusical, the contribution of Lloyd Webber, and the significance of sound design in its aesthetic, it’s worth returning to 1971 to consider Jesus Christ Superstar.5 This show reflected a major change on Broadway as one of the most successful early examples to embrace the sound of late-60s rock.

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Superstar’s score differs from the standard Broadway sound of just a few years previously. Gone was the orchestral or jazz sound of the golden age. Instead, the screeching of guitars, pounding of drums, and gymnastics of rock vocals were thrust into the acoustic space, bombarding audiences with a sound quality new to the stage. Three clear devices in Superstar use the affect of that sound for dramatic purposes. First, extreme emotional highpoints—guilt, pain, transcendence—are expressed through extreme vocals whose materiality performs the emotion of the drama (consider “Heaven on their Minds” or “Gethsemane”). Second, stylistic musical quirks such as surprising pitches or pastiche create shorthand codes for audiences to side with or against characters on the basis of the authenticity of the voice; for example, the extremely low and high vocal ranges of Caiaphas and Annas, respectively, characterize them as scheming and untrustworthy. Third, quieter moments allow a close engagement with characters aided by amplification through which singers can use more intimate expression, as with “I Don’t Know How to Love Him.” In short, Rice and Lloyd Webber’s understanding of the rock aesthetic, together with a savvy handling of their product, was supported by a dramaturgical ability to characterize through the shorthand of acoustic effect. Burston picks up on the performative power of that effect. “The megamusical’s aural aesthetics,” he writes, “are comprised of the genre’s specifically musical texts on the one hand, and its sonic or acoustic texts on the other.”6 This is an interesting observation, reflecting the late-90s attention of scholars to performance dynamics (the impact of the theater experience in live performance) as much as dramatic dynamics (the power of a storyline and characters). Burston’s focus is the acoustic materiality of the event—the texture of sound as it is heard by our experiencing bodies. Other scholars focus on different elements such as energy, nostalgia, or intertextuality,7 or structural concerns like the “crackle of difference”8 that emphasize the performance encounter independently of the musical text. Burston continues, “We need to consider how technological means of sonic production and reproduction affect the in-theater acoustic environments where we watch and listen to these shows. We need to examine how sound has changed therein over the past decade and a half, not only in the music-textual realm, but in the acoustic realm as well.”9 In other words, Burston invites us to explore how the audience experience has changed as technologies like radio mics and surround sound have developed. Let’s do this, then, beginning with the innovations that emerged with Jesus Christ Superstar. Superstar was first released as a studio album, a promotional strategy to generate momentum for developing the piece on stage. As it was prepared, the press reported that Superstar was “ready for production in substantially the same form in which it was recorded.”10 This comment suggests it was possible and desirable to create an analogue to studio sound on the stage. In the end, transferring that aesthetic to the theater was not straightforward. The original production was so dogged by sound problems that producer Robert Stigwood was forced to cancel its first three previews. It was only when Abe Jacob, the sound designer of Hair, was brought in at the eleventh hour that the theater was transformed into a space capable of emulating the sound of the recording. Although the performers could replicate the recording’s music, amplification in the live acoustic space proved challenging for three reasons. First, since wireless technology was primitive, singers had to use handheld mics with trailing cables, restricting their movement. Second, because speakers were located at a distance, the sound seemed not to originate from the performers, causing confusion. Third, people in the first few rows were deafened while those in the gods could barely hear11; with rows of seating underneath balconies, sound was harder still to amplify around the house. Bringing in Jacob, with his awareness of new sound technologies, was instrumental. Using a principle known as the “Haas Effect,” Jacob patched in secondary speakers to amplify the sound more consistently around the space. To avoid the echo effect caused by sound from the speakers 88

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reaching listeners before sound from the stage, he programmed a split-second delay into the amplified sound to “preserve the illusion that the sound was emanating from the source.”12 By the fourth preview, audiences could experience the effect of the album on stage. But that was it: absorbed by the challenges of technology, early megamusical aesthetics were driven by “assisted resonance”13 —an attempt to augment what already existed but not to use sound for its dramaturgical potential. The possibilities of making something bespoke to the theatrical milieu would have to wait. Lloyd Webber’s origins in the recording domain proved vital in developing a new aesthetic. As technologies became more versatile, he could realize more creative ideas. Working with sound designers like Jacob, and later Andrew Bruce and Martin Levan, Lloyd Webber effectively turned the theater environment into a live mixing space. Placing the sound desk in its now ubiquitous position at the back of the house was a visible manifestation of this shift. The ramifications in the development of megamusical sound design were also aesthetically creative, artistically innovative, and rather political.14 Burston makes a number of points in his article, but the reason it is most often cited is for establishing the term “McTheater”: the idea that the megamusical has commodified musical theater by packaging each show as a standardized product. Burston is critical of the megamusical, though he points out some important nuances. One focus of his discussion, and a key standardizing feature of the megamusical, is its appropriation of a vocal style he calls the “FM-sound”: “a kind of hyper-real sound, closely and indeed often deliberately linked to the aesthetics of the compact disc.” He continues: “Qualities of head voice and of crooning take on a greater prominence as those of Broadway’s belting cantorial traditions diminish,” a new aural aesthetic which he argues “embraces a globally recognised ‘commercial’ music sound,” and reflects a move away from the “vigorous ‘rock ‘n roll’ sound of the rock musical of the 1970s.”15 Notwithstanding Burston’s reading of this characteristic aesthetic as “significantly political”16 —and endemic of the homogenizing shift toward McTheater—I’d suggest that the development of the FM vocal sound is a symptom of a more interesting innovative shift17: the move by creatives like Lloyd Webber to bring the aesthetics of the studio into the theater. The megamusical creates a distinctive dramaturgical encounter for the spectator, and thus deserves closer attention for its artistry than the dismissive term McTheater implies.

Starlight Express (1984) The breakthrough came with Starlight Express, whose combination of technology, musicality, and spectacle tapped into an aesthetic unique to the megamusical, at least in its original London production. Starlight Express tells of a community of trains vying to compete in a series of races. Diesel, electric, and steam are all represented; it is assumed that the most modern locomotive will win. Not everyone plays fair, so there are attempts to win by misadventure; above all, the diesel and electric trains don’t want the indignity of losing to steam. When they sabotage Rusty the steam engine’s chances, it seems that one of the modern engines will triumph. Yet the power of steam turns out not just to be its locomotion: Rusty consults the aging engine Poppa who tells him of a mysterious force, the Starlight Express, which will guide the worthy to achieve their dreams. Rusty perseveres, and in an epiphany realizes that the Starlight Express is simply the drive within him. Armed with new confidence and the value of goodness, Rusty races in the final and wins. The other trains concede defeat while Rusty celebrates the triumph of the common train. The show’s dramaturgical and emotional climax is the discovery and “appearance” of the ­ Starlight Express, the realization by Rusty that its spirit resides within him, and the confidence this gives him to find romance with the carriage Pearl. During the sequence from “Starlight 89

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Express” at the end of act one through “I Am the Starlight” in act two, to “Only He” and “Only You” at the denouement, Lloyd Webber and lyricist-librettist Richard Stilgoe create theatrical magic (literally: a magical character) by conjuring the presence of the Starlight Express through sound.18 As the lyrical West End pop voice of Ray Shell croons the homogenized FM sound ­Burston identifies, a second voice enters the mix: “the operatic bass playing Poppa,” explains Stilgoe, “who doesn’t unleash his potential until that moment.”19 This is the voice of the Starlight Express, a godlike presence who uses biblical expressions to suggest superhuman power (“the sea will part before you; stop the rain, turn the tide”). We’ve heard Poppa throughout the show—­ notably in “Poppa’s Blues,” which uses a bluesy vocal style that traditionally underplays a pure vocal tone in favor of emotional expression. In “I Am the Starlight,” however, the same performer Lon Satton’s classically trained voice soars over the voice of Rusty, pitching two distinct vocal qualities against one another and filling the acoustic space with sounds that have different relationships with amplification. Poppa’s voice is weighty and deep in tone, its thicker sound caused by the low position of the larynx and a wide pharyngeal space. This is a voice-type more common to a legit sound: resonant, well supported, and powerful. By contrast, Rusty uses a contemporary pop falsetto, aspirant, with a thin sound pitched high to resonate in the nasal cavities. The two different-sounding voices take intrinsically different approaches to singing. Where Poppa’s is born from the technique of live, unamplified performance, Rusty’s reflects a voice that exploits close microphone technology, “a kind of electrified sotto voce.”20 As Stilgoe reveals, bringing in Satton’s voice on top of Shell’s at this point was a deliberate effect built into the affect of the show: “­Hearing mezzo voce all the way through,” he suggests, “is like waiting for ‘Nessun Dorma’ in Turandot. Holding that moment back is part of the writer’s fun.”21 The power of this moment, which exploits different vocal qualities and knowingly combines the different idioms from which they emerge, is only fully possible in the theatrical encounter of a megamusical, which benefits from sound technologies that can be independently controlled. The FM quality—with the intimacy Burston, Soto-Morettini, and Stilgoe observe—is only possible when the voice is independently miked. “It’s really useful for most members of the cast to be able to work at domestic levels and be audible,” Stilgoe comments. A production team “can use the sound system in a completely different way,” he suggests; “you can now whisper loudly on stage.” Thus, against the “operatic bass” can be matched the “whisper” of the contemporary FM-sound singer.22 If this was the big step in exploiting sound technology, there is no surprise that it emerged in work by Lloyd Webber. “Because Andrew Lloyd Webber came from a world where he made the record first, he was the first to embrace that sort of sound technology in the theater,” observes Stilgoe. In his next show, The Phantom of the Opera, the sophistication with which Lloyd Webber exploits that new aesthetic is more advanced, though even from the start of Phantom’s overture, the dimension of sound is knowingly manipulated. “It’s exactly the same thing a minute or two into the overture of Phantom when the strings come in,” comments Stilgoe. “Up to then, it’s as if we have been listening on a transistor, and suddenly the hi-fi kicks in, or in modern terms, the surround sound.”23

Musicality and Spectacle The possibilities of technology alone cannot be understood without considering the creative impetus that exploits them dramaturgically, and acknowledging the experience of the audience. Let’s now discuss the musicality of the creative composition, and the spectacle of the megamusical experience. Together with technological developments, these afford the full potential of the megamusical’s aesthetic innovation. These elements provide rather more quality cuisine than a McTheater Happy Meal. 90

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I’ve touched on contemporary ideas enabling us to understand theater’s encounter with performance. By way of a prism for my discussion, I could turn to theories about liveness,24 performativity,25 the postdramatic26 or the aurality of theater.27 However, since he explicitly embraces music terminology, I’ll bring in the work of David Roesner, who writes about “musicality” not just as an element of musical craft, but as an “intrinsic quality” of theater.28 He sees theater in its widest sense (i.e. dramatic, not just musical theater) characterized by a musical dispositif, and refers to practitioners “composing with the stage,” “assembling and organizing material and adjusting parameters such as volume, timbre or tempo.” To him, they are “conscious of the associative potential of the music, rhythm, gestures, set design, etc.”29 Musicality to Roesner is not simply a musical skill; it’s “a general expressive capacity of all human beings”30 and “a way of thinking and understanding.”31 He seeks to disentangle the term “from its more common use as a descriptor of individual musical ability.”32 Instead, he adopts it metaphorically, a conceptual term to encapsulate heuristically some of the multi-layered affective qualities of theater: the rhythms of stage movement, the sound of language, dynamic design elements like lighting and color, and even communicative expressions of the body.33 Musicality “creatively connects all contributors of the final production,”34 he continues, and for some “the sonic becomes an important dramaturgical and creative driver.”35 Like Burston’s distinction between musical and acoustic texts, Roesner notes an “assumed separation” in musical theater (to be precise, opera) between the text and its performance. He argues that the dispositif of musicality “offers one opportunity to question this separation and to highlight instead the multi-layered interweaving of music and theater.”36 In other words, megamusicals are not just stories linked through song, nor simply dramas whose narrative and dramaturgical material is song; they are compositions whose structure, performative trajectory, embodied presence, affectual material, and phenomenological experience capture the dynamics of musicality. The role of voice in this music-making has always been a characteristic focus of the musical stage’s affect, both materially and symbolically37; with the megamusical’s overt repurposing of vocal potential through advancing technology, savvy composition, and diverse performance approaches, the capacity of the voice to characterize, dramatize, and thrill reached a new level. At the same time, megamusicals have become infamous for their spectacle,38 which is often seen to triumph over substance.39 Starlight Express, for example, is frequently derided as superficial, but it is worth reflecting on what this show did, at least in the West End, and therefore what the spectacular can offer to the megamusical aesthetic. Structurally, the producers rebuilt the inside of its theater to create a performing space encircling the auditorium on two tiers.40 This became the racetrack, and with the cast on roller skates, races featured performers whizzing round the audience’s heads, behind the seating and on different levels across the stage. Complex scenery swung into place as trains rushed across bridges, and up and down ramps as the races progressed. The effect was exhilarating and spectacular. It was fast, dangerous, thrilling, and accompanied by a soundtrack of driving pop-rock. “Starlight Express was part sport, part rock-concert,” suggests Stilgoe41; the power of its spectacle caused its particular dramaturgical use of sound. The technological challenges of creating the sound for Starlight were considerable. With the extreme physicality of the performances, extensive use of space, and competition against loud music, there was a clear need to amplify voices; yet with this fast-moving, immersive show, there was no option of shackling performers with microphone cables. The cast used radio mics, while booth singers provided additional singing from offstage. But aside from technical innovation, the theatrical assumptions of the production meant that the composition, arrangement, and dramaturgy of the sound palette also became highly innovative, requiring, for instance, the immersive experience to be supported acoustically by a sound system siting the spectators within it, just as they were within the action. 91

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To consider the megamusical critically as a performance encounter, we must not simply consider it as a musical text, but also as an acoustic one, structured through complex collaborative composition involving technology, musicality, and spectacle. Lloyd Webber’s next work, The Phantom of the Opera (1986), is a resounding example of this composite, and the performance encounter of the audience is—thanks to the site-specificity of its story—uniquely immersive.

The Phantom of the Opera (1986) Phantom opened in the West End on September 27, 1986. Based on Gaston Leroux’s serialized novel Le Fantôme de l’Opéra (1909–1911), it tells of the operatic ingénue Christine Daaé, who becomes muse to the dreaded Phantom of Paris’s Opéra Populaire. Blessed with the voice of an angel by the disfigured Phantom, Christine is plucked from the chorus to usurp the prima donna’s place. Yet the Phantom exerts deadly pressure on the opera’s managers, forcing them to stage his own avant-garde compositions and demanding stiff payments from the profits. As the Phantom becomes more murderous, Christine’s lover Raoul seeks to end his tyrannous regime and ventures down to the Phantom’s lair. Christine is rescued, and she and Raoul reunited, but—in the musical—the Phantom escapes in a magical disappearing act, leaving the conclusion unresolved. Le Fantôme is set in 1881, a time of rapid technological progress. The first microphones were invented in 1876 by Emile Berliner. In 1877 Thomas Edison invented the phonograph; in 1880 he invented the electric lamp, and electric lighting was installed in theaters to replace gas throughout the 1880s. By the 1890s the Lumière brothers were using projections and opening the first movie theaters. In 1901, Marconi sent radio waves across the Atlantic, and in 1904 the United States granted the first patent for radio. By 1906, shortly before Le Fantôme was serialized, the first music was broadcast by Amalgamated Wireless in Australasia. Against this backdrop, it’s not difficult to see Leroux’s fascination with technology. The seemingly magical ability for sound, lighting, and images to be created and sent over distances offered new tricks for the theater, and the opportunity to explain such magic with gothic stories of the supernatural. Leroux sets both these ideas up as he creates in his opera house an environment of magical voices, visions, and phantasmagoria that is explained through nervous rumors about a ghost. Le Fantôme explores a dramaturgical world inspired by the marvels of technology, and imagines the possibilities of the acoustic space in which it is set. As a megamusical—and using the technology, musicality, and spectacle of the form—Phantom enables that dramaturgical world to become a reality. There are two distinctive magical voices in Le Fantôme: those of the Phantom and his muse, Christine Daaé. The Phantom’s is “a divine voice,” we learn, with “celestial harmonies”42; that are “as beautiful as the voice of an angel.”43 The “very soft, very captivating” voice is “heroically sweet… gloriously suggestive… delicate… powerful… irresistibly triumphant.”44 All these descriptions point toward its affect: “it seemed to command me,” says Christine, “to stand up and come to it. It retreated and I followed.”45 If this is the Phantom’s magical voice, Christine’s own sound is just as impressive: following her first performance under the Phantom’s spell, her voice is “seraphic,” managing to reach “superhuman notes.”46 Her own recollection is equally compelling: “I sang with a rapture I had never felt before and I felt for a moment as if my soul were leaving my body.” She reports the Phantom describing her voice as “a little of the music of Heaven.”47 The two voices, then, are clearly remarkable, and are given a mystical dimension in the novel. Not only are they distinctive in their quality and the effect they have on listeners, but also in the way they magically appear. Raoul perceives the Phantom’s voice to be one “without a body” that seems to inhabit the building: “it was as though the walls themselves were singing!” Then, “It came through the wall… it approached… and now the voice was in the room…”48 92

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In transferring the phantasmagoria of these voices and their affect into theatrical performance, Lloyd Webber and his collaborators use similar imagery. The Phantom and Christine are referred to as the “Angel of Music,” as if they inhabit the same spectral presence when influenced by the muse. The sound of that music—the “Music of the Night”—seems, as in the novel, to have a spirit of its own, to magically appear and be everywhere. Music “shall caress you,” we are told, and “possess you.” At the same time, the Phantom sings of his song “tak[ing] flight”; in the stage directions, the trajectory of this flight is detailed: Christine “begins to vocalize strangely, her song becoming more and more extravagant […] Her voice climbing higher and higher in pitch.”49 These descriptions of the voices and music are no more than the (musical) text; in order to turn these into affective qualities of the material encounter they must find their way into the “acoustic text” of the event. And this—thanks to the technological developments of the 1980s, the dispositif of the creative team’s musicality and the spectacle of the show—is achieved through innovations in staging, technical setup, and the acoustic possibilities of the megamusical. The title song brings exactly that into play, as Christine sings higher and higher while the Phantom urges her to “Sing, my Angel of Music!” In the megamusical, for the first time, it is technologically possible to make a voice not only sound “very beautiful … very soft … absolutely and heroically sweet … gloriously suggestive … delicate … powerful … irresistibly triumphant,”50 but also to make those qualities audible to spectators wherever they are seated. The Phantom can move freely around the space: onstage, in the wings, above the audience’s heads. The technology was constructed accordingly: “This was an era when a lot of invention was required to move theater sound forward,” reports sound designer Martin Levan.51 “Very few manufacturers were actually developing products specifically for theater, so we had to grab a bit from broadcasting, some more from recording and some from the live concert sectors.” The innovation worked, thanks in part to concealed speakers placed around the auditorium: “We used them to create the surround sound for a few special effects including the Phantom’s reverb/ambience at different points in the show. This […] put him right into the walls of the theater, giving him a real sense of the Phantom’s omnipresence.”52 Stilgoe makes the same point: “the Phantom’s voice could be the whole building speaking rather than an individual.”53 In the course of a single song (“The Music of the Night”) the timbre, tone, and volume run the gamut from “very soft” (“softly, deftly”) to “irresistibly triumphant” (“Let your soul take you where you long to be”). Paradoxically, and in contrast to Burston’s vocal model, Crawford’s performance works as a riposte to the compression of the “FM sound.” The FM sound becomes just one performative choice of the megamusical actor who can exploit the versatility of the amplification system to use his voice both intimately and with full projection. As much as it became a commodified, homogenized aesthetic (McTheater), the acoustic potential enabled by technology, musicality, and spectacle created in the megamusical’s sonic world a multidimensional art form whose fusion of “musical text” and “acoustic text” achieves new levels of affect. Reconsider Stilgoe’s comments about how he and Lloyd Webber used Satton’s operatic bass thoughtfully in Starlight Express; comparable moments are equally crafted in Phantom. The early “Think of Me” sequence, for example, showcases three distinct voices: first, Carlotta sings the opening of the number, ostensibly an aria being rehearsed. Her voice, which Leroux describes as “rather too splendidly massive,”54 deliberately sounds excessive, not only in its tessitura and accented Italianness but also in the way amplification effects such as reverb give further body to the sound. Next, Christine sings a longer passage at a slightly lower pitch to make it more grounded, with clearer, flatter English vowels to sound more familiar to the audience, and with less reverb, to complete the impression that Christine is a less trained singer. In the novel, we hear repeatedly how Christine’s “ordinary” voice is distinguished from the “seraphic” and “superhuman” voice trained by the Angel: Christine reports that “I sang with my ordinary, every-day voice and nobody noticed anything.”55 Hers is a “fresh, top of the mountain voice and not the mannered singing that Carlotta does,” as Stilgoe puts it.56 93

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Whatever the “musical text” qualities of her voice, the tweaking of the acoustic text makes her voice better (i.e. more accessible) to a contemporary audience: “Ironically,” observes Derek B. Scott, “the audience will no doubt prefer Christine’s less operatic voice to that of the diva Carlotta.”57 In other words, the sound of these voices is deliberately crafted. Finally, in response to “Think of Me,” Meg sings an extract from the melody of “Angel of Music,” and her sound is markedly different from either Carlotta’s or Christine’s. In Meg’s line, “Where in the world have you been hiding?,” we hear none of the tone, training or finish of Carlotta or Christine, and the technological modeling of her voice is less applied: this, we are being told, is a common voice, with neither the pretensions of the diva nor the raw appeal of the ingénue.

Past the Point of No Return What is read in these examples can be detected in numerous other megamusicals, from Les Misérables (1995) to Wicked (2003). But the development of acoustic dramaturgy within the megamusical was a feature of a particular period. As technologies have digitalized to become cheaper and more versatile, innovations have shifted away from the spectacular and found their home in small-scale encounters, performance walks, binaural technologies, and immersive installations, as Lynne Kendrick’s book Theatre Aurality explores. Perhaps the triangulation of technology, musicality, and spectacle that characterized the sound innovation of the megamusical in the 1980s and 1990s is a product of that era. Despite those innovations, musical theater sound design still focuses on “assisted resonance,” though new technological innovations such as tracker systems (Aladdin, 2017) have been warmly received by the industry. If there have been dynamic sound experiments in mainstream productions, these have often been in shows classified as plays (Peter and the Starcatcher, 2012; The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime, 2013). In more recent large-scale productions, the triangulation of technology, musicality, and spectacle moved toward structural design or video projection, toying with aerial display (Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, 2002; Mary Poppins, 2004; Spiderman: Turn off the Dark, 2012), 3-D scenography (The Woman in White, 2004; The Little Mermaid, 2008), hologram technology (Sinatra: The Man and His Music, 2015), and virtual reality (The Lion King, 201558; School of Rock, 2015). Meanwhile the acoustic dimension of the musical stage has embraced alternative genre sounds from hip-hop (In the Heights, 2012; Hamilton, 2015) and rock (Hedwig and the Angry Inch, 2000; Spring Awakening, 2006; American Idiot, 2010) to acoustic folk (Once, 2011; Natasha, Pierre and the Great Comet of 1812, 2016) and even dance (Here Lies Love, 2013).59 Elsewhere, a fascinating approach by directors like John Doyle and Craig Revel Horwood has been to restage classic musicals using actor-musicians (Sweeney Todd, 2005; Company, 2006; Sunset Boulevard, 2008). This creates new dramaturgical dynamics between characters, their singing voices, and the instrument with which they also “speak.” Results have been varied, and the production format (aside from “dead rock-star shows”) is still a niche aesthetic. But perhaps this reflects the most exciting possibilities for musical theater to appropriate the legacy of the megamusical’s acoustic innovations.

Notes 1 Jonathan Burston. “Enter, Stage Right: Neoconservatism, English Canada and the Megamusical.” Soundings 5 (1997): 179–190; Jonathan Burston. “Theatre Space as Virtual Place: Audio Technology, the Reconfigured Singing Body, and the Megamusical.” Popular Music 17.2 (May 1998): 205–218. 2 David Roesner. Musicality in Theatre: Music as Model, Method and Metaphor in Theater-Making. Farnham and Burlington: Ashgate, 2014. 3 See Anthony Tommasini. “Opera? Musical? Please Respect the Difference.” New York Times. 7 July 2011; Bryan Appleyard. “The Mormons and Liberty Valance.” bryanappleyrd.com. 28 Feb. 2013. Web. 14

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Starlight Expression and Phantom Operatics Mar. 2017 ; Derek B. Scott. “Musical Theater(s).” The Oxford Handbook of Opera. Ed. Helen M. Greenwald. New York: Oxford UP, 2014. 52–72. 4 See Burston, “Enter”; Burston, “Theatre Space”; Dan Rebellato. Theater & Globalization. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009; Dan Rebellato. “Does the Mega-musical Boom Mean Theater’s Bust?” The Guardian. 18 Jan. 2011. 5 As Jessica Sternfeld does in her book The Megamusical. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana UP, 2006. 6 Burston, “Theatre Space,” 206. 7 Millie Taylor. Musical Theater, Realism and Entertainment. Farnham and Burlington: Ashgate, 2011. 8 Scott McMillin. The Musical as Drama. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2006. 9 Burston, “Theater Space,” 206. 10 Van Ness in Michael Braun et al (ed.). Jesus Christ Superstar: The Authorised Version. London: Pan Books Ltd, 1970. 11 “The gods” is theatrical slang in the United Kingdom for the uppermost balconies in the auditorium, named because many Victorian theater ceilings are painted with murals of the sky, angels, or mythological figures. 12 Timothy Tracey. “The Forging of Modern Broadway Sound Design Techniques amid the Fires of the Rock Musicals in the Late 1960s and 1970s.” Electronic Theses and Dissertations, Paper 1186 (2015): 50. 13 Burston, “Theatre Space,” 208. 14 Ibid. 15 Ibid., 208–209. 16 See also Burston, “Enter.” 17 Burston does acknowledge “that contemporary audio designs can enhance performance practice as much as they might delimit it” (Burston, “Theatre Space,” 214), recognizing opportunities for “performance innovation”, “a wide range of dramatic possibilities,” and an “expansion of innovative possibility” through new technology (211). 18 This analysis refers to the original West End version of Starlight. The show changed significantly in subsequent productions. The Original Cast Recording is available, and the tracks can be heard on YouTube, especially “Starlight Express”. ; and “I am the Starlight” Web. 26 Mar. 2017. . 19 Richard Stilgoe, personal interview with author. 21 Feb. 2017. 20 Burston, “Theatre Space,” 211; see also Donna Soto-Morettini. Popular Singing and Style. London and New York: Bloomsbury Methuen, 2014. 48. 21 Stilgoe, 2017. 22 Ibid. Even so, both this singing style and the demands of Lloyd Webber’s writing have been criticized for relying on technology at the expense of technique (see Elizabeth L. Wollman. The Theater Will Rock: A History of the Rock Musical from Hair to Hedwig. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2006. 126). 23 Stilgoe, 2017. 24 See Philip Auslander. Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture. London and New York: Routledge, 1999; Carolyn Abbate. In Search of Opera. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton UP, 2001; Peggy Phelan. Unmarked: The Politics of Performance. London and New York: Routledge, 2003. 25 See Taylor, Musical Theater. 26 See Hans-Thies Lehmann. Postdramatic Theatre. New York and Abingdon: Routledge, 2006. 27 See Pieter Verstraete. The Frequency of Imagination: Auditory Distress and Aurality in Contemporary Music Theatre. Enschede: Ipskamp Drukkers bv, 2009; Lynne Kendrick and David Roesner (eds.). Theater Noise: The Sound of Performance. Newcastle Upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2011; Lynne Kendrick. Theater Aurality. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. 28 Roesner, Musicality, 9. 29 Ibid., 251. 30 Ibid., 8. 31 Ibid., 17. 32 Ibid., 8. 33 Ibid., 13–15. 34 Ibid., 254. 35 Ibid., 252. 36 Ibid., 260. 37 See Michel Poizat. The Angel’s Cry: Beyond the Pleasure Principle in Opera. Ithaca and London: Cornell UP, 1992; Abbate, In Search of Opera; Wayne Koestenbaum. The Queen’s Throat: Opera, Homosexuality

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38 39 40

41 42 43 4 4 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59

and the Mystery of Desire. New York: Da Capo Press, 2009; Millie Taylor. “Experiencing Live Musical Theatre Performance: La Cage aux Folles and Priscilla, Queen of the Desert.” Popular Entertainment Studies 1.1 (2010): 44–58. Jessica Sternfeld and Elizabeth L. Wollman. “After the ‘Golden Age’.” The Oxford Handbook of the ­American Musical. Ed. Raymond Knapp, Stacy Wolf, and Mitchell Morris. New York: Oxford UP, 2011. 111–124. Oscar G. Brockett, Robert J. Ball, John Fleming, and Andrew Carlson. The Essential Theater. Boston: Cengage Learning, 2015. 290; Vagelis Siropoulos. “Evita, the Society of the Spectacle and the Advent of the Megamusical.” Image & Narrative 11.2 (2010): 165–176, 165. The show ran in London for 18 years. When it transferred to Broadway, it was staged without any structural changes to the theater. As a result, a crucial audience experience was lost, and perhaps for this reason the production ran for just two years, failing to recoup its investment. Elsewhere—in Germany in particular—the show has fared better. Opening in 1988 in the purpose-built “Starlight Express Theater,” it has been performed continuously ever since. Stilgoe, 2017. Gaston Leroux. The Phantom of the Opera. Ware: Wordsworth Classics, 1995. 36. Ibid., 86. Ibid., 71–72. Ibid., 89. Ibid., 9. Ibid., 87. Ibid., 71–72. Richard Stilgoe, Andrew Lloyd Webber, and Charles Hart (1986). The Phantom of the Opera, libretto, Web. 31 March 2017. , 24. Leroux, Phantom, 71–72. Sarah Rushton-Read. “The Phantom of the Opera Is Still Here.” Lighting and Sound International (Oct. 2017): 44–52, 49. Ibid., 49–50. Stilgoe, 2017. Leroux, Phantom, 10. Ibid., 86. Stilgoe, 2017. Scott, “Musical Theater(s),” 64. Tim Moynihan. “The Lion King Musical in VR Is an Incredible Experience.” Wired. 18 Nov. 2015. Web. 18 May 2018. . Dating musicals is tricky, given their lengthy gestations regionally or off-Broadway. These dates refer to the original productions either on Broadway or the West End—some shows gained success in other spheres prior to these incarnations.

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10 THE SUNG AND THE SPOKEN IN MICHAEL JOHN LaCHIUSA’S MUSICALS Alex Bádue

American musical theater composer Michael John LaChiusa (b. 1962) came to prominence in 1993, after the Off-Broadway opening of his musical First Lady Suite. His works continue to be staged Off-Broadway, where shows like Hello Again (1994), Little Fish (2003), See What I Wanna See (2005), Bernalda Alba (2006), Queen of the Mist (2011), Giant (2012), and First Daughter Suite (2015) find homes and fans. In the 1999–2000 season, LaChiusa had two musicals on Broadway, Marie Christine (1999) and The Wild Party (2000). Despite his presence in New York theater and a steady output, LaChiusa remains somewhat of an outsider. He has never had what show business might consider a hit, and although he has been applauded for composing intricate scores, crafting complex plots, and exploring the psyche, emotions, and intimate desires of his characters, these have also been source of some harsh criticism. He has also been a vehement critic of the state and trends of the American stage musical in the twenty-first century.1 As a result, he remains distant from mainstream musical theater and has developed both ardent devotees and detractors of his musicals. LaChiusa himself has acknowledged, “I don’t begin a musical thinking about how I can write a hit song for the score…I want to know I am reaching as many people as I can with a song. But I want to do it without pandering. And I can’t worry about being popular.”2 In the musicals for which he wrote music, lyrics, and book, LaChiusa frequently develops dramatic action by creating scenes that alternate between sung and spoken words, refraining from clearly demarcating the boundaries between dialogue and song. Not only do his songs frequently interrupt spoken dialogue in his musicals, but they also become underscoring, which become recitative, which become new songs. In other instances, he intersperses spoken dialogue with sung lines until the scene in question erupts into a full-blown song. The close relationship he has forged between sung and spoken words marks a hallmark of his compositional style, and grants his musicals the distinction of being nearly sung through. He has explained that, “I like to keep an audience guessing. A character might sing a line, speak the next, sing the next five, then deliver a spoken monologue and then the number.”3 This chapter discusses examples from five musicals by LaChiusa in which he combines the sung and the spoken in this manner, and examines how this technique results in subtext and symbolism that enhance the dramatic action of his plots. LaChiusa believes that blurring the boundaries between the sung and the spoken raises the emotional stakes for how audiences experience musical theater. The technique, he argues, “causes great anxiety in the audience so that you have a long stretch of music or long, long stretch of ­d ialogue. It tricks the ear, tricks the emotional template, subconsciously, for the audience.” On the other hand, he believes that the technique pays off in the end, since it helps his audiences “feel 97

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[the musical] as a living thing.”4 Playing with his audience’s expectations actually helps him shape musicals. “You have to be choosy about what’s sung, what’s not sung,” he explains. “It might not be clear, but there is definitely a reason why something sounds [like] something. And it’s not always a matter of importance, [but] it’s a matter of emotion. Sometimes if a character lies, I may have them sing in pastiche, then speaking the truth.”5 The technique of effacing the boundaries between the sung and the spoken is not entirely unique to LaChiusa, nor is he strictly its pioneer. Think, for example, of the bench scene that takes place between Julie Jordan and Billy Bigelow in Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Carousel (1945), when the two perform the number “If I Loved You.” Other examples include the number “Politics and Poker” from Bock and Harnick’s Fiorello! (1959), “Tradition” from the same team’s Fiddler on the Roof (1964), “Simple” from Stephen Sondheim’s Anyone Can Whistle (1964), and the prologue of his Into the Woods (1987), among many others. Still other musicals, like Frank Loesser’s The Most Happy Fella (1956) and Sondheim’s Passion (1994), consist of so much music that they create the impression of through composition that unevenly blends spoken and sung lines; both, however, present straightforward dialogue in some pivotal scenes that clearly contrasts with the act of breaking into song. Finally, other musical theater composers have mastered the technique of developing dramatic action from song to accompaniment to underscoring to recitative to new song, avoiding spoken dialogue altogether. Examples of completely sung-through musicals include Lloyd Webber’s Jesus Christ Superstar (1971) and The Phantom of the Opera (1988), Schönberg and Boublil’s Les Misérables (1987) and Miss Saigon (1991), and William Finn’s Falsettos (1992) and A New Brain (1998). LaChiusa’s approach, however, differs from all of the above-mentioned examples. He does not limit the blurring between dialogue and singing to just within the limits of musical numbers, like Rodgers and Hammerstein, Harnick and Bock, and Sondheim. Nor are his musicals completely sung-through. Rather, both the sung and the spoken occur at times between musical numbers, across entire scenes, and sometimes throughout an entire work, thereby more dramatically and consistently effacing the difference between them. The same music acquires the function of underscoring spoken lines and accompanying sung ones. After a character stops singing a song, the music often continues, momentarily underscoring spoken dialogue, then again becoming accompaniment for a new line sung by a different character, which then morphs into a completely new song. Conversations move between the sung and the spoken with a flow that is often lacking when lyricists press words into poetic meter and music.

First Lady Suite This technique deepens characterization and plot development in the first musical for which ­LaChiusa wrote music, lyrics, and book. First Lady Suite dramatizes in four self-contained ­v ignettes the power dynamics between a First Lady ( Jacqueline Kennedy, Mamie Eisenhower, ­Margaret Truman, and Eleanor Roosevelt) and the women surrounding them and their roles in the White House. The first of four segments in this “chamber musical,” titled “Over Texas,” takes place on Air Force One’s flight to Dallas on November 22, 1963. The focus of this scene is not on ­Jacqueline Kennedy, but on the conflicts of her exhausted and underpaid personal secretary, Mary Gallagher. Mary is uncertain about her job’s purpose and expresses her frustration and unhappiness to Evelyn Lincoln, John F. Kennedy’s secretary. Later, Jacqueline Kennedy appears to Mary in a dream and explains that she, too, is unsure about her purpose as the First Lady of the United States. If Mary sees her life suffocated by the demands posed by the First Lady, Jacqueline sees a similar dynamic between herself and the President. A mix of sung and spoken lines circumscribing two songs, “The Smallest Thing” and “This Is What We Are,” develops the climax of the scene, when Mary realizes the parallels between her life and that of the First Lady. 98

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After Mary lies down for a nap, the First Lady enters, marking the beginning of the dream. In the dialogue that follows between the two women, Mary initially speaks her lines, while ­Jacqueline sings hers. Mary is initially not very respectful of the First Lady; she gives only clipped, spoken replies to Jacqueline’s questions. The First Lady, in an attempt at cordial professionalism, sings requests for her coat, hat, and gloves. Mary quickly begins to lose her patience with the First Lady’s questions, and starts revealing her true feelings and discontentment about her job. The growth in intensity causes her to start singing her clipped responses. Musical accompaniment gets more prominent and underscores both sung and spoken words such as “I don’t care,” “I want vacation,” “I want to never hear your voice again,” and “I never thought my life would be like this.” These lines seem to shape the scene to develop into a duet, but Jacqueline, understanding her secretary’s frustrations, speaks a line that prevents Mary from breaking into song. Instead, the First Lady begins her own number, “The Smallest Thing,” during which she explains to Mary that she, too, dislikes her job and struggles with its limitations. She sings that her life has been reduced to just smiling and waving, and exemplifies that fact by describing a ride in the presidential limousine that foreshadows the President’s assassination. Mary wakes up at the end of the song, and resumes her dialogue with Evelyn. Mary is confused by what she has just seen in her dream, and unsure if she is supposed to learn from Jacqueline’s words or the prediction of the President’s death. Evelyn can see that Mary is even more anxious than she was before the nap, and as she tries to soothe Mary, musical accompaniment underscores both spoken words (such as Evelyn’s “Things’ll go just fine. Where’s the campaign spirit?”) and sung lines (as Mary’s “I don’t know”). In doing so, LaChiusa disorients the audience and fulfills his idea of creating anxiety: it is not clear when or if the sung lines will turn into a song. Only when Mary asks Evelyn to assure her of the importance of their jobs does the underscoring become the intro to a song. In “This Is What We Are,” Evelyn convinces Mary that although they may not be as influential as the President and the First Lady, they can nonetheless do good things and have an impact on history. By effacing the boundaries of song and speech in the structure and content of “Over Texas,” LaChiusa blurs the distinctions between the characters’ reality and desires.

Hello Again LaChiusa’s next musical, Hello Again, consists of ten characters pairing up in ten different scenes of sexual encounters. One character from each scene moves on to the next, seemingly breaking up with an old partner in favor of a new one. As LaChiusa explains it, in “ten scenes, A meets B, B meets C, C meets D, and so on.”6 In the tenth and last scene, a character from the ninth scene meets a character from the first one, completing the cycle. Hello Again is based on Arthur ­Schnitzler’s 1897 play La Ronde, which features a similar structure, but LaChiusa updates the piece by setting each scene in a different decade of the twentieth century.7 Further, he employs his technique of mixing sung and spoken lines to differentiate the seducer from the seduced. In scene three, for example, a Nurse seduces a College Boy sometime in the 1960s. The main song in the scene is the Nurse’s solo, “In Some Other Life.” The scene opens with underscoring that alternates between the song’s main theme and solo bongos. Both characters speak their lines at first, but as the Nurse seduces the College Boy, she begins to sing her lines of dialogue. The College Boy continues to speak his, but as he gradually falls for her seduction, he begins to sing some of his lines in recitative, using repeated pitches within a small range. The Nurse culminates the seduction with “In Some Other Life.” While she does not make room for the College Boy to break into song, he occasionally interjects some hesitant, spoken lines during the Nurse’s number. After the song, the solo bongos underscore some spoken lines by both characters. The College Boy finally sings a line, asserting that he no longer needs a nurse. His tuneful melody contrasts with the recitatives from before the song, indicating that her seduction of him was successful. 99

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Having attained what she desired, the Nurse no longer sings. As she prepares to leave, she speaks her lines. The main theme of “In Some Other Life” reappears as underscoring at the scene’s end, but now in a fragmented texture as the College Boy shouts out for the Nurse to come back. Similarly, scene seven of Hello Again, set in the 1970s, dramatizes the encounter between the Writer and the Young Thing. It features three songs: “Montage,” “Safe,” and “The One I Love.” Sung and spoken lines interspersed through the songs identify the seducer and the seduced. The scene opens with the disco-themed “Montage,” in which the Writer sings of envisioning his newest project. Once he sees the Young Thing on the dance floor, disco music underscores a dialogue in which the Writer tries to seduce him, but the Young Thing does not seem very impressed. The Writer sometimes speaks and sometimes sings his lines, while the Young Thing only speaks his. The seduction then moves to the Writer’s bedroom, where the Young Thing, annoyed by the Writer’s endless questions, becomes the seducer. He sings a line for the first time in the scene, seguing into his song, “Safe,” which silences the Writer’s sung and spoken lines. After the song ends, the Writer fantasizes that this one-night encounter may develop into him finding the love of his life. Now, sung and spoken lines begin to differentiate reality from fantasy. An eighth-note chord arpeggiation underscores a dialogue in which the Writer sings about this fantasy, which the Young Thing repeatedly interrupts with spoken lines. When the Writer begins to imagine that the Young Thing shares his fantasy, the two sing the duet “The One I Love.” Music reminiscent of “Montage” brings the fantasy to an end and underscores the scene’s final dialogue. Here, both initially speak their lines, but soon start singing as they agree to go out to eat together. LaChiusa has stated that his main point with the plot of Hello Again was “to say it doesn’t matter where you are, when you are, who you are, this thing of us trying to find the lover of our lives in that person that also wants to be gratified sexually…is such a struggle over and over…We will keep looking for that thing that gives us pleasure and that we get our pleasure from…And the music in the piece sort of confuses that issue.”8 Indeed, music pervades the scenes, and singing becomes a subtext for the need to connect with someone else. Such connection may be seduction (as in “In Some Other Life” and “Safe”), fantasy of falling in love (as in “The One I Love”), or simply getting to know another person (as in “Montage”). Speaking portrays characters either about to be seduced, or who have successfully seduced their target. They do not have, or need, a connection with their scene partner. If singing means searching and establishing a connection, be it love or sex, or both, then the song “The Bed Was Not My Own,” sung by the Senator in the last scene of Hello Again, culminates and conceptualizes the idea. It is the only full-blown song in the scene, following a spoken dialogue between the Senator and the woman with whom he spent the night. The Senator tries to be objective about the difference between love and sex and sings that his search for connection has included several different people that have crossed this path. LaChiusa has explained how the Senator’s song dramatizes this and ties all of the ten scenes of the musical together: Because each character meets a new character, and this new character meets another new character, the one thing about the play was [to show] that each person that you meet in your life…you take a little bit of something from them, and they take a little bit from you, so [in the musical] everybody builds on a piece of music from the other. So that by the end when the Senator sings “The Bed Was Not My Own,” it’s actually an amalgam of all the other characters’ songs. Each musical phrase derives from a previous song.9 Thus, the ambivalence between singing and speaking in Hello Again turns carnal desire and seduction into what one critic characterized as “psychological and philosophical components and implications of human sexuality” in the search for a lover.10 100

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Little Fish The musical Little Fish explores how the protagonist, the aspiring writer Charlotte, struggles to connect with her ex-boyfriend, her roommate, her friends, and her acquaintances in her chosen city, New York City in the years immediately following the September 11 attacks. She sees her life entwined with that of other New Yorkers, but prefers to run away from people and problems, which is exacerbated by the fact that she has recently quit smoking. LaChiusa uses Charlotte’s new habits of running and swimming as metaphors for the way she behaves in life. She attempts these activities to improve her mood, well-being, and relationships, but still finds it difficult to gather strength and joy in a shattered city. As a critic puts it, LaChiusa dramatizes “the tale of someone for whom actual running represents metaphorical standing still.”11 The mix of sung and spoken lines interspersed among four songs (“The Track,” the reprise of “Flotsam,” “Simple Creature,” and “Days”) depicts the protagonist’s tormented mind and signals the ways she gradually understands that friends and fun are crucial for surviving in the time and place in which she lives. Charlotte’s breakdown begins during “The Track.” Here, she talks with an executive who runs alongside her. He points out that she must be used to running and not getting tired, but she interprets the comment to mean that she is used to running away from her problems and is not interested in breaking the habit. LaChiusa has the rest of the company chant excerpts from the previous song, “Poor Charlotte,” to underscore the dialogue. Tormented by nicotine deprivation and her inability to make a change, Charlotte explodes, and delivers a brief, unaccompanied monologue in which she confesses that she is, in fact, too tired to continue running. The scene changes to depict Charlotte buying cigarettes at a bodega. When she opens the pack, she sings the reprise of “Flotsam,” a song previously sung by her childhood heroine, Anne Frank, who had warned her to be careful with repressed feelings. This reprise does not find a closing cadence. Instead, Charlotte tosses the cigarette pack without lighting one and utters the same line that she spoke at the very beginning of the musical, confessing that she has gotten to know herself better since she quit smoking. This spoken line links the reprise of “Flotsam” to Charlotte’s new song, “Simple Creature,” in which she takes the message of the previous song to heart and realizes that she has the ability and resources to make herself happy. After “Simple Creature,” Charlotte speaks again, and reveals her desire to change. This prompts the next song, “Days,” during which Charlotte sings about clearing away the noise in her head, observing instead a better life, closer and healthier relationships, and a better city to live in. Her ultimate realization—that as a little fish, she must swim with the tide and not against it—is voiced in a single, spoken line in the middle of “Days.” In moving from the track to the bodega, and then to a restaurant and a gallery (in “Days”), this scene gradually reveals the ways Charlotte has become aware of her anxiety, and more sensitive to the life and the city around her. Graciela Daniele, who directed the original Off-Broadway production of Little Fish, has observed that “those quick cuts are hard to do onstage, but I like the challenge because it’s a very contemporary way of representing urban life today.”12 Mixing the sung and the spoken reflects and spotlights the anxieties of urban life; the uncertainty of when one musical number ends and another begins allows this scene to develop from one locale to another, and intensifies the drama of Charlotte’s self-understanding.

See What I Wanna See Based on three short stories by Japanese writer Ry ū nosuke Akutagawa (1892–1927), See What I Wanna See consists of three different stories organized in two acts. The first story, “Kesa and Morito,” occurs as the opening of both acts, and “R shomon” constitutes the rest of Act I, while the third story, “Gloryday,” forms the rest of Act II. In all three stories, different characters provide 101

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contrasting, occasionally even contradictory, perspectives on the same situation, and the audience never learns exactly who is telling the truth and who is lying. LaChiusa uses the technique of blending the sung and the spoken to fulfill this dramatic agenda in “Gloryday,” through which the protagonist sings his lies and speaks the truth. “Gloryday” dramatizes a priest who, doubtful of his beliefs and purpose, announces that Christ will rise from a Central Park pond on a Tuesday at 1 p.m. The story focuses on how different people—a CPA, an actress, the priest’s aunt, and a reporter—react to the announcement of this miracle. The priest purposefully fabricates it to prove that humans will believe anything without questioning. He sings his announcement—a lie—in the song “First Message.” Later, in a dialogue with his aunt during which he admits to having lied, he speaks, arguing that humans believe in lies because they are afraid of the truth. On the day of the event, in the park, the priest sings about souvenirs, celebrities, and different religious groups that he has gathered for what he believes to be as a great joke. But the CPA, the actress, and the priest’s aunt all find him to share that his announcement and faith in the miracle have moved them and made a positive impact on their life choices. Having a change of heart, especially after his atheist aunt sings the ballad “There Will Be a Miracle,” the priest becomes desperate to avoid chaos and hurting these people. As the other characters sing for forgiveness in “Prayer,” the priest simultaneously speaks his lines, trying to convince them to listen to him, and to believe that he lied about the miracle. But then, a violent storm hits the park and forces everybody to flee looking for shelter. The priest, alone onstage, sings in “Rising Up” that he was the only one who looked back and saw what nobody else saw: something ascending from the pond, which he concludes was “glory.” In the final moments of the musical, the priest delivers a spoken monologue during which he acknowledges to still question his faith since his lie, which was for everyone, became the truth, but only for himself, and he does not know what to do with the fact. LaChiusa’s decision to make the priest sing when he lies and speak when he tells the truth leaves the sung explanation of the miracle open to interpretation. The priest sees something moving out of the pond and into the sky, but the other characters claim to have seen nothing—just a storm. Is the priest really telling—or more appropriately—singing the truth? Or is he singing another lie? The blending of spoken and sung lines by the same character reflects ambiguities in his behavior and his questioning about what to believe; the audience can see only what the priest wants to see. The idea of singing a lie and thereby belying a character’s true intentions has parallels in other musicals. Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice purposefully wanted a soaring melody for “Don’t Cry for Me Argentina” in Evita (1978) to disguise Eva Peron’s real purpose of gaining the people’s acceptance. She sings the beautiful melody because the “point was that Eva was being deliberately insincere, seducing the audience with more style than content.”13 Similarly, in Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd (1979), Toby means the words he sings in “Not While I’m Around.” He wants to protect Mrs. Lovett from evil actions that he suspects Sweeney Todd has been doing. Mrs. Lovett, however, uses the same music and lyrics to deceive Toby. She sings that she will protect him, too, but she lies: she wants him to feel safe next to her, so that she can eventually kill him and secure his silence about her and Sweeney Todd’s murky business. Out of their dramatic context, both “Don’t Cry for Me Argentina” and “Not While I’m Around” work as ballads of comfort and sincerity. LaChiusa’s “First Message” and “Rising Up,” on the other hand, do not. Performances of these songs will always concern both an intention and a miracle whose truthfulness is too ambiguous to be proved.

First Daughter Suite Continuing his exploration of female power and powerlessness in the White House, LaChiusa’s First Daughter Suite expands the dramatization of its predecessor, First Lady Suite. Both musicals 102

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consist of four scenes that fantasize the history and personal conflicts of women who have lived in the White House. Despite the title, First Daughter Suite also focuses on the First Ladies dramatized in each scene (Patricia Nixon, Betty Ford and Rosalynn Carter, Nancy Reagan, and Barbara Bush). In fact, the scenes reveal that the first daughters’ conflicts are just some of the many tribulations that the First Lady has to handle. In the third scene of First Daughter Suite, “Patti By the Pool,” mixing the sung and the spoken highlights subtext during a disagreement between Nancy Reagan and her daughter, Patti Davis. The scene is introduced with music, but the two characters do not sing initially. Instead, they speak their dialogue with no musical accompaniment once the introductory music stops. Patti visits her mother at the home of socialite Betsy Bloomingdale in California. As the dialogue unfolds, Patti begins to reveal her discontentment regarding her mother’s values and prejudices. Percussive sounds punctuate her lines; these gradually morph into sung lines accompanied by chords on the piano. Patti sings to confront her mother and accuse her of knowing the truth behind the Iran-Contra affair. As Patti’s state of mind alters throughout the scene, the music that accompanies her grows in intensity, and her vocal lines expand in range. But Patti does not find a song. Instead, she continues to alternate between spoken and sung portions, criticizing her mother for her narcissistic behavior and President Reagan’s actions vis-à-vis a political scandal. Nancy, on the other hand, only speaks her lines, which are occasionally accompanied by chords on the piano, or maracas when the maid Anita is on the scene. Not only do Nancy’s spoken lines prevent Patti from concluding her sung portions, they also show that Nancy is not affected by the unpleasant reality that Patti wants her to face. Nancy prefers to maintain a façade to protect her and her husband’s names and legacy. She even tells Patti that she and President Reagan never knew anything about the Iran-Contra affair, and this is what Patti ought to “say” to the press as well. Singing in this scene implies a desire to vocalize problematic issues concerning both the Reagan family and the Reagan administration. Speaking implies the will to deny them. At the climax of the scene, Nancy has Anita prepare a drink with a tranquilizer that makes Patti fall asleep, silencing not just her opinions on the Reagan presidency and Nancy’s personal choices, but the first daughter’s singing, too. Nancy then delivers a spoken monologue in which she confirms her vain values. She sings just one unaccompanied line, when she concludes that the people at the Bloomingdale mansion—presumably aware but dismissive of the flaws of Reagan’s presidency—are her friends. This is the only sung portion that Nancy has in the entire scene. This brief sung passage suggests that Nancy is actually conscious of the criticism that Patti raised throughout the scene. But it is just one line, and like Patti’s singing, the acknowledgment cannot go any further in order to keep the Reagans’ feigned composure. The maracas that underscore great part of the spoken dialogue and Nancy’s final monologue morph into musical accompaniment for “Anita’s Song,” during which the maid comments on mother-daughter relationships by comparing them with how a bird and its offspring interact in the wild to survive. Anita’s singing invites the audience to consider and question the power dynamics between mother and daughter, which, incidentally, is applicable to all scenes of First Daughter Suite. “Patti By the Pool” exemplifies LaChiusa’s claim that effacing the line between the sung and the spoken tricks the audience’s emotional template. It is never exactly clear when Patti will break into song, or if Nancy will ever resort to singing. It is not until “Anita’s Song” and the end of the scene that the audience can deduct that Patti’s singing is a subtext for turning private issues of their family into public affairs, and Nancy’s speaking was an attempt to keep public affairs as private as possible.14 Thus, with the technique of not clearly demarcating the sung and the spoken, LaChiusa dramatizes what audiences see, hear, and read about women at the White House living on public display, next to the most powerful man in the United States, but without much power themselves. Over the course of his career, Michael John LaChiusa has expanded the conventions of the book musical, which conventionally relies on alternation between spoken dialogue and songs, 103

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or between book and score. Breaking into song in a book musical furthers characterization and changes the mode of expression presented initially by the book. Scott McMillan argues that in musical theater, when a song starts, the book is typically discontinued; musical numbers repeat in song what the book has already established.15 LaChiusa repeatedly challenges this notion with his musicals by setting ambiguous boundaries between book and musical numbers. As seen in the musicals discussed earlier, he does not differentiate between song and dialogue, but the sung and the spoken. As his characters transit between sung and spoken lines without clearly demarcating when one ends and the other begins, the contrast not only deepens some aspects of plot and character that had been introduced before but also reveals subtext that the audience cannot get from anywhere else in the musical. Such depth of plot and character does not come free; it requires close listening and careful consideration of the characters’ intentions, states of mind, and feelings. LaChiusa has stated that, “Musicals have to have spontaneity. When you hear it, sitting there in the audience, it has to catch you, as if it’s being created in that moment.”16 As composer, lyricist, and book writer of his own musicals, LaChiusa weaves music into his scripts in ways that not only tighten the integration of songs (or score) and spoken dialogue (or book) but also blur the distinctions between them. LaChiusa has long advocated for an American stage musical that does not just subscribe continuously to conventions that make the genre mechanical or routine; because “for expectations to be met,” he argues, “there can be no room for risk, derring-do or innovation.”17 Indeed, while his musicals do contain aspects of the conventional components of musical theater, they are combined and arranged unconventionally. LaChiusa has acknowledged that breaking the mold may be one reason why his musicals are not widely acclaimed. “The unconventional is harder to pay for, play for, to act and to build,”18 he notes. But still, he credits Oklahoma! (1943), Company (1970), A Chorus Line (1976), and Evita (1978) as revolutionary musicals in their own time because of their unconventionalities.19 Then again, and despite his low profile, LaChiusa’s innovations find parallels in the works of other musical theater composers, both his contemporaries and those who have followed him. The technique of mixing and blurring the sung and the spoken—or the score and the book—occurs in musicals like Jeanine Tesori’s Caroline, or Change (2003) and Fun Home (2013), Dave Malloy’s Natasha, Pierre, and the Great Comet of 1812 (2012), Juliana Nash’s Murder Ballad (2013), Lin-­ Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton (2015), and Anaïs Mitchell’s Hadestown (2016). LaChiusa’s approach marks a craftsmanship that characterizes musicals from the end of the twentieth and beginning of the twenty-first centuries without completely dismissing the elements that define musical theater aesthetics. His musicals fulfill his own agenda of creating musical theater that “nods to the past and leans to the future.”20

Notes 1 As an example, see Michael John LaChiusa. “The Great Gray Way.” Opera News 70.2 (Aug. 2005): 30–35. 2 Michael John LaChiusa. “I Sing of America’s Mongrel Culture.” The New York Times. 14 Nov. 1999. 3 Ibid. 4 Michael John LaChiusa, interview by author, New York, 22 June 2015. 5 Ibid. 6 Ibid. 7 In the 2017 film version of Hello Again, LaChiusa updated once again, bringing one scene to the ­t wenty-first century. 8 Michael John LaChiusa, interview by author, New York, 22 June 2015. 9 Ibid. 10 John Simon. “Defacing a Masterpiece.” The New York Magazine. 14 Feb. 1994.

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Michael John LaChiusa’s Musicals 11 David Finkle. Review of Little Fish, TheaterMania, 14 Feb. 2003. Web. 6 June 2015. . 12 Don Shewey. Quoted in “She Sings the Body Desperate for a Smoke.” The New York Times. 9 Feb. 2003. 13 Michael Coveney. Cats on a Chandelier: The Andrew Lloyd Webber Story. London: Hutchinson, 1999. 72. For more on Lloyd Webber’s mix of melody, recitative, and spoken lines in Evita, see Stephen Citron. Sondheim and Lloyd-Webber: The New Musical. New York: Oxford UP. 226–229. 14 Patti Davis actually made many issues of the Reagan family public in her book The Way I See It: An Autobiography, published in 1992. 15 Scott McMillin. The Musical as Drama. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2006. 1–10. 16 Quoted in Barry Singer. Ever After: The Last Years of Musical Theater and Beyond. New York: Applause, 2004. 90. 17 LaChiusa, “The Great Gray Way,” 33. 18 LaChiusa, “I Sing of America’s Mongrel Culture.” 19 Ibid. 20 LaChiusa, “The Great Gray Way,” 32.

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11 THE NEW “SOUNDS OF BROADWAY” Orchestrating Electronic Instruments in Contemporary Musicals Michael M. Kennedy In American musical theater, the orchestra serves as an essential indicator of style. Broadway musicals of the mid-twentieth-century’s so-called Golden Age had particular sonic traits, informed by accomplished orchestrators. Among the most celebrated was Robert Russell Bennett (1894–1981), who orchestrated all or part of over 300 musicals. The two most comprehensive texts on musical theater orchestrations, Bennett’s autobiographic The Broadway Sound (1999) and Steven Suskin’s The Sound of Broadway Music (2009), describe how this acoustic age became standardized, ­incorporating either string-dominant European traditions (like Bennett’s), or American jazz-band approaches (like with the equally prolific Don Walker).1 By equating Golden Age orchestrations with the Broadway sound, these monographs’ titles connote the idea that musical theater’s aural signature may be predominantly defined with conformity. Since the late 1960s, however, Broadway has undergone numerous aesthetic shifts and become a heterogeneous soundscape, with new orchestral methods developing alongside the continuation of earlier styles and resulting in a melting pot of “Broadway sounds.” An abrupt shift occurred with the 1968 Broadway opening of Hair, which subverted Golden Age orchestrations by utilizing an all-rock score, and a rock band augmented with winds and auxiliary percussion. Following Hair and during the growth of the megamusical, the overt amplification of voices and instruments became a desired theatrical attribute. This progression in the artistry of sound design paralleled the onset of musical theater pits that utilized diverse, wholly electronic musical instruments. 2 Electronic instruments have been used on Broadway since the 1940s. Kurt Weill, who commonly orchestrated his own compositions, sometimes wrote for prototypes of electronic keyboards, as with his use of a Hammond organ in Lady in the Dark (1941).3 Musicals in the 1960s and 1970s occasionally employed early analog synthesizers, which possessed unique but limited onboard sounds and restricted programming capabilities. Breakthroughs in music technology came in the late 1970s with commercially available, programmable polyphonic synthesizers, and in the early 1980s with synth manufacturers’ adoption of Musical Instrument Digital Interface (MIDI), which enabled sound mapping and memory storage among instruments.4 These and other innovations have expanded orchestrators’ sonic palettes through various electronic music techniques, including digital synthesis, sampling, sequencing, voice layering, and editing, all of which allow a single musician to perform a vast array of sounds.

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This chapter identifies the aesthetic and sometimes ideological ramifications of implementing electronic music in Broadway productions, using case studies from the orchestrations of Michael Starobin for Sunday in the Park with George (1984), William David Brohn for Miss Saigon (1991), and Alex Lacamoire for Hamilton (2015).5 While these musicals differ greatly in compositional style, their orchestrations demonstrate a similar postmodern strategy of situating historical subjects, period settings, or indigenous cultures in eclectic sonic environments that merge acoustic and electronic instruments. The dexterous use of synthesizers and sequencers in both Sunday and Hamilton enhances the musicals’ diverse expressions, while also showcasing state-of-the-art music technologies for their respective eras. In contrast, the sampling and synthesis of East Asian instruments in Miss Saigon seemingly provide authenticity, but they are actually endemic of the musical’s widespread exoticism and cultural approximations, which pander to Western audiences. Thus, whereas the orchestrations for Sunday and Hamilton can be seen as progressive for their anachronistic accompaniment of period elements, Miss Saigon’s score is perhaps regressive in terms of its rampant cultural misrepresentations.

Exploring Colors with Michael and George Michael Starobin’s (1956–) orchestrations are known for generating lavish sounds with relatively small ensembles, as in Assassins (1990 Off-Broadway, 2004 Broadway), Falsettos (1992), and The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee (2005). Starobin has pioneered Broadway’s integration of synthesizers since the 1980s, while distinguishing himself for his meticulous synth programming. His orchestrations for any given production utilize many unique electronic sounds, including approximately two- to three-hundred patch changes per show. Using synths for artistic reasons, he derides relying on technology as a cost-saving replacement for acoustic instruments: The goal is not to fool someone into thinking there is a bigger orchestra. The goal is to make something theatrical and to tell a story…. Many musicals have shifted stylistically towards chamber music, …and as an orchestrator, I have always worked a lot with synthesizers and counterpoint as ways of creating complexity and texture.6 Beginning his career during the dawn of programmable MIDI-based polysynths, Starobin demonstrated his prowess with electronic music when he made his Broadway debut orchestrating Stephen Sondheim’s Sunday in the Park with George. Prior to its May 1984 Broadway opening, Sunday workshopped in July 1983 at Playwrights Horizons, an Off-Broadway nonprofit theater known for experimentation. With music and lyrics by Sondheim and book and direction by James Lapine, Sunday offers a meditation on art’s creation and functionality. It comprises two interconnected stories in two acts, which are related through actor doublings, structural parallels, and musical reiterations. Act 1 presents fictionalized vignettes of the French Neo-Impressionist painter Georges Seurat (referred to as George). As George works on Un dimanche après-midi sur l’île de la Grande Jatte from 1884 to 1886, he cultivates his pointillist style and struggles with personal and professional relationships. In the Act 1 finale, he assembles the cast to fashion a tableau vivant of the completed painting—a metaphor of creating order from chaos. Set in 1984, Act 2 depicts Georges Seurat’s fictional great-grandson, also referred to as George, an American artist-inventor of light machine-sculptures called Chromolumes that have been inspired by Seurat’s work. At the musical’s conclusion, George has become disillusioned by the stagnant directions of his life and art. He encounters the subjects from Seurat’s painting when visiting La Grande Jatte, and the experience encourages him to realize his passions and the future’s innumerable possibilities. Starobin, having been a resident musician and orchestrator at Playwrights Horizons in the early 1980s, performed in Sunday’s workshop improvising a synth part alongside piano, percussion,

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and trumpet. For the task of orchestrating the full musical’s Broadway production, Lapine recommended Starobin, who had collaborated with Lapine on William Finn’s March of the Falsettos (1981). Because Sondheim’s usual orchestrator, Jonathan Tunick, was not available, Sondheim agreed to audition Starobin by having him orchestrate the numbers “Color and Light” and “Beautiful.” After Starobin received constructive criticism and adjusted his style accordingly, Sondheim lauded the orchestrator’s work as “brilliant”; because Sondheim composes only with piano in mind, he relied on Starobin to craft the musical’s instrumental soundscape.7 Sunday often forgoes conventional musical theater styles and utilizes minimalism. It emphasizes the repetition of rhythmic, fragmented motives, which sonically manifest Seurat’s pointillist brushstrokes.8 Correspondingly, Starobin drew upon his formal training by recalling Steve Reich’s minimalist works. He listened to chamber pieces by Claude Debussy, Maurice Ravel, and Elliott Carter, which motivated him with innovative colors, complicated textures, and intricate keyboard writing. Starobin’s original orchestrations for Sunday comprised an 11-member ensemble using string quartet, two reed doublers, French horn, percussion, harp, acoustic piano, and synthesizers.9 In the musical’s original Broadway production, Starobin featured the Prophet T8—a programmable analog polysynth with digital processing. Released by Sequential Circuits in 1983, the Prophet T8 was novel for its MIDI capacity, 76 weighted keys, real-time sequencer, and ability to perform one sound with eight voices, or two sounds of four voices each. The production’s pianist occasionally doubled on the Prophet 5, an older model that provided synthetic harpsichord and clavinet sounds. For the diegetic accompaniment of younger George’s Chromolume #7, Starobin’s arrangements deployed the Prophets along with pre-programmed loops triggered on a Roland MSQ-700 sequencer that drove a Korg Poly-800 synthesizer.10 The synths, with their expansive electronic sounds, enhance Sunday’s technological aesthetic. This logically relates to Act 2’s contemporary setting, as well as its depiction of the Chromolume, which is regarded for its advanced engineering and artistic innovation. Perhaps more surprising, however, is that electronic music saturates Act 1, which Starobin explains as his way of depicting the elder George exploring the park and its colors through his own fantasy.11 During Sunday’s “Opening Prelude,” George recites his catechism of artistic fundamentals, including “order, design, composition, balance, light, and harmony.” Interspersing this text, piano and synth respond in unison with variations of arpeggiated major chords, punctuated by crotales, harp, and strings (see Figure 11.1). Starobin decorates these initial motives with the Prophet T8’s “bright ping” sound in order to produce an unexpected effect: It is an unusual opening, …but it needs to be thrilling with its theatrical gestures. And trying to make a bright bell-like sound that is otherworldly tells me that this is not simply bucolic park music, but rather that this is a man who is seeing something quite remarkable in this place.12 After George concludes his artistic catechism, the once-barren stage gradually assembles the park while George introduces Dot, his fictional muse and mistress. Concurrently, the score dramatically shifts to feature a majestic French horn melody, accompanied by the continuing five-note piano motive, undulating flutes and strings, a suspended cymbal roll, and a sustained bass drone in the cello and synth. The predominance of the French horn links this opening music to the painting la Grande Jatte, which includes a brass player in the background. The horn’s melody also prefigures the “Sunday” theme that is sung by the full ensemble during Act 1’s finale as the painting’s tableau vivant is completed.13 The warmth of the horn solo denotes a hot Sunday morning, and Starobin arranged its accompaniment to have a fluid texture with freely moving flutes and strings that reflect the shimmering water surrounding the park.14 While launching the narrative, this 108

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Figure 11.1  “ Opening Prelude,” m. 1, music by Stephen Sondheim, orchestration by Michael Starobin, Sunday in the Park with George.15 Source: Music Theatre International, New York, 1984.

musical introduction establishes a precedent for acoustic instruments often underscoring moments inspired by live subjects and real settings. In contrast, electronic music often correlates with George’s process of creation and technique. Later in Act 1, “Color and Light” provides the first display of Seurat’s actual la Grande Jatte, projected with light onto a scrim, which simulates George’s canvas. Frequently when George paints or sketches, Sondheim mimics the rhythmic movement with a rapid, eighth-note pointillism motive, comprising shortened articulation and alternating leaps.16 After the scene’s transition, the onset of the first refrain in “Color and Light” coincides with the inaugural presentation of Seurat’s masterpiece in progress. At this pivotal moment, the pointillism motive becomes a harmonized ostinato in the Prophet T8, performing a “bright electric piano” patch as George’s fragmented melody alternates with percussive attacks from harp, piano, vibes, and pizzicato strings. An avoidance of winds induces a lack of warmth (see Figure 11.2). The prominence of a synthetic accompaniment connects to the biological rationale of Seurat’s pointillist experimentations: the eye’s ability to blend separate color spots into a wide spectrum of colors with heightened luminosity, which is similar to the ear perceiving distinct aural effects as unnaturally coalesced musical sounds. Through the remainder of the number and scene, the orchestra explores various instrumental combinations, both electronic and acoustic, resembling George’s exploration of color combinations. Starobin’s orchestrations for Sunday in the Park with George, especially the use of synths, enrich the musical’s self-referential way of examining modes of creation and innovating artistic elements. The musical’s acoustic-dominant passages tend to signal both Georges’ passions for real-life subjects, whereas electronic musical moments typically signify their passions for innovating their 109

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Figure 11.2  “Color and Light,” mm. 54–57, music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim, orchestration by ­M ichael Starobin, Sunday in the Park with George. Source: Music Theatre International, New York, 1984.

work through scientific methodologies. The score’s application of processed sounds highlights art’s artificiality, particularly relating to the exploration of color, and parallels the musical’s intersection of art, science, and technology.

Sounding Exoticism in Saigon Associated with big-budget musicals including Ragtime (1998), Wicked (2003), and Mary Poppins (2006), William David Brohn (1933–2017) garnered renown for grandiose orchestrations that employed symphonic traditions, blended with popular and electronic music influences. His symphonic style drew inspiration from Bennett, with whom Brohn collaborated late in Bennett’s career. Brohn had little background with pop and electronic music, but learned techniques from these genres through various colleagues. His unique approach—orchestrating numbers while observing them in rehearsal—immersed his work in the collaborative process. He first gained international acclaim with his orchestrations of Miss Saigon, which premiered in 1989 in London’s West End prior to its 1991 Broadway opening.17 The pit for Saigon’s original Broadway production boasted a 25-member ensemble that was traditional in terms of size. Brohn’s orchestrations, however, are distinct for integrating East Asian instrumental sounds, created mostly through the aid of synths, within a larger orchestral framework. Miss Saigon came at the zenith of the megamusical genre, following such predecessors as Cats, Les Misérables, and The Phantom of the Opera. Jessica Sternfeld considers Saigon to be a “quintessential 110

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megamusical” in that it incorporates all of the genre’s features, including an epic plot with strong emotions, a sung-through operatic-pop (or “popera”) score, highly commercialized productions with wide marketing hype, and extravagant production elements, including most famously a helicopter that lands and takes off from the stage.18 Written by the French lyricist-composer team of Alain Boublil and Claude-Michel Schoenberg (who also wrote Les Mis), Saigon combines its authors’ opulent popera style with East Asian cultural allusions. Loosely borrowing plot points from Puccini’s Madama Butterfly that are reset at the end of the Vietnam War, Saigon depicts the doomed relationship between a US marine named Chris and a Vietnamese bar girl named Kim, with meddling from the Engineer, a greedy pimp.19 The musical’s Vietnam War-era setting prompted its creative team to engage in some historical and cultural research, but not so deeply that they were lauded for their production’s realism or authenticity.20 Rooted in many stereotypes, Saigon accords with a long tradition of musicals and operas exhibiting Orientalist tendencies, which exploit (even while sometimes admiring) other cultures in order to define one’s own identity through differentiation.21 Cultural approximations and a general disregard for Asian sensibilities resulted in the musical’s frequent use of exoticisms that were often criticized as misrepresentative at best and exploitative at worst. Controversy surrounded the original Broadway production before it opened, due especially to its portrayal of certain Asian characters by white actors, notably Jonathan Pryce, who originated the role of the half-Asian Engineer in both London and New York. Moreover, Saigon’s content marginalizes Asian characters concerning both ethnicity and gender. Aside from Ellen, Chris’s American wife, the female characters are scantily clad prostitutes used for erotic exhibitionism. While the only two featured Asian male roles are despotic (Thuy) and sleazy (the Engineer), the Asian male ensemble characters are either impoverished rabble or mindless soldiers.22 Miss Saigon’s score participates in Orientalism through its approximation of Asian music, beginning with Schönberg’s folk-like melodies, typified by their simplicity, repetitiveness, and frequent pentatonicism. The introduction of US marines early in Act 1 establishes rock as a musical foundation, denoting American culture’s infiltration of Saigon, which allows indigenous styles to be “othered.” By deliberately avoiding direct references to any specific 1970s pop or Asian music, Schönberg expresses his own contemporary popera language infused with exoticism, while intending to broadly sound “a clash between two cultures.”23 Corresponding to Schönberg’s composition, Saigon’s orchestrations inflate the musical’s ­Orientalism. Producer Cameron Mackintosh asked for suggestions about suitable orchestrators from Tunick, who recommended Brohn for his symphonic approach. The creative team became convinced of Brohn’s ability to sound the musical’s cultural allusions after hearing his orchestrations for a concert suite of dances from Sondheim’s Pacific Overtures. Brohn, however, had little knowledge of East Asian music. Capitalizing on the uncommonly long pre-production and rehearsal schedules, he researched indigenous instruments from various Asian cultures by listening to recordings, receiving assistance from specialists in New York, and seeing performances of gamelan ensembles in London’s South Bank. Schönberg and Brohn then selected Saigon’s exotic sounds based solely on instruments’ evocative timbres and sonic variety, while giving no consideration to cultural significance. Consequently, the orchestrations present a blend of heritages, including Japanese (the shakuhachi, shamisen, koto, and taiko drums), Chinese (cymbals, gongs, tam-tam, mokugyo, and tao-ku), Thai (bells, ching, and kyeezee), Indonesian (gamelan and gambang), and Vietnamese (đàn tranh). Since many of these instruments were unfeasible for an orchestra pit due to size and availability, the production team had recordings and samples made to be programmed into various modules and synths.24 The musical’s initial deployment of electronic instruments was practical for their contemporary and exotic colorings, and ambitious for their amount and disposition. The original West End production used a complicated setup of several different modules, samplers, and synths to achieve the 111

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sonic diversity desired. To simplify the layout for the musical’s Broadway opening, the production hired Brett Sommer, one of the earliest synth programming specialists in musical theater. Creating new samples and retaining others from the previous production, Sommer configured keyboard, guitar, and percussion controllers to each trigger their own Roland S-770—a newly released sampler with greater efficiency and capacity than earlier models. The lead keyboard player utilized an E-mu Proteus piano module for supplemental sounds. The entire network connected to Yamaha DMP-7 digital mixers, adding more sonic effects.25 An overt fusion of acoustic and electronic instrumentation is apparent in the music of the Engineer, which is often marked by bright, eccentric-sounding synth patches, including clavinet and jauntily written plucked strings on koto and shamisen. These are frequently accompanied by pointed attacks from metallic and wooden Asian percussion. Reflecting the character’s Eurasian cultural hybridity, his songs are a mix of musical influences. The result was a hybrid that Brohn offensively called “Bamboo rock” when referring to the number “If You Want to Die in Bed,” but applicable as well to “What a Waste” and “The American Dream.” This objectionable label refers to Brohn’s combination of “Oriental,” American, and French instrumental sounds with lavish wind and brass writing set against an aggressive pop style, which he considered “beautiful” for its “funny, trashy rock beat.”26 A subtler but integral example of Orientalism through instrumentation occurs in the Act 1 wedding of Chris and Kim, during which Kim and her fellow bar girls, conservatively dressed for the first time, sing what appears to be Vietnamese ceremonial music. Boublil admits that this wedding blessing is not authentic, but instead is based on French texts that he found in readings about Vietnam, which he translated after soliciting suggestions from several Vietnamese waitresses and selecting the version that sounded best to him.27 The wedding’s orchestral accompaniment exposes numerous musical exoticisms (see Figure 11.3). The orchestration features the shakuhachi (labeled “Asian flute” in the score), a traditional ­Japanese bamboo flute. The shakuhachi was one of the few indigenous instruments performed acoustically in Saigon’s pit, because its delicate sound made it difficult to sample. Schönberg and Brohn only use the shakuhachi to accompany or reference Kim; Brohn explains, “The wailing of the Oriental flute comes to represent the sacrifice of the Oriental woman.”28 Other East Asian sonic allusions include the strings’ harmonics and pizzicato emulating Chinese string effects, as well as the improvised, sparse use of wooden and metallic percussion. Establishing modal harmonic shifts, the synthesizers’ pentatonic figures play in unison with “new age piano” and “gamelan” patches, providing a contemporary flavor to seemingly traditional music. The use of samplers and synthesizers here and throughout Saigon provides a conduit for the musical’s cultural approximations by alluding to certain East Asian instrumental sounds without the specificity of borrowing actual indigenous music. This scene’s various generalizations—its nonsensical text, clichéd plaintive accompaniment of femininity, and uncomfortable hodgepodge of musical identities—are indicative of Saigon’s racist, misogynist depictions. While the musical problematizes notions of the “American dream” and the US involvement in Vietnam, it simultaneously engages in the same cultural exploitation it attempts to critique. Its Asian references and allusions—created by an all-male, European-American production team for European-American audiences—are projected through a white patriarchal perspective, which filters indigenous and period elements through a tragic narrative with universal themes while avoiding genuine issues concerning the West’s culpability for the war and its devastation of Vietnam and its people.29 Despite (or perhaps because of ) its generalizations and stereotypes, Miss Saigon resonated with Broadway patrons, earning $37 million in advance ticket sales (a record in 1991), enjoying 4092 performances during its ten-year run, and becoming the thirteenth-longest running production

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Figure 11.3  “ The Wedding,” mm. 60–66, lyrics by Alain Boublil, music by Claude-Michel Schoenberg, orchestration by William David Brohn, Miss Saigon. Source: Music Theatre International, New York, n.d.

in Broadway’s history to date. Subsequently, the musical has reaped great commercial success, especially throughout the United States and United Kingdom. Western audiences have identified with the musical’s promotion of dominant Western ideologies, or have been enticed by its Orientalist marginalizations of East Asian music and culture through vague yet approachable representations. David Schlossman qualifies the musical’s reception: It is important to recognize that audience members may critique a performance even as they derive pleasure from it. Spectators … mediate critique and pleasure, suggesting on the one hand that one cannot draw a direct line between Miss Saigon’s support for dominant ideologies and the audience’s experience of the musical, but also revealing that spectators may subordinate critical urges to pleasure.30

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Among Saigon’s most “pleasing” attractions is its pageantry, including its immense sets, special effects, imposing score, and melodrama. And Brohn’s sumptuous orchestrations amplify the musical’s spectacle, particularly with the prominence of electronic music, which helps bridge Miss Saigon’s stylistic gap between contemporary popera and East Asian exoticism.

Turning the Theater World Upside Down Alex Lacamoire (b. 1975) is the latest star among Broadway orchestrators, having recently tied the record by winning three Tony Awards for Best Orchestrations for In the Heights (2008), Hamilton (2015), and Dear Evan Hansen (2016).31 His wielding of electronic instruments in a rhythmically intense pop style is intrinsic to his background in classic rock and pop, the sounds and textures of which are part of his “blood and hearing of music.”32 After his breakthrough working under Brohn as assistant music director and arranger for Wicked (2003), Lacamoire first became associated with Lin-Manuel Miranda on In the Heights. Following that show’s successes, Miranda retained its creative team for Hamilton.33 Whereas this chapter’s previous case studies set fictional narratives against period settings, ­Hamilton constitutes what Elissa Harbert labels a “history musical,” portraying real people and events from the past with a reasonable amount of historical accuracy.34 Adapted from Ron ­Chernow’s biography of Alexander Hamilton, the musical depicts the founding father’s rise from poverty in the Caribbean to his exceptional military and political careers, which included serving in the Revolutionary War as George Washington’s aide, framing the US Constitution, and helping establish the new nation’s financial system as the first Treasury Secretary. Eschewing conventional period representations, Hamilton adopts a hip-hop aesthetic, including rap-style numbers and the multiracial casting of white historical figures. Promoting immigrant cultures’ influences and relating America’s founding fathers to contemporary diversity, Miranda describes how, “For all of its variety of style and subject, rap is, at bottom, the music of ambition, the soundtrack of defiance, whether the force that must be defied is poverty, cops, racism, rival rappers, or all of the above.”35 Further contextualizing this approach, Loren Kajikawa suggests, “Miranda’s assertion that Hamilton embodies hip hop illuminates how heroic individualism, rugged masculinity, and poetic self-invention underwrite narratives of the nation’s birth as well as the musical personas of numerous hip hop stars.”36 Hamilton effectively deploys hip-hop’s essential characteristic—the musical borrowing, through allusion and quotation, of various songs from different genres.37 Miranda borrows extensively from classic rap artists including Grandmaster Flash, the Beastie Boys, A Tribe Called Quest, Mobb Deep, DMX, Eminem, Jay-Z, and especially The Notorious B.I.G. Hamilton also contains sonic and lyrical allusions to representatives of styles ranging from R&B (Beyoncé, Mary J. Blige), pop (the ­Beatles), and musical theater (Gilbert and Sullivan, Rodgers and Hammerstein, Jason Robert Brown). ­Lacamoire engaged with the various genres’ and artists’ distinctive sounds, while finding additional inspiration in the styles of other artists, including D’Angelo, Destiny’s Child, and The Roots.38 Lacamoire began collaborating with Miranda on Hamilton in 2009, which allowed the team a remarkably long time to develop the work prior to its February 2015 premiere Off-Broadway and its move to Broadway that August. Lacamoire describes the extensive collaboration period as “liberating”; his imprint permeates the score, since he served as co-arranger, music director, conductor, and lead keyboard player in addition to orchestrator.39 Technological innovations aided not only Hamilton’s sonic design but also its composition. Atypical for musical theater at that time, Miranda made song demos with Logic Pro, recording his own vocals and adding basic harmonies and accompaniment with keyboard, drumbeats, and other sampled instruments. Lacamoire or his assistants then transcribed the music into piano-vocal scores, while Lacamoire provided additional arrangements before finalizing the full orchestrations.40 114

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Rap depends on vocal flow and lyricism; Lacamoire thus balanced acoustic and electronic instrumentation so the latter would not be overwhelming. By 2013, he conceived of the show’s 10-member ensemble, comprising a string quartet and a pop band, including two keyboards, guitar, bass, drum set, and percussion. The string quartet sometimes provides eighteenth-century period elements, and supplies warmth and lyricism; in other instances, the strings adapt to rapstyle passages by adding to the rhythmic grooves. Further strengthening the musico-narrative content, Lacamoire associates specific characters with certain instruments. For example, the cello conveys knowledge and wisdom, symbolizing Hamilton’s two primary narrators, Aaron Burr and Angelica Schuyler—but with a dark, sinister timbre for the former and a nobler expression for the latter. Harp samples also signify Angelica because of the instrument’s suitability to perform her accompanying motive, with its high ascending-descending arpeggiation first heard in “Satisfied.” Lacamoire complements Hamilton and his wife, Eliza, through instrumentation: Hamilton’s rapping alongside digital, percussive grooves denotes his intense energy, while Eliza’s music, rooted in acoustic strings, guitar, and piano, evokes calmness. George Washington’s songs often utilize a Wurlitzer piano effect, with its vintage, sage feel. And the British and loyalists correlate with the harpsichord’s brittle, antiquated sound.41

Figure 11.4  “ Yorktown,” mm. 54–62, music by Lin-Manuel Miranda, orchestration by Alex Lacamoire, Hamilton. Source: Alex Lacamoire’s personal files, n.d.

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Figure 11.4  (Continued).

Regarding the show’s diverse electronic instruments, the keyboardists play Yamaha S-90s controlling MainStage and Galaxy sample libraries, which have become standard in musical theater. The bassist doubles on electric, upright, and an Arturia bass synth keyboard. In addition to playing drum pads and auxiliary acoustic instruments, the percussionist performs a Yamaha Motif keyboard for celeste, vibes, and a mixed celeste-Rhodes keyboard sound. Supplementing this assortment of synths, the orchestrations’ most innovative component is Ableton Live, a software music sequencer and digital audio workstation capable of composing, arranging, recording, mixing, and sounding various turntablist effects. Triggered by the percussionist, Ableton serves two functions in Hamilton: it supplies a click-track for the musicians, which keeps tempos consistent and syncs with certain light cues; and it sounds digital effects that cannot be performed by musicians, providing a sense of authenticity in terms of rap’s processed aesthetic.42 ­Ableton’s numerous turntablist effects in Hamilton include distortions, record scratches, sirens, sound loops, digital delays, arpeggiations, and other instrumental alterations. These have characterized rap since the genre’s origins in the 1970s, when early DJs transformed turntables into musical instruments through sound manipulating innovations.43 Ableton also provides vocal delays with actors’ voices being recorded and sampled as loops, which Lacamoire uses occasionally for Burr, Hamilton, and Angelica to indicate how their voices echo through history while also reflecting a hip-hop studio effect.44 116

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The orchestrations’ hip-hop style is on full display during the dance break of “Yorktown (The World Turned Upside Down).” This number portrays the decisive Battle of Yorktown, with the dance break depicting a week-long fight before the British surrender (see Figure 11.4). The orchestration’s “noisy” affect here lends to the scene’s suggestion of a climactic battle and to a distinctive hip-hop quality. As heavy percussion, keyboards, guitar, and bass lay down driving, syncopated beats, the string quartet demonstrates its versatility by contributing to the groove while also outlining the phrase’s melodic contour. Ableton (labeled “Loops/SFX” in the score) occasionally sounds explosions and bells to depict period elements, and also features record scratches, which add intricate rhythmic counterpoint and further connect the moment to hiphop’s studio sound and DJ origins. Fully embracing the anachronism of historical figures rapping and singing pop, Hamilton incorporates sung- and danced-through structures while being self-aware of its theatricality and hip-hop aesthetic. This presentational style situates the past in the present both emotionally and historiographically, by placing the audience in the role of historian.45 Hamilton is paradigm-­ shifting in many ways, including how it redefines modes of genre, casting, and storytelling. But it also has reimagined Broadway’s sound, with Lacamoire’s orchestrations enhancing the work’s contemporary pop-music style and exemplifying hip-hop’s live performativity with musicians playing alongside diverse, elaborate digital effects with precision and vitality.

Concluding Thoughts: The Age of Electronic Storytelling Unconventionally juxtaposed against a wide range of narrative and thematic elements, electronically processed sounds in these case studies effectively negotiate various issues of distance, whether in time, among cultures, or between spectator and subjects. This, in turn, strengthens the accessibility of the musicals for contemporary audiences. Coloring period and modern representations, Starobin’s use of synthesizers for Sunday in the Park with George helps connect the narrative arcs of two characters separated by a century, and highlights parallels between one’s artistic vision and the reality in which one exists. Decorating Brohn’s overarching symphonic style, the synthetic treatment of rock and exoticism in Miss Saigon functions as a musical mediator, both geographically and culturally. And Lacamoire’s deployment of electronic music in Hamilton provides a foundation for the work’s hip-hop sound, while also accentuating US history’s current social relevance. Synthesizers, samplers, and sequencers have become significant components of musical theater’s lexicon. The technologies mentioned herein represent a small fraction of the makes and models of electronic instruments used on and off Broadway in recent decades. Such diversity necessitates consideration of how a musical’s aural design depends upon the collaboration of a network of artists and technicians—not solely composers, but also orchestrators, music directors, contractors, synth programmers, and performing musicians. Illustrating the manner in which orchestrations infuse their works’ narratives through the integration of acoustic and electronic instruments contributes to an understanding of the ways technological advancements have engendered the stylistic pluralism of contemporary American musical theater and the innumerable possibilities for its future.

Notes 1 George J. Ferencz, ed. “The Broadway Sound”: The Autobiography and Selected Essays of Robert Russell Bennett. Rochester: U of Rochester P, 1999; Steven Suskin. The Sound of Broadway Music: A Book of ­O rchestrators and Orchestrations. New York: Oxford UP, 2009. 2 Elizabeth Wollman. The Theater Will Rock: A History of the Rock Musical, from Hair to Hedwig. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2006. 124; Larry Stempel. Showtime: A History of the Broadway Musical Theater. New York: W. W. Norton, 2010. 620–621. 3 bruce d. mcclung. Lady in the Dark: Biography of a Musical. New York: Oxford UP, 2007. 77–78.

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Michael M. Kennedy 4 For a history of electronic instruments, see Mark Vail. The Synthesizer: A Comprehensive Guide to Understanding, Programming, Playing, and Recording the Ultimate Electronic Music Instrument. New York: Oxford UP, 2014. 5 Parenthetical dates refer to original Broadway productions unless otherwise indicated. Case study ­descriptions only refer to these musicals’ original Broadway stagings and orchestrations. 6 Michael Starobin, interview by author via Skype, 28 Dec. 2015. 7 Mark Eden Horowitz. Sondheim on Music: Minor Details and Major Decisions, 2nd ed. Lanham: Scarecrow Press, 2010. 228–229; Michael Starobin, interview by author via phone, 3 May 2017. For Sunday in the Park with George, Starobin won the 1984 Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Orchestrations. The American Theater Wing did not establish the Tony Award category of Best Orchestrations until 1997. 8 Stempel, 547. 9 Starobin, 2017. Sondheim initially wrote Sunday’s fanfares to be performed by trumpet for the Playwrights Horizons workshop. When expanding the instrumentation for the Broadway production, ­Starobin replaced the trumpet with a French horn after informing Sondheim that that instrument was more suitable for a chamber setting in terms of blending and versatility. 10 For each production of Sunday in the Park with George that Starobin has worked, he has rearranged the Chromolume’s music in accordance with visual effects and timing. 11 Starobin, 2017. 12 Ibid. 13 Steve Swayne. How Sondheim Found His Sound. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2005. 232–233. 14 Starobin, 2017. 15 All score examples present instruments in concert pitch, except for bass, which sounds an octave below its written notation. 16 Horowitz, 91–93. 17 William David Brohn, interview by author via phone, 5 Apr. 2017. Brohn’s work for Miss Saigon and The Secret Garden jointly won him the 1991 Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Orchestrations. 18 Jessica Sternfeld. The Megamusical. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2006. 293–295. 19 Edward Behr and Mark Steyn. The Story of Miss Saigon. New York: Arcade, 1991. 26–27. 20 Ibid., 50. 21 Raymond Knapp. The American Musical and the Formation of National Identity. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2005. 249. 22 David A. Schlossman. Actors and Activists: Politics, Performance, and Exchange among Social Worlds. New York: Routledge, 2002, 149–152. 23 Behr and Steyn, 50–55. 24 Ibid., 42–43 and 51–54; Brohn, 2017; Margaret Vermette. The Musical World of Boublil and Schönberg: The Creators of Les Misérables, Miss Saigon, Martin Guerre, and The Pirate Queen. New York: Applause Theatre and Cinema Books, 2007. 302. 25 Jim Harp, interview by author via written correspondence, 9 May 2017. Harp worked for Brett ­Sommer’s Music Arts Technologies and assisted with updating Miss Saigon’s synths midway through its original Broadway run, which mostly comprised replacing Roland A-80 keyboard controllers with Kurzweil K2500 models and updating the samplers’ formats accordingly. 26 Behr and Steyn, 54. 27 Ibid., 63. 28 Ibid., 52–53; Vermette, 303. 29 Schlossman, 145–147. 30 Ibid., 153. 31 Doug Besterman was the first to win three Tony Awards for Best Orchestrations for Fosse (1999), The Producers (2001), and Thoroughly Modern Millie (2002). 32 Alex Lacamoire, interview by author via Skype, 1 Dec. 2016. 33 Lin-Manuel Miranda and Jeremy McCarter. Hamilton: The Revolution; Being the Complete Libretto of the Broadway Musical, with a True Account of Its Creation, and Concise Remarks on Hip-Hop, the Power of Stories, and the New America. New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2016. 53. 34 Elissa Harbert. “Hamilton and History Musicals.” American Music 36, no. 4 (2018): 413. 35 Miranda and McCarter, 21. 36 Loren Kajikawa. “‘Young, Scrappy, and Hungry’: Hamilton, Hip Hop, and Race.” American Music 36, no. 4 (2018): 472. 37 Ibid., 470. 38 Lacamoire, 2016.

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Ibid. Miranda and McCarter, 52. Lacamoire, 2016. Ibid. Mark Katz. Groove Music: The Art and Culture of the Hip-Hop DJ. New York: Oxford UP, 2012. 43–69. Lacamoire, 2016. When Hamilton’s Broadway cast changes or for the musical’s regional and touring productions, programmers make new vocal recordings and sampled loops for Ableton Live. 45 Harbert, 417.

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12 CHART-TOPPERS TO SHOWSTOPPERS Pop Artists Scoring the Broadway Stage Matthew Lockitt Just over a month before the March 12, 2015 Broadway premiere of the musical Finding Neverland, Gary Barlow discussed his transition from pop artist to Broadway composer in an interview with The New York Times. Barlow, frontman of the ’90s British boy band Take That, writer of numerous number-one hits, and former head judge of The X Factor UK, acknowledged that the “one thing I didn’t want to try to be was a Broadway songwriter […] There are great ones out there who are having success every night, so there’s no need for me to do that. I needed to do what I do.”1 Journalist Rob Weinert-Kendt, paraphrasing Barlow, follows this quote by reassuring “America’s musical-theater composers and lyricists: He’s not after your jobs.”2 Considering the way Barlow scored the gig as the composer of a Broadway show, this seems a curious statement to make: why the need for overt placation of the American musical theater writing community in defense of a British pop and reality-TV star? It is even more striking since, a few weeks prior to the Times interview, Broadway.com reported that Barlow was working on the score for a new musical adaptation of Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days. Collaborating again with his Neverland co-writer, music producer, and songwriter Eliot Kennedy, Around the World was initially to be produced by Harvey Weinstein, lead-producer of Finding Neverland.3 Meanwhile, Calendar Girls—a musical written in collaboration with Tim Firth, based on Firth’s 2003 screenplay and subsequent 2008 play—premiered in Leeds in November 2015 before opening in London’s West End.4 Clearly, Calendar Girls was at an advanced stage of development in order to premiere in the same year as Finding Neverland. What, then, would prompt a mainstream songwriter of Barlow’s stature to suggest that he is not aiming to take opportunities away from Broadway musical theater writers, even as he makes a career transition that will likely result in his doing just that? Is it guilt or, perhaps in this case, a performance of placation after he was hired by Weinstein to replace Scott Frankel and Michael Korie, Neverland’s original composer and lyricist?5 This chapter uses Barlow’s comments as impetus to explore the various reasons why artists from the popular music sphere may be attracted to writing for the Broadway stage, thereby embracing an art form largely dismissed as “uncool” earlier in their careers. Pop artists cross over for a variety of reasons, motivated by either commercial or artistic interests. Producers might approach mainstream artists with an existing fan base to provide a commercially accessible musical score as a means of broadening a show’s potential audience and appeal, while simultaneously hoping to alleviate some of the financial risk. The artists themselves may be seeking career longevity or alternative forms of income within an evolving popular music 120

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industry. Or, perhaps they desire the creative challenge of working within an alternative medium that allows them to explore telling story through song. This chapter considers such reasons. It also addresses the difficulties pop artists face when venturing into an unfamiliar genre: typically, an extended narrative form with dramaturgical concerns they may not have previously encountered, including scoring the evocation of period and place, and the sonic explication of character and plot. Ultimately, artists who make the transition from the pop charts to the boards do so with varying degrees of success: for every Cyndi Lauper (Kinky Boots, 2013) there is a Paul Simon (The Capeman, 1998). Various factors impact on the success of any given musical, but as this chapter ­explores, nontraditional writers also confront the tension between maintaining their own distinctive voice and meeting the demands and aesthetics of the new form.

From Billboard to Broadway Dramaturg and producer Jack Viertel suggests that it was Elton John’s string of successful contributions to Broadway, beginning with Disney’s The Lion King and Aida in the late 1990s and culminating with Billy Elliot (West End, 2005; Broadway, 2008), which paved the way for other recording artists to follow.6 While it may appear a growing number of scores are being written by nontraditional musical theater practitioners migrating from the charts to the boards, the phenomenon is not entirely new. In 1968, producer David Merrick hired pop songwriters Burt Bacharach and Hal David to write the score for Promises, Promises, in collaboration with playwright Neil Simon. That production utilized microphones to amplify the orchestra and backing vocalists in an attempt to effectively capture the show’s pop music aesthetic.7 Even earlier, of course, pop music and Broadway fare were interchangeable: the 32-bar song form was pioneered and perfected by artists like George M. Cohan, Irving Berlin, and George Gershwin, who wrote popular songs for Broadway, as well as plenty intended for other kinds of mass consumption, both in the United States and abroad. Broadway music supervisor Joseph Church proposes that Berlin represents “the archetypal pop stage songwriter”—the first in a long line of pop composers to write as well for the musical theater, which now includes contemporary pop and rock musicians like Paul Simon, Harry Connick Jr., Jake Shears, Cyndi Lauper, Sara Bareilles, and Sheryl Crow, among others.8 Viertel observes: We’ve come full circle. For the first half of the twentieth century, theater writers supplied the most potent popular hits. For the second half, rock and rollers supplanted them on the hit parade, while Broadway scores maintained their integrity but rarely visited the record charts. And in the twenty-first century, the pop writers have invaded Broadway, and the lines have become blurred beyond recognition.9 Yet true crossover is, at least in some respects, still elusive: more artists are crossing over from the pop charts to write for the stage, but it is still rare for songs from the contemporary musical theater to reach the pop charts. This might be changing: in 2015, the original Broadway cast recording of Lin-Manuel M ­ iranda’s Hamilton (2015) reached number one on the Billboard rap charts,10 and peaked at number three on the Billboard 200 following the 2016 Tony Awards.11 In that same year, What’s Inside: Songs from Waitress, the solo concept album from Waitress composer and lyricist Sara Bareilles, debuted at number ten on the Billboard 200, while the original Broadway cast recording of Waitress debuted at number 82.12 In February 2017, the original Broadway cast album of Dear Evan Hansen debuted at number eight, the highest debut of a cast recording since 1961.13 The score of Hansen, by Benj Pasek and Justin Paul, has a contemporary pop sensibility filtered through the lens of well-crafted musical theater dramaturgy and construction. Billboard journalist Rebecca Milzoff writes that the 121

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songs in the score “come as close as I’ve heard to sounding like pop songs I could have heard on the radio.”14 Yet the fact that Dear Evan Hansen is only the fourth cast album in the past 50 years to rise to the top ten of the Billboard 200 indicates that the lines between Broadway and Billboard aren’t quite as “blurred” as Viertel suggests; Broadway still doesn’t cross over to the pop charts as regularly as pop artists cross over to the Broadway stage. Although Bareilles’ single, “She Used to Be Mine,” from the second act of Waitress, received international radio airplay, it remains unusual that a song from a Broadway musical, no matter how popular, is heard on commercial radio. Why are pop artists attracted to writing for the musical theater? Elizabeth L. Wollman identifies two reasons why nontraditional artists may transition from chart-topper to showstopper: either their original career has lost momentum, or they are so well established that the shift will have little effect on their reputation.15 In both cases, these transitions generally occur later in an artist’s career, as in the case of Elton John, Cyndi Lauper, and Barlow, all of whom wrote musicals after their careers were firmly established and crossing over wouldn’t impair their credibility. Film director Barry Levinson has an alternative theory. Levinson, who is working on the musical adaption of his 1982 film Diner,16 featuring an original score by Sheryl Crow, recognizes that the popular music “landscape has radically changed,” and that the “storytelling songs” Crow and others built their careers on are no longer in vogue. He believes there is a gravitational pull for writers like Crow toward storytelling; it is thus natural to invite them to cross over to a storytelling art form, because “in a musical you can get to storytelling again.”17 Indeed, many of the artists who have made the move to writing musicals appear to be attracted to a storytelling aesthetic. Scissor Sisters frontman Jake Shears, who co-wrote the score for ­Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City (2011),18 suggests that his inclination to write songs “from a particular [but fictional] point of view” reflects a musical’s sense of character and is, perhaps, why book writer Jeff Whitty approached Shears and John Garden to collaborate on the project in the first place.19 Similarly, Paul Simon, Elton John, Dolly Parton, and Burt Bacharach all exhibit storytelling sensibilities in their work. The transition to musical theater may thus be a natural progression for some writers, the result of a maturation of style and aesthetic. New York Times journalist Lorne Manly, writing about Sara Bareilles’ Waitress, notes how the popular music industry has changed. He cites the impact the Internet has had on reshaping the music industry, resulting in substantial reductions in album sales and song writing royalties, and creating a pool of musicians “eager for new opportunities.”20 According to producer Scott ­Sanders, there is space for outsiders to write for the theater, noting that as “an industry, we producers are finding that the talent pool of the traditional theater writers—librettists and composers and l­yricists—has not really expanded.”21 As Broadway hopefuls graduate from a growing number of musical theater writing courses like those at Berklee College of Music and New York University, however, there is more trained talent working toward writing for the stage. Emerging talent can also perfect the craft of writing for the musical theater through developmental programs like the ASCAP workshops led by Stephen Schwartz, and the landmark BMI Musical Theatre Workshop founded by Broadway conductor and educator Lehman Engel in 1961. Engel’s vision was to “create a place where the fundamentals of musical theater craft could be conveyed to a new generation of theater songwriters.”22 Similarly, in the United Kingdom, emerging writers can hone their craft via the Book, Music, and Lyrics Workshop, or through master classes held by Mercury Musical Developments. With new writers emerging from various programs in hopes of entering the theater industry, it seems curious that Sanders perceives a lack of growth in musical theater writing talent. The website newmusicaltheater.com, established to promote and provide a repository for new writing, represents the work of 50 American songwriters. These writers, who have experienced various levels of success, include Pasek and Paul, Dave Malloy (Natasha, Pierre and the Great Comet of 1812), Chris Miller and Nathan Tysen (Tuck Everlasting), Adam Gwon (Ordinary Days), 122

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Ryan Scott Oliver (35mm), and Georgia Stitt (Snow Child). If the pool of writers is expanding, why are producers providing opportunities to artists who are well-established in other entertainment industries, rather than working with and supporting the next generation of musical theater composers and lyricists? The most obvious answer is that successful artists from other genres come with preexisting audiences. Further, the artist’s fan base may be foreign to the musical theater, thereby broadening the production’s potential audience through a form of cross-genre tourism, in which the fan crosses over with the artist to visit the new art form. Some nontraditional writers experience c­ areer rejuvenation and become more permanent residents of the musical theater realm: for example, the multifaceted David Byrne wrote scores for Here Lies Love (2013) and Joan of Arc: Into the Fire (2017), both of which ran at New York’s Public Theater. Burt Bacharach is providing songs for Some ­L overs,23 his first original score since Promises, Promises. Elton John is collaborating on an adaptation of The Devil Wears Prada,24 while Cyndi Lauper is attached to a forthcoming adaptation of the ’80s film Working Girl.25 However, a preexisting fan base does not guarantee box office success as Harry Connick Jr. (Thou Shalt Not), Paul Simon and Dolly Parton, can attest. Considering the financial benefits, musical theater producers will no doubt continue to invite established songwriters to explore writing for the musical theater. This overtly commercial approach to creating musicals is not dissimilar to the practice of “stunt casting” a recognizable name in a principal role as a box office drawcard. Discussing the trend of casting alumni of American Idol or The Voice in musicals, educator and former Broadway performer Andre Garner argues, “Broadway is sacrificing its artistic prestige by appealing to the lowest common box office denominator, and the Broadway actor gets hamstrung, since these reality programs advocate a singing style that applauds vocal theatrics while rejecting commitment to the story.”26 Just as many celebrity actors need to negotiate singing, dancing, and even stage presence in making a career move to musicals,27 pop writers often must confront the demands of writing for specific dramatic circumstances, and the art of revealing character through song. Whether or not “Broadway is sacrificing its artistic prestige,”—its sense of aesthetic authenticity, as Garner suggests—by employing nontraditional theater composers is a larger question.

The Challenges of Dramaturgy The skills an artist develops as a singer-songwriter are not necessarily immediately transferrable to the task of contributing to the score of a musical. Structurally, songs are inherently built on lyrical, melodic, and rhythmic repetitions.28 However, a primary aesthetic difference between a standalone song and one for the musical stage is that the latter needs to serve the dramatic needs of the larger work: the book, the characters, the situation. Composer and lyricist Jason Robert Brown argues that popular “songs by their nature are about establishing a mood, sustaining it, and finishing with it. Theater songs are about the opposite; good theater songs go from one end of an idea to a different place.”29 British director Adam Lenson suggests that musical theater songs tend to be of a “higher voltage”: they transmit more information through music and lyrics than their pop counterparts. “Low voltage” songs, then, are, perhaps, not as well-suited for telling stories.30 To explore these ideas, let’s take a moment to compare two contemporary songs, one from the pop charts and one from the boards. For fun, on the day of writing this, I decided to consider Drake’s “Nice for What” (2018) which held the number-one position at the time. Stylistically, this suggested “Wait for It” from Hamilton (2015) as a case for comparison. “Nice for What” (2018) quickly establishes its mood musically and lyrically. It sustains that mood through numerous repetitions of the female voice sample, which functions as the sung refrain and the underlying accompaniment to the male rap voice; the song doesn’t feature a key change or much else in the way of musical development.31 Conversely, Lin-Manuel Miranda’s “Wait for It” depicts Aaron Burr wrestling with his own 123

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confidence and insecurities. The lyric shifts from the irresponsibility of loving another man’s wife to the responsibility of living and honoring the family name, to wondering what it would be like to stand in his rival’s shoes. The song allows Burr to declare his defiance and his patience. Musically, Miranda and music director Alex Lacamoire manipulate the musical textures of the accompaniment, layering in backing vocals, cellos, and keyboard effects, giving the piece a sense of propulsion. The song doesn’t feature a traditional musical theater key modulation, which might dramaturgically represent Burr waiting patiently in the wings. However, as he contemplates Hamilton’s success, the accompaniment almost completely vanishes, leaving Burr vocally exposed and vulnerable over subtle piano chords, before the orchestra and chorus rebound, echoing Burr’s new determination to be patient.32 While the high-voltage “Nice for What” contains an overwhelming amount of verbal information, it lacks the narrative and musical trajectory of “Wait For It.” Of course, not all theater songs aim to achieve this active quality. For example, during “Time Heals Everything” (Mack and Mabel, 1974), Jerry Herman allows Mabel—and the audience—a moment to wallow, to be caught up in a mood: to be inactive. Although it could be argued that Mabel is attempting to convince herself she will recover from her heartbreak, the character is essentially in the same emotional and intellectual place at the song’s conclusion. Either way, “­Everything” doesn’t move through an idea as Brown suggests. In many ways, it operates much like a conventional pop song enabling it to effectively standalone outside of its dramatic context. Similarly, contemporary musical theater songs may focus on mood rather than action; consider “Waving Through a ­Window,” Evan Hansen’s declaration of his inability to actively participate in life. Nevertheless, dramaturgical considerations are required of writers working in an extended narrative form when they cross over to musical theater. Sara Bareilles, who, like Barlow on N ­ everland, was brought in to replace writers already working on the adaptation of Waitress,33 recalls, “It actually took me a long time to say that I love this project. It was very hard; it was confusing; it was foreign.”34 As a solo artist, Bareilles had to overcome her tendency to not share her work until she felt that it was “completely finished, fleshed out,” because “that is less helpful in this process, because this show depends on the music serving the book, the book serving the music, the music serving the actors.”35 During the early stages of scoring Tales of the City with Scissor Sisters’ collaborator John Garden, Jake Shears recalls a similar disorientation: “…you don’t really know what you’re doing.”36 Garden notes that it was during the show’s first read-through that it became apparent “when a song just stopped the action completely. […] I think that was when we went away and started thinking more about how to get from A to B by the end of songs.”37 Because it takes longer to sing an idea than it does to speak it, there isn’t any, as Shears articulates, “real estate or breaks where you can just throw in a brainless pop song”; everything should contribute to developing character or plot.38 Sheryl Crow refers to the challenge of negotiating what she identifies as the basic principles of musical theater style while attempting to maintain an individual voice: “The way you end songs to make sure the audience knows when to applaud, things that I naturally would say, ‘I would never do that’. Modulate a song? Never.”39 These comments demonstrate an awareness of the needs of a foreign genre. A musical theater song cannot fade out the way most pop songs do, since a fadeout could leave a character unresolved, suspended, stuck in the moment. Modulation, too, is a technique employed to create the sensation of dramatic movement and development, helping to move a character from A to B through song, a form which is effectively based on repetition. Not all artists, however, are as facile in their attempts to cross from the charts to the stage. Paul Simon’s The Capeman, for example, suffered due to its composer’s unwillingness to play by the rules of the stage musical. Both Linda Winer and Greg Evans, in their respective reviews of this production, acknowledge the quality of Simon’s songs, but question the dramatic integrity of the work overall.40 The material, many theater critics ultimately suggested, would work better as a song cycle in a concert setting, with any attempt at narrative and dramatic flow discarded. 124

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Considering the challenges nontraditional musical theater composers encounter working in a dramatic idiom for the first time, it is, perhaps, informative to consider the differences Gary Barlow observes between his creative processes on Finding Neverland and on Calendar Girls. In a promotional video for the West End premiere of the latter, Barlow admits to setting lyrics for the musical without necessarily being aware of the dramatic circumstances in which the songs occurred.41 He suggests that he didn’t find himself “scratching [his] head and thinking, ‘Oh God, right, we’re in the park; I’ve got to write a lyric that fits.’”42 We can infer from this statement, especially since Neverland features numerous sequences in Kensington Gardens, that Barlow and Kennedy, under the astute dramaturgical eye of Paulus, grappled with crafting songs to suit specific dramatic situations. In contrast, he equates his collaboration with Tim Firth on Calendar Girls to writing a pop album: Barlow wrote numerous settings of a lyric, from which Firth would take “a verse from track one and a chorus from track five” to construct the song.43 Barlow claims this process allowed him to approach Calendar Girls “as an artist.”44 The term “artist” is intriguing in this context: it implies a distinction between the artistry of pop in its allusion to creative freedom and self-expression, and the craft of writing for the stage, which requires honing a piece within the tight limitations of dramatic context. The artistic freedom Barlow experienced was no doubt founded in the trust that Firth, who was adapting his own play and screenplay, implicitly understood the characters and story. The tension Barlow expresses between the two processes points to a central concern that can be explored through the concept of authenticity.

Notions of Authenticity Near the end of Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine’s Sunday in the Park with George (1984), the spirit of Dot appears to the modern George and tells him that if he can be true to himself, the art he creates will be original.45 Gary Barlow, in this chapter’s inciting quote, articulates this sentiment when he notes that on Finding Neverland he needed to do what he does, rather than try to imitate what Broadway writers do.46 He had to find a way of writing in the dramatic medium that remained true to his own voice while still meeting the dramaturgical needs of the story and its director, Diane Paulus. For Paulus, the pop aesthetic juxtaposed against the Edwardian dramaturgically positions the protagonist J. M. Barrie as out-of-step with the world around him.47 While Paulus embraced these aesthetic tensions, they underscore the point raised earlier concerning authenticity. While there are numerous authenticities,48 two forms are particularly relevant to this discussion: aesthetic and personal authenticity. Aesthetic authenticity accounts for musical theater as a form. What is it that makes a musical a musical? Is there such a thing as an authentic musical? Are musical theater aficionados able to read a musical theater score as somehow authentic or inauthentic to the form? If so, in an art form that appropriates and embraces numerous styles aesthetically, what might be key indicators of authenticity for someone in the know? The central indicator seems to be craft. Does a song reveal character and plot? Is a song ­primarily oriented toward mood, or does it evoke action? Does it possess the conversational tone that composer and lyricist William Finn proposes makes “theater [songs] theater”?49 Or is there an adherence to the craft of perfect rhymes, one of the hallmarks of musical theater lyric writing, which differentiates it from pop writing?50 These are formal concerns that pop writers negotiate in crossing over to musical theater. Sheryl Crow articulates such concerns when she refers to the basic principles of the musical theater score, including things like key changes, which compete with her instincts as a pop writer.51 Similarly, when Jake Shears observes that a musical theater song has limited “real estate” to achieve what it needs to, he is acknowledging the dramaturgical imperatives of the form the writer is required to satisfy.52 125

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To take the discussion of authenticity in the musical theater a step further, why does the hip-hoperatic style of Hamilton strike many as “authentic” while the pop sensibility of Finding ­Neverland made less of an impact? The obvious answer to this question is that Lin-Manuel ­M iranda, growing up loving both musicals and rap, intrinsically understands musical theater dramaturgy and form, whereas Barlow and many of his pop peers may not be as aware of the form’s complexities. Miranda is what we might call an “authoritative” creator of musicals, which is why Hamilton, while drawing on various musical styles—rap, rhythm, and blues, ‘60s Brit pop—feels comparatively authentic.53 Paul Simon’s The Capeman appears to work as a cycle of songs but fails dramatically, a fundamental aspect of what defines a musical. Perhaps musicals by nontraditional authors that achieve greatest success are ably guided by authoritative co-creatives toward a degree of aesthetic authenticity. Diane Paulus shepherded both Finding Neverland and Waitress to Broadway; Cyndi Lauper benefited from the expertise of playwright Harvey Fierstein and director/ choreographer Jerry Mitchell with Kinky Boots. However, this level of expertise doesn’t guarantee success, so there are likely other factors that contribute to the mix. Musicals are a risky business, even for authoritative creators. While grappling with the challenges of writing for a dramatic and narrative medium, pop writers also contend with personal authenticity: maintaining a sense of their own distinctive style and voice within the new form. Peter Kivy proposes that an artwork “can be personally authentic in the sense of truly emanating from the artist […], rather than a derivative imitation of some other artist’s work.”54 Barlow, for example, wanted to maintain what was “Barlow” about his work even while writing in a new medium. Over time, musical theater creators such as Sondheim, Miranda, and Pasek and Paul develop distinctive personal styles, through which they articulate and navigate the aesthetics of the form. However, pop writers tend to be carefully selected by producers for specific projects, based on their existing style. There is a reason why Cyndi Lauper was hired to score Kinky Boots, or the Scissor Sisters’ sound was deemed appropriate for the musical world of Tales of the City. The distinctive musical styles of these artists, harnessed to meet the dramatic needs of the musical, help to ensure that the writers maintain a degree of personal authenticity while working to create a piece that can be identified by fans as being authentic to the musical theater form.

Conclusion The commercial musical theater will no doubt continue to be a destination for nontraditional artists. Producers often look to employ brands or names—performers, writers, source material—to make their product a viable commodity. Moreover, popular musicians will continue to seek new avenues to develop creatively and artistically, and the opportunity to work within an extended narrative form poses an exciting challenge. This does not mean, however, that they are prepared to meet the challenges of working within a dramatic form. To some extent these issues can be mitigated through the support of authoritative musical theater collaborators: a dramaturgically inclined director willing to help the writer achieve new levels of specificity; a music team able to supply sections of music between and beyond the songs, thereby constructing a score from the building blocks supplied by the pop writer. Further areas of inquiry might include studies of the creative development of specific projects, or dramaturgical analyses of various musicals to ascertain the degree to which writers, new to the genre, are successful in meeting theatrical demands. It is probably also prudent to consider the positive and negative implications pop writers may have on the form. While they may raise the profile of a musical, thereby generating ongoing work for the performers and crew, they don’t always prove successful at generating box office receipts: for every Waitress there is a Tales of the City. And as the presence of a chart-topping name doesn’t necessarily alleviate the risk, why not invest in the many writers who may not be as recognizable to the general public but are schooled 126

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in the craft of creating musical theater? Is the work by crossover writers less authentic than that of their authoritative counterparts? It is clear that musicals by nontraditional creatives are not going to disappear from the commercial stage; in fact, as the economics of Broadway become more complex, they may become more prevalent. Only time will tell, however, what impact these crossover artists might score into the form itself.55

Notes 1 Cited in Rob Weinert-Kendt. “Finding Neverland and the Pop Heart Inside J. M. Barrie.” The New York Times. 2015. Web. 16 Sept. 2016. . 2 Ibid. 3 Ryan McPhee. “Gary Barlow Will Fly from Neverland to Around the World in 80 Days in New Musical Adaptation.” Broadway.com. 2015. Web. 28 Nov. 2016. . 4 Calendar Girls: The Musical, opened at the Phoenix Theater, London, under the original title The Girls. Directed by Tim Firth, the musical began previews on January 28, 2017, before officially opening on February 21 and closing on July 15. The rebranded Calendar Girls commenced a UK tour on August 16, 2018 in Leeds. 5 The Tony Award nominated team Korie and Frankel wrote scores for Grey Gardens (2006), Happiness (2009), Far From Heaven (2013), and most recently War Paint (2016), among others. 6 Jack Viertel. The Secret Life of the American Musical: How Broadway Shows Are Built. New York: Sarah Creighton Books, 2016. 268. 7 Elizabeth L. Wollman. The Theater Will Rock: A History of the Rock Musical, from Hair to Hedwig. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2006. 124. 8 Joseph Church. Music Direction for the Stage: A View from the Podium. New York: Oxford UP, 2015. 83. 9 Viertel, The Secret Life, 268. 10 Marjua Estevez. “Hamilton Broadway Album Tops Rap Chart.” Vibe. 2015. Web. 6 Mar. 2017. . 11 Keith Caulfield. “Hamilton Cast Album Races to No. 3 on Billboard 200 Chart after Tony Awards.” Billboard. 2016. Web. 7 Mar. 2017. . 12 Keith Caulfield. “Billboard 200 Chart Moves: Waitress Cast Album Debuts, The Lonely Island & Rebellion Make Waves.” Billboard. 2016. Web. 6 Mar. 2017. . 13 Dear Evan Hansen is the fourth cast recording to reach the top 10 of the Billboard 200 in the last 50 years; the others are Hamilton and The Book of Mormon, which debuted at number three in 2016 and 2011, ­respectively, and Hair, which occupied the top slot for 13 weeks in 1969; see Keith Caulfield. “Billboard 200 Chart Moves: Dear Evan Hansen & Hamilton Give Broadway Two Albums in Top 20 for First Time in More Than 50 Years.” Billboard. 2017. Web. 6 Mar. 2017. . If/Then (2014), RENT (1996), and Dreamgirls (1982) all debuted within the top 20; see Keith Caulfield. “Hamilton’s Historic Chart Debut: By the Numbers.” Billboard. 2015. Web. 6 Mar. 2017. . 14 Rebecca Milzoff. “Music Supervisor Alex Lacamoire on Life after Hamilton, Recording New Hit Musical Dear Evan Hansen.” Billboard. 2017. Web. 7 Mar. 2017. . 15 Wollman, The Theater will Rock, 34. 16 Diner: The musical premiered at Virginia’s Signature Theater on December 9, 2014, directed and choreographed by Kathleen Marshall. Delaware Theater Company staged the musical in December 2015. It is yet to make its Broadway premiere. 17 Peter Marks. “Sheryl Crow and Others Discuss Diner the Musical.” Washington Post. 2014. Web. 6 Oct. 2016. . 18 Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City, premiered in an out of town tryout at the American Conservatory Theater, San Francisco. The musical—book by Jeff Whitty, music and lyrics by Jake Shears and John Garden, and directed by Jason Moore—began previews on May 18, 2011, before officially opening on May 31 for an extended run which closed on July 10. While the musical has not yet transferred to

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19 20 21 22 23

24 25 26 27

28

29 30 31 32 33

34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 4 4

Broadway, the original cast reunited for a one night only concert presentation of the work at Broadway’s Box Theater, March 27, 2017. Elizabeth Broderson. “Finding Atlantis: An Interview with Creators of Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City: A New Musical.” Words on Plays: Insight into the Play, the Playwright, and the Production Elizabeth Broderson, Publications Editor 27.6 (San Francisco: American Conservatory Theater, 2011). 11. Lorne Manly. “Sara Bareilles Takes Her Slice of Broadway with Waitress.” New York Times. 2016. Web. 6 Oct. 2016. . Cited in Ibid. “History of the Lehman Engel Musical Theater Workshop.” BMI. Web. 3 Mar. 2017. . Some Lovers, written with book writer and lyricist, Steven Sater (Spring Awakening), premiered at the Old Globe in San Diego in 2011. It received an industry reading in February 2017 at Southwark Playhouse, London, by Aria Entertainment, who subsequently produced a staged workshop during their 2017 Page to Stage festival at London’s The Other Palace. Guardian Staff. “Elton John to Write Devil Wears Prada Musical for Broadway.” The Guardian. 2017. Web. 6 Mar. 2017. . Gordon Cox. “Working Girl Musical in Development with Songs by Cyndi Lauper.” Variety. 2017. Web. 7 Sept. 2017. . Andre Garner. “Reality TV singing competitions take Broadway down a discordant path.” Voice and Speech Review 9.2–3 (2015): 186–201. Web. 20 Mar. 2017.https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.10 80/23268263.2016.1189061 For reviews of film actors Jennifer Jason Leigh (Cabaret) and Cuba Gooding Jr. (Chicago), respectively, crossing over to musical theater: See Charles Isherwood. “Cabaret.” Variety. 1998. Web. 19 Apr. 2018. ; and Fergus Morgan. “Review Round-up: Chicago Starring Cuba Gooding Jnr at Phoenix Theater, London.” The Stage. 2018. For a discussion on the inherent repetition of song form, see Scott McMillin. The Musical as Drama. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2006. 31–53. For an alternative view on repetition see, Matthew Lockitt. “‘Love, Let Me Sing You’: The Liminality of Song and Dance in LaChiusa’s Bernarda Alba.” Gestures of Music Theater. Eds. Dominic Symonds and Millie Taylor. New York: Oxford UP, 2014. 91–108. Jonathan Frank. “Spotlight on Jason Robert Brown.” Talkinbroadway.com. 2000. Web. 20 Feb. 2012. . Adam Lenson. “Soapbox #2: Danger, High Voltage!” Dischord: Figuring Out Music and Theater. iTunes. 2016. Web. 8 Feb. 2017. . “Nice for What” debuted on the Billboard: The Hot 100 chart at Number One, the week of April 28, 2018. Web. 30 Apr. 2018. . Interestingly, Miranda drops the chorus about Hamilton from The Hamilton Mix Tape version of “Wait for It.” The deletion of this section limits the dramatic arc of the song for commercial airplay. Waitress producer Barry Weissler indicates that they “tried other writers, and they couldn’t tell the simple, heartfelt story”; see Rebecca Milzoff. “Sara Bareilles on Her Broadway Move: ‘I Have an Odd Relationship with My Contemporaries’.” Billboard. 2015. Web. Mar. 6, 2017. . Cited in Manly. “Sara Bareilles Takes Her Slice.” Ibid. Broderson, “Finding Atlantis.” 2. Ibid., 8. Ibid., 7. Marks, “Sheryl Crow and Others.” See J. Wynn Rousuck. “Capeman Blanketed with Murderous Reviews Theater: Paul Simon’s Long-awaited Broadway Musical Has Not Been a Hit with Critics.” The Baltimore Sun. 1998. Web. 30 Mar. 2017. . “In Rehearsal with Gary Barlow and Tim Firth’s The Girls.” What’s on Stage. 2016. Web. 11 Nov. 2016. . Ibid. Ibid. Ibid.

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Chart-Toppers to Showstoppers 45 Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine. “Move On.” Sunday in the Park with George. New York: Applause Theatre Book Publishers, 1991. 171. 46 Weinert-Kendt, “Finding Neverland and the Pop Heart.” 47 Ibid. 48 For an explication of the complexity surrounding the issue of authenticity, see Peter Kivy. Authenticities: Philosophical Reflections on Musical Performance. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1995. 49 Thomas Cott. “A Conversation with William Finn.” Lincoln Center Theater: Platform Series. 22 July 1998. Web. 8 Feb. 2017. . 50 Stephen Sondheim. “Rhyme and Its Reasons.” Finishing the Hat. London: Virgin Books, 2010. xxv–xxvii. For a counterargument against perfect rhyming, see Michael Friedman. “The Song Makes a Space: Michael Friedman at TEDxEast.” TEDx Talks. 3 Aug. 2012. Web. 12 Jan. 2018. . 51 Marks, “Sheryl Crow and others.” 52 Broderson, “Finding Atlantis.” 8. 53 Kivy, Authenticities, 3. 54 Ibid., 122. 55 Thank you to the editors of this collection, and to my colleagues Millie Taylor and Adam Rush, for their patience and valuable feedback on this chapter.

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13 SCENOGRAPHIC AESTHETICS AND AUTOMATED TECHNOLOGIES IN BROADWAY MUSICALS Christin Essin Hudson Scenic Studios in Yonkers, New York, does not appear to the casual onlooker like a vital hub in the increasingly global marketplace of Broadway musicals. Train commuters heading to Manhattan on the Metro-North see nothing but a drab collection of industrial buildings between them and the Hudson River, remaining heedless to the glittering spectacle hidden behind cinderblock walls. In 2015, I visited Hudson Scenic, disembarking at the Ludlow ­Station with a group of carpenters and following them over the bridge to the shop. Our journey had begun 30 minutes before in Grand Central Station, itself only a few blocks from many of the Broadway theaters, like the Nederlander, Shubert, and Minskoff, that housed Hudson’s scenic products.1 Since 1917, when the Ziegfeld Follies designer Joseph Urban established his scenic shop in ­Yonkers, the town has served as an important outpost for constructing Broadway musicals. At Hudson, scenic painters still use the same techniques Urban pioneered, but practices then considered revolutionary—like applying multiple layers of color on stretched canvas anchored to the floor—are now conventional. During my visit, I watched Midge Lucus kneel on the canvas to blend colors on a backdrop for the soon-to-open Broadway musical Something Rotten, designed by Scott Pask. In another room, Jane Snow demonstrated Hudson’s integration of new painting technologies: scenic artists on ladders had touched up a vertically hung scenic portal for the national tour of Matilda that the shop previously subcontracted out for digital printing. They had saved significant time by starting with this base, but still needed to blend out the digital print’s mechanical precision so the portal matched the color and textures of other hand-painted pieces. Every corner of Hudson’s massive shop showed evidence of this fusion between old- and new-school techniques—a merging of fundamental but highly refined manual skills with advanced computer technologies. Dominic Godfrey, the department head for carpentry, showed me the scenic deck his crew manually constructed for the Matilda tour, and the room housing the CNC (computer numerical control) wood router used to digitally cut intricate patterns into lumber. ­Automation specialist Dani Wolber demonstrated a control system she was building for the ­Mexico City production of The Lion King; Hudson constructed Richard Hudson’s original Broadway design, and the shop continues to adapt it for each new venue. A successful Broadway musical can provide years of employment for Hudson’s large workforce, and its trucks regularly travel farther than midtown Manhattan to deliver products. The robust health of the Broadway musical as a globally marketed and distributed brand of live entertainment

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is evident in Hudson’s success. A view of the musical industry from this shop floor provides insight into the ways scenographic technologies have shaped the Broadway brand as an international commodity.2 Since the late 1960s, Broadway musicals have integrated advanced electronic and computer technologies into commercial theater practices, raising spectators’ expectations for splashy spectacle, seamless transitions, majestic elevations, and harmonious auditory experiences blending vocal, instrumental, and machine-engineered sounds. Drawing from a variety of sources, including ethnographic research into Broadway’s extensive pool of backstage employees, this chapter examines the visual and sonic impact of computer-controlled and automated lighting, motorized and automated scenery, and amplified sound on a selection of contemporary musical productions. These technological and aesthetic shifts have altered practices of backstage labor on Broadway, particularly among the members of Local 1 of the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage ­Employees (IATSE). When examined, these typically hidden technologies, mechanics, and backstage personnel increase understanding of a production’s artistry and the refinement of skills practiced by its full panoply of craftspeople, thereby providing a broader historical understanding of contemporary Broadway culture. Those nostalgic for the handcrafted artistry of a mystical musical theater past typically are wary of this new age of automation and amplification. Before advanced technologies “aesthetically homogenized” Broadway,3 the story goes, a leading lady needed only to “park and bark” from a single spotlight center stage; a curtain hiding a scenic shift was the only device needed to move a show from one scene to the next. Nowhere is this nostalgia more evident than in debates around sound amplification through the use of wireless microphones and audio mixing technologies. Purists argue that amplification produces an inauthentic, dishonest, poor sonic experience that dilutes a performer’s voice and gives a free pass to lesser performers.4 With each technological shift that has produced louder, brighter, faster musicals, purists insist, the industry has “tricked” audiences into accepting spectacle over artistry while simultaneously bloating costs beyond financial sustainability. Certainly, for those persistently predicting the death of Broadway, expensive technology upgrades and increased labor costs are easy targets. Yet today’s globally marketed Broadway brand depends on scenographic artistry that requires advanced computer technologies, and craftspeople trained in their execution. Beginning with Tharon Musser’s use of computer-aided control for her lighting design of A Chorus Line (1975), this chapter selects key musical productions and shifts in the genre as sites to mine crucial intersections between artistry, technology, and production labor. A study of Broadway from behind the curtain—one that accesses rarely told stories of backstage personnel—highlights moments when industry leaders break with convention and take economic risks. The lighting, scenic, and sound technologies examined here have substantively altered the Broadway musical. Each new application of technology, whether welcomed or disdained, began as an experiment on a shop floor or a backstage wing. Economic and artistic objectives motivated the subsequent standardization of these technologies; an investigation into these choices by designers, directors, and producers provides insight into the cultural economy of Broadway and the expansion of its brand into global markets.

Lighting Technologies The chairman of Hudson Scenic Studios, Neil Mazzella, began his career as a theater technician in the early 1970s and, as a result, has witnessed some key technology shifts during his tenure.5 The many books in his office speak to his interest in theater design and production, and during our discussion, he reflected on productions that ushered in new practices, starting with A Chorus Line. “That was all Tharon,” said Mazzella, describing Musser’s influence on Broadway’s

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transition to computerized lighting control systems. Her career followed that of pioneer designer Jean ­Rosenthal, who had insisted the industry accept “lighting design” as an artistic practice distinct from “scenic design.” Musser further defined the discipline through her implementation of computer technologies, which helped designers gain more control over theatrical light. Through the 1970s, Musser worked in regional theaters that used electronic, preset memory control boards that could store the levels of upcoming cues, allowing for more complex lighting sequences than possible on manually operated resistance dimmers. She was eager to implement existing electronic and emerging computer technologies in New York, but Broadway venues still used earlier-generation manual dimmers, which limited cuing and the number of instruments in the plot. “It used to be that a musical couldn’t have any more than about 300 lights,” said designer Beverly Emmons, because the operation of resistance dimmers was labor-intensive and their wattage capacity was limited.6 Only 12–14 resistance dimmers could be packed into a “piano board” (the colloquialism for dimmer crates, which resembled upright pianos), and a 3,000-watt-rated dimmer could only operate the fades for six instruments with 500-watt bulbs. Each electrician stood between two boards, performing an elaborate choreography of manual fades, and producers would only agree to “three sets of boards and three salaries.” 7 The implementation of electronic boards and dimmers solved this dilemma; memory stored on circuits was more consistent than the kinesthetic memory of electricians counting fades with manual levers. But more importantly, argued designers, they would gain the power to operate more instruments, thus having more tools to realize their artistic vision. While the benefits of advanced lighting technologies were clear to designers, the Broadway industry initially hesitated. Local 1 electricians were justifiably worried about the elimination of jobs, since new control systems would replace three board operators with one. Most theater owners feared the expense of rewiring their electricity from direct to alternating current. Mazzella remember that “no one wanted to invest in new technology.”8 Unlike regional theaters that buy and maintain their own equipment, Broadway producers rent instruments and control systems on a show-by-show basis; companies like Four Star Lighting, which supplied the New York area, owned “basement[s] full of piano boards” and weren’t eager to replace their stock.9 Enter Tharon Musser, the Shuberts, and A Chorus Line, the soon-to-be iconic musical that was enormously popular with audiences, a Pulitzer Prize winner, and the recipient of nine Tony Awards. The musical had begun with director/choreographer Michael Bennett and a group of professional dancers sharing personal stories, progressed through workshops funded by producer Joseph Papp, and culminated in a highly successful Off-Broadway production that opened at Papp’s Public Theater in April 1975. Bernard Jacobs, president of the Shubert Organization, knew A Chorus Line was a surefire hit and promised the creative team anything they wanted when it transferred to Broadway’s Shubert Theater. At the Public’s Newman Theater, Musser had cued the musical on a five-scene preset memory board; this electronic technology allowed the operator to set cues in advance and Musser the freedom to include more complex timing sequences, including many long fades and some cues that bumped out instantly.10 Her design couldn’t be replicated on piano boards, so with Jacobs’ blank check, Musser upgraded to next-generation technology, ordering a computer control console designed by Gordon Pearlman of Electronics Diversified Incorporated and hiring Gershon “Gary” Shevett to operate it as the production’s head electrician. The alignment of these industry leaders brought computer-aided lighting control to Broadway, but it was Musser’s Tony Award-winning design that secured the new era of lighting technology.11 Certainly Theoni Aldridge’s costumes and Robin Wagner’s scenery were essential to establishing the characters—auditioning dancers standing in rehearsal clothing on a white line on a bare stage with a mirrored backdrop—but Musser’s design took center stage. Her lighting was the primary scenographic vehicle for telling the characters’ stories and moving the musical from one number to the next. The brightly lit opening number was intentionally unflattering; Bennett wanted to 132

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see the dancers working and sweating for the audition.12 But as the characters began reflecting on their lives during the musical numbers, Musser’s lights faded to a more “mottled, colorful world of emotional expression.”13 With the large inventory of instruments accommodated by electronic dimmers and the computer control system, Musser plotted a series of what she called “thought lights” and focused one on each dancer’s position on the white line. During moments of character reflection, Musser singled out individuals, bathing them in a deep purple hue. Bennett made sure each actor knew their exact position; when alterations were needed, he trusted Musser so implicitly that he changed the actor’s blocking rather ask her to refocus the light.14 Another series of top lights mixed lavender, pink, and blue with geometric, Mondrian-inspired patterns to add more vibrancy and texture to the dream-like atmosphere of the songs and dances.15 Red and green side lights mixed as white on the dancers’ bodies, but cast “interesting colored shadows” as they moved around the stage.16 In Cassie’s solo “The Music and the Mirror,” for example, Musser mixed different colors with three follow spots, so multihued shadows followed each movement.17 Musser’s design was a watershed on Broadway: computer control enlarged and expanded her capacity as a visual storyteller and made the lighting part of the musical’s dramaturgy. Bennett’s biographer Ken Mandelbaum describes Musser’s “contribution [as] equal to that of the writers and even that of Bennett himself.”18 Not as celebrated are the contributions of Pearlman and ­Shevett, who designed and operated the control system that reproduced Musser’s design each night. ­Musser’s lighting made a persuasive artistic argument for embracing computer control, but their ingenuity and skill demonstrated its reliability and sustainability. By the early 1980s, Broadway’s transformation to computer control in lighting was complete, particularly once producers realized the cost-saving benefits of a one-man board crew and lower electricity costs. Electricians, too, realized that the decreased labor hours running piano boards were offset by more hours mounting productions with much more instrumentation. Production electricians like Shevett, who built skills around computer technologies, became specialists, with higher salaries and more industry status, who worked in close collaboration with lighting designers. Broadway’s lighting technicians became even more specialized with the introduction of automated instrumentation, which uses computer controls to remotely refocus and change the colors of individual instruments as part of a production’s cuing. A company called Showco introduced the first generation of automated instruments, called Vari-Lites, for the 1981 concert tour by the band Genesis. As first conceived, these instruments gave designers the freedom to refocus specials “in the dark to get from point A to point B,” according to Vari-Lite operator and engineer Tom Littrell.19 But designers soon realized the potential of illuminated choreography—series of instruments moving in synchronization with music and performers. Linda Essig’s interview with designer Natasha Katz documents her use of automated fixtures in EFX (1995), a musical spectacle featuring Phantom of the Opera star Michael Crawford at Las Vegas’s MGM Grand Casino. Katz emphasized her use of Vari-Lites for flashy effects and to isolate performers amidst the lavish production, and later she did the same on Broadway. With next-generation improvements in noise reduction, color fading, and light shaping, many designers began to integrate automated fixtures with conventional instrumentation.20 In 2006, Katz used automated instrumentation when she adapted Musser’s design for the revival of A Chorus Line, directed by Bob Avian (Bennett’s co-choreographer) and Baayork Lee (the original dance captain). Katz studied Musser’s design “forensically” and realized alterations would be necessary; using the same technology Musser had was neither possible nor desirable.21 The original Roscolene “gel” colors and the “leko” ellipsoidal reflector spotlights were now obsolete. The new industry-standard ETC Source Four instruments used by Katz had brighter intensities and cooler color temperatures, thus requiring adjustments for light levels.22 She replicated much 133

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of Musser’s instrument placement, and added Vari-Lites to supplement the follow spots’ illumination of faces and create more options for the “multi-colored, Mondrian-like squares around the dancers.”23 The result was the seamless execution of Musser’s design as translated through Katz’s artistic eye, with technology 30 years in the making. While the lighting remained “absolutely in Tharon’s world,” Katz said, advances in control systems and automation specialization gave her more freedom to manipulate individual fixtures, adjust colors, and coordinate with the show’s choreography.24 Although engineers crafted automated lighting systems for the more spectacular effects of concert stages, Broadway designers have demonstrated its successful application to theatrical lighting, to increase a plot’s flexibility and reactiveness to live performance. For the musical stage in particular, automated lighting offers a range of effects, from a flamboyant sweep of multicolored patterns for flashy production numbers to the austere isolation of a soloist. Automated lighting is now stock equipment, and specialists trained in its operation are significant additions to Broadway’s labor force. Automation programmers work in collaboration with designers to maximize the instruments’ capabilities; they are “artistic partners,” according to Littrell, who translate designers’ described effects into a numeric language.25 While some bemoan the high costs of technology and specialized labor, new industry standards and aesthetic expectations have been set, and designers, paid by producers, continue to replicate them. Audiences may not walk into Broadway theaters demanding excellence in illumination, but they have come to expect stage artistry that exhibits glitz, glamour, and radiance with the signature imprint of these new technologies.

Scenic Technologies “Okay, so when did scenery start to catch up?” Mazzella asked rhetorically as we sat in his office at Hudson Scenic. Before the scenic application of computer technologies, Broadway’s carpenters used winches—motorized drums that wind steel cables connected to counterweight systems to fly scenery—“but we had to set limits manually and run it 20 times to get it right. We were doing that forever.”26 Initial forays into computerized automation—digitally controlling scenic movement with precise timing and consistency—occurred in the early 1980s, but the impulse toward fully implementing and standardizing the technology came with the arrival of megamusicals from L ­ ondon’s West End.27 The 1987 Broadway transfer of Alain Boublil and Claude-Michel ­Schönberg’s Les Misérables provided New York shops with the challenge of automating its sizable turntable, but Andrew Lloyd Webber’s The Phantom of the Opera, with its massive set and multiple effects, demanded a fully integrated automation system when it transferred the following year. East Coast Theater Supply, little known at the time, implemented this system with a computer console that controlled all the motion effects powered by winches, motors, rotators, or other mechanical elements. The company’s Phantom success set the standard for scenic automation on Broadway. Fred Gallo started East Coast Theater Supply in a rented space with “a table saw, a radial arm saw, and some hand tools. . . we didn’t have anything, but we had chutzpah.”28 I spoke with Gallo while he took a break from loading in Doctor Zhivago at the Broadway Theater on West 52nd Street. His father and uncles worked as stagehands, and after attending school for architectural engineering, Gallo returned to Broadway. His success story reveals a level of showmanship not typically attributed to backstage technicians. He and his partner Jerry Harris had implemented some automation technology in previous productions, but Phantom offered a next-level challenge: “here was the largest automated show in the history of theater, and by hook or by crook,” he said, “we were getting that contract.” Gallo set the stage for his meeting with producer Cameron Mackintosh’s representatives, renting additional space and borrowing some scenery from a nearby shop. “I took out all the mechanical stuff and put it on workbenches. Then all of my stagehand friends came in and made believe they were working. So when [the producers] came in, there 134

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were maybe fifteen guys all looking like they were working on mechanics. What did they know, you know?”29 Gallo won the automation contract; he worked with Mazella at Hudson Scenic, who won the scenic construction contract, to implement a complete automation system to control Phantom’s multiple scenic elements, from rising candelabras to the falling chandelier. To install the complete scenic rig, the Majestic Theater required a $2 million renovation, including steel reinforcements, an expanded basement, and a new stage floor.30 When Phantom opened, critics spilled significant ink describing Maria Björnson’s design, detailing its lavish settings and various moving parts. The New York Times’ Frank Rich expressed discomfort with the “histrionic” extravagance of Phantom’s spectacle, but his scenographic descriptions recognized the design as “a victory of dynamic stagecraft” that “constantly shuffles” between onstage and backstage perspectives.31 The Times’ Walter Kerr also devoted paragraphs to the moving dynamism of Björnson’s design, especially the “old-encrusted, multi-tiered, peachtinted” chandelier that amazed audiences with its elegant ascent and later shocked them with its sudden (intentional) collapse.32 Both Rich and Kerr disparaged Phantom’s seeming reliance on stagecraft to hide faults in the libretto, following suit with many Broadway critics “unwilling or unable,” as Jessica Sternfeld notes in The Megamusical, to see spectacle as anything other than “visual trickery.”33 But it is clear from their abundant descriptions of automated scenic elements that Phantom set a new benchmark for a dynamic Broadway scenery that only automated technology could produce. In Changed for Good, Stacy Wolf observes that the scenic dynamism of megamusicals like Phantom competed with performers onstage to such an extent that “the set itself became a performer” by distracting the audience “away from actors’ bodies and the labor of performance and toward fog, flashing lights, and smoothly moving set pieces.”34 Automated scenery’s ability to coordinate precisely with the sung-through scores of megamusicals gives it an appearance of innate belonging: like a character, it is a seemingly inevitable part of the production text. Following the popularity and economic success of megamusicals, automated scenery became desired by many producers and expected as part of the Broadway experience. Gallo won subsequent contracts for Mackintosh’s transfers to Broadway, including Miss Saigon (1991), and his Stage Command motion control system became the go-to technology for automating scenery.35 What began as a small shop is now the Scenic Technologies arm of Production Resource Group, or PRG, a global leader in entertainment technology. Hudson Scenic also integrated automation into its scenic services, but it was not until 1997 with The Lion King that the shop “got into it in a big way,” according to Mazzella. Richard Hudson’s scenic design featured a turntable drum that elevated from below the stage to 20 feet above, producing a spiraling Pride Rock that dramatically crowns the stirring opening number, “Circle of Life.” In different configurations, the same turntable represents other locations. According to Drew Siccardi, house carpenter at the New Amsterdam Theater, the crew removed the entire stage floor and rebuilt it around the automation mechanics. When The Lion King moved to the Minskoff Theater in 2006, “there was still a hole forty foot by forty foot,” which required that Siccardi’s crew build a new deck before installing the scenery for Disney Theatrical’s next production, Mary Poppins. 36 As indicated by these significant alterations, the integration of scenic automation has had a dramatic impact on Broadway’s production budgets and schedules. Most musicals now require a specially built deck and rigging system in addition to newly constructed scenery. As with the implementation of advanced lighting technology, scenic load-ins now require more labor hours. “If you look at some of the largest hit musicals from the ‘40s, ‘50s, and ‘60s, you’ll see that they loaded shows in over three days. Now, it takes a month,” said Gallo. Regardless, “everyone wants automation,” Mazzella concluded. Even smaller musicals like Fun Home (2013), staged in the round at Circle in the Square, featured automated lifts to raise platforms from below the stage. 135

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The growth of automated technology has run parallel with shifting tastes and demographics of Broadway audiences that increasingly include more tourists, both national and international, eager to consume megamusicals like Phantom and spectacles like The Lion King. With the standardization of automation, commercial scenery now moves with quiet, easy precision. Ideally undetectable to audiences, the technology subtly contributes to an aesthetic that distinguishes the Broadway musical as a quality brand.

Sound Technologies Musical theater scholars and journalists have written more about the integration of electronic and digital technologies in sound than about other design areas. Criticism of amplification—the magnifying and balancing of performers’ voices and the orchestra with microphones, speakers, and control consoles—centers on a perceived disconnect between performers and their voices (or instruments and the sounds they make) and a more “homogenized” (or “artificial”) auditory environment that sacrifices the dynamism of live performance for a purer “studio sound.”37 More pointedly, many argue, amplification has diminished the talent of Broadway performers, or at least contributed to a “decline of the traditional ‘belter’ and the proliferation of singers best equipped not for the stage but for the recording studio.”38 Or, as remembered by composer John Kander, “one day Jule Styne turned on the foot mikes without telling Ethel Merman. I say it’s been downhill all the way from that moment.”39 Broadway theaters had used basic sound equipment—amplified cues played from vinyl records or reel-to-reel decks and floor microphones—since the 1930s. But the introduction of rock musicals like Hair (1968) and Jesus Christ Superstar (1971) took sound amplification to the next level, including more microphones to amplify specific voices and instruments and implementing control consoles to blend audio levels. Designer Abe Jacob, known to industry insiders as the “godfather” of theatrical sound, began his career touring with musicians like Jimi Hendrix and the Mamas and the Papas. In 1970, he brought an electronic concert sound with him to Broadway when Michael Butler asked him to come to New York to “fix” the sound for Hair.40 Because the production’s band sat onstage instead of in the Biltmore Theater’s orchestra pit, the floor microphones commonly used for musicals were not mixing well.41 Jacob’s alterations included the addition of ­m icrophones—stationary for instruments, handheld for performers—with a console that could adjust sound quality and volume; the console also helped Jacob boost instruments with softer sounds so they could compete with the electric guitars, a significant addition to the composition of rock musicals. He implemented the same strategy with Jesus Christ Superstar. Jacob’s alterations, however, required the training of sound engineers—technicians who could both master the equipment and respond like musicians, actively listening and adjusting the mix throughout the performance. Before the advent of sound specialists, microphones and speakers were the responsibility of electrics crews. “You were never called a sound man,” said retired technician Bobby Miner, “you were always an assistant electrician.”42 Michael O’Keefe was an electrician at the Metropolitan Opera before joining the sound crew for Superstar, but he quickly learned the skills he needed. “It was my first experience with a sound console; it had sixteen faders. I couldn’t believe they miked the whole orchestra and could accentuate each instrument. It was amazing.”43 Jacob developed a relationship with John Shearing at Masque Sound to supply the needed equipment for his productions; Shearing had a solid standing with New York’s Local 1 stagehands, and he helped identify those eager to learn the new audio technology.44 Jacob trained sound mixers to reproduce his design by listening and responding to what they heard, from the modulations of performers’ voices to the particularities of musicians. “A singer’s voice may be a bit weak one night or a trumpet player might be blowing slightly off mike,” explains Patrick Maloney, who reviewed Jacob’s design for Beatlemania (1977).45 Jacob had placed 136

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Beatlemania’s mixer, Jesse Heimlich, with the sound console in the auditorium of the Winter Garden Theater: “part of the set was seeing the mixing position in the middle of the theater like you do at a rock concert.”46 Having Heimlich in the auditorium hearing what audiences heard proved beneficial to the mixing process, and with Beatlemania’s success, more productions sought to move sound engineers out from their backstage posts. Producers resisted, however, because the elimination of seats translated into lost revenue. “You can’t believe the fights we had!” said Miner. But with the support of powerful directors like Bob Fosse and Michael Bennett, who wanted the highest quality production value, sound mixers gradually moved into Broadway houses. While rock musicals launched Jacob’s Broadway career, productions like Pippin and A ­Chorus Line solidified it. Jacob worked closely with his collaborators on A Chorus Line, and Bennett blocked the actors to maximize sound levels for certain monologues and songs. “The innovation of A Chorus Line was just being real,” Jacob said.47 While his designs for Hair and Superstar were noticeably amplified, here he demonstrated how musicals could use the same tools to achieve a more natural sound. Jacob’s continued success established sound as a distinct category of design artistry; similar to the evolution of lighting design, the addition advanced technologies gave specialists more tools to express their artistry. When included within the creative team, sound designers can collaborate with other designers to place microphones strategically, establishing an auditory environment that reinforces a production’s aesthetic. When wireless body microphones (or “body mikes”) became more prominent in the 1980s, sound designers worked closely with costumers to conceal their transmitters and power supplies while maintaining the performers’ range of movement. As demand for body mikes increased, sound designers also collaborated with audio engineers to minimize the artificiality of amplified voices, including the implementation of distributed sound systems with digital delays. Voices on stage captured by microphones can be sent to any number of speakers, but delaying the amplified sound by a few milliseconds allows the audience to first hear the voices onstage and thus to place the sound with the performer “psychoacoustically.” In the 1970s at Masque, Shearing began using Lexicon digital delay equipment, and distributed sound quickly became standard.48 In 2014, I interviewed sound engineer Earnest Mitchell during preview performances of the musical Aladdin, and he described the same locational effect produced by his digital delay equipment. His completely automated console for Aladdin shows significant advancements from the equipment first implemented by Shearing. But sound mixers still have “ultimate control,” Mitchell reassured me, and the ability to adjust each night to performers’ and musicians’ variations.49 What an audience hears may be filtered through an electronic source, but the operational controls are still in the hands of specialists who develop solid relationships with the onstage artists and understand the dynamics of live performance. Mixers also develop relationships with conductors, but one outcome from the proliferation of sound amplification is the separation of performers and orchestras. With microphones on each instrument, musicians no longer need to occupy an orchestra pit or be in audible proximity to performers or spectators. Today, musicians can occupy a variety of backstage spaces, perhaps playing in separate rooms while watching the conductor on a video monitor. In 2003, producers dangled the threat of amplification technology and the possibility of a “virtual orchestra” before members of Local 802 of the Association of Musicians of Greater New York, who fought a decrease in minimum salaries.50 The resulting four day strike made national news, and the musicians were ultimately successful with the support of other unions like IATSE and Actors’ Equity. The resulting public dialogue convinced producers that audiences expected music from a live orchestra—even one with unseen musicians playing into microphones—when they purchase the Broadway brand.51 The contentious debates around sound amplification will surely continue, but in practice, today’s Broadway musicals are wedded to amplification, producing sounds that audiences have 137

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come to expect, despite continued criticism from stalwarts of a bygone era. One of the rarely mentioned advantages of amplified sound is the way it expands patronage for musicals. For example, Sound Associates now equips every Broadway theater with assisted listening devices for spectators with diminished hearing. Spectators with impaired vision can also take advantage of live audio descriptions through the same system.52 Sound Associates maintains this equipment in their Manhattan office, but their larger shop is in Yonkers, about four miles from Mazzella at Hudson Scenic. While many in the industry remain unconvinced that their contributions have improved Broadway musicals, IATSE Local 1 has awarded both Mazzella and Fitzgerald its highest distinction, gold card memberships, for their career contributions. As the Broadway market continues to expand, reaching a wide variety of international venues with larger seating capacities, advanced scenographic technologies have become a crucial strategy for reproducing, as best as possible, an original Broadway experience. As a result, Sound Associates and Hudson Scenic will surely continue to serve as important if unassuming industry outposts, supplying technologies to sustain today’s Broadway brand.

Notes 1 My interviews and observations at Hudson Scenic Studios occurred on April 4, 2014, January 29, 2015, and February 23, 2015. The Lion King still runs at the Minskoff; Newsies closed at the Nederlander in 2015 and Matilda closed at the Shubert in 2017. 2 Elizabeth Wollman notes in The Theater Will Rock that the emergence of multinational corporations as theater producers has produced a “significant boost in employment” across Broadway. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2006. 147. 3 Jonathan Burston. “Theatre Space as Virtual Space: Audio Technology, the Reconfigured Singing Body, and the Megamusical.” Popular Music 17.2 (1998): 206. 4 Burston, 210–211. Also see Harold Schonberg. “Stage View: The Surrender of Broadway to Amplified Sound.” New York Times. 15 Mar. 1981. ; Lawrence O’Toole. “Musical Theater Is Discovering a New Voice.” New York Times. 22 Jan. 1995. ; Vincent Canby. “Look Who’s Talking, Microphones.” New York Times. 22 Jan. 1995. . For more recent coverage, see Ellen Gamerman. “Broadway Turns Up the Volume.” Wall Street Journal Online. 23 Oct. 2009. . 5 Neil Mazzella, interview with the author, 4 Apr. 2014. 6 Beverly Emmons, interview with the author, 20 June 2013. 7 Ibid. For a more complete description of this choreographed labor and that of A Chorus Line’s followspot operators, see my article “Unseen Labor and Backstage Choreographies” (2015). My thanks to Theatre Journal for allowing me to include some of the writing from the article in this chapter. 8 Mazzella. 9 Robert Bell. Let There Be Light: Entertainment Lighting Software Pioneers in Conversation. Cambridge: ­Entertainment Technology Press, 2004. 44–45. 10 Gershon (Gary) Shevett, interview with the author, 10 Mar. 2014. The console of a five-scene preset light board includes five separate lines of channel faders. With one scene live, the board operator can manually set the levels of upcoming cues on the remaining lines. A master fader triggers the fade from one cue to the next. 11 In The Speed of Light, lighting designer Linda Essig writes that 1975 is “immortalized forever in lighting history” with the arrival of A Chorus Line. Portsmouth: Heinemann, 2002. 5. 12 Rob Halliday. “A Chorus Line.” Lighting and Sound International. Apr. 2013: 67. . 13 Christin Essin. “Unseen Labor and Backstage Choreographies: A Materialist Production History of A Chorus Line.” Theatre Journal 67.2 (2015): 203. 14 “One Singular Sensation: The Design Team of the Original A Chorus Line.” Live Design Online. 1 Mar. 1999. . Sound mixer Otts Munderloh remembers a technical rehearsal when Bennett noticed an actor out of their light.

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15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27

28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 4 4 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52

“Tharon would say, ‘Move the person!’ Then Michael would go up on stage and say, ‘Where’s the light coming from, Tharon?’ And she would say ‘The left!’ And he’d move the person.” Ken Mandelbaum. A Chorus Line and the Musicals of Michael Bennett. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989. 135. Ellen Lampert-Gréaux. “The Ultimate Line Dance.” Studio Live Design. 1 Dec. 2006. . Essin, 204. Mandelbaum, 118. Essig, 48–49. Ibid., 72. Natasha Katz, Telephone interview with the author, 11 Dec. 2013. Source Fours were first introduced in 1992 by Electronic Theater Controls (ETC). Lampert-Gréaux. Katz. Quoted in Essig, 68; 51. Matthew Hudson worked as the automation specialist for Katz on A Chorus Line, with Jimmy Fedigan as the production electrician and Eric Norris as the lead electrician. Mazzella. Mazzella’s example of early implementation was Pete Feller’s work on The Tap Dance Kid (1983). Automation technician Bobby Valli noted the two automated turntables on Chapter Two (1978), run by the electrics rather than the carpentry department. With the increase in scenic automation, this responsibility shifted. Bobby Valli, Personal interview with the author, 29 Jan. 2015. Fred Gallo, Personal interview with the author, 11 Feb. 2015. Ibid. Carol Ilson. Harold Prince: A Director’s Journey. New York: Limelight Editions, 2000. 353–354; Stacy Wolf. Changed for Good: A Feminist History of the Broadway Musical. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2014. 151. Frank Rich. “Stage: ‘Phantom of the Opera,’” New York Times. 27 Jan. 1988. . Walter Kerr. “Now, About That Chandelier That Goes Crashing.” New York Times. 14 Feb. 1988. . Jessica Sternfeld. The Megamusical. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2006. 80–81. Wolf, 139. EFX, the same Las Vegas spectacle featuring Natasha Katz’s addition of Vari-Lites, also featured Gallo’s Stage Command system. Gallo. Drew Siccardi, Personal interview with the author, 4 Mar. 2014. Burston, 207; Canaby. Wollman, 126; Gamerman. O’Toole. Richard Thomas. The Designs of Abe Jacob. Syracuse: United States Institute of Theatre Technology, 2008. 19. Thomas, 25. Jacob designed the sound for the Boston production of Hair, and afterward implemented a similar design in New York (29). Bobby Miner, interview with the author, 31 Jan. 2015. Michael O’Keefe, interview with the author, 18 Mar. 2013. Miner. Masque also pioneered the use of wireless microphones on Broadway. Patrick Maloney. “Live Performance Sound Reinforcement: Beatlemania.” Recording Engineer/Producer 10.2 (1979): 89–103. . Thomas, 43. Ibid., 51. John ( Jack) Shearing, Personal interview with the author, 22 May 2014. Earnest Mitchell, Personal interview with the author, 4 Mar. 2014. Leonard Leibowitz. “Broadway Epilogue.” Allegro 103. 7–8, 2003. . Steven Greenhouse. “The Theater Walkout.” New York Times. 9 Mar. 2003. . Mark Annunziato, Personal interview with the author, 24 Feb. 2015. Also Richard Fitzgerald, Personal interview with the author, 3 Apr. 2014.

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PART 4

Reading the Musical through Gender

Gender theory lends itself beautifully to musical theater and allows interested scholars to investigate just how musicals navigate issues like gender roles and stereotypes, our culture’s pervasive tendency toward heteronormativity, and the impact of musicals that attempt to move beyond depictions of heterosexual characters and male-female romantic plot lines. Looking at musicals through the lens of gender, broadly defined, reveals that while some musicals break with typical narratives and portrayals, many—even those that seem bold or edgy on the surface—rest on an expected and even conservative foundation of storytelling. How can Broadway do better to thwart gender-based expectations in its narratives, characters, and music? Does telling less familiar stories risk losing the interest of ticket buyers? Women are overwhelmingly outnumbered by men behind the scenes of professional theater making; how can this be addressed? And how, in a genre so often created and patronized by gay men, is there still such a lack of non-stereotypical stories about them on stage? It’s certainly still common for plots of musicals (or films, TV shows, or any popular narrative) to revolve around men wooing women while facing and overcoming obstacles (whether the couple survives or not) to become part of a happy and unified community. Heterosexual romantic plots are sometimes central to the action (Rent, The Phantom of the Opera, Once, Pretty Woman) and sometimes secondary to it (Dear Evan Hansen, The Lion King, Hamilton, Wicked), but the expectation of a boy-meets-girl plotline remains high. In the #MeToo era, unfolding as we finalize the manuscript of this book, long-awaited awareness has risen about the roles women play on stage, both as performers and in the parts they present. Must female performers always be romantic objects, foils to male leads, divas with great songs but second billing in the show? What does a truly feminist musical look like? Recent musicals have both met and thwarted the typical narrative expectations in various ways. Waitress (2016), for example, was created by an all-female team and largely concerns a seemingly feminist story about a woman breaking out of an abusive relationship. Yet it also rests squarely on not one but three heterosexual couplings, all of them traditional or even backward-looking in the way they portray the women’s (lack of ) autonomy. ­ omosexuality— The topic of gender and the role of women weave together with the topic of h and the performance of gender writ large—as portrayed on stage, and as regards performers themselves. What stakes get changed when characters on stage are gay, perhaps still depicting heterosexual will-they-or-won’t-they plots? Does it matter to a show’s success or reception if the actors in the pairings—straight or gay—are straight or gay themselves? What becomes of notions

Reading the Musical through Gender

of masculinity and femininity when characters or performers present as gender-fluid, or as trans, or as drag queens? Performing gender becomes part of performing a role, both on stage and off. This section includes two essays that focus on the role of women, and two that focus on issues of homosexuality and drag performance. Mary Jo Lodge tackles the topic of women and jobs, applying the Bechdel test, among other criteria, to successful musicals that ran on Broadway over the last 75 years. She traces how many musicals can pass the test—that is, how many involve two named female characters discussing anything other than a man for a decent length of time—and discovers results both inspiring and not. Lodge also applies the criterion of work: how many female characters have a job (and thus are defined at least partly by that and not solely by serving as a love interest)? How has this number changed over the years? And what might that imply? Trudi Wright also explores women at work in her discussion of the collaborative musical Working, a show that depicts a series of characters doing their jobs. Wright focuses particularly on one song performed by a housewife. In her analysis of “Just a Housewife,” Wright sheds light on the character’s mixed feelings about her job, and what the song says about her character, about working women, and about the 1970s context of the show. Aaron Thomas addresses a recent Broadway controversy when the gay actor Sean Hayes played a straight character and got criticized for his lack of believability by a member of the press. In closely considering and unpacking the incident, Thomas explores broader themes of contemporary gender and performativity. Finally, in his essay on drag in Broadway musicals, John Clum traces shifting cultural constructions of gender through three musicals that use costume to explore gender performance and presentation in various ways, thereby considering how Broadway has understood drag, homosexuality, and the performance of masculinity over the last few decades.

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14 DO-RE-#METOO Women, Work, and Representation in the Broadway Musical Mary Jo Lodge

Even more importantly, the way we are represented in entertainment matters. When a girl sees herself as a scientist, or a boy sees someone with his skin color as a law student, it plants a seed that this is possible. -Actress Eva Longoria, founding member of the Time’s Up movement1

At the conclusion of her speech accepting the Academy Award for Best Actress in 2018, Frances McDormand said, “I have two words for you: inclusion rider.” The remark refers to the clause first championed by Stacy Smith, founder of the Annenberg Inclusion Initiative at the University of Southern California, which “an actor can insist be inserted in their contract that requires cast and crew on a film to meet a certain level of diversity.”2 McDormand’s speech was just one of many ways that the 2018 Oscars highlighted the methods that the film industry, and the female creators and actors within it, are using to fight back against the apparently widespread sexual harassment committed by men in the business (most notably the now disgraced producer Harvey Weinstein), as well as against the lack of gender parity in film that has fostered a climate in which predators like Weinstein thrived. The #MeToo hashtag went viral on Twitter in October 2017, and the movement began to snowball thereafter.3 A film-centric movement, Time’s Up, was founded by a group of female film celebrities on January 1, 2018, to address and prosecute sexual misconduct in the film industry and to encourage gender parity among staff and creative teams on film productions. Actress Eva Longoria, one of the Time’s Up founders, noted in the essay excerpted earlier that gender parity behind the scenes is not the only goal of the movement; on-screen representation also matters, since the kinds and numbers of roles afforded to women and minority actors shape the views of audiences. Longoria echoes scores of other critics of the film industry, all of whom reiterate that representation matters; researchers, too, have noted that media portrayals “can serve as a proxy for experiences audience members haven’t actually lived, shaping their views on people of color and women ― and shaping the way those people view themselves.”4 This newfound focus on representation and activism for gender parity among film and television stars has not, thus far, shown particular influence on the much smaller theater industry, though organizations like the League of Professional Theatre Women are attempting to address the lack of women working behind the scenes. They have commissioned a series of studies called “Women Count,” which track data underscoring that women hold few positions as playwrights, directors, designers, and crew members in the Off-Broadway realm. The League also launched an

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initiative in 2018 called #OneMoreConversation, described as “a call to directors, artistic directors, producers, boards, and other decision-makers to have just one more conversation with a woman theater artist or professional before making a hiring decision.”5 Representation on stage in musicals is a different matter. On the amateur level of ­t heater-making across the country, women and girls tend to overwhelmingly outnumber men and boys in their participation in musicals. But things are very different at the professional level: Actors’ Equity Association, the professional stage actors’ union, commissioned a recent hiring bias study that found that while “membership is evenly divided between women and men,” gender parity did not follow.6 Instead, “across all the on-stage contracts examined in this study, men were offered close to 60 percent of the on-stage contracts.” 7 Clearly, more roles are given to men than women on Broadway stages. Further, the Actors’ Equity data only reveal information about the quantity of roles for women—it says nothing about the quality of the roles women play on Broadway, let alone specifically in Broadway musicals. Even large roles for women can involve problematic representations on stage. Prominent industry composer and musical director Georgia Stitt raised concerns about this very issue in November 2017 when she Tweeted, “With respect to the creatives who will be employed by these projects, I will say I’m concerned about a Broadway season that includes PRETTY WOMAN, CAROUSEL and MY FAIR LADY all at the same time. In 2017 is the correct message really ‘women are there to be rescued’?” Stitt’s tweet, which Michael Paulson of The New York Times described as sounding “an alarm on social media,” inspired Paulson’s Times article, which noted in its headline that revivals of Broadway musicals “Revive Gender Stereotypes, Too.”8 It’s not only revivals, however, that present problematic portrayals of women on Broadway: Pretty Woman, which Stitt referenced, is a new stage musical adaptation of the 1990 film starring Julia Roberts (about a prostitute who is “rescued” by a wealthy business man), which opened on Broadway in August 2018. Other recent musicals, including the critical and commercial blockbuster Hamilton (2015), feature similarly regressive portrayals of women.

Gauging Gender Representation in Musicals In this chapter, I examine gender representation in Broadway musicals over a 75-year period (­between 1942 and 2016) by exploring their female characters, specifically in regard to their quality. In this case, “quality” refers to how dimensional the characters are. I first applied the Bechdel test, first introduced in a 1985 comic strip by Alison Bechdel, to these Broadway musicals. When the Bechdel test first entered the mainstream, it was used to reveal gender bias in films. It set an extraordinarily low bar for women’s film roles to cross: films needed to contain at least two named female characters who talked to one another about something other than men. Nevertheless, few films passed the test. Applying the Bechdel test to Broadway musicals reveals similarly disheartening results: of the 241 musicals I examined over a 75-year period, just 34% passed the Bechdel test. The Bechdel test alone, however, is too simplistic a means of gauging representation: it shows that women are in these musicals, and that they speak (or sing), at least for a line or two, but it otherwise reveals little about the characters themselves. To resolve that conundrum, I opted to examine another layer, and thus analyzed which female characters in these Broadway musicals held jobs, which is something quite common for most male characters. I then examined how these classifications—musicals that pass the Bechdel test and musicals that pass the jobs test—have functioned in three 25-year periods between 1942 and 2016. The data revealed that for nearly all criteria, the numbers have remained surprisingly flat over time, with only slight increases. I then examine what these numbers reveal about larger trends regarding gender representation in the Broadway musical over time. 144

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While the focus of this book is the contemporary Broadway musical, the periods selected for my study extend back to 1942, largely because of the unique history of the genre. The period from 1942 to 1966 corresponds with what is generally acknowledged to be Broadway’s Golden Age: a time when many musicals premiered that have subsequently been dubbed classics, beginning with Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma! (1943), through perennial chestnuts like Frank Loesser’s Guys and Dolls (1950), Lerner and Loewe’s My Fair Lady (1956), and Bock and Harnick’s Fiddler on the Roof (1964). This provides some context for reviewing the later periods, the first of which extends from just after the Golden Age in 1967 through 1991. This era dovetails with the advent of Second Wave feminism, as well as with such musical theater forms as the concept musical—which departs from the traditional plot structure of Golden Age shows—and concludes with the peak years of the large, spectacular, and generally sung-through megamusicals that dominated through the 1980s. The final era extends from 1992 to 2016, a period that lies more squarely in the era of Third Wave feminism. This period includes the arrival of Disney on Broadway in 1994 with Beauty and the Beast and subsequent revitalization of the theater district, as well as recent blockbusters like Hamilton (2015). In the study, musical revivals (which are often more reflective of the period in which they were originally created) and musical revues (which do not typically feature distinct characters or plots) have been excluded from consideration.

Feminism and the Bechdel Test The original comic strip that spawned the Bechdel test was created by comic strip artist and graphic novelist Alison Bechdel, whose life was the subject of the book and subsequent musical Fun Home in 2015. The test was introduced in her comic strip “Dykes to Watch Out For,” which ran in numerous gay periodicals and later online between 1983 and 2008. “The Rule,” now known as “The Bechdel test,” appeared in her comic strip in 1985 wherein a woman tells her friend that for her to see a movie, it needs to conform to “The Rule.” She says, in subsequent panels, “I only go to a movie if it satisfies three basic requirements. One, it has to have at least two women in it…who, two, talk to each other about, three, something besides a man.” In a blog post on her website from November 8, 2013, Bechdel noted that, “the Test is about something I have dedicated my career to: the representation of women who are subjects and not objects.”9 In the years since Bechdel’s test entered the mainstream, arguments have ensued over its specifics, and additional details have been added by various interpreters in order to formalize its applications. For instance, a commonly used criterion today is that the two female characters under consideration for the test must have names. Even so, few films pass the bar. For instance, Lucy Feldman of The Wall Street Journal analyzed the eight best picture nominees for her article, “How the 2016 Oscar Nominees Did on the Bechdel Test,” and found that only three passed the test: Brooklyn, Mad Max: Fury Road, and Room.10 While it can be argued that the Bechdel test is too simplistic, and its threshold too low, the test does bring to the forefront “where feminism ‘begins,’” according to feminist theater scholar Elaine Aston.11 In pointing out the lack of women in theater (or film), the Bechdel test gives name to what Aston calls “feelings of exclusion” and “…the growing awareness that women’s social and cultural lives have been overlooked, marginalized and trivialized by male-dominated social systems and cultural values” (xi).12 Many academics argue that identifying a lack of female representation is the first step toward creating feminist theater. While scholars don’t always agree about what exactly constitutes feminist theater, perhaps Sue-Ellen Case sums it up best in the conclusion to her landmark study Feminism and Theatre: The feminist in the theater can create the laboratory in which the single most effective mode of repression – gender – can be exposed, dismantled and removed; the same laboratory may 145

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produce the representation of a subject who is liberated from the repressions of the past and capable of signaling a new age for both women and men.13 For Case, then, feminist theater exposes gender disparities and attempts to replace them with progressive images of women. The stage musical—often considered one of the most conservative forms of theater, in large part due to its reliance on nostalgia and its mass-market appeal—is thus largely seen as less progressive in its portrayals of women than other types of theater. That being said, there are progressive, feminist musicals, as well as musicals that might be considered progressive when viewed through different lenses. Musical theater scholar Stacy Wolf, in her books A Problem Like Maria: Gender and Sexuality in the American Musical and Changed for Good: A Feminist History of the Broadway Musical, examines roles for women in musicals from the 1950s to the present, in part by deconstructing their heteronormative narratives. Because Wolf considers the “love story or romance” so central to the musical that “few commentators even note it as a convention rather than a fact or requirement,” she does not attempt to fully deconstruct the musicals she highlights.14 Instead, she zeroes in on the “love story,” extending it to include female protagonists in a musical, whether or not the libretto suggests that they are romantically involved.15 She considers moments, particularly climactic ones that involve female duets, as evidence of these relationships; for instance, she unpacks what can be read as a queer relationship between the two witches of Wicked, Elphaba and Glinda, who sing several duets together. Though Wolf doesn’t explicitly utilize the Bechdel test, she too considers musicals to be feminist if they have at least two named female characters who talk (or sing) to each other about topics other than their relationships with men.

Gender Representation in Musicals, 1942–2016 For this analysis, I narrowed down the shows under consideration in the three periods by using the eighth edition of Stanley Green and Cary Ginell’s book Broadway Musicals, Show by Show, which lists Broadway musicals that opened in a given year that the authors considered to have either historical significance, or else, “other importance to the development of the musical.”16 In an editor’s note, they note that criteria for inclusion included, “length of run, seminal importance, people involved, uniqueness of approach or subject matter, quality of the score, and general acceptance as a significant work in the field.”17 Published in 2014, the eighth edition only covers shows through A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder (2012), so I extended the study to include all musicals that appeared on Broadway after that show, from late 2013 to the end of 2016. For my study, the female characters had to have names, and I stipulated further that the characters had to interact for longer than one or two lines or sung lyrics. In evaluating characters’ jobs, I opted to cast as broad a net as possible. I considered royalty (like the Disney princesses Jasmine in Aladdin and Amneris in Aida), students (like the high schoolers in Bring It On), witches (like Lola in Damn Yankees or Elphaba in Wicked), goddesses (like the muses in Xanadu or Asaka and Erzulie in Once on this Island), and prostitutes (like Lucy in Jekyll and Hyde) to be gainfully employed. I did not, however, consider work that wasn’t paid or that was mentioned only in passing or alluded to but never depicted (like Helen’s community theater work in Fun Home and Eliza’s philanthropic work with her orphanage in Hamilton) to be employment. Also, only one female character needed to have a job in a show for the show to count. Using these criteria, the complete results of the analysis of musicals premiering between 1942–1966, 1967–1991, and 1992–2016 are presented in Table 14.1.

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Total number of musicals (excluding revues and revivals) Total number that pass the Bechdel test Number of musicals that pass both the Bechdel and jobs test Number of musicals that pass the Bechdel test, but NOT the jobs test Number of musicals that do NOT pass the Bechdel test, but female characters have jobs Total number of musicals with female characters with jobs, broadly defined, both Bechdel passing and non-Bechdel

Broadway Musicals 1942–1966

Broadway Musicals 1967–1991

Broadway Musicals 1992–2016

94 (excludes 4 revues)

63 (excludes 6 revues)

84 (excludes 4 revues)

29 (31%)

19 (30%)

35 (42%)

20 (21%)

19 (30%)

29 (35%)

9 (10%)

0 (0%)

6 (7%)

36 (38%)

25 (40%)

30 (36%)

56 (60%)

44 (70%)

59 (70%)

Analyzing the Data Table 14.1 reveals several things about musicals from over this 75-year period. While it seems to suggest that the number of musicals produced declined considerably from the first period to the middle period under study, the reality is that this apparent production decline is actually reflective of the choices made by the editors of the Show By Show volume (which was the basis for this study) about which musicals to include in their volume, which includes a greater number of musicals from the Golden Age era. While there were, in fact, fewer musicals produced on Broadway during the 1980s and 1990s, the drop in production (and subsequent turnaround) was not so drastic as the chart suggests. What is surprising about the results, however, is their consistency across all three 25-year periods considered. In the earliest period, 31% of musicals considered passed the Bechdel test, while in the next 25-year period, 30% of musicals passed. Thus, for the first 50 years of the 75-year period studied, the percentages of shows that could pass the Bechdel test decreased by 1%. Over the most recent 25-year period, from 1992 to 2016, the musicals that passed the Bechdel test jumped to 41%, representing only a 10% gain over the original numbers dating back to 1942. These numbers fall shy of the 53% of films that passed the Bechdel test when analyzing film, according to Smith (Hickey). The percentages of musicals that pass the jobs test but not the Bechdel test were remarkably consistent as well. They fluctuated just 4% over 75 years, ranging from 38% in the earliest period to 40% between 1967 and 1991, and then 35% in the most recent period. In addition, the total number of musicals that depict at least one woman with a job, whether or not the musical passes the Bechdel test, is also steady. Between 1942 and 1966, 60% of musicals depicted women with jobs. That number rose to 70% in 1967 and stayed there through the most recent period. Finally, the percentage of musicals that pass the Bechdel test but not the jobs test has also remained consistent—at under 10% for the entire 75 years studied. These results imply that it is far more likely for a musical to pass the Bechdel test if a female character is employed in it; perhaps

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having a focus other than men for a character aids in more progressive portrayals. Also, notably, the percentage of musicals that could pass both the Bechdel and jobs tests did increase over time, moving from 21% in the earliest period studied to 30% between 1967 and 1991, and then finally peaking at 35% in the most recent period. There has also been a sharp increase, from 41% in the period 1967–1991 to 59% in the period 1992–2016, in musicals that depict at least one female character with a job, regardless of whether the musical passes the Bechdel test.

Interpreting the Data: Female Employment and Feminism Since American musicals did not develop in a vacuum, the results of the earlier research are best viewed in context. According to data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, women’s participation in the American labor force has gradually increased, from 32%, starting in 1948 (the earliest date when gender-driven records are available) to 56.7% in April of 2018.18 The US Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics “Women in the Labor Force” databook notes: Immediately following World War II, less than one-third of women were in the labor force. However, women soon began to participate in greater numbers, and their labor force participation rose rapidly from the 1960s through the 1980s before slowing in the 1990s. Women reached the peak of their labor force participation in 1999, with a rate of 60.0 percent. Since then, labor force participation among women has declined, to 56.7 percent in 2015. In addition, a large share of women work full time and year-round.19 The data collected on musicals revealed that from 1942 to 1966, 60% of musicals depicted women with jobs, a figure that greatly exceeds the percentage of women in the actual US labor force at that time.20 These early musicals, then, were more progressive in their depiction of women’s labor than the lived reality of women in the workforce. Perhaps musicals at the time were more interested in reflecting wish fulfillment (as musicals consistently do), than in portraying life as it was. The 50 years from 1967 to 2016 show a consistent rate of 70% labor force participation by women in stage musicals. In real life, women’s participation in the labor force in 1967 hovered just over 40%, and it increased to 57.4% in 1991, at the transition between the latest two periods studied.21 In 2016, female labor force participation was nearly the same as it was 25 years earlier, at roughly 59.8%.22 Again, the data for Broadway musicals produced in this era exceed the real-life statistics, particularly in the period from 1967 to 1991, where the percentages at some points are nearly 30% higher than the actual female labor participation at the time. Thus, the musical theater data that might initially be interpreted as revealing a disheartening trend of stagnancy in the numbers regarding female employment in fact consistently show that women characters on Broadway had jobs far more often than their real-life counterparts. Even for a medium viewed as conservative, and arguably even regressive, Broadway musicals are rather progressive in this regard. Indeed, the change from 60% participation in the labor force, as depicted in the earliest period of musicals studied, to the 70% in the middle and later periods is a significant increase and shows that at some points in the 75-year span, female labor force participation represented on Broadway stages was sometimes 30% higher than it actually was in the United States during that same time period. It is helpful to contextualize this examination of female employment as depicted on Broadway stages as it relates to feminism. First Wave feminism, largely concerned with women’s suffrage in the United States and elsewhere, had long peaked as a movement by 1942, when this study begins. Between 1942 and 1966, the seeds of Second Wave feminism—more concerned with women’s sexual and reproductive freedom, as well as their presence and rights in the workplace—were sown in part by the spike of women in the workforce during World War II. While US employment statistics are not available during this period in the same form as the data cited earlier, 148

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other statistics reflect significant changes in the US labor force during World War II. Goldin and Olivetti report that “[a]round 14 million men were mobilized, the male labor force declined by almost 9 million and the female labor force, which stood at 14 million in 1940, increased by more than 7 million.”23 This substantial increase in women’s participation in the labor force, and their subsequent removal from those jobs when the men returned home from World War II, resulted in the reluctance of some women to give up the positions and salaries they earned during the war. This discontent helped fuel the Second Wave of feminism, which was further fueled by landmark publications on the role of women in society like Simone De Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (1949) and Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1963). This cultural shift might account for the significant increase in representations of female employment in Broadway musicals in the 1967–1991 period, which coincided with the rise of Second Wave feminism. As noted earlier, the leap from the actual labor force participation in the period, which rose steadily from 40% to 57.4%, to the depicted labor force participation in musicals, which rocketed to 70% in the same range, is significant and contradicts the lived experiences of female (and indeed all) viewers of musicals at the time.

“Nice Work if You Can Get It”: Musical Trends and Female Character Employment Over the course of the 75-year time span, the number of musicals with female characters who could pass both the Bechdel test and meet the job criteria test increased just 14%, from a dismal 21% in the earliest period, peaking at 35% in the most recent one. Even today, just over a third of new musicals on Broadway feature at least two women who have conversations (either spoken or sung) about something other than a man, and at least one woman holds a job, which gives her character context outside of the more traditional musical theater role for women as love object. In fairness, however, this has increased from the dismal fifth of musicals that could pass both the Bechdel and jobs test in the earliest period studied, 1942–1966. Of course, perhaps this 14% overall increase is simply in keeping with the slow but incremental changes in the way women are viewed in American society, since Broadway typically takes time to catch up with societal advances. In fact, Wolf has argued that within the Broadway musical’s fairly narrow scope, which is nearly always trained on heterosexual romance, the medium still has been continually “revising its representation of gender and of heterosexual romance to navigate social ills and conflicts.”24 Not all representations of female characters, particularly in the Golden Age, are as problematic as these numbers might suggest. For instance, while the early musicals of Rodgers and ­Hammerstein weren’t especially progressive in their treatment of female characters, every show the pair wrote, from The King and I in 1951 to the end of their collaboration in 1959 with The Sound of Music, passes both the Bechdel and jobs tests (none of the ones that pre-date The King and I do). Other Golden Age musicals, including My Fair Lady (1956), West Side Story (1957), The Music Man (1957), and Gypsy (1959), easily pass both tests as well. By the 1960s, Stacy Wolf points out that “Single Girl” characters had emerged on Broadway and includes the title characters from such iconic musicals as Hello, Dolly!, Mame and Sweet Charity in that designation; she adds that, first and foremost, a character who falls into this category “is employed, and her workplace is the location of monetary and emotional security.”25 For these characters, their work is a crucial part of their identity. Even so, Hello, Dolly! can’t quite pass the Bechdel test, but the so-called “Single Girls” in Mame and Sweet Charity push both musicals to pass both the jobs and Bechdel tests. Still, to echo the concerns raised in Paulson’s New York Times article, gender stereotypes remain alive and well on Broadway. The incremental changes made in representation of women in musicals have yielded some transformations in how characters function, but there is much progress still needed. Still, a recent trend in musicals of moving away from love stories as central 149

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subjects—particularly in musicals where women play a major role both on-stage and off—seems to have aided in creating characters that can pass both the Bechdel and jobs tests. With jobs, or, indeed, anything to talk about other than men, women seem to have a better chance of being depicted as subjects in their own lives. In fact, these new shows push back against the foundational idea of the musical as love story, and are, instead, the antithesis of love stories. For example, Waitress (2016), which features an entirely female creative team (a Broadway first), can be read as the story of a woman who gets out of not one but two ultimately destructive or limiting relationships with men. If/Then (2014), which features complicated dueling storylines using the same characters, is also less about the love life of its heroine Liz/Beth, and more about the way she survives and succeeds on her own as a single working woman and mother after a divorce and then the death of her second husband, or the end of destructive affairs with her male friends or colleagues. Beautiful (2014) is about Carole King’s career trajectory through her failed marriage, divorce, and years as a single mother. Ultimately, all three of these musicals are really about the destruction of marriages or romance and the primacy of the mother/child relationship in these working women’s lives.

Moving Forward and Conclusions In examining the specifics of representation of women in Broadway musicals, it is helpful to refer to data gathered about a large number of shows—in this case, 241 of them. Studying these musicals in relationship to the Bechdel test and the jobs criteria has revealed a number of trends regarding gender representation on Broadway. There is, however, much work to be done. E ­ xamining musicals in terms of their depictions of gender and race, in keeping with Third Wave feminism, would surely be illuminating, particularly given the dearth of complex female characters of color on Broadway until recently. Also, exploring the kinds of jobs women hold in musicals would be revealing, particularly since it appears that nearly all of the jobs depicted are either in the performance world (as singers, dancers, or actors), or else are deeply traditional ones for women (teachers, nurses, and secretaries among them). It is clear, for instance, that an extraordinarily small number of musicals depict women in jobs related to STEM fields (as doctors, ­engineers, or scientists); thus, even the jobs criteria might be more limiting than expected, in terms of equitable (or even aspirational) gender representation. In addition, exploring the complicated role that additional female creators might have in the representation of female characters in musicals opens numerous avenues of inquiry, particularly since it is widely assumed that more women behind the scenes translates to more progressive characters on stage. Anecdotally, this assumption seems true—the team of Lisa Kron and Jeanine Tesori, who won the first Tony award for Best Score awarded to a female writing team for Fun Home in 2015, created a rich musical about work and female identity that does not revolve around heteronormative romantic entanglements. Still, more study is needed—and more female creators need to break through Broadway’s glass ceiling—to even examine whether their participation makes a notable difference in female representation on stage. Thus, while the increase in numbers of gainfully employed female characters in Broadway musicals might indicate some progress in representation (and indeed, is a more progressive depiction than what was women’s lived experience at the time), the fact remains that the number of working women who speak or sing to each other about things other than men has barely increased since the Golden Age. Perhaps, as is the hope for films, increased involvement of women as the creators of musicals might lead to dramatic changes in women’s roles onstage, as post-study musicals like Come From Away and Amelie (which pass the jobs and Bechdel tests, and which have female creative team members in significant roles) suggest, and might change the conversation about gender representation in Broadway musicals. 150

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Acknowledgment Lafayette College Excel Scholar Madeline Kraft, class of ’18, served as research assistant for this essay.

Notes 1 Eva Longoria. “Eva Longoria: Representation Matters. It’s Also Just Good Business.” Time.com. 1 Mar. 2018. Web. 16 May 2018. < http://time.com/5179369/eva-longoria-representation-in-hollywood/> 2 Martin Belam and Sam Levin. “Woman Behind ‘Inclusion Rider’ Explains Frances McDormand’s Oscar speech.” theguardian.com. 5 Mar. 2018. Web. 16 May 2018. < https://www.theguardian.com/ film/2018/mar/05/what-is-an-inclusion-rider-frances-mcdormand-oscars-2018> 3 Activist Tarana Burke first began using the phrase “Me Too” to support sexual assault survivors and end sexual violence in 2006. The movement went viral in October 2017 and was initially credited to others, but her original coining of the term was subsequently acknowledged. 4 Sara Boboltz and Kimberly Yam. “Why On-Screen Representation Actually Matters.” huffingtonpost. com. 24 Feb. 2017. Web. 16 May 2018. 5 League of Professional Theatre Women. “#ONEMORECONVERSATION – A SPECIAL LPTW ACTION.” Web. 17 May 2018. n.d. 6 Russell Lehrer. “Looking at Hiring Biases by the Numbers.” Actors’ Equity Association Equity News 102.2 (Spring 2017): 8. 7 Ibid., 8. 8 Michael Paulson. “The Problem With Broadway Revivals: The Revive Gender Stereotypes, Too.” nytimes.com. 22 Feb. 2018. Web. 16 May 2018. < https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/22/theater/genderstereotypes-carousel-my-fair-lady-pretty-woman.html> 9 Alison Bechdel. “Other Projects.” 8 Nov. 2013. Web. 22 June 2016. . 10 Lucy Feldman. “How the 2016 Oscar Nominees Did on the Bechdel Test.” WSJ.com. 14 Jan. 2016. Web. 22 June 2016. < https://www.wsj.com/articles/not-in-the-picture-1452807110> 11 Elaine Aston. Foreword to Feminism and Theatre by Sue-Ellen Case, reissued ed. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2008. xi. 12 Ibid., xi. 13 Sue-Ellen Case. Feminism and Theatre. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2008. 132. 14 Stacy Ellen Wolf. Changed for Good: A Feminist History of the Broadway Musical. New York: Oxford UP, 2010. 8. 15 Ibid., 8. 16 Stanley Green and Cary Ginell. Broadway Musicals, Show by Show. 8th ed. Milwaukee: Applause Theatre & Cinema, 2014. n.p. 17 Ibid., n.p. 18 Bureau of Labor Statistics Reports. “Women in the Labor Force: A Databook.” Apr. 2017. Web. 24 May 2018. . n.p. 19 Ibid., n.p. 20 FRED Economic Data, St. Louis Fed. “Civilian Labor Force Participation Rate: Women.” updated 1 Apr. 2018. Web. 24 May 2018. . 21 Ibid. 22 Ibid. 23 Claudia Goldin and Claudia Olivetti. “Shocking Labor Supply: A Reassessment of the Role of World War II on Women’s Labor Supply.” The American Economic Review 103.3 (May 2013): 257. 24 Stacy Ellen Wolf. Changed for Good: A Feminist History of the Broadway Musical. New York: Oxford UP, 2010. 9. 25 Ibid., 59.

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15 IT’S STILL WORKING Collaborating to Perform the Stories of Everyday Americans, Then and Now Trudi Wright

Composer Stephen Schwartz, who by the age of 26 had already experienced success with Godspell (1971), Pippin (1972), and The Magic Show (1974), became enthralled in 1974 with an unlikely source for his next project: Studs Terkel’s national bestseller Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do, which was published that same year.1 Schwartz, and eventually a team of talented collaborators, wrote Working for a cast of five women and ten men, who tell most of the show’s stories through song. The company numbers, as well as many solo pieces, depict characters’ varying feelings about their lives at work with dialogue drawn from the interviews collected and published by Terkel. The original Broadway production of Working also featured a few simple but poignant dance numbers. See Table 15.1 for song titles, composers, original characters, and the location of the songs’ inspiration in Terkel’s book.2 Table 15.1  Working, Original Cast Recording Occupation/Person Interviewed

Referenced in Terkel’s Working

Walt Whitman/ Stephen Schwartz

Company

“Lovin’ Al”

Micki Grant

“The Mason” “Nobody Tells Me How”

“Just a Housewife”

Craig Carnelia Mary Rodgers/Susan Birkenhead James Taylor (Spanish lyrics by Graciela Daniele and Matt Landers) Carnelia

Parking lot attendant/ Alfred Pommier Mason/Carl Murray School teacher/Rose Hoffman Migrant worker/ Roberto Acuna

Not referenced. Some text from Whitman’s poem, “I Hear America Singing” pp. 297–302

“Millwork”

Taylor

Song Title

Lyricist/Composer

“All The Livelong Day ‘I Hear America Singing’”

“Un Mejor Día Vendrá”

Housewife/Therese Carter Felt presser/Grace Clements

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pp. xlv–xlix pp. 483–88 pp. 7–14

pp. 396–401 pp. 384–389

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Song Title

Lyricist/Composer

Occupation/Person Interviewed

“If I Could’ve Been”

Grant

Company

“Joe”

Carnelia

“It’s an Art” “Brother Trucker”

Schwartz Taylor

“Fathers and Sons”

Schwartz

“Cleanin’ Women”

Grant

“Something to Point To”

Carnelia

Retired man/Joe Zmuda Waitress/Dolores Dante Truck driver/Frank Decker Fireman/Tom Patrick and others from a section called “Fathers and Sons” Cleaning woman/ Maggie Holmes Company

Referenced in Terkel’s Working

pp. 562–570 pp. 389–395 pp. 279–296 pp. 705–748

pp. 161–168

The show’s character vignettes come together to create what Schwartz called a “documentary musical” or “nonfiction musical,” which was a new genre floating around the 1970s theater world. Schwartz writes, “Working is a non-fiction musical. A musical documentary. The words spoken, and generally the words sung, did not spring from a writer’s imagination; they were spoken by real people.”3 Although documentaries, as a genre, can tell a gripping story from beginning to end, ­others—like Working and the musicals Schwartz names as influences, including The Me Nobody Knows (1970), A Chorus Line (1975), and Runaways (1978)—are held together by a common theme and thus play more like revues. Because Working’s scenes can be viewed as stand-alone pieces, each of which speaks to a unique social issue, it is possible to study them individually. This makes Working an excellent show to analyze in the music or history classroom. In this chapter I will demonstrate the case study model by analyzing the song, “Just A Housewife” by Craig Carnelia. The character in this piece is influenced by second-wave feminism of the 1970s, and yet her story sounds eerily current. Indeed all of the interviews, chosen to become scenes, are fully representative of the sociocultural themes of the 1970s and yet, because many of the issues presented in the show linger on into the present, Working can be studied as both an artifact and a representation of modern-day culture.

Inspiration Schwartz learned of Terkel’s bestseller in a Book-of-the-Month flyer he found in a pile of mail at his Connecticut home. In the advertisement, he read about Heather, a telephone operator who noted how grateful she was to customers who took the time to ask her about her day. As Schwartz tells it, Heather’s simple gratitude made him realize the importance of treating the operator as the person she was, and not just the voice of a large company: I would be the guy we put in the show who curses the phone company, and I would complain about it being a monopoly. Suddenly, I realized that there was a person sitting in some location that I’d never pictured in my mind, and he or she had a whole life and a series of dreams and disappointments and expectations and wearinesses that I had never thought about, and that I was connected to this person through this transaction. I had never given it an instant’s thought. Some people might find that obvious and not particularly compelling. To me it was enormously compelling, and I wanted to write about it.4 153

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Heather’s genuine account of the importance of human kindness during her work day prompted Schwartz to further investigate Americans’ complicated relationships with their work, with the aim of adapting Working into a musical.5 Schwartz contacted his agent, Shirley Bernstein, who arranged for him to visit Terkel in ­Chicago in hopes of retaining rights for the book.6 Terkel remembered, When Stephen Schwartz, out of the blue, suggested the book Working as the “book” for a musical, I was astonished. A most unlikely idea, I thought. At first. The more he talked about it, the more enthusiastic he became, the more my doubts were assuaged. I was attracted toward his vision. Something told me he had something: it was more than just a musical. It was a celebration of the “ordinary” people, whose daily lives are unsung. He would sing about them, the anonymous many, whose lives touch ours every day without our realizing it. Go ahead, I said. And he did.7 It was Schwartz’s commitment to the workers and their stories that convinced Terkel to support the unlikely project of setting worker interviews to music. Although Working was revised and updated in 2012 by Schwartz and writer/director Gordon Greenberg to reflect the changing landscape of America’s work, this chapter focuses on the 1978 version of the show. Many scenes from the 1978 version remain, including “All the Livelong Day,” “Nobody Tells Me How,” “Brother Trucker,” “Just a Housewife,” “Millwork,” “If I Could’ve Been,” It’s an Art,” “Joe,” “Cleanin’ Women,” “Fathers and Sons,” and “Something To Point To.” However, new songs have since been added to reflect the sociocultural changes in the ­A merican workplace, both positive and negative, over the past 40 years. The updated version includes work scenes featuring “the land of office cubicles” and workers with modern jobs, including the character Raj Chanda, a tech-support operator for Verizon. (Raj takes the place of Heather the telephone operator.) The update also includes two numbers by Lin-Manuel Miranda: “Delivery,” sung by the character Freddy Rodriguez, who is working in the fast-food industry and saving money to live out his dreams of a work life with more freedom, and “A Very Good Day,” which depicts two immigrant workers who find reward in their work despite the low pay they receive in the e­ lderand child-care industries. Although the updates were meant to modernize Working by taking into account the effects of technology on society and the financial disparities felt by immigrants in America’s current economy, the 1978 version is still performed more frequently than its 2012 counterpart.

Workers and Their Creative Process At first, Schwartz intended to write and direct Working on his own, a decision he made on the heels of his two previous shows, Pippin (1972) and The Baker’s Wife (1976).8 Pippin, now an especially beloved entry in the Schwarz canon, was fraught with creative difficulties during its inception. The young Schwartz was used to a collaborative creative process, which he had enjoyed during his experience writing and staging Godspell (1971). Pippin’s director Bob Fosse, however, wanted complete control of that production, thus setting up a contentious dynamic during rehearsals and previews. The Baker’s Wife shares a similar story. The writing of the show came easily to Schwartz and his newly acquired creative partner, Joseph Stein. The rehearsals and preview process, however, were fraught with issues, most of which related to differences of vision between Schwartz and Stein, and David Merrick, the show’s producer. The Baker’s Wife toured in the United States for six months (in its ever-changing versions), but never made it to Broadway. Although negatively affected by some of the business and creative dealings of Broadway, Schwartz knew the benefits of communal script creation because of the successful collaborative 154

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process that brought Godspell, the first of Schwartz’s many successful musicals, to the New York theater scene.9 This may be why, not long after finishing Terkel’s book, Schwartz contacted friend and fellow writer Nina Faso, who then shared in the adaptation process. The two spent time reading and choosing parts of the book to adapt for the musical, but then chose to work out the logistics and other potential content with more input from friends and colleagues. Working thus ended up being developed with much material coming directly from the actors. The value Schwartz placed on the ideas of “the workers” of this production was not unlike the newfound respect he had gained for workers like Heather the telephone operator. With this ethos in play, Schwartz and Fasso invited a group of their actor friends to a rented rehearsal space to try out and try on some of the “characters” from Terkel’s text. Paying them with lunches and transportation reimbursements, Schwartz first asked the actors to read pre-chosen monologues from Working. He also asked them to read all of Terkel’s book, and to note passages that interested them. De Giere reports, “In a free-form, experimental way, the workshop group honed potentially stage-worthy material and watched each other improvise physical movements for particular jobs so that a vision of staging could emerge.”10 This experimental process was a common practice in New York theater at the time, especially Off and Off-Off Broadway, which is where Schwartz got his start with Godspell. During these rehearsals, Schwartz recalled that all ideas were tried out in front of the group, no matter how impractical or bad they sounded.11 This open-minded and supportive process no doubt allowed each member of the team to feel heard and safe from judgment, fostering a conducive environment for the creative process and nurturing the sensitive, multiple-­perspective show. Because there were a number of points of view represented by the actors who attended the workshops and helped make the various work stories come to life, a variety of experiences contributed to the different voices we hear on stage. The process also speaks to the respect Schwartz felt for his coworkers, something he thought had not been present in his two previous shows. Along with rehearsals, Schwartz organized outings for the actors to visit various workplaces. The cast visited a local fire department, a parking lot, and a restaurant to observe actual workers. Schwartz wanted the cast to embody not only the movements of the workers doing their jobs but also how the ways these movements reflect their feelings about their work.12 Cast member and dance captain Steven Boockvor recalled, “We got embedded into the real behavioral understanding of each one of those characters. Stephen Schwartz is very organic that way.”13 In fact, Schwartz continues to encourage all casts of Working to do similar “hands-on” research to more deeply understand the working lives of others. The direction for casts to visit local workers in order to learn from them appears in the show’s production notes and in an online forum hosted on the composer’s official website. Schwartz suggests, …as I think I say in my production notes, it wouldn’t be a bad idea, if you have time, to take your cast on a field trip to something like a local firehouse, or have someone come to talk to them about his or her job, just to see how people behave when they are talking about what they do (they DON’T over- dramatize or feel sorry for themselves, they DO use humor and a kind of self-deprecation). This might help them in their performances.14 Although not every cast possesses the time or means to visit places of employment or invite guests to rehearsals, many companies do. These visits create heightened awareness, which can deepen a cast’s understanding of actual people in their community. Thus, the nuanced characters we meet in every performance of the show were created by myriad sources. These include the original stories collected by Terkel, the many actors who lent their ideas and talent to bring the workers’ stories to life, and the songwriters Schwartz eventually 155

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approached to compose songs for the show in order to give each character a unique sound. This is another reason why Working can be studied as a whole work of art or analyzed scene by scene. Schwartz began to write the score alone, just as he had with the script, but while struggling to get the parking lot attendant song to sound the way he wanted, he sought the help of a friend. Schwartz remembers, “I said to myself, ‘This is silly. Why am I sitting here trying to do a Micki Grant song? Why don’t I just call Micki Grant?’”15 She accepted his offer and began to compose for Working, eventually contributing “Lovin’ Al” and “If I Could’ve Been.” This opened the floodgates for other collaboration opportunities. As can be seen in Table 15.1, Schwartz collaborated with singer-songwriter James Taylor, the actress and composer Micki Grant, the songwriting team of Mary Rodgers and Susan Birkenhead, and Craig Carnelia, a Broadway newcomer with a sensitive compositional style.

Craig Carnelia’s “Just a Housewife” Carnelia was exposed to Broadway at an early age and claims Richard Rodgers’s No Strings, which he saw at age 14, as his first musical of inspiration. He learned to play the guitar and piano, sang in a folk group, and attended Hofstra University. While there, he won the role of The Boy in the long-running Off-Broadway musical The Fantasticks. After his run in that production, he pursued a career in songwriting and, later, musical theater composition. His first big break was writing songs for Working. Other credits include music and lyrics for Is There Life After High School? (1982) and Three Post Cards (1987), and lyrics for Sweet Smell of Success (2002). He wrote lyrics for Imaginary Friends (2002), which he also co-scored with Marvin Hamlisch, as well as Poster Boy (2016). His work has garnered the Johnny Mercer Award and the first annual Gilman and Gonzalez-Falla Musical Theater Award. In addition to his career as a composer and writer, Carnelia also mentors young writers at the ASCAP Musical Theatre Workshop, the Dramatists Guild Musical Theatre Fellowship, and the Eugene O’Neill Musical Theatre Conference.16 Carnelia’s ability to write the humanity of the character into his songs has become a hallmark of his compositional style. It was this quality that Stephen Schwartz noticed and admired in Carnelia’s writing. In a 2004 interview with theater critic Peter Filichia, Carnelia remembers Schwartz coming to see him in a cabaret performance and liking what he heard. Carnelia said, “he was drawn to my work because we had very similar influences--folk, mid ‘60s rock, the Beatles, Paul Simon, and James Taylor.”17 Schwartz then asked him to write “Joe” and “Just a Housewife.”18 A few different writers from the creative team offered versions of “Just a Housewife,” including composer Mary Rodgers and lyricist Susan Birkenhead, who eventually contributed “Nobody Tells Me How,” but in the end, it was Craig Carnelia who provided “the song’s feeling of quiet desperation.”19 When asked about Carnelia’s contributions to Working, Schwartz remembers, All of Craig’s songs for Working, but most particularly ‘Joe,’ taught me something about writing for characters, and thus about writing for musical theatre. What Craig did, more vividly than other musical theatre composers I had heard, was to capture the essence of the character, not just in the lyric, but in the music as well. The music was not just a tune with an appropriate mood, but a tonal portrait of the character’s soul and circumstances. Even if you don’t speak English, you can hear ‘Joe’ and the music will tell you about the character. Since working with Craig on Working, I’ve tried to emulate that aspect of his writing in my own.20 Schwartz’s description of the “tonal portrait” created by Carnelia is not only heard in “Joe,” a song featuring the reminiscences of a proud, retired man, but also in the thought-provoking “Just a Housewife,” which features a “quietly desperate” musical setting.

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“Just a Housewife,” now considered by Schwartz to be a classic from the show and a number he kept in the 2012 update, is a ballad in ABA form about a woman’s work in the home.21 Written during a time of intense debate about women’s roles on both the public and domestic fronts, Carnelia keenly captures a slice of middle-class America in the 1970s. When the song was written, what is now often referred to as second wave feminism was in full swing. According to scholar Harriet Kimble Wrye, the second wave was “a broad sociopolitical-cultural movement located in the 1960s and 1970s, [which] focused on consciousness-raising around gender issues, women’s liberation ([think] Betty Friedan, Kate Millet, Simone de Beauvoir, Bela Abzug, Gloria Steinem), and job and economic parity.”22 Second wave feminism emerged after World War II. Scholar Margaret Walters reports, In 1947, a Commission on the Statues of Women was established by the United Nations, and two years later it issued a Declaration of Human Rights. Between 1975 and 1985, the UN called three international conferences on women’s issues, where it was acknowledged that feminism “constitutes the political expression of the concerns and interests of women from different regions, classes, nationalities, and ethnic backgrounds…There is and must be a diversity of feminisms, responsive to the different needs and concern of different women, as defined by them for themselves.”23 This opening of dialogue inspired many women to share their experiences through writing, including Betty Friedan. Her 1963 book The Feminine Mystique exposed the myth of the happy housewife.24 Although criticized by later feminists like bell hooks and Jill Johnston for her narrowly defined white middle-class feminism, Friedan’s ideas nevertheless influenced countless other women, and fueled the movement. They also resonated with Carnelia, whose lyrics for “Just a Housewife” resemble the kind of woman spotlighted by Friedan, but through his music paints a nuanced and highly recognizable female character.25 The housewife in Working is inundated with feminist ideas from the media as proven by ­Carnelia’s lyrics, “Nowadays all the magazines make a bunch o’ beans out o’ family life. / You’re a wiz if you go to work, but you’re just a jerk if you say you won’t. / Women’s Lib says they think it’s fine if the choice is mine, but you know they don’t!” Although some women of the seventies bravely broke new ground in the workforce and enthusiastically supported their female counterparts who made the same choice, others, like Carnelia’s “Housewife,” stayed home to raise their families. “Just a Housewife” brings to light the inconsistencies of feminism at the time. The feminists of the period were keen on women choosing their own career path, but only if that path lead to a job outside of the home, which is why this housewife struggles with her decision to stay home. In the previous line, she feels that the media and members of the women’s liberation movement look down on her work. The “choice” to work in the home, which some American women were fortunate enough to make because of their socioeconomic status, is still being made by mothers of today. Just as the slow pace of Joe’s days as a retired person is reflected in the repetitive accompaniment of his song, so too is repetition incorporated into the housewife’s lament. Her accompaniment oscillates between a D major chord with an added second scale degree and an A major chord. In addition, Carnelia adds a suspension-like figure on beats one and three of the piano’s bass line in every other measure, between the notes G sharp and F sharp (see Figure 15.1). The repetitive movement from G sharp to F sharp colors the D major and A major chords, and represents the dichotomy of the woman’s life. On the one hand, she feels that she is “nothing special,” but also knows the importance of being a mother and wife. Notice, too, the singer’s melodic line. No matter which chords are playing below, the melody is made up of two repeating motifs,

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Figure 15.1  “Just a Housewife,” mm. 4–8.

which represent her feelings of being stuck: she feels that what she is doing is the right thing for her family, but she also wants the world to understand that she is more than her seemingly menial daily responsibilities. Although she considers her choice to stay home the right one for her, she feels underappreciated—both by her family and the women of her society. Once again, the desire to understand more deeply the person behind the profession is what inspired Schwartz’s idea for a musical based on Working in the first place. In the words of original cast member Matt Landers, “I remember how powerful the show was. It made you notice how unappreciative people can be. That’s the thing, the depersonalization of people by the jobs because they are defined by their jobs….But they are all individual people underneath that, and that’s the message of the show. That’s what really made it work.”26 In keeping with the driving impulses of the show in general, Carnelia’s music expresses some highly personal moments in “Just a H ­ ousewife.” For example, as the woman lists her many duties, she also relives moments when she “loses her patience.” To intensify the feeling of impatience, Carnelia features a section in which the singer, reverting to spoken dialogue, begins to count to ten, a common tactic used to control rising temper. Although the woman succeeds in “cooling down,” a raised key change to E flat major occurs immediately after her counting in the song representing her still heightened emotions. The accompaniment continues with an oscillation, now between E flat and B flat major, and the singer resumes her repetitious melody, now in a higher key. The B section of “Just a Housewife” returns to D major, but now features a new melody. The housewife, who begins by singing, “I don’t mean to complain at all, but they make you feel like you’re two feet tall,” uses the section to express all her frustrations, supported by a more active accompaniment than in the A section. Her melody is recitative-like, in that it stays on the same pitch with a few half-note fluctuations from A to G sharp and back to A (see Figure 15.2). In the middle of this second section, Carnelia again modulates from D major to E flat major to support the character’s growing emotions. He cleverly raises the key to emphasize the word “know,” in the lyric “Women’s Lib says they think it’s fine if the choice is mine / but you know they don’t!.” This key change sets up the crux of the housewife’s argument, which arrives in her next line: “What I do; what I choose to do may be dumb to you / but it’s not to me.” 27 Although she may be judged for “only” doing the work of a housewife, she knows and understands the worth of her life. It is at this moment we hear her defiance against the narrow feminist ideal, which claims that the only way to equality with men is to choose work outside of the home. The final A section, which returns to the original key of D, is a compression of information from sections A and B. The accompaniment and the singer’s emotions arrive back to the despondency of the beginning. It is as if she accepts the fate of being judged by society. Instead of the 158

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Figure 15.2  “Just a Housewife” by Craig Carnelia, mm. 63–67.

continuous oscillation between the two-measure patterns found in the original A section (see m. 7–8 in Figure 15.1), however, he adds a repeat of the second measure’s melody (see Figure 15.3). By removing the “All I am is…” and its corresponding melody, and repeating what she feels she is—“someone’s mother,” “nothing special” and, later in the same manner, “unexciting,” and “kinda dull”—the listener is alerted to her lack of self-worth. For a moment in this final section, the more defiant B section comes through with the familiar line and melody, “I don’t mean to complain at all,” (as seen in Figure 15.2) but is quickly supplanted with the A section material again, which slows “poco a poco” to the end where she proclaims with finality that she is…“just a housewife.” “Just a Housewife,” with its message of deep internal conflict, still applies to many women. Whether mothers decide to stay home with their children like the protagonist in the song, choose to return to work despite guilt about doing so, happily go back to work, or find that they must work to support themselves and their families, the Working scene offers a plethora of choices to begin or continue dialogue around women’s issues of both the past and present. Some women go to work because they have a passion for their vocation, while others must work to provide for their families. Some stay home out of a desire to do so, while others must stay home to care for special-needs children or ailing parents. Many who go to work yearn to spend more time with their families and feel guilty for missing important moments in their children’s lives, while those who stay home can experience feelings of frustration, much like the housewife in Working. Many articles in the popular press that currently circulate about mothering in the twentyfirst century imply that neither choice is ideal; women are frequently judged, regardless of 159

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Figure 15.3  “Just a Housewife” by Craig Carnelia, mm. 105–107.

the choices they make about childbearing and child-rearing. “Dear Stay-at-Home Mom Who Plays with Kids and Think You have a ‘Real Job.’” This salaciously titled blog post catches the reader’s attention and then praises the work of stay-at-home mothers.28 Published only two years earlier, “Kids of Working Moms Are Better Off ” offers findings from a Harvard Business Review study that suggest “daughters of mothers who work are more successful than their peers” and earn more, too. 29 The sheer number of articles on the relationship between mothering and work speaks to the currency of this topic and why “Just a Housewife” remains a “classic” for all those who perform and view Working year after year: it articulates the human experience Schwartz felt would translate into box-office success, which came to Working, if in a nontraditional way. “Based on a New York Times Best seller!” “Nominated for five Tony Awards!” “Winner of two Drama Desk Awards!” These accolades, most often displayed by successful Broadway shows in their splashy marketing campaigns, are all ways to describe Working. However, Working originally ran for only 24 performances, a flop by Broadway standards. And yet, after undergoing revisions by Schwartz and the director Paul Lazarus soon after its dismal showing on the Great White Way, and again in 2012 to update the show’s content, Working enjoys numerous productions all over the world. According to Musical Theatre International (MTI), the theatrical licensing agency that holds the rights to Working, the original version of the show has been produced by 1,018 schools, 429 community theaters, 392 ­colleges, 26 professional theaters, and ten international theaters since the mid-1990s. The 2012 version has been performed in 135 schools, 60 community theaters, 47 colleges, seven professional theaters, and four international productions, for a grand total of 2,128 productions to date.30 Working continues to speak to school groups and amateur theater audiences because of the creative team’s fierce commitment to portraying the nuanced feelings of people we all know and engage with in our communities on a daily basis. The show began in the actor’s workshop where Working’s nonfiction content developed under the leadership of Steven Schwartz who exhibited deep respect for all of the workers involved in its creation. Its score features the songs of five talented composers, including the genuine depiction of intricate human emotion by Craig Carnelia, and its script contains an authentic collection of scenes about the work of everyday people who make up the intricate and complicated fabric of American society. In it, we hear the stories of our parents, our siblings, our neighbors—and even ourselves. Leonard Bernstein so eloquently described the American musical as “an art that arises out of American roots….”31 So too can this definition be used to describe Working. It is a musical that tells the story of America’s laborers, which is why it still “works.”

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Notes 1 Studs Terkel. Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do. New York: Pantheon Books, 1974. 2 See Stephen Schwartz. Working: A New Musical. Original cast recording. Sony Music Entertainment, MASTERWORKS and MASTERWORKS BROADWAY, 88691 99108 2, 1978; compact disc reissue, 2012. 3 Stephen Schwartz. “Working.” Web. 27 Apr. 2017. . 4 Carol de Giere. Defying Gravity: The Creative Career of Stephen Schwartz from Godspell to Wicked. New York: Applause Theatre and Cinema Books, 2008. 146–147. 5 Heather Lamb’s story (Terkel, 65–69) was turned into a scene for Working and can still be seen, thanks to the Educational Broadcasting Corporation and Community Television of Southern California. This version is available on DVD: Studs Terkel’s Working. Broadway Theatre Archive. Directed by Stephen Schwartz and Kirk Browning. Produced by Phylis Geller and Lindsay Law. Image Entertainment 143810882-2, 1982. A more detailed discussion of this television version can be found in Paul Laird’s chapter on Working in The Musical Theater of Stephen Schwartz: From Godspell to Wicked and Beyond. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2014. 133–150. 6 Paul R. Laird. The Musical Theater of Stephen Schwartz: From Godspell to Wicked and Beyond. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2014. 134. 7 Stephen Schwartz. Working: A New Musical, Original Cast Recording Liner Notes, 1978. JS 35411. 8 de Giere, Defying Gravity, 149. 9 For more information on the creative process of Godspell, see de Giere’s chapter, “Godspell Off-Off Broadway.” Defying Gravity, 42–66 and Paul R. Laird’s chapter, “Godspell.” The Musical Theater of Stephen Schwartz, 15–44. 10 de Giere, 150. Some of the members of that original actor’s workshop were Robin Lamont, Gilmer McCormick, Jeffey Mylett (all members of the Godspell cast); Laurie Faso (Nina Faso’s brother); Bobo Lewis and Matt Landers (original Working cast members); Steven Boockvor (an original cast member of A Chorus Line and Working); and Lynne Thigpen (who was playing in Schwartz’s The Magic Show and went on to later fame as the Chief in Carmen Sandiego). A Chorus Line shared a very similar collaborative process as that show was being written. Having some of that cast create Working was an intentional move by Schwartz and Faso. 11 Ibid., 151. 12 Ibid., 150–151. 13 Ibid., 151. 14 Stephen Schwartz. “Working – Notes for Directors and Musicians.” Web. 11 Apr. 2017. . 15 de Giere, Defying Gravity, 152. 16 “Craig Carnelia.” Web. 13 Dec. 2016. . ­Samuel French is a licensing company, which holds the licensing rights to all of Carnelia’s shows, except Working. 17 Peter Filichia. Theater News for Theatermania, “A Conversation with Craig Carnelia.” Web. 17 Mar. 2017. . 18 During the creation process of the show Carnelia also wrote “The Mason,” which features a brick-layer’s celebration of the permanence of his craft, and the show’s closer “Something to Point To,” which uses the image of a newly erected building to bring all the workers of the show together in loose conclusion to this revue. 19 Laird, “Working,” 137. 20 de Giere, Defying Gravity, 155. 21 Laird, “Working,” 146. Carnelia’s other songs for the show, including “Joe,” “The Mason,” and Working’s closing number, “Something to Point To,” are also included in this list. The only one of his songs not considered a “classic” is “Hot’s Michael at the Piano,” a number which was cut during the show’s previews in Chicago. 22 Harriet Kimble Wrye. “The Fourth Wave of Feminism: Psychoanalytic Perspectives Introductory ­Remarks.” Studies in Gender and Sexuality 10 (2009): 185. 23 Margaret Walters. Feminism: A Very Short Introduction. New York: Oxford UP, 2005. 97. 24 Betty Friedan. The Feminine Mystique. New York: W.W. Norton, 1963.

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Trudi Wright 25 bell hooks. Feminist Theory from Margin to Centre. Boston: South End Press, 1984; Jill Johnston. ­L esbian Nation: The Feminist Solution. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1973. In her writing, hooks introduces a feminism that takes into consideration women of color and women who must work to support themselves and their families. Johnston, on the other hand, argues for lesbianism within the feminist ­movement, where women totally separate from men who represent the patriarchy of American culture. To enhance the feminist discussion surrounding “Just a Housewife,” students could also consider the Mickey Grant song, “Cleanin’ Women,” to underscore the ideas presented by bell hooks and others. Another avenue of study is the scholarship surrounding the employer/household worker relationship, which includes: Judith Rollins. Between Women: Domestics and Their Employers. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1987 and Mary Romero. Maid in the USA. New York: Routledge, 2002. 26 De Giere, 171. 27 Both “know” and “choose” are italicized in the Craig Carnelia Songbook. Milwaukee: Hal Leonard ­Corporation, 2006. “Just a Housewife” was originally published in Oradell, NJ by Big A Music, 1978. 28 Kelsey Strater. “Dear Stay-at-Home-Moms Who Play With Kids and Think You Have a Real Job.” under “Inspirational” tab. Web. 28 Apr. 2017. . Other articles include Michelle Zunter. “Why Is Stay-At-Home Mom Shaming Still Happening?” Web. 28 Apr. 2017. ; and Farrah Alexander. “I’m a Stay-at-Home Mom and a Feminist.” Web. 28 Apr. 2017. ; Dulce Zamora. “Hard Choice for Moms: Work or Stay at Home?” Web. 28 Apr. 2017. . There are hundreds, if not thousands, of articles dedicated to this topic, both in print and online. 29 Ananya Bhattacharya. “Kids of Working Moms Are Better Off.” CNN Business. Web. 16 Oct. 2018. . 30 Richard Patterson (Professional Licensing Associate, MTI), email message to author, 4 Aug. 2016. 31 Larry Stempel. Showtime: A History of the Broadway Musical Theater. New York: Norton, 2010. 684.

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16 THE PINK ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM Aaron C. Thomas

The day after the revival of Promises, Promises opened on April 25, 2010, Newsweek posted an article entitled “Straight Jacket” on its website that began with the following provocation: “The reviews for the Broadway revival of Promises, Promises were negative enough, even though most of the critics ignored the real problem—the big pink elephant in the room.”1 As the author, pop culture critic Ramin Setoodeh, saw it, the problem everyone was ignoring about the revival was that Sean Hayes, the actor playing Promises’ lead role, was unconvincing in the part because he is an out gay man. Setoodeh reminds readers that Hayes is “best known as the queeny Jack on Will & Grace” and that the actor’s “sexual orientation is part of who he is.” Thus, he complains, “it’s weird seeing Hayes play straight. He comes off as wooden and insincere, as if he’s trying to hide something, which of course he is.”2 Setoodeh then describes a different gay actor’s performance on a primetime television show as “more like your average theater queen” than a convincing love interest for a girl, but returns to the topic of Promises, Promises to describe Hayes as someone who “tips off even your grandmother’s gaydar.”3 The piece’s ostensible point is to discuss the difficulties of being an out gay or lesbian actor, but the article is neither a careful critique of Promises, Promises nor coherently argumentative. Rather, Setoodeh’s article is more a set of musings prompted by his attendance at the Promises revival, and his dislike of the show and its central performance. These postshow ruminations caused rather a stir. On the gay culture website After Elton, ­editor-in-chief Michael Jensen posted a scathing response in which he described Setoodeh’s opinions as “shockingly retroactive,” and accused the critic of reiterating “tired gay-obsessions of the far right.”4 For Jensen, the crux of the matter was that Setoodeh’s critiques damaged the gay community as a whole. Jensen noted that Setoodeh is himself an out gay man, and he argued that “It’s already difficult enough for actors to brave any possible backlash by coming out. Having another gay man say he doesn’t think gay men can convincingly play straight, doesn’t make it any easier.” A few days later Sean Hayes was nominated for a Tony award as best actor in a musical, but the Newsweek kerfuffle had only just begun. Hayes’s Promises co-star Kristin Chenoweth was next to weigh in on the topic publicly, calling the Newsweek piece “horrendously homophobic” and describing it as a “bigoted, factually inaccurate article that tells people who deviate from heterosexual norms that they can’t be open about who they are and still achieve their dreams.”5 Through early May, responses to Setoodeh’s article proliferated. Television producer Ryan Murphy called for a boycott of Newsweek; Oscar-winning screenwriter Dustin Lance Black penned an op-ed for the Hollywood Reporter with Jarrett Barrios, then-president of the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation. The men attacked Setoodeh 163

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directly, saying that his piece “seems to raise more questions about his own internalized biases than what the ‘public’ actually perceives” and that the article “leans away from reality and tilts toward openly gay Setoodeh’s own issues with sexuality and femininity.”6 Some critics came to Newsweek’s defense. Alongside Barrios and Black’s vituperative ad hominem attacks, the Hollywood Reporter ran a well-reasoned dissent by Andrew Wallenstein.7 In a piece for the Huffington Post entitled “Now That You Mention It, Rock Hudson Did Seem Gay,” playwright Aaron Sorkin defended Newsweek, joking, “This is a sentence I never thought I would type: I’m coming to the defense of a theatre critic.”8 The theater industry apparently remained unsettled by the Straight Jacket affair, and in late May CBS announced that Hayes (a popular television star, after all) would host the annual Tony awards. At the ceremony in mid-June, Hayes and Chenoweth opened the evening by sharing what the New York Times’ Patrick Healy described as “a long, open-mouthed kiss.”9 This performance of heterosexuality (believable or not) succeeded, for a time at least, at putting the Straight Jacket affair to rest.10 Although most of the responses to the Newsweek piece were condemnatory, and although the Straight Jacket affair might seem a silly tempest in an even sillier teapot, I want to look more closely at what it can illuminate about contemporary mainstream theater. What went mostly ignored in the responses to Setoodeh’s piece is the rather obvious fact that he was an audience member like any other. If a spectator disliked the show he attended, this ought to be cause for introspection rather than dismissal. In other words, rather than argue with the critic, it might be better—as directors often tell actors—simply to take the note. In this essay, I attempt to take Ramin Setoodeh seriously as a member of the Promises, Promises audience who saw a performance he disliked. I’ll make several arguments about what this audience response can tell us about Broadway musicals in the twenty-first century. First, I want to make an argument about “playing gay” and “playing straight”: our beliefs about the ability to play one or the other have much to say about what we think about gayness itself (and sexuality as such). Complicating this first argument is the idea of the closet—a site of contestation that still troubles many actors—and the even more vexed question of outing, a divisive political tactic from the 1980s and 1990s that haunts the Straight Jacket affair in peculiar ways. This exploration of outing, a practice fundamentally about queer identity and the ways queer people speak to and about other queer people, will lead us to a discussion of contemporary queer criticism and the objectification that attends a majority of popular theater criticism—not just that published in Newsweek. The expression “the elephant in the room” refers to something we all know is there but attempt to ignore. The color pink has long been associated with the gay rights movement, but “seeing pink elephants” is a euphemistic phrase referring to drunken hallucinations caused by Delirium Tremens. Setoodeh’s evocation of the pink elephant combines these three ideas, describing open secrets and figures of fantasy, fabricated by audience members and articulating the contract of desire between actor and audience. This essay explores the implications of this simultaneously monstrous and hilarious image, examining the disavowed eroticism always at work in acts of criticism.

An Elephant in a Room Although Chenoweth, GLAAD, Murphy, and others called the Newsweek piece offensive or inappropriate for suggesting that gay people can’t play straight people, this was not really Setoodeh’s argument. Such a statement would, in fact, be manifestly nonsensical. As Derek Thompson noted in the Atlantic, “Gay actors play straight all the time,” and this is as true of the out gay actors Thompson cites—“Neil Patrick Harris in How I Met Your Mother; David Hyde Pierce in Frasier; Ian McKellen in Lord of the Rings, and X-Men, and everything”—as it is of the (let’s just say dozens of ) 164

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gay and lesbian actors who keep their sexual preferences out of the public eye.11 In other words, not only do gay actors play straight all the time, many are good enough at it that audiences don’t question their portrayals. But the critic never made this argument in the first place. Although most of the commentators in the Straight Jacket affair concern themselves with this topic, Setoodeh did not say gay actors shouldn’t play straight characters; he simply found Sean Hayes unconvincing as Chuck Baxter. Rather than attack the critic for homophobia or self-hatred, I want to consider his own observations as an explanation. In the original Newsweek piece, Setoodeh says he found Hayes “wooden and insincere, as if he’s trying to hide something, which of course he is.”12 Setoodeh interpreted Hayes’s awkwardness as him trying to hide his gayness from the audience, but one might as easily attribute Hayes’s insincere performance to an attempt to hide something else. More likely, Hayes was trying to shed the persona of Jack McFarland, the sitcom character that made him famous and with whom he is identified in the popular imagination. Most of Promises’ critics, in fact, found themselves unable to forget Hayes’s earlier television performance. Daily News critic Joe Dziemianowicz noted that the role of Chuck Baxter calls for “a slapstick clown and a standup comic, so it’s inevitable that [Hayes] recalls Jack from Will & Grace”; indeed, every review of Promises mentions Will & Grace.13 Even the Hollywood Reporter’s Frank Scheck, who enjoyed Promises more than most critics, cites Hayes’s ability to shed Jack McFarland as an indication of his skill, writing that he “shows no traces of his familiar persona from TV’s Will & Grace and delivers a winning, low-key turn.”14 Like the Harry Potter franchise has for Daniel Radcliffe since the early 2000s and The Count of Monte Cristo did for James O’Neill in the nineteenth century, Will & Grace haunts Hayes. As recently as 2016 a Times reporter annoyed Hayes with a question about shedding his McFarland persona. “I gave up caring about that a long time ago,” Hayes replied.15 But it has seemingly been difficult for many spectators to see Hayes as anyone other than Jack, and critics continue to have this same problem. Indeed, Will & Grace, which ran for eight seasons from 1998 to 2006, was revived in 2017 and ­renewed for a second (that is, tenth season) before the new episodes even hit the air. Jack McFarland wasn’t simply the zany next-door neighbor on a television sitcom. He was understood as a particular kind of silly neighbor. In an interview for NPR in 2010, Hayes said the character was more a product of audience reception than his own intentions: At the beginning of Will & Grace, I played Jack as the funny next-door-neighbor type, as we’ve seen in the past. And I thought that was my role. I didn’t really play into the gay part as much – the stereotypical gay part. And I have to say, the critics […] pegged Jack as the flamboyant, extremely gay character because they didn’t know what else to call him.16 Not only mainstream publications read Hayes’s performance this way; the gay press did as well. Hayes was “Will & Grace’s queeny, über-homo Jack McFarland,”17 “the flamboyantly out-andproud Jack.”18 McFarland stepped into the shoes of a powerful, inescapable comedic type, the silly figure Vito Russo catalogues so comprehensively in the first chapter of The Celluloid Closet. In other words, Hayes’s performance in Promises was haunted not only by Jack McFarland but also by the entire history of the effeminate sissy on stage and screen, a history that taught audiences how they were supposed to look at Hayes long before he appeared on Broadway in 2010. The late-1960s world of Promises, Promises puts the history of this stock figure into stark relief. Neil Simon’s script, based on the I.A.L. Diamond–Billy Wilder film The Apartment (1960), follows a mild-mannered office worker named Chuck Baxter whom nobody notices. Chuck is in love with his coworker Fran Kubelik, who can’t seem to remember his name and takes no notice of him. In order to ingratiate himself with his bosses, Chuck begins lending out his apartment to the company’s many vice presidents for their extramarital flings. Through a series of farcical situations, Chuck and Fran become friends, and the show ends with the possibility of romance. 165

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Much of the humor of Promises, a show whose jokes long ago began showing their age, involves a kind of winking innuendo in which the audience knows that sex is the topic of discussion but at least one of the characters is naively oblivious to the joke. A typical (and typically Neil Simon) gag in the first act involves the timid Chuck’s neighbors confusing him for a ladies’ man when it is his bosses and not he who have been using the apartment for their rendezvouses. Embedded in the joke is the idea that Chuck isn’t who he seems and that he feels powerless to correct assumptions made about him. Consider, also, the sequence in which Mr. Dobitch pretends Sylvia is sick the first time Chuck lets them use his apartment. Chuck tells us: “She was fine the next day but it must have been a recurring ailment because she began feeling sick regularly every Tuesday night for a month.”19 Promises’ comedy hinges on misunderstandings about the sexual abilities and desires of various characters. And the audience is in on the joke. But if, in the pre-Stonewall days of Promises’ original 1968 production, Chuck’s powerlessness could be read as unsuccessful heterosexuality, hilarious for its lack of success, 40 years later Chuck’s inability to succeed with women is difficult to read as anything but homosexuality. What’s worth noting is that today, assumed heterosexuality—the heterosexual default we are all used to decrying—is slipping away.20 Audiences, at least on Broadway, have become skeptical of heterosexuality. A character is no longer heterosexual until proven otherwise; audiences both gay and straight are on the lookout for signs of the love that dare not speak its name. Even grandmothers, Setoodeh notes, have gaydar. And Jack McFarland is always the elephant in the room, even when Sean Hayes is not onstage.

A Closet of Pachyderms Although it was written a decade before the Straight Jacket affair, one might be surprised to find the second edition of John Clum’s Acting Gay (2000) prefaced by a prescient discussion of Hayes, his sexuality, and his first film, Billy’s Hollywood Screen Kiss (1998). Clum describes Hayes as “the sort of actor one would hire to play a stereotypical gay character. He’s slender, cute, sweet, with a very expressive face and a high tenor voice.”21 Clum finds Hayes and his film charming but is impatient with the coy way Hayes avoids discussing his sexuality: “Hayes plays his own games about being and acting gay. On the Billy’s Hollywood Screen Kiss website, both Hayes and [costar Brad] Rowe claim to be heterosexuals. They may well be,” Clum remarks drily, “but we all know the official Hollywood mythology: There are no gay actors, only gay roles.”22 Clum’s frustration with Hayes’s claims to be straight in 1998 and his later statement—repeated during the original run of Will & Grace—that he wanted “to keep his sexuality a mystery,” was shared by many in the gay media.23 As out and proud as Jack McFarland was, Hayes himself officially came out a month before appearing in Promises. His revelation was the Advocate cover story for April 2010, the same month Promises opened. The bright blue magazine advertised “The interview you’ve waited 12 years to read.” Inside, Hayes says “He’s not happy about sitting down with the magazine” and tells his interviewer that he wasn’t in the closet but trying to keep his options open as an actor: “Faced with the very real prospect of jeopardizing his chance at landing straight roles down the road, he started reciting stock answers.”24 But “I am who I am,” Hayes says. “I was never in, as they say. Never.” As Steven Schelling notes in the gay magazine Xtra!, however, long before 2010 Hayes “drew speculation as to his sexual orientation. (Okay, straights speculated—the gays knew.) But despite urging and prodding from gay advocates and gay media, he refused to speak on the record about his sexuality” until he started doing press for Promises.25 The Advocate interview was clearly a bid to promote the revival to the gay press: the article is upfront about that promotion and includes a synopsis of the show and quotes from Chenoweth and Promises producer Craig Zadan.

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Schelling’s claim that “the gays knew” directs us toward questions central to the politics of the closet: to whom is one out? And what might it mean to be in the closet if “the gays” already know? We would do well to ask what it is that “the gays” believe themselves to know about Hayes or any other actor. Queer people differ from one another in numerous ways (including gender, class, race, preferred sexual practices, religion, and nationality)—a fact often occluded by those who wish to look at us as a political group or market niche, a reality too quickly covered over by unthinking use of the term LGBT. Eve Sedgwick reminds us—as the first axiom of Epistemology of the Closet— that “People are different from each other,” and homosexuality as a blanket term describes a wide variety of practices, desires, and subjectivities.26 Even if “the gays knew,” then, we didn’t know much. As David Halperin puts it, “gay male desire actually comprises a kaleidoscopic range of queer longings – of wishes and sensations and pleasures and emotions – that exceed the bounds of any singular identity and extend beyond the specifics of gay male existence.”27 Coming out, on the other hand, publicly defines a sexuality, linguistically encompassing and making sense of a collection of desires that in fact make little sense. Once declared, this sexuality brings with it a set of meanings that allows others to believe they better understand the person so defined. For Wayne Koestenbaum, “Coming out is a way of telling a coherent story about one’s sexuality, and it has worked political wonders […]. But coming out is only one version of the vocalization underlying sexuality itself.”28 For the sake of LGBTQ politics, activists or fans might wish for celebrities to define their sexualities, but as Sedgwick notes, there are remarkably few of even the most openly gay people who are not deliberately in the closet with someone personally or economically or institutionally important to them. Furthermore, the deadly elasticity of heterosexist presumption means that […] every encounter with a new classful of students, to say nothing of a new boss, social worker, loan officer, landlord, doctor, erects new closets.29 I argued previously that audiences’ heterosexist presumption is fading, but it is not unreasonable to argue that Hayes and other actors—performers in the business of embodying the desires of audiences—might want to keep their own desires private, even secret, to maintain a public image as a desirable sexual object. (In the theater, this tradition dates back to the first celebrity actors. To cite two examples from the seventeenth century, Sakata Tōjū rō, the famous kabuki actor in Genroku Japan, maintained strict secrecy about his love life; Anne Bracegirdle, the Restoration England actress, specifically cultivated a coy virgin persona. Both exploited their own attractiveness to the opposite sex by being mysterious about their private lives.) But even setting aside this argument that secrecy about a performer’s own desires is good for business, we would do well to heed Halperin’s and Sedgwick’s reminders that terms like gay and lesbian are never comprehensive and always remain inadequate descriptions of the capaciousness of desire. Critics and media commentators of the Straight Jacket affair, however, discussed “heterosexuality” and “homosexuality” as essential attributes, expressed either badly or well, rather than describing desire as multiplicitous, complex, or even confusing. Chenoweth, Black, and Setoodeh himself treat homosexuality as an essential component of a person rather than a dynamic, mutable relationship between bodies. Hayes, on the other hand, with his silence and the coy periphrasis he has employed to discuss his sexuality, long resisted committing to such a coherent story about sexual desire.30 “I don’t see sexuality,” he said in 2016, and the reasons he has given for resisting a public categorization of his sexual life were neither meritless nor ill-advised.31 In this way, the Straight Jacket affair calls attention both to the politics of the closet and the politics of outing— that is, publicly condemning someone for hiding his or her homosexuality.

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As the April 2010 Advocate cover notes, Hayes had been famous for 12 years before coming out, but the Advocate had itself already outed him. In 2006, in the antagonistic piece “Sean Hayes: the Interview He Never Gave,” the Advocate reminded readers that Hayes had “played two very well-known gay characters,” had never publicly dated a woman, and had refused for eight years to be interviewed by the magazine.32 The Advocate, of course, claims a largely gay readership; Newsweek’s audience is more mainstream, and it seems likely that Setoodeh’s April 2010 piece outed Hayes to broader audiences. As Richard Ouzounian noted in the Toronto Star, “There might still have been millions of people who hadn’t known before that Hayes or Groff or Cynthia Nixon or Neil Patrick Harris or Portia de Rossi were gay […]. But everyone now sure knows.”33 Further, Setoodeh’s article accuses Hayes of homosexuality—“the big pink elephant in the room”—and censures other critics for lying about it. Newsweek, in other words, used the old trope linking homosexuality to insincerity and deviousness, outing Hayes with language approximate to the hostile outings of homophobic politicians in the 1990s. To complicate matters further, Setoodeh’s opponents employed this same politics of outing in their counterattacks. Chenoweth’s open letter notes that she’d been “told on good authority that Mr. Setoodeh is a gay man himself,”34 and GLAAD’s Barrios and Black refer to “openly gay ­Setoodeh’s own issues with sexuality and femininity.” An overwhelming majority of the articles comprising the Straight Jacket affair go out of their way to speak, as the Atlantic does, about “Setoodeh, who is openly gay,”35 or to lament with Ryan Murphy that “Mr. Setoodeh is himself gay.”36 Thus, these articles, while praising out actors and ostensibly celebrating gay identity, take pains to out Setoodeh—to tell readers that the man calling an actor too gay for his job is also a gay man. In either case, the writers doing the outing use the sexuality of others as a weapon. Both writers frame the sexualities of their targets as coherent and essential; while Setoodeh accuses Hayes of attempting to hide his sexuality, the responding articles obliquely accuse Setoodeh of precisely the same thing. The actor’s sexuality, in this case, was expressly used against him by the critic; the critic’s sexuality was, in turn, used against him by others. If, to paraphrase Foucault, sodomy used to be something one was charged with doing, homosexuality remains something one is accused of being. The Straight Jacket affair makes clear that in contemporary criticism, homosexuality is frequently still something to hide.

Desiring Pink Elephants (on Parade) The musical theater has long been recognized as a complex site for the various operations of gay and lesbian desire. These queer desiring relationships have been noted by D.A. Miller, Stacy Wolf, David Savran, and John Clum, among others.37 A teenaged Wayne Koestenbaum even “worried, listening to records of Darling Lili, Oklahoma!, The Music Man, Company, and No, No, Nanette, that [he] would end up gay: […] I had a clear impression,” he says in The Queen’s Throat, “that gays liked musical comedy.”38 As Miller quips in Place for Us, “In the admittedly monstrous case that he isn’t gay, the aficionado of the Broadway musical must resign himself to being thought so, or work as hard as Frank Rich to establish his improbable but true sexual orientation.”39 Miller argues that “though not all gay men – nor even most – are in love with Broadway, those who aren’t are hardly quit of the stereotype that insists they are.”40 Audiences seem to agree with this overwhelming critical consensus: a year after the Straight Jacket affair, Tony awards host Neil Patrick Harris joked in his opening number that “Broadway has never been broader; it’s not just for gays anymore!” One of the fundamental arguments in Place for Us is that queer desire’s relationship to ­Broadway musicals shifted profoundly after Stonewall. Miller argues that before 1969, musicals could function as a kind of expression or vehicle of identificatory possibility for a widespread, unlocalized homosexual desire for a range of men—that it was a form designed “to indulge men in the thrills of a femininity become their own.”41 After Stonewall, with the ascendance of gay identity, 168

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US American culture “could no longer help sensing that the Broadway musical was ‘a gay thing,’” irremediably associated with homosexuality.42 Miller is no doubt correct, but if the musical initiates queer operations of desire, these operations aren’t uniform. Rather, the audience’s desire for the musical performer works in several modes, relating simultaneously to identification, eroticism, and virtuosity. A spectator can desire a character in multiple ways—to be the character, sing like the character, be loved by the character, be loved like the character. The spectator might also ­desire, on a different level, simply to sing, dance, act, perform. The critic, in the guise of dispassionate observer, catalogues and evaluates, frequently pretending that this description and assessment are unrelated to and uninflected by the complexities of desire. The distance necessary for criticism, however, hasn’t stopped critics from using the language of desire to discuss performances and performers. Indeed, the history of theater criticism is filled with critics speaking openly about the desirability of the performers they watch. In his review of Wicked, for example, Ben Brantley described Elphaba, or rather Idina Menzel, as “the slinky babe with green skin on the broom.”43 To return to my examples of seventeenth-century performers, the most frequently quoted description of Anne Bracegirdle refers explicitly to desire. Colley Cibber writes, “she had no greater claim to beauty than what the most desirable brunette might pretend to. But her youth and lively aspect threw out such a glow of health and cheerfulness, that on the stage few spectators that were not past it could behold her without desire.”44 Although Sakata Tōjū rō was a heartthrob for most of his life, critics became unkind as the actor aged. The 1708 hyōbanki, a kind of yearbook for kabuki critics, is worth quoting; note that the critic isn’t shy about using the language of desire, arguing that: No one really believes that a woman would fall in love with such an old man. […] Now, there are some people who will say that everything in theater is imaginary, so one needn’t be concerned with the question of whether actors are young or old men. If they act skillfully we become absorbed in the play and are moved […], but foolish women like myself – no matter what play we see – feel that what is going on is real and true. We shed tears at the sad places, and our hearts race during frightening scenes. We are aroused by love scenes and our hearts are strangely moved.45 If this critique is harsh to Tōjū rō, its frankness about the effect of desire on the “believability” of a performance is remarkable. The passage expresses what many commentators during the Straight Jacket affair wished to confound: audience perceptions about actors’ attributes do affect their responses. Claims to the contrary are simply dishonest. Hayes may claim not to “see sexuality,” but critics of Promises, Promises certainly did—and not only Ramin Setoodeh. In the New York Times, Brantley argued that Hayes’s “relationship with Ms. Chenoweth’s Fran feels more like that of a younger brother than a would-be lover and protector.”46 In a subsequent piece he described Promises as mostly lacking in “sexual energy,” commenting that throughout the play’s first act “[Hayes] – despite being cast opposite the appealing Kristin Chenoweth – has given the impression of someone still waiting for a playmate to bring out the devil inside him.”47 In the Toronto Star Richard Ouzounian wrote, “Hayes has a winning personality as Baxter, but he’s too sweet. You […] don’t really believe he’s in love with Kubelik. A puppy-dog crush, maybe, but little more.”48 Perhaps even more telling is a remark made by New York Post’s Michael Riedel when the show’s casting was announced—two years before Promises opened. “Hayes,” worried Riedel, “doesn’t seem quite virile enough to play a role originated by Jerry Orbach, one of Broadway’s greatest leading men.”49 The comparison to Orbach contrasts the masculinity of one actor with another, but let’s be clear that virility is a quality not remotely associated with Promises’ Chuck Baxter, the 169

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lonely bachelor who lets his superiors at work use his apartment for sex. Chuck is, to the contrary, a character whom critics consistently describe as a nebbish and who, in his opening monologue, identifies himself as “the kind of person that people don’t notice.”50 The show’s characterization of Chuck is precisely the opposite of masculine: as early as the musical’s first scene, Dobitch asks if he can talk to Chuck “Man to man,” and Chuck replies, “Gee, Mr. Dobitch, I never thought you considered me that way.”51 Chuck knows he lacks masculinity: it is a lack essential to his ­character. Riedel’s comparison to Orbach, then, had nothing to do with whether Hayes was right for the role; it appears to have been simply a coded way of wondering whether Hayes was “too gay” for the part. To put it another way, although Setoodeh bore the brunt of the criticism during the Straight Jacket affair, numerous male critics apparently felt entitled to comment on Hayes’s ­perceived lack of masculinity as long as they pretended they were talking about something else. Black and Barrios, then, might well accuse Setoodeh of having “issues with sexuality and femininity,” but so do most of us, straight and gay alike. In How to Be Gay, David Halperin charts the rise, in mid-century gay literature, of “the straight-acting and -appearing gay man.”52 In the 1950s, this image or type became the romantic ideal for many gay men, and “was built on systematic contrasts with other, earlier, queerer types [like Vito Russo’s sissies]; in fact, it thrived on explicit put-downs of effeminate or gender-deviant men, from whom the hero or the author recoiled in horror.”53 The sissy is ridiculed for his femininity on all sides, including by many gay men. One need only look on gay social media to see such shame at work and note the number of males whose profiles include the phrase “masc 4 masc.” But this eroticization of masculinity among gay men and its attendant ridicule of femininity contradict the out-and-proud story we’ve all agreed to tell straight people about gay culture. For Setoodeh to say, in a mainstream publication like Newsweek, that Hayes’s perceived femininity interrupted the pleasures of the critic’s evening of musical theater—desires normally disavowed by critics—was a kind of uncloseting all its own. The Straight Jacket affair, in many ways, outed the mainstream gay community’s own biases against men who aren’t quite “masc” enough. This returns us to the operations of desire at work between the critic and Broadway performer. Setoodeh’s article details, however clumsily, a failed experience at the theater. The audience is supposed to want to be Chuck Baxter, to be loved by him, to be loved the way he is loved, to sing like him, simply to sing, or some combination of these desires. This desiring operation did not work for Setoodeh, and in the case of Promises, Promises we might do better to blame heterosexist masculinity instead of queer sexuality, the closet itself rather than the person in (or out of ) it. But what the Straight Jacket affair makes most apparent is that the critic is a desiring sexual subject, whose judgments about an actor’s performance are affected by what he or she finds attractive, and that the actor is the object of that erotic investment, a figure of fantasy on which each of us projects our desires.

Notes 1 Ramin Setoodeh. “Straight Jacket.” Newsweek 155.19 (2010): 50–51, at 50. Newsweek 155.19 is dated May 10, 2010, but the article first appeared online on April 26, 2010 as “From Glee to Sean Hayes: Gay Actors Play Straight.” Web. 2 Feb. 2017. . The responses from Jensen and Chenoweth appeared before the article appeared in print. 2 Setoodeh, 50. 3 Ibid., 51. 4 Michael Jensen. “Newsweek’s Ramin Setoodeh Strikes Again: Gay Actors Can’t Play Straight.” New NowNext. 27 Apr. 2010. Web. 25 May 2019. . 5 Quoted in Michael Jensen. “Kristin Chenoweth ‘Offended’ by Ramin Setoodeh’s Homophobic Article in Newsweek.” NewNowNext. 7 May 2010. Web. 25 May 2019. .

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The Pink Elephant in the Room 6 Jarrett Barrios and Dustin Lance Black. “Milk Scribe Joins GLAAD against Newsweek.” Hollywood ­Reporter. 12 May 2010. Web. 25 May 2019. . 7 Andrew Wallenstein. “Why Newsweek Need Not Apologize to GLAAD.” Hollywood Reporter. 12 May 2010. Web. 25 May 2019. . 8 Aaron Sorkin. “Now That You Mention It, Rock Hudson Did Seem Gay.” Huffington Post. 12 May 2010. Web. 25 May 2019. . 9 Patrick Healy. “Red and Memphis Win Top Tony Awards.” New York Times. 14 June 2010, C1. 10 The Straight Jacket affair flared up again in January 2011 because Setoodeh revisited the issue in an article in the Daily Beast. This garnered furious responses from AfterElton and GLAAD, but by ­January 2011, Promises was no longer the focus of the criticism. See Aaron McQuade. “Gay Actors and Ramin Setoodeh: Setting the Record ‘Straight’.” GLAAD.org. 5 Jan. 2011. Web. 25 May 2019. ; Michael Jensen. “Ramin Gets It Wrong Again. Anyone Surprised?” NewNowNext. 3 Jan. 2011. Web. 25 May 2019. . 11 Derek Thompson. “Of Course Gay Actors Can Play Straight.” TheAtlantic.com. 15 May 2010. Web. 25 May 2019. . 12 Setoodeh, 50. 13 Joe Dziemianowicz. “Promises: Say a Little Prayer.” Daily News. 26 Apr. 2010, 24. 14 Frank Scheck. Review of Promises, Promises, Hollywood Reporter. 26 Apr. 2010, 7. 15 See Erik Piepenburg. “He’s Playing God on Broadway.” New York Times. 22 May 2016. AR7. 16 Sean Hayes. “Offstage with Broadway Star Sean Hayes.” Fresh Air, NPR.org. 11 June 2010. 17 Steven Schelling. “Can Gays Play Straight?” Xtra! 17 June 2010, 19. 18 Melissa Rose Bernardo. “Offstage with Sean & Kristin.” Playbill 28.9 (2010): 6–7, at 6. 19 Neil Simon. Promises, Promises. New York: Random House, 1969, 10. 20 See Adrienne Rich. “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence.” Signs 5.4 (1980): 631–660. 21 John M. Clum. Still Acting Gay. New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 2000, vii. 22 Clum, viii. 23 Ibid. 24 Ari Karpel. “Sean Hayes: I Am Who I Am.” Advocate.com. 8 Mar. 2010. Web. 25 May 2019. . In print, the article appeared in April 2010, pp. 32–37. 25 Schelling, 19. 26 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. Epistemology of the Closet. Berkeley: U of California P, 1990. 22. 27 David M. Halperin. How to Be Gay. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2012. 69–70. 28 Wayne Koestenbaum. The Queen’s Throat: Opera, Homosexuality, and the Mystery of Desire. Boston: Da Capo Press, 2001. 174. 29 Sedgwick, 67–68. 30 This changed in late 2016 when Hayes apologized for not coming out sooner and referred to himself as “a proud gay man.” See Chris Gardner. “Sean Hayes Says He’s Sorry for Not Coming Out Sooner.” Hollywood Reporter.com. 24 Oct. 2016. Web. 25 May 2019. . 31 Piepenburg, AR7. 32 Neal Broverman. “Sean Hayes: The Interview He Never Gave.” Advocate.com. 10 Mar. 2006. Web. 25 May 2019. . 33 Richard Ouzounian. “Actors: What’s Gay Got to Do with It?” Toronto Star. 16 May 2010, E3. 34 Chenoweth quoted in Jensen, “Kristin.” 35 Thompson. 36 “Glee Creator Ryan Murphy Pushes for Newsweek Boycott.” EW.com. 11 May 2010. Web. 25 May 2019. . 37 See D. A. Miller. Place for Us: Essay on the Broadway Musical. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1998; Stacy Wolf. “‘Defying Gravity’: Queer Conventions in the Musical Wicked.” Theatre Journal 60.1 (2008): 1–21; David Savran. “‘You’ve got that thing’: Cole Porter, Stephen Sondheim, and the Erotics of the List Song.” ­T heatre Journal 64.4 (2012): 533–548; John M. Clum. Something for the Boys: Musical Theater and Gay Culture. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2001. 38 Koestenbaum, 11.

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Miller, 16. Ibid. Ibid., 90. Ibid., 134. Ben Brantley. “There’s Trouble in Emerald City.” New York Times. 31 Oct. 2003, E1. Quoted in Leigh Hunt, ed. The Dramatic Works of Wycherley, Congreve, Vanbrugh, and Farquhar. London: Edward Moxon, 1840, xxviii. Quoted in Laurence R. Kominz. The Stars Who Created Kabuki: Their Lives, Loves and Legacy. Tokyo: Kodansha International, 1997. 173. Ben Brantley. “Back in the ’60s: Let’s Tryst Again.” New York Times. 26 Apr. 2010, C1. Ben Brantley. “Promises, Promises Katie Finneran and Sean Hayes.” New York Times. 16 May 2010, AR15. Richard Ouzounian. “Promises Made, But Unfulfilled.” Toronto Star. 26 Apr. 2010, E2. Michael Riedel. “Thick Web of Intrigue.” New York Post. 19 Mar. 2008, 44. Simon, 3. Ibid., 7. Halperin, 46. Ibid., 46–47.

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17 “A LITTLE MORE MASCARA” Drag and the Broadway Musical from La Cage aux Folles to Kinky Boots John M. Clum

At the opening of the 1983 musical La Cage aux Folles (book by Harvey Fierstein, music and lyrics by Jerry Herman), a chorus of what seemed to be provocatively dressed women sang that they are “an illusion.” In the original Broadway production, all but two of these “chorines” were men in drag. This opening chorus underscores the questions drag raises. The feminine appearance of these men was an “illusion,” but if audience members assume this is a chorus of men in drag, the two women—biological females indistinguishable from the biological males in drag—were also an illusion. The men were so convincingly dressed and made up as women that the gender of the chorus members was virtually impossible to determine particularly since extra women’s voices were mixed into the singing the audience heard. Who was male and who was female? Gender itself became an illusion. I want to examine the different ways in which drag, homosexuality, and gender have coalesced in three musicals that have drag performers as leading characters: La Cage aux Folles, Hedwig and the Angry Inch (1998; music and lyrics by Stephen Trask, book by John Cameron Mitchell), and Kinky Boots (2013; music and lyrics by Cyndi Lauper, book by Harvey Fierstein).1 The drag queens in these shows are empowered by drag—by performing as women. At the same time, however, on stage they dominate and supplant women. The shows I discuss celebrate femininity, but only when presented through a male body. Intentionally or not, all three shows raise questions about gender definitions and norms through their use of drag. While La Cage and Hedwig, both entertainments and, for their time, political statements, make the connection between female impersonation and homosexuality, Kinky Boots implies that the two are not necessarily related. All three musicals emphasize issues of gender over those of sexual orientation. Moreover, the pleasure and empowerment the transvestite characters in these musicals experience come from performance, not from sex. I begin with two caveats. First, to some extent, drag has always been part of the American musical. I don’t mean in the sense that musicals focused on men in women’s clothing—though that was a staple of Ivy League musicals produced by groups like Harvard’s Hasty Pudding Club and Princeton’s Triangle Club before coeducation shook up those all-male bastions, as well as an element of World War II musicals like This Is the Army and Call Me Mister.2 I am talking instead about the exaggerated, cartoon-like presentation of femininity in what Ethan Mordden calls the “Big Lady musicals” of the 1960s and early 1970s. As Claude J. Summers has written, “For many gay men, the centerpiece of the musical was the larger-than-life female star, her persona an exaggeration of femininity that one associates 173

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with drag queens.”3 For Summers, the exaggerated femininity of the musical diva “plays out the parodic, larger-than-life performance of gender that the musical privileges.”4 There is thus already a connection between the female divas of musicals and drag queens.5 It should not be surprising, then, that in 2015, Lee Roy Reams played the title character in a regional theater production of the Jerry Herman/Michael Stewart musical, Hello, Dolly! Dolly was always something of a drag character, a cartoon version of femininity famously played by aging stars who themselves had become camp.6 Al LaValley notes, “Extreme camp figures already seem like drag queens,” 7 citing as one such figure, Carol Channing, the first Dolly, famous for her big eyes and baritone voice. Channing has acknowledged that she was often imitated by drag queens: “I can’t remember the last time one of my imitators didn’t have a five o’clock shadow.” 8 It was no great leap, then, that composer-lyricist Jerry Herman moved from creating songs for Dolly Levi and Auntie Mame to writing music and lyrics for drag queen Albin in La Cage aux Folles. Second, the Broadway musical has always been a conservative art form. It may occasionally reflect left-leaning politics or cultural shifts, but it is seldom, if ever, revolutionary. Gender-bending in the Broadway musical came decades after it appeared in popular music and, as a rule, appeared in more conservative garb. Although Hedwig and the Angry Inch was a commercial Off-Broadway production, its origins in downtown drag clubs and its venue, the shabby ballroom of a West ­Village hotel that had seen better days, reinforced its unconventional form—part monologue, part rock concert—and content.9 Disney’s The Lion King was the Broadway hit of the season while more adventurous shows like Paul Simon’s The Capeman failed. Jonathan Larson’s Rent, developed at the nonprofit New York Theatre Workshop and a Broadway hit by the time Hedwig and the Angry Inch opened, was tamer musically and in terms of gender and sexual politics. Rent offered among its East Village Bohemian characters a gay Latino drag queen who dies of AIDS-related infections.10 Angel’s character echoes old stereotypes of the gay man as victim, while Hedwig remains outrageously alive until the final curtain. One sign of Broadway’s conservatism is that it took 16 years from its Off-Broadway opening for Hedwig and the Angry Inch to move uptown to Broadway, in a production starring one of America’s most famous openly gay performers, Neil Patrick Harris.11 Both in terms of its rock score and its questioning of gender norms and sexual politics, Hedwig was still cutting edge for Broadway in 2014. The biggest hit of the 2013–2014 Broadway season was Disney’s Aladdin.

Drag, Gayness, and Gender Identity In his 1968 book Drag, Roger Baker wrote that drag, “is about role-playing and questions the meaning of both gender and sexual identity…. It is about men’s fear of women as much as it is about men’s love of women and it is about gay identity.”12 For Baker, drag is inevitably connected with gayness. Esther Newton agrees; in her classic 1978 study of drag performers, Mother Camp, she argues that “Female impersonators are both performing homosexuals and homosexual performers.”13 Performing drag, then, is not always only about performing femininity, but can also be a means of performing homosexuality. Baker wrote Drag before elements of drag became mainstream in British glam rock in the 1970s and 1980s, before gender theorists made drag a serious topic for analysis, and before dramatic changes in gay culture would marginalize the “queen” and valorize “straight looking and acting” gay men. As Newton notes a decade later, “Where ten years ago the streets of Greenwich Village abounded with limp wrists and eye makeup, now you see an interchangeable parade of young men with cropped hair, leather jackets and well-trimmed mustaches.”14 For many post-Stonewall gay men, as drag kings Del Lagrace Volcano and Judith “Jack” Halberstam observe, the drag queen is “both a revered image of queerness and an image associated with shame,”15 174

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The power of drag reaches well beyond its expression and historical importance for gay men and women. A number of scholars and theorists have explicated the complex gender politics implicit in the masculine body under a feminine disguise. As Newton wrote in Mother Camp, drag is “a double inversion that says ‘My outside appearance is feminine but my essence ‘inside’ [the body] is masculine.’ At the same time, it symbolizes the opposite inversion: ‘my appearance ‘outside’ [my body, my gender] is masculine but my essence ‘inside’ [myself ] is feminine.”16 Here, Newton assumes a binary that later gender theorists deconstruct. In her seminal work Gender Trouble, Judith Butler claims that drag “is an example that is meant to establish that ‘reality’ is not as fixed as we generally assume it to be.” For Butler, drag isn’t a matter of violating a gender binary—it questions that binary. Drag is an illusion that demonstrates the contingency of gender categories and norms.

“Sorry, but you do act like his mother” Torch Song Trilogy17 From his early drag performances to his hit stage adaptations of the films La Cage aux Folles and Kinky Boots (both of which center on drag performers), to his performance as Edna Turnblad in the Broadway adaptation of John Waters’ cult classic Hairspray (on stage in 2002 and on television in 2016), the openly gay Fierstein is arguably America’s most famous creator and performer of drag roles. His first commercial hit as writer and performer was the non-musical Torch Song Trilogy, which was first performed Off-Broadway and then ran on Broadway from 1982 to 1985 before being made into a movie in 1988. Chubby, with a gravelly baritone voice that sounds decidedly masculine, Fierstein looks and sounds less effeminate than one expects a drag queen to be; the way he presents begs the question: did Fierstein’s performance as Arnold make Torch Song Trilogy safe Broadway fare? Arnold, the central character in Torch Song Trilogy, is a drag queen who wants a husband and family. Torch Song Trilogy was simultaneously adventurous for Broadway in its presentation of a fiercely proud, sexually active gay man as its moral center, and anachronistic in its linking of gay men to effeminacy and drag. In the course of the three one-act plays that comprise Torch Song Trilogy, Arnold wins over the bisexual Ed from his fiancée Laurel. He also dismisses his mother from his home when she won’t accept his relationship with Ed as equal to hers with her husband and condemns Arnold’s parenting of a 15-year-old gay boy. Arnold wants to be a good mother to his son—not a father, which he assumes will be Ed’s job. While not transgender, Arnold falls into the broad category of gender variance. He sees himself as a man, but as one who wants to play traditional feminine roles both on- and offstage. In doing so, the character can be interpreted as one who courageously defies gender norms. Some critics, however, saw a darker side to Arnold’s aspirations. Alan Sinfield observed, “Arnold doesn’t just share feminine attributes; he doesn’t just, by pushing women out of the action, marginalize them. He seizes the feminine for himself; he is the better woman. It is Arnold [not Laurel] who has a son, and Ed is made to agree that Arnold in drag is the more beautiful woman.”18 This subtext—the man in drag is the better woman—emerges in most of Fierstein’s successful works. Take for example Fierstein’s book for La Cage aux Folles, which began its 1,722 performance run at the Palace Theater in summer 1983, while Torch Song Trilogy was still running a few blocks away and gay activists were beginning to mobilize against the AIDS epidemic.19 La Cage, a 1973 Paris stage farce, was made into a movie in 1978 and was for years the top-grossing foreign film in the United States. The film spawned two sequels, in 1980 and 1985, and was the basis for the hit American film, The Birdcage (1996). In the musical version he wrote with composer-lyricist Jerry Herman, Fierstein sentimentalized the source material, making the story more about marital devotion and a son learning to appreciate his parents. 175

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In the musical, drag performer Albin has lived for two decades in a quasi-marriage with straight-looking and -acting Georges. They have raised a son, the product of a one-night stand Georges had with a “British tart” who has shown no interest in her offspring. Like Arnold with David in Torch Song Trilogy, Albin has proudly served as Jean-Michel’s mother. When Jean-Michel falls in love with Anne, the daughter of a homophobic right-wing politician, he asks Georges to make sure Albin is not present when Anne’s parents visit. Georges responds, “Look at him. The man who has dedicated the last twenty years to making a home for us … consider what it is you’re doing; throwing him out of the home he has made for us.”20 To Georges, Albin is a successful homemaker, playing the traditional female role at home as well as onstage in the club’s nightly drag show. But Jean-Michel can’t have Albin meet Anne’s homophobic parents because unlike Georges, Albin cannot pass as straight. He is an incurably over-the-top cartoon of an effeminate gay man. As D.A. Miller points out, “this ‘gay musical’ denies its homosexualizing tendencies not by rejecting the homosexual, but by recognizing him, as a mythological creature that no one could ever actually be.”21 During the song “Masculinity,” Georges initially attempts to give Albin lessons in acting straight so he can come to the wedding as “Uncle Al.” But straight “Uncle Al” quickly proves to be beyond Albin’s range as a performer. Albin ultimately appears at dinner with Anne’s parents disguised as Jean-Michel’s biological mother—a performance that not only proves right up his alley but also contains a good deal of truth. While masculinity for Albin would be a performance, then, femininity comes naturally. Throughout, La Cage conflates same-sex desire and gender nonconformity. When Albin sings “I Am What I Am” at the end of the first act, it is a celebration of his dual identities as a female impersonator and proud gay man. In La Cage, the effeminate homosexual succeeds not only in performing women on stage but also in reasserting and reaffirming their traditional roles in the home. The musical thus not only reinforces these stereotypical roles but also the outmoded idea that a gay couple serves as a mere parody of husband and wife. In Torch Song Trilogy and La Cage aux Folles, the straight-looking and acting men are most ambivalent about being proud of and fighting for their positions as bisexual or gay. The queens in Fierstein’s early work are the fighters. In a 2015 interview, Fierstein recalls, “You know, there’s a moment in Vito Russo’s movie The Celluloid Closet where they edited it with Arthur Laurents saying, ‘I hate sissies,’ and it cuts to me quickly and I say, ‘I love sissies!’ and I make that point— visibility at any price.”22 At a time when many post-Stonewall gay men were resisting effeminacy, Fierstein was celebrating it, even if in doing so, his Georges-Albin depiction simultaneously reinforced a number of stereotypes. La Cage is a musical about theater, alternating diegetic numbers on stage at the titular nightclub with book numbers that heighten the emotional power of the backstage domestic drama. The nightclub is a carnivalesque place where patrons lose their inhibitions. In the diegetic numbers, drag is a glamorous theatrical illusion, but what is theater without theatricality? Albin as Zaza is far more exciting than Albin out of drag. In the HBO documentary Drag Time, female impersonator Varla Jean Merman asserts the irony of drag: “The very clothes that imprison women liberate men,” or at least men who find joy in wearing women’s clothes. Albin, for one, is miserable in male drag. At the end of the musical, Dindon, Anne’s father, cannot understand the dynamics of Jean-­ Michel’s family, but the young man is finally proud to assert the truth: DINDON:  Your parents? What parents? Oh, one of them could have possibly fathered you, but

you can’t tell me that the other one is your mother. JEAN-MICHEL:  That’s precisely who he is. (90)

Jean-Michel’s choice of pronoun is important: “he” is my mother. According to Fierstein’s book, a man can be a better mother than a woman. One might read this as a manifestation of Fierstein’s 176

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latent misogyny, but the playwright is trying to make the point that gender is irrelevant, at least within the confines of the Broadway musical. As John Epperson says on Drag Time, “If everyone could let go of this male-female thing, everyone would be so much happier.” La Cage may present a rather reactionary picture of a gay couple as a straight-acting man and an effeminate one in a dress, but Fierstein was nevertheless trying to find a way to out the heretofore unacknowledged queerness and gender nonconformity of the Broadway musical.

“Wig in a Box” Hedwig and the Angry Inch By the time La Cage aux Folles opened on Broadway, drag and hints of homosexuality had become staples of popular music genres as divergent as glam, disco, and hard rock. As Richard Smith claims, “Pop music had been embracing ‘genderfuck’ and androgyny since the 1950s. Its history is littered with men who have challenged and changed what it means to be a man, and blurred the boundaries of gender.”23 By the end of the decade, male rock stars like the Rolling Stones, Alice Cooper, Lou Reed, and David Bowie had incorporated drag into their live acts.24 John Cameron Mitchell and Stephen Trask’s Hedwig and the Angry Inch was inspired in part by the gender-­bending rock of David Bowie, Boy George, and their American counterparts, as well as the queer aspects of Andy Warhol’s factory. Maimed by botched gender reassignment surgery that has left him with neither penis nor vagina, and jilted by his American soldier husband who demanded the sex change in the first place, the young, gay, East German Hansel, now identifying as the female ­Hedwig, is stranded in a Kansas trailer park. Caught between genders, Hedwig’s only comfort comes from putting on makeup and the wig she keeps in a box, and from playing rock and roll with a group of army wives. Female drag and rock music allow Hedwig temporary escape into glamour and an embrace of her feminine persona. Given Hedwig’s lack of male or female sexual organs, any gender identity is a choice and a performance. Hedwig and the Angry Inch takes the androgyny of glam and glitter rock quite literally. Hedwig is incomplete—physiologically neither male nor female. But she believes that our incompleteness, our dividedness, is the source of our need for and ability to love. In the song “The O ­ rigin of Love,” she sings that we were once creatures with four arms and legs and two sets of eyes; some all-male, some all-female, some both. Since the jealous gods split the creatures in two, each half has longed to be put back together with its other. Hedwig, too, longs for completion. When her husband deserts her, young Tommy Speck, the “twin born by fission,” becomes her other half.25 Hedwig gives Tommy her love, her knowledge of rock music, and her songwriting talent, but Tommy leaves her when he discovers her lack of genitalia, stealing her songs in the process. After Tommy becomes a star with Hedwig’s songs, Hedwig feels compelled to follow him from town to town, singing in dives near the larger venues where Tommy performs for ­thousands of fans. Meanwhile Yitzhak, Hedwig’s green-card husband and backup singer, desperately wants to put on drag like Hedwig. The casting of the musical emphasizes the painful sense of loss and dividedness Hedwig feels and inflicts on Yitzhak, a man longing to dress and perform as a woman, played by a woman in masculine drag. At the end of the musical, Hedwig, by some mystical means, “absorbs” and thus reunites with Tommy Gnosis. He strips off his costume and appears before the audience as a man; he bestows his wig to Yitzhak, who, in turn, appears before the audience in full female drag (drag for the character, not for the actress playing him). In so reuniting with the object of his desire, Hedwig is made spiritually whole. Yet the vehicle for that wholeness is rock and roll. While the last number, “Midnight Radio,” celebrates music created by women—“Patti/ and Tina/ and Yoko/ Aretha/ and Nona/ and Nico/ and me”26 —Hedwig nevertheless presents as a man. Elizabeth Wollman writes that in this respect, Hedwig reflects the male domination of 177

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rock and roll: “Hedwig is transformed at the end … when the character strips away all artifice (read: femininity) and stands nearly naked (and clearly male) before the audience. Simultaneously, Hedwig’s cross-dressing husband, Yitzhak, is transformed into a role that is expected of women in rock: a backup singer.”27 Here, as in Fierstein’s work, men retain their masculine authority, even in drag. But what is drag for this character? Isn’t Hedwig’s final outfit also drag? Like the Children of the Moon he sings of in “The Origin of Love,” he must combine masculinity and femininity. But drag is still identified with homosexuality, linking desire for men with an identification with women.

“The Sex Is in the Heel” Kinky Boots It is interesting that in the twenty-first century Harvey Fierstein, who was a gay culture hero in the 1980s, and Cyndi Lauper, a staunch advocate of gay and transgender rights with a large gay following, would create a musical in which the drag queen is sexless, and only the straight white male has a love interest. In Fierstein’s previous celebrations of drag, female attire was liberating for homely gay men, an expression of their sexuality and their sense that true glamour is feminine. Yet Fierstein wants us to believe that Lola (aka Simon), the drag queen who is half the bromance at the center of Kinky Boots, is not homosexual. In a 2013 interview with gay journalist Michelangelo Signorile, Fierstein noted, “The really interesting thing to me is that not one critic—not the gay critics, not the straight critics—not one critic picked up on him being straight. Not one.”28 Since Lola’s sexual orientation is never mentioned, one can read her as gay or straight. Billy Porter, who originated the role of Lola, played her as gay: “I don’t think there is one moment of the show where if you ask anybody the question as to whether Lola was gay or straight, that you think my version of Lola was straight.”29 Yet Fierstein calls Lola “sexless.” There is no mention in the musical of Lola having any romantic or sexual life; Ben Brantley observed in a 2015 review of the musical that he “was aware more than ever of the lack of genuine sexual content in Mr. Fierstein’s script.”30 The 2013 musical Kinky Boots is faithful to the 2005 film on which it is based. In both versions, Simon/Lola’s narrative is totally about gender identity, not sexual orientation. Simon, uncomfortable in his masculine persona, is happiest as Lola, whose songs are about the sexiness of inhabiting a female persona. Yet Lola doesn’t have a sex life. While gender identity is distinct from sexual orientation, what is gender identity without sexual desire? Lola wants to be desired by her audience, but does not seem to desire anyone. The design of the boots she wears is of crucial importance because, according to one of her songs, “The Sex Is in the Heel.” But what does sex mean to Simon/Lola? In Kinky Boots, drag replaces love or sexual satisfaction. Like his sexual orientation, Simon/Lola’s racial identity is not an issue in Kinky Boots. Would it make any difference if Lola were played by a white actor? In place of sexual desire, Kinky Boots offers homosociality. Instead of the gay “marriage” in La Cage aux Folles, we have a bromance. Kinky Boots focuses on Simon’s friendship and business partnership with Charlie, the heterosexual heir to a northern England shoe factory that is sliding into bankruptcy. After accidentally meeting Simon/Lola in London, Charlie decides to convert his struggling business into a factory that designs and produces shoes for drag queens, and brings Simon/Lola onboard as his design consultant. Billy Porter is right in saying that Kinky Boots is basically about “two unlikely friends who happen to have Daddy issues.”31 Charlie’s father pushed him into the family business; Simon’s father hated his effeminacy and made him learn to box so he could defend himself. Together, Charlie 178

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and Simon sing that they are not their father’s sons. Yet Charlie has saved his father’s business and Simon proves his mettle as a boxer to earn the respect of the men in the factory. Lola is not only the most glamorous “woman” in Charlie’s factory; as Simon, he is also the most desirable man. In the song “What a Woman Wants,” the character insists that he understands better than the men in the factory what a woman wants: a man with his combination of masculine and feminine attributes. His female auditors enthusiastically agree. Simon lets macho Don win a boxing match, because he has compassion and understanding that Don lacks—traditionally feminine characteristics that make him the better man. In totally separating gender identity from sexuality, Kinky Boots becomes a show about masculinity. At the end, everyone sings “Just be what you wanna be”—but the show implies one is only free to be a heterosexual man or a sexless one in feminine attire. While celebrating gender liberation, Kinky Boots endorses heterosexuality: Charlie ends up with a doting girlfriend; Lola remains sexless and alone. In its own way, Kinky Boots is as old-fashioned as La Cage is. Lauper’s music is as decidedly 1980s as Jerry Herman’s was 1950s Broadway in the 1980s. The show’s sexual politics are even more reactionary. Ben Brantley noted of the audience at a 2015 performance of Kinky Boots ­starring heterosexual television personality Wayne Brady as Lola: “I don’t think I’ve ever encountered a straighter-looking, more quintessentially Middle American group assembled for a  Broadway show, not even in the heydays of Cats and Mamma Mia! And this, by the way, was a crowd primed to love Lola — to roar whenever she talked dirty (which is never too dirty) and to take her side against any hidebound macho man who would deny this glamazon her choice to be fabulous.”32 Lola, in other words, is unthreatening even to midwestern Republicans. In some ways, Kinky Boots is even more conservative than Fierstein’s earlier work. Torch Song Trilogy was overtly (homo)sexual, including a comic presentation of anal sex in the backroom of a gay bar. Like Torch Song Trilogy, La Cage aux Folles advocated gay marriage and parenting long before they gained much public acceptance, although the butch-femme marriage in the musical verged on parody of a heterosexual marriage. The drag queen in Kinky Boots is totally unthreatening. She is part of a safely apolitical musical. The 2014 Broadway revival of Hedwig and the Angry Inch was more a measure of how far ­A merican culture had come since it first appeared on Jane Street. Its openly gay star had just spent almost a decade playing a caricature of a straight womanizer in a hit television comedy series. Now in glitter and drag, he attracted sellout audiences. In 2014, Hedwig still raised crucial questions about gender as destiny and choice. Having lost his phallus, the symbol of masculine power, ­Hedwig chooses to assert, celebrate, and perform her femininity. In the Broadway version of ­Hedwig and the Angry Inch, the title character is not a rock star like his former lover, Tommy Gnosis, who has risen to the top by stealing Hedwig’s creations, but as embodied by Harris and the performers who followed him, he is a Broadway star. In a musical, that is the ultimate empowerment. Hedwig and the Angry Inch is the richest of the musicals I discuss here, offered a challenging picture of gender and identity as Hedwig turns her entire sad life into a fierce performance.

Notes 1 These are not the only recent Broadway shows to feature drag performances. Billy Elliott depicted a boy who loved to dress in drag. Priscilla, Queen of the Desert was about three drag queens touring Australia. The villainess Miss Trunchbull in Matilda was played by a man in drag. And Edna Turnblad in Hairspray, originally performed by Harvey Fierstein, is a drag role. 2 This sort of World War II-era number was recreated in the “Honeybun” number in Rodgers and ­Hammerstein’s South Pacific (1949). 3 Claude J. Summers, ed. Queer Encyclopedia of Music, Dance and Musical Theater. San Francisco: Cleis Press, 2004. 182. 4 Queer Encyclopedia, 182.

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John M. Clum 5 D. A. Miller maintains that heterosexual men can never fully enjoy Golden Age musicals because they force men to identify with the female lead. For him, the musical’s “unpublicizable work is to indulge men in the thrills of a femininity become their own.” Place for Us: [Essay on the Broadway Musical]. ­Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1998. 90. 6 It was rumored that producer David Merrick wanted Liberace to play Dolly on Broadway. Danny La Rue, one of Britain’s most celebrated drag performers, played Dolly Levi in a West End revival in 1983. Among the women who followed Channing in the role on Broadway: Ginger Rogers, Betty Grable, Martha Raye, Phyllis Diller, Pearl Bailey, and Ethel Merman. Touring Dollys included Mary Martin, Dorothy Lamour, Eve Arden, Ann Sothern, and Yvonne de Carlo. The 2017 Broadway revival featured Bette Midler, Donna Murphy, and Bernadette Peters and, on tour, Betty Buckley. 7 Al LaValley. “The Great Escape.” Out in Culture: Gay, Lesbian and Queer Essays on Popular Culture. Durham: Duke UP, 1995. 64. 8 Michael Musto. “Carol Channing on Gay Men, Drag Queens, and Johnny Depp.” . A video of Channing’s performance in a 1977 revival of Hello, Dolly! (with Reams as Cornelius) is available on YouTube. Her manic parading on the passerelle that surrounds the orchestra pit during the title song reminds one of a drag pageant. 9 Elizabeth Wollman’s book, The Theater Will Rock: A History of the Rock Musical from Hair to Hedwig. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2006, discusses Hedwig’s place in the history of the rock musical. 10 I wrote in 2000 of the romance in Rent between Collins and Angel, “The formula isn’t much different from that of Kiss of the Spider Woman, in which a nelly Latino queen got to have sex with a macho man, or A Chorus Line in which Paul, the abject gay, was a Latino drag queen … Angel doesn’t carry the baggage of guilt and shame Paul carries and the macho man [he has sex with] is gay, but this is a small step forward.” Something for the Boys: Musical Theater and Gay Culture. New York: St. Martins, 2000. 272. 11 There are three available versions of Hedwig and the Angry Inch in print: the 1998 version (New York: Overlook, 2000) and the 2014 Broadway version (New York: Overlook Duckworth, 2014). The 2001 film adaptation, released by New Line Cinema, is available on DVD. 12 Roger Baker, with contributions by Peter Burton and Richard Smith. Drag: A History of Female Impersonation in the Performing Arts. New York: New York UP, 1994. 18. 13 Esther Newton. Mother Camp: Female Impersonators in America. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1979. 20. 14 Newton, Mother Camp, xiii. 15 Del Lagrace Volcano and Judith “Jack” Halberstam. The Drag King Book. London: Serpent’s Tail, 1999. 35. In July, 2015, the organizers of Free Pride, a more radical alternative to Glasgow, Scotland’s Gay Pride celebrations, set off a storm of controversy by banning drag queens from performing at their event. The organizers stated, “It was felt that it would make some of those who were transgender or questioning their gender uncomfortable.” According to the organizers, drag queens reflected the “transmisogynistic” attitudes of many gay people. 16 Mother Camp, 103. 17 Harvey Fierstein. Torch Song Trilogy. New York: Gay Presses of New York, 1980. 114. Further references are to this edition. 18 Alan Sinfield. Gay and After. London: Serpent’s Tail, 1988. 110. 19 La Cage aux Folles has been revived twice on Broadway. A large-scale production failed in 2004. However, a tacky small-scale import from London opened in 2010 and ran a year. 20 La Cage aux Folles. New York: Samuel French, 1984. 46. 21 Miller, Place for Us, 131. Miller argues that “gay musicals” aren’t as gay as their closeted predecessors. 22 “Q&A: Harvey Fierstein Opens Up on the Success of Kinky Boots, His ‘Legendary Disaster’ & Insulting Double Standards.” Pridesource 2252. 6 Jan. 2015. Web. . 23 Richard Smith, “Frock Tactics.” in Baker et al., Drag, 240. 24 Todd Haynes’ 1998 film Velvet Goldmine presents a fictional account of the complex sexuality of glam rock performers. ­ uckworth, 25 John Cameron Mitchell and Stephen Trask. Hedwig and the Angry Inch. New York: Overlook D 2014. 70. 26 Hedwig and the Angry Inch, 81. 27 Wollman, The Theater Will Rock, 208. 28 Michelangelo Signorile. “Harvey Fierstein on Kinky Boots, Working with Cyndi Lauper and His Show’s Big Surprise.” Huffington Post. 17 May 2013. Web. . Fierstein’s next play, Casa Valentina (2014), depicts a group of

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29 30

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heterosexual transsexuals in 1962 who despise the connection made between transsexuals and homosexuals. One is intent on making sure that there are no homosexuals in the association he is organizing for transsexuals. “Billy Porter’s ‘Kinky Boots’ Character is Fierce, Sexy … and Gay.” Web. . Ben Brantley. “Kinky Boots with Wayne Brady as a Cross Dresser You Could Take Home to Mother.” New York Times. 27 Dec. 2015. Web. . At the end of May, 2017, Kinky Boots had run on Broadway for 1,730 performances, longer than the original production of La Cage aux Folles, and was still running. Ibid. Ibid.

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PART 5

Reading the Musical through Race and Ethnicity

Cultural identities, the blending or clashing of races or ethnicities, and other issues involving personal or group identity have long been at the center of the musical’s preoccupations. Even opera, which one might think of as being stuffy, romantic, “timeless,” and otherwise unconcerned with real-world problems, often visits topics of racial or ethnic tension to drive its plots. Verdi’s Otello (1887), for example, which is based on Shakespeare’s play Othello, is about a beloved military hero who nevertheless feels insecure and shunned by society because he is a dark-skinned immigrant in a white community. Similarly, lyricist Oscar Hammerstein infused South Pacific with calls for racial equality or, at least, heightened awareness of racism; it was 1949 and he didn’t do it perfectly, or in a “woke” modern way, but he did it loudly and with conviction. During and following the 1960s Civil Rights Movement, musicals became more frequently concerned with racial and ethnic tensions. Hair (1968) touches on a host of hot social issues of its day, including race. Ragtime (1998) tells of three different racial, class, or ethnic groups— wealthy, fully assimilated white professionals, working-class black servants and musicians, and recent ­Eastern European Jewish immigrants—meeting, clashing, and mixing in 1920s America. Avenue Q (2003) explores the topics of racism and ethnic diversity via humans and puppets meant to represent different races and species. Issues of race also pervade the question of casting a Broadway musical. Whether or not the plot involves topics of race or ethnicity, a show’s creators must decide how to cast the show: with “­realism,” if the show is set in a particular place and time? With “color-blind” casting, disregarding historical incongruities to cast the best voices and actors? With intentional “miscasting,” choosing to use performers of color in traditionally white roles to make a statement about biases in casting and provide work for minorities? Must a musical always cast an actor who exactly matches the character’s race or ethnicity—if that’s even possible? We may recall the intense controversy surrounding the casting of a white actor as the half-white, half-Asian Engineer in Miss Saigon (1991). Shows can change their stance on casting if they run long enough, as well; this reflects social changes and shifting views on race and ethnicity. Les Misérables (1987), for example, was originally cast with almost entirely white performers, presumably because the story took place in France in the early 1800s and all the characters would have been white in real life. But the show loosened this rule after running for many years. Jess saw a production well into the show’s 16-year ­ adame run that looked like this: Monsieur Thénardier, played by a white man, is married to M Thénardier, played by a black woman. Their daughter, Eponine, was played as a child by a white,

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blonde-haired, blue-eyed little girl. Eponine ages ten years before intermission, and in this production the role was taken over by an Asian-American adult actor. The tour group of senior citizens bussed in from Brooklyn, sitting around Jess in the audience, was confused, but when she explained the story and casting choices, they rolled with it just fine. The anecdote itself, however, raises questions that are examined in the following essays: is it acceptable—or even encouraged and socially helpful—to cast without regard to race, or even to cast against culturally dominant expectations? How many directors are willing to ignore historical inaccuracy or occasional audience confusion, versus risking backlash for not casting a diversity of actors? Will Hamilton’s intentionally diverse recasting of the founding generation cause ripple effects in other early twenty-first-century productions, or cause a conservative backlash, or both depending on the production and its audience base? The authors in this section all take up questions of race and ethnicity, both in musicals and in casting. Todd Decker traces the history of casting people of color (especially in shows not specifically calling for such actors) from the 1970s to the present. Sissi Liu uses the case study of Hello, Dolly! to discuss the industry and societal impact of casting with an all-black or all-Asian group. Stefanie A. Jones discusses Avenue Q, a show that purportedly takes racism head-on; they argue that despite its hip and confrontational stance, the musical mines stereotypes for comedy rather than calling for reform. Elizabeth Craft analyzes the racial politics at work in all three of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Broadway musicals to date, noting how despite Hamilton’s massive popularity and bold casting, Bring It On (2012) is the more radical and hopeful show in terms of race relations. The final essay of this section moves from issues of race and color to issues of ethnicity and religion: Raymond Knapp and Zelda Knapp look at Falsettos (1992; the authors focus on the 2016 revival) as a recent depiction of Jewish identity, discussing how it reckons with the powerful influence of that most Jewish of Broadway hits, Fiddler on the Roof (1964).

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18 THE MULTIRACIAL MUSICAL METROPOLIS Casting and Race after A Chorus Line Todd Decker The Broadway audience is overwhelmingly and enduringly white, educated, and wealthy. Since the 1980s, the Broadway League—an organization of theater owners and producers—has ­provided statistics to support this description of people who attend Broadway shows.1 The League’s first “demographics of the audience” report, released in 1980, counted 83% of the audience as white. In annual reports issued from the 1998–1999 season to the 2015–2016 season, the audience has averaged 78.4% Caucasian, with little variation. The annual reports note that, on average, 75% of theatergoers over age 25 have a college degree, with just over half of those (37% of the audience) holding graduate degrees. Since the late 1990s, annual income has shifted in these surveys: in 2002–2003, 33.3% of the audience earned over $150,000; by 2015–2016, that group had risen to 40.8%. In the 2008–2009 and 2015–2016 reports, over 5% of respondents reported making over $750,000 annually. The majority white, educated, upper-income makeup of the Broadway audience—a privileged population by three separate measures—provides an important context for historic developments in the post-1970 musical. Succinctly put, in the last 40 odd years, and especially since the mid1990s, racially and ethnically diverse casts have increasingly appeared on Broadway stages in shows which entirely or almost entirely avoid the exploration or expression of racial identity or difference in their the textual and performed content. These reciprocal and persistent new ­practices in the casting and content of Broadway musicals have required audiences to be nimble about how they interpret the meaning of performers’ evident racial or ethnic identities. Central to this trend is a new kind of musical, defined here under the term multiracial and including productions with visibly diverse casts performing shows that bear in their texts no or only minimal traces of racially marked content—whether in spoken or sung words, or in musical or dance style. The trend toward multiracial casts emerged in the mid-1970s with the seminal hit A Chorus Line, and came to dominate Broadway productions from the mid-1990s to the present. Visible diversity onstage with little or no reference to racial or ethnic difference in the content of a show allows the Broadway audience to, if they wish, have their cake and eat it too. The Broadway stage may look diverse; yet the commercial American musical as a genre—with some significant ­exceptions—still consistently avoids engaging with the questions and realities of racial and ethnic difference and experience in the United States. The Broadway musical remains white—­ understood here as a tacit, privileged lack of concern with racial identity or difference—even as performers of color appear in a greater proportion of each season’s shows than in the past.

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The multiracial musical takes three distinct forms: 1 Book shows, mostly set in contemporary New York City. So-called colorblind casts—rare in the commercial musical theater—are included here under the term cross-racial casting. 2 Retrospective revues with multiracial casts that celebrate past musical and dance styles. 3 The near-ubiquitous practice (documentable since 1996) of including one to three persons of color (usually black) in otherwise all- or almost all-white ensembles, in musicals where most or all of the leading and featured performers are white. These three sorts of productions, as defined by both casting and content, express the larger multiracial conceit of the Broadway musical over the last four decades. None of these three strategies yields musical theater that addresses urgent racial or ethnic issues remaining in what—for a few years during this period—some were hopefully if misguidedly calling the post-racial era. Nor do these approaches celebrate racial or ethnic diversity in a spirit of multiculturalism—another catchphrase of the era’s cultural conversations. Social critique and the celebration of racial otherness, always constructed as non-whiteness, remain the purview of sporadically appearing black-, Asian-, or Latinx-cast shows like The Color Purple (2005; revived 2015), Allegiance (2015), and On Your Feet! (2015), or shows demanding diverse casts that perform racial or ethnic types and tell pointed stories of racial and ethnic history such as Show Boat (1927, revived 1994), Big River (1985, revived 2003), Ragtime (1998, revived 2009), Hairspray (2002), Avenue Q (2003), Memphis (2009), and The Book of Mormon (2011). In contrast with shows that thematicize the performance of racial or ethnic identities, the multicultural musical in all guises typically combines visual diversity—literally on the faces of the cast—with dramatic and musical homogeneity, most often some brand of Broadway whiteness (a stylistic mixture which, like most popular culture realms, presents a whiteness heavily invested in black music and dance). And while multiracial musicals may provide jobs for performers of color, these shows do not engage with past histories or current controversies around race and ethnicity, nor do they highlight the distinct experiences of nonwhites in song and dance. Multiracial shows can present an empty diversity—seen but not sung or danced—and mark the contemporary Broadway musical as a commercial and creative sphere where whiteness prevails even in the presence and bold performances of individuals who, in the Broadway context, resolutely remain in a position of racial otherness. The range of effects and thoughts stimulated by multiracial shows is felt inside each individual theatergoer and, like any such personal response to cultural products, inevitably responds to distinct intersectional identities. Still, given Broadway’s overwhelmingly white audience, the multiracial musical is best understood as offering an experience with racial and ethnic otherness that works to assure white, wealthy, educated elites that the commercial theater has, in some measure, embraced diversity and is open to persons of talent from any racial or ethnic background. This comforting subtext serves as a default interpretive position that preserves the musical stage as a nonconfrontational political and social arena of pure enjoyment, a utopian commercial space with a high price of admission, where racial and ethnic histories have been overcome, or can be set aside for the span of a story told in song and dance.

Book Musicals (Mostly Set in New York City) Seventeen dancers, facing forward and standing in a row, make up the quintessential stage picture of the 1975 musical A Chorus Line. The audience, together with the director running the ­Broadway chorus audition that forms the narrative frame, has ample time to look at and compare individual faces and bodies. Two of the seventeen, in the original production and most professional stagings, are visibly not white: Connie (fourth from house left) is Asian; Richie (seventh 186

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from house right) is black. Two other dancers, Paul and Diana (side by side at the house right end), are revealed in dialogue to be Puerto Rican. A Chorus Line gets close to but narrowly avoids being what Ronald Dennis, the original Richie, privately titled the show during rehearsals: “A Group of White Dancers.”2 Only the smallest of gestures in the libretto and score for A Chorus Line acknowledges the racial and ethnic otherness of Connie, Richie, Paul, and Diana. Diana introduces herself this way: “My name is Diana Morales. And I didn’t change it ’cause I figured ethnic was in.” When asked, “What made you start dancing?” Diana replies, “Who knows? I have rhythm—I’m Puerto Rican.” The moment reads as nerves, in no way expressing Diana’s actual understanding of why she became a dancer. Later in her solo “Nothing,” Diana quips, “we don’t have bobsleds in San Juan” and briefly prays to “Santa Maria,” but the song’s melody and arrangement carry no Latin musical markers. While the actor cast as Diana needs to be convincingly “Puerto Rican”—a designation that can be stretched to include a range of stereotypical looks—nothing about Diana’s part pegs her as Latina. Connie, Richie, and Paul’s nonwhite status shows up in the show’s text even less than Diana’s. Connie’s racial heritage can be removed by eliminating her statement, “I was born in Chinatown” in the “Year of the Chicken”; alternate lines “IF THE GIRL PLAYING CONNIE IS NOT ORIENTAL” (emphasis original) are provided in an appendix to the rental script.3 (Connie’s diminutive stature—“four foot ten” she sings repeatedly—may be read as an Asian stereotype or a challenge any below-average-height aspiring chorus performer might face.) Richie wryly tacks on a visually obvious bit of information when introducing himself, saying “And I’m black.” ­Otherwise his character goes unexplored, except for a brief feature in the ensemble number “Hello Twelve, Hello Thirteen, Hello Love.” Casting a nonblack performer in the role of Richie is as simple as casting a non-Asian dancer as Connie, and various replacements for Richie’s “And I’m black”—including “And I’m gay.”—circulate in Chorus Line’s production history. Paul’s ethnic background never comes up; his monologue instead explores the otherness of being gay. With virtually no exploration of Diana, Connie, Richie, or Paul’s experiences of racial and ethnic otherness, A Chorus Line is, in essence and sometimes in practice, about “A Group of White Dancers” for whom questions of race and background can be ignored. In analogous fashion, the multiracial New York City book show after A Chorus Line has featured a group of individuals marked as specific urban types hailing from distinct neighborhoods and defined by career goals or personal aspirations rather than racial or ethnic backgrounds. In A Chorus Line, the “neighborhood” is a Broadway stage—the symbolic heart of the genre and, by extension, the city. Other shows focus on less iconic New York locations, presenting characters whose visibly evident racial and ethnic differences are submerged within a shared social niche. The artists and activists in Rent (1996) live in a yet-to-be-gentrified Alphabet City. The Life (1997) depicts pimps and prostitutes in Times Square at its sex-business peak, before the redevelopment in progress when the show was running. The show’s script defines the cast as “multi-racial and multi-ethnic,” but pegs only one character—Mary, “a young, pretty blonde from Duluth”—by race or ethnicity.4 If/Then (2014) celebrates a group of successful adults in gentrifying, neoliberal Manhattan, where lives and time itself are fundamentally shaped by individual choices (even if the conceit of fate—both romantic and tragic—is invoked). In the Heights (2008) presents diversity among Latinos in Washington Heights. A single African-American character, Benny, lends an edge of racial tension to one of the show’s romantic couples.5 In all these shows, racially diverse groups of friends and acquaintances share their professional and personal lives. Interracial couples are common and unremarked upon in Rent and If/Then. Black pimps manage white prostitutes without comment in The Life. In the Heights uses an interracial couple to highlight generational resistance to love across color lines—the Latino father objects to his daughter’s black boyfriend; in the song “Enough,” the Latina mother calls an end to such prejudices. Here, the tolerant multiracial city is synonymous with a younger generation who sees 187

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through visible differences. Beyond racial and ethnic differences, Rent and If/Then also embrace gay and lesbian relationships without comment, while In the Heights refers to them humorously. If/Then even features a bisexual character paired off in different narrative strands with a man and a woman, thereby imagining the city to be without limits on individual choice in the realm of sexuality. However, as in A Chorus Line, small touches in the texts of these shows nod toward nonwhite racial or ethnic identities. More importantly, consistent replacement casting along near identical phenotypical lines indicates the visible diversity of skin tones in each multiracial book show to be intentional and, on some level, constitutive of unspoken meaning. For example, Rent. Mimi is Latina to about the extent of Diana in A Chorus Line. Mimi sings of growing up “where the Spanish babies cry” and her mother’s message on an answering machine is in Spanish. An apartment shared by two white, straight men—Roger and Mark, Rent’s de facto leads—defines the physical space of the show. Nonwhite characters visit this homosocial zone of creative white men to various ends: Mimi enters as a suitable partner for Roger; the nonwhite Angel, in drag for part of the show, brings exotic color linked to a more flamboyant performance of gayness than that of the nonwhite and gay Collins. (Replacement casts have shown an expansive view of Mimi’s Latinx identity, with black performers such as Renée Elise Goldsberry in the role. Angel, mostly played by Latinx actors, has been taken on by Asian-identified performers such as Jose Llana and Telly Leung.) Rent’s double insistence on African-American affluence is evident in the cast’s two gainfully, prosaically employed supporting characters: the landlord Benjamin Coffin III and the lawyer Joanne (whose elite parents are especially developed). The Life, If/Then, and In the Heights offer a similar mix of small textual touches and unspoken assumptions embodied in consistent casting along racial and ethnic lines. Avenue Q offers a compelling contrast to the five New York book shows grouped earlier. Avenue Q concerns a diverse group of characters in a distinctive neighborhood—specifically a handful of college-educated, underemployed New Yorkers looking to find their purpose in life and in Brooklyn. Riffing on Sesame Street, the children’s television show that has offered an engaged and positive vision of the multiracial city since 1969, Avenue Q takes up issues of race and sexuality in direct, comic fashion. Combining human characters with puppets called monsters, Avenue Q defuses controversial issues in a spirit of crude “did they say that?” humor that declares implicit agreement on racial questions as part of the freedom to shock. The characters acknowledge racial categories and stereotypes in the song “Everyone’s a Little Bit Racist,” but declare this “doesn’t mean they go around committing hate crimes.” In the unity of the street they share “For Now,” as the closing song goes, race and ethnicity can be joked about freely and safely in a show that dares to offend but only in the solidly liberal territory of a Broadway theater. In short, Avenue Q engages with the diverse identities of its characters directly and thoughtfully in ways multiracial book shows on the model of A Chorus Line and Rent do not. The consistent casting practices of multiracial book shows offer insight into the similarly multiracial cast of The Lion King (1997). The casting of black and white performers in specific roles playing animals—which are, of course, not racially marked—has been utterly consistent. The online resource Playbill Vault allows for quick assessment of the headshot of almost every performer to appear in the show’s 20-year Broadway run. These standardized professional images inevitably locate individuals within specific types. Looking at this resource like a casting director, racial casting patterns quickly become evident. Black performers play all the “good” lions (Mufasa, Simba, Nala) and fill the entire singing and dancing chorus. White leading and featured roles ­follow defined physical types as to age and physical size: older with an air of distinction (Scar); older, balding (Pumbaa); younger, tilting toward Mediterranean (Timon); comic supporting actor ­lacking “leading man” good looks (Zazu, Ed). Clearly, despite The Lion King’s elaborate makeup 188

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and mask-work, the races of performers make meaning for the show’s creators and audiences. Director Julie Taymor has insisted across the show’s global, multilingual run that black South African performers play the narrator, Rafiki, and be a substantial presence in the chorus to add an authentic connection to the score’s South African musical elements, credited to composer ­Lebohang “Lebo M.” Morake. Taymor has called the cast’s South African contingent the production’s “spiritual foundation.”6 Attention to racial casting patterns opens The Lion King to various readings. For example, Scar’s outsider status is reinforced by his being the only “white” lion. The connection between Simba and his father Mufasa is strengthened by both being embodied by black performers. (In the original animated film [1994], Simba is voiced by Matthew Broderick and Mufasa by James Earl Jones, an interracial pairing not replicated in the theater.) And the seriousness of Simba’s battle with Scar unfolds as blackness redeeming the world from a white usurper with help from silly but good-hearted white sidekicks. For a liberal New York audience, The Lion King tells a subliminal tale of good whites (who are funny to boot) helping a black prince reclaim his inheritance from a white villain.7 Multiracial book shows that ignore questions of race and ethnic identity work at one remove from productions where performers of color are cast in roles normally given to whites, a practice best understood under the term cross-racial casting. (The reverse practice—white performers playing characters of color, sometimes called whitewashing—is increasingly rare on Broadway, if still present in Hollywood, and typically hotly criticized.) Examples of cross-racial casting, a rare practice in the commercial musical, include revivals of Carousel (1994) and 110 in the Shade (2007), both starring Audra McDonald, and the Gershwin musical Nice Work if You Can Get It (2012), which cast black actor Stanley Wayne Mathis as a Long Island police chief in the 1920s. Long-­ running shows frequently refresh their casts by bringing in performers of color in leading roles with the potential to attract new or repeat audiences: Toni Braxton was the only black Belle in the 13-year run of Disney’s Beauty and the Beast—the character was given a new song, “A Change in Me,” when Braxton joined the cast—and the long-running revival of Chicago (1996) has rotated performers of color into every major role. It took until 2014 for the title role in The Phantom of the Opera to be played by a black man (Norm Lewis, who also played Javert in the 2006 Les Misérables revival), although Robert Guillaume took over the role in LA as early as 1990. In these cases, the race of the performer means nothing in the world of the show but means much in the theater, where audiences can register a positive racial breakthrough while not being required to deal with any other, perhaps more troubling, racial issues. Perhaps the ultimate exercise in cross-racial casting is Hamilton (2015), in which a cast of nonwhite performers embody the nation’s white founding generation. Here, again, the race of the performers means nothing in the world of the show, but everything in the theater and in the show’s hip-hop infused score and choreography. Enthusiastic embrace of Hamilton by young audiences and liberal and conservative elites—and resistance to the show by historians and other scholars—suggests the ambiguity of cross-racial casting in the high-stakes historical and political context of Hamilton’s setting and story. More broadly, Hamilton points toward the difficulty of pinning down the meaning of multiracial casting as defined here. Whether multiracial and cross-racial casting in book shows is taken to be positive or negative depends on the content and context of a production and the individual position of each theatergoer and performer. Given the overwhelmingly white Broadway audience, it is safe to say that the default interpretive position offered by the book shows described earlier is celebration of increased opportunity and visibility for performers of color—a diversity goal achieved—coupled with a (perhaps) welcome release from dealing with the more controversial aspects of race and ethnicity in the United States, issues that shows like Show Boat, Ragtime, The Book of Mormon, Avenue Q, The Color Purple, and Allegiance make central to the stories they tell. 189

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The Abstract Multiracial Space of the Retrospective Revue The late 1970s saw the emergence of a new sort of revue that brought the intimate address of cabaret to the Broadway stage, where the audience and economic stakes were larger. Most of these revues were retrospective celebrations of past Broadway creators, primarily songwriters. The initiating pair of retrospective revues starkly contrasted white and black: Side by Side by Sondheim (1977) transferred from London’s West End with its original cast of four white performers; Ain’t Misbehavin’ (1978), featuring five black performers doing songs by or associated with Thomas “Fats” Waller, moved from Off Broadway for a four-year Broadway run, winning the Tony Award for Best Musical along the way. The small-cast, minimally staged, commercially successful retrospective revue was a regular presence in the 1980s and 1990s, when Times Square was in economic transition, moving toward redefinition as a family oriented arena. In Broadway’s twenty-first century economic boom, the retrospective revue has largely passed out of fashion, replaced by the jukebox musical. Most retrospective revues from the 1980s and 1990s employed multiracial casts (see Table 18.1). If Ain’t Misbehavin’ built its evocation of 1930s and 1940s Harlem on an all-black cast, Sophisticated Table 18.1  Retrospective Revues, 1977–2010

Year

Title

Performances

Featured Creator or Musical Style

Racial Makeup of Cast

1977 1978 1978 1980 1981 1981 1982 1985 1986

Side by Side by Sondheim Ain’t Misbehavin’ Eubie! Perfectly Frank Shakespeare’s Cabaret Sophisticated Ladies Blues in the Night Jerry’s Girls Jerome Kern Goes to Hollywood

390 1,604 439 17 54 767 53 139 13

Stephen Sondheim Thomas “Fats” Waller Eubie Blake Frank Loesser William Shakespeare Duke Ellington Blues Jerry Herman Jerome Kern

All-white All-black All-black All-white Multiracial Multiracial Multiracial Multiracial Multiracial

1985 1992 1993

Leader of the Pack Five Guys Named Moe A Grand Night for Singing

120 445 52

Multiracial All-black All-white

1995

Smokey Joe’s Café: The Songs of Lieber and Stoller Swinging on a Star Street Corner Symphony

2,036

Ellie Greenwich Louis Jordan Rodgers and Hammerstein Lieber and Stoller

Multiracial Multiracial

99+ 461 276 17

2003

Putting It Together Swing! It Aint’ Nothin’ But the Blues The Gershwins’ Fascinating Rhythm The Look of Love

Johnny Burke 1960s and 1970s pop and soul Stephen Sondheim retro swing Blues George and Ira Gershwin

Multiracial

2010

Sondheim on Sondheim

76

Burt Bacharach and Hal David Stephen Sondheim

1995 1997 1999 1999 1999 1999

97 80

49

+ Strictly limited run.

190

Multiracial

All-white Multiracial Multiracial Multiracial

Multiracial

The Multiracial Musical Metropolis

Ladies (1981) celebrated the same milieu through the music of Duke Ellington but with a slightly multiracial troupe. The principal stars of Sophisticated Ladies, dancers Judith Jamison and Gregory Hines, were African-American, but white performers like Terry Klausner (with featured billing) were also part of the show. Near the close of act two of Ain’t Misbehavin’, the revelry stops and the all-black cast acknowledges the impact of racism with a haunting version of the song “Black and Blue.” Sophisticated Ladies never takes a similar pause, setting a pattern followed by multiracial revues to follow. The practice of mixing black and white performers celebrating famous songwriters continued in the short-lived London transfer Jerome Kern Goes to Hollywood (1986) and the all-female Jerry’s Girls (1985), a compilation of songs by Jerry Herman. In the former, the legendary Elizabeth Welch, whose Broadway career stretched back to the early 1920s, appeared with three other performers: two white, one black. Welch was not assigned songs composed for black characters, and beloved tunes the audience might anticipate as perfect for her—like Julie’s numbers in Show Boat—were performed by her castmates. In Jerry’s Girls, Leslie Uggams shared the spotlight with Chita Rivera and Dorothy Loudon.8 Uggams sang numbers for characters she would have been unlikely to play in a full-scale production: “If He Walked into My Life” from Mame and “I Am What I Am” from La Cage aux Folles. While her rendition of the latter could be interpreted as transferring gay pride into an expression of black pride, the entire conceit of the multiracial retrospective revue worked to soft-pedal such associations, leaving them for audience members to take or leave as they wished. The multiracial revue as a quasi-theatrical space where any performer can sing any song comes to the fore in such moments, which invite theatergoers to assess each production choice, within their knowledge and experience, as evidence for racial “progress,” a wrong-headed artistic decision, or just another song and dance that does or does not engage with the nation’s racial history. Retrospective multiracial revues also celebrated popular music styles and eras not typically present on Broadway, seeking specific, nostalgia-oriented audiences. Leader of the Pack (1985), featuring the 1960s pop songs of Ellie Greenwich (with Greenwich herself in the cast), suggested black and white youths had always sung together. Street Corner Symphony (1997) combined pop and soul hits of the 1960s and 1970s in similar fashion. Smokey Joe’s Café (1995) featured Lieber and Stoller songs from the late 1950s and early 1960s, when black and white tastes overlapped and pop music fans might not have registered whether a given singer was white or black. On the stage, of course, such distinctions are always waiting to be made. The 1999 revue Swing! exploited that decade’s emergence of so-called neo-swing: an updated approach to popular music of the 1930s and early 1940s. Swing!’s Playbill cover featured competitive ballroom dance champions Ryan Francois and Jenny Thomas, an interracial couple, in a pose that signaled the athletic, high-energy nature of the show. Most of the danced and sung duets in Swing! were similarly interracial, with a preponderance of black man and white woman pairings. In its celebration of the present, Swing! almost entirely submerges the fraught racial history of its titular music and dancing style, which emerged among black bands and dancers and moved, like so many pop-culture trends, into the white mainstream. Only in the penultimate number, “Stompin’ at the Savoy,” is the racial context for swing mentioned, and only in a celebratory mode. White singer Ann Hampton Callaway sang her own new lyrics, “To think that syncopation / Outsmarted segregation. / Blacks and whites were rompin’ and stompin’ all night, / At the Savoy.” Callaway concluded, “And the beautiful thing that’s happenin’ today / Is that the spirit of Savoy is here to stay.” Callaway and Swing! offered a sanguine view of American history: interracial couples, seen in number after number, including a salute to World War II-era USO shows, were uncommon at the Savoy, or during the swing era. The staging, sets, and costumes for Swing! avoided precise period re-creation: the show was firmly in the now, a realm constructed around the elision of racial questions and a tacit celebration of interracial collaboration. 191

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The multiracial cabaret-style revue faded from Broadway in the twenty-first century. ­ elebrations of older Broadway musicals found a home in the Encores! series, which each season C brings shows unlikely to receive commercial revivals back in semi-staged concert versions. The explosion of so-called jukebox musicals tapping post-rock styles uses the semblance of a story to hold the audience, generating hits like Mamma Mia! (2001), Jersey Boys (2005), and Beautiful: The Carole King Musical (2014)—each of which employs racially diverse casts. The multiracial revues of the 1980s and 1990s briefly opened a space for song and dance that centered more on performers than characters. And while these productions surely gave performers of color welcome opportunities to appear on a Broadway stage, these shows rarely highlighted the historical, political, or social contexts for the popular music they celebrated and offered another variety of empty diversity that reinforced the default whiteness of New York’s commercial musical theater.

Racial Casting Practices in Ensembles: A Statistical Perspective At the climax of A Chorus Line, the director casts eight of the seventeen dancers in the chorus of his upcoming Broadway musical: six whites, one Latina, and one black man. These choices anticipate an ensemble casting practice that can be documented on Broadway since the mid-1990s: the inclusion of one or two performers of color in an otherwise white ensemble. Tables 18.2 and 18.3 express in statistical terms casting practices in 208 musical ensembles in shows that played Broadway between June 1996 and May 2016.9 The opening night cast for each production was assessed in racial and ethnic terms based on headshots and biographies of every cast member listed in Playbill. (Photo arrays of complete casts became standard practice for nearly every show only in the 1990s.) Broadway performers strategically deploy their headshots as tools to further their careers: to signal their “type” or present a maximally flexible persona.10 Casting directors and audiences apprehend a performer’s race in part through the self-curated index of the headshot, a professional calling-card that, to a greater or lesser extent, presents racial or ethnic identity that, as philosopher Linda Alcoff has noted, operates in part “through visible or otherwise discernible features.”11 Performer biographies offer a further index of performed racial identity in the professional theater: for example, ensemble performers cast in the 2012 revival of Porgy and Bess can be reliably understood as black. Still, the statistics offered here rely on my own respectful guesses as to individual performers’ racial and ethnic identities based on the publicly available evidence of headshots and bios. As Table 18.2 shows, 75% of Broadway musicals staged between 1996 and 2016 included performers of color in their ensembles. Seventeen percent had all-white ensembles. Eight percent had entirely nonwhite ensembles, whether all-black (The Color Purple), all-Latinx (On Your Feet!), or all-Asian (Flower Drum Song [2002]). Table 18.2 reveals the prevalence of multiracial casting in ensembles over this 20-year period. Table 18.3 divides the 208 surveyed shows into six groups (A-F) by placing multiracial ensemble casting in context with casting in leading and featured roles. These more specific categories Table 18.2  R  acial Makeup of Broadway Ensembles (208 Productions Opening between June 1996 and May 2016) %

Racial Makeup of Ensemble

75 17 8

Racially mixed All-white ensemble Entirely nonwhite

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The Multiracial Musical Metropolis Table 18.3  R acial Makeup of Broadway Ensembles in Relation to Casting in Leading and Featured Roles (208 Productions Opening between June 1996 and May 2016) Group

%

Racial Makeup of Ensemble

Racial Makeup of Leading and Featured Performers

A

16

Multiracial

B

13

Multiracial

C D

4 43

E F

17 8

Multiracial Three or fewer black performers in ensemble otherwise all-white All-white ensemble Entirely nonwhite

Multiracial in a context where race matters to the plot Multiracial in a context where race is peripheral to the plot (including multiracial revues) Color-blind casting All or almost all white All or almost all white Entirely nonwhite

suggest how ensemble casting works in relationship to race as a narrative theme in the Broadway musical and as an interpretive challenge to the Broadway audience. Thirty-three percent of the productions surveyed (Groups A, B, and C) included a thoroughly multiracial ensemble, with four or more performers of color, in a context where leading and supporting roles were played by both white performers and performers of color (almost always black). Slightly less than half the productions (Group A) demanded multiracial casting for narrative and thematic reasons. Hairspray!, for example, tells of racial integration in 1960s Baltimore through racially sorted musical styles. White and black principals, featured players, and ensemble members prove essential to the meaning of Hairspray! In such shows, a multiracial ensemble is a dramaturgical requirement. By contrast, just over half of productions with multiracial ensembles (Groups B and C) demand from the audience a strikingly different response toward visible racial diversity in the ensemble. When leading and featured roles are cast using cross-racial practices (Group C), the multiracial nature of the ensemble becomes a visible fact to be ignored, as in the abovementioned revivals starring Audra McDonald. Similarly, in multiracial book shows with multiracial characters that do not take up questions of race per se (Group B)—as in The Life or If/Then—a multiracial ensemble recedes in importance. The multiracial musical revues discussed earlier fall into this category as well. This leaves nearly half (43%) of the musicals surveyed: Group D, productions that combined all- or almost all-white principals and featured players with an ensemble placing three or fewer black performers among almost all-white performers. These productions ask the viewer to see through race only in the ensemble, often with a small nonwhite presence. Of the 88 shows in this category, 30 include only one person of color in the ensemble. What explains this phenomenon? In nine productions in Group D, a black member of the ensemble understudied a lone black featured player in the cast. The practicalities of insuring a performer of color who was ready to step into a specific role had the effect of adding minimal racial diversity to an otherwise nearly all-white ensemble. Further insight into why some productions in Group D employed slightly integrated ensembles can be gleaned from a consideration of Group E, which includes productions with all-white ensembles and all or nearly all white leads and featured players. In the 20 years under consideration, this was an unusual choice: slightly less than one of five musicals had all-white ensembles. Two similar sorts of shows appear in this group. Many revivals of canonic musicals with period settings employed all-white casts—including 1776 (1997), Cabaret (2014), Fiddler on the Roof (2004, 2015), Gypsy (2003, 2008), A Little Night Music (2009), She Loves Me (2016), and The Sound of Music (1998). New musicals using period settings, especially set in Europe or distinctive regions of the United States, also opted 193

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for all-white casts, for example, Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson (2010), The Bridges of Madison County (2014), Bullets over Broadway (2014), Doctor Zhivago (2015), The Light in the Piazza (2005), The Woman in White (2005), and Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (2010). All these productions used racially appropriate casting. The choice not to include one or two persons of color—in these years going against general practice—can be understood dramatically to encourage audience immersion in a consistently imagined, slightly foreign or past world. Theatrical presentation of a racially uniform space, where race carries implicit narrative meaning, applies also to entirely nonwhite cast shows (Group F)—including Fela! (2011, 2012) and The Capeman (1998). Many such racially homogeneous musicals carry a story-centered seriousness that lends itself to more dramatic emotional engagement. By contrast, revivals and new musical comedies oriented toward crowd-pleasing entertainment, spectacle, and broad comedy more often accommodate the inclusion of few persons of color in the ensemble and find their place in Group D. Productions with one or two such cast members and all-white leads and featured players include 42nd Street (2001), Bye Bye Birdie (2009), Curtains (2007), Irving Berlin’s White Christmas (2008, 2009), Mary Poppins (2006), Once Upon a Mattress (1996), and The Producers (2001). The ensembles in such musicals may serve as a signal not to take the story-world of a given production too seriously, inviting spectators instead to relax and enjoy the fun without thinking much about race, while also proffering visible evidence—in the isolated black face or faces in the ensemble—that diversity has been accounted for. A less charitable interpretation might read the lone black performer in an otherwise all-white ensemble as tokenism—to which one reply would be the perennial argument that at least said performer has a job. A show with few black performers in an otherwise all-white ensemble can, serendipitously, allow for musical blackness to emerge, leaving a trace that remains after a select black ensemble member departs the show. The 2015 musical Something Rotten! celebrates the history of the musical with frequently hilarious references to and quotes from over 40 familiar shows. Only one of these is a black-cast musical. In the second act’s show-within-the-show, a female ensemble member pops out of an egg costume and sings, “And I am telling you, I’m not gonna be an omelet.” This reference to Dreamgirls (1981) was introduced by Marisha Wallace, the only black female performer in Something Rotten!’s original ensemble. Wallace had played Dreamgirls’ Effie earlier in her career. Her channeling of Effie’s big number, “And I Am Telling You,” in an egg costume marks the only moment when Something Rotten! acknowledged Wallace’s blackness within the show. Otherwise, she was—like the single other black performer in the show12—part of the production’s cartoonish evocation of Elizabethan England. Wallace departed Something Rotten! from May to July 2016. During this period, another black woman, Tracee Beazer, stepped into the ensemble. But when I saw Something Rotten! on June 1, the show’s ensemble was entirely white and the bit from Dreamgirls was sung by a white performer, forced by the text of the show into a moment that could be construed as whitewashing. At this performance, the quote from Dreamgirls became—for this theatergoer, who also saw the show with Beazer in the cast—less a satisfying burst of blackness in Something Rotten!’s otherwise white homage to musical theater and more a remnant of the show’s original, ever-so-slightly racially diverse cast, enduring evidence for Broadway’s multiracial ensemble casting practices over the previous 20 years.

Notes 1 Statistics draw on A Study of the New York Audience for Broadway Theater (by Consumer Behavior Incorporated for the League of New York Theaters and Producers, 1980) and annual reports by the Broadway League, usually titled The Demographics of the Broadway Audience. League reports consulted include those for the 2002–2003, 2008–2009, and 2015–2016 seasons, all of which include information dating to the 1997–1998 season. 2 Robert Viagas, Baayork Lee, and Thommie Walsh with the original cast, On the Line: The Creation of A Chorus Line. New York: Morrow, 1990. 156.

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The Multiracial Musical Metropolis 3 James Kirkwood, Jr. and Nicholas Dante. A Chorus Line (1975, typescript rental parts libretto), author’s collection. 4 The Life prompt book, Tams-Witmark Music Library (1996). 5 On the Town (1944) and Seesaw (1973) anticipate the post-Chorus Line multiracial musicals discussed here. On the former, see Carol J. Oja. Bernstein Meets Broadway: Collaborative Art in a Time of War. New York: Oxford UP, 2014. 6 Michael Paulson. “‘The Lion King’ Effect.” New York Times. 19 Nov. 2017. 7 Taymor has noted how the racial identities of performers behind the makeup inflect The Lion King’s meaning in different countries. 8 Before its Broadway run, Jerry’s Girls toured with Uggams, Carol Channing, and Andrea McArdle. The cast album features these performers. 9 Only performers not billed as leading or featured players were counted. Such performers, even if they play small roles, are also listed as part of the ensemble. Small-cast musicals lacking any ensemble are excluded. 10 Interview with Ken Cerniglia, dramaturg and literary manager, Disney Theatrical Group, 16 Nov. 2017. 11 Linda Alcoff. The Future of Whiteness. Malden: Polity, 2015. 40–41. 12 The role of the Minstrel was cast as black during the Broadway run, with Michael James Scott and André Ward both appearing in the part.

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19 “BEFORE THE PARADE PASSES BY” All-Black and All-Asian Hello, Dolly! as Celebration of Difference Sissi Liu

In 1967, faced with waning audiences at his blockbuster hit show Hello, Dolly! (1964), the infamously mercenary impresario David Merrick hired an all-Black cast starring Pearl B ­ ailey and Cab Calloway to bring the show back to life from 1967 to 1970. In 2013, an A ­ sian-­A merican theater company revived Hello, Dolly! at the Pershing Square Signature Center in New York with an all-Asian cast and Christine Toy Johnson in the title role. Was the all-Black Hello, Dolly! by any means socially progressive? Was the all-Asian Hello, Dolly! a gimmick? Was it a coincidence that both productions took place during the historical periods when the A ­ frican-American and Asian-American communities, respectively, advocated for more inclusion in American theater? Did Hello, Dolly! comprise secret messages of activism? What new meanings did the minority casts provide the Broadway blockbuster? To answer all these questions, this chapter introduces a new perspective of reading the musical that celebrates minoritarian performance, examines the historical purposes and significance of both the all-Black and all-Asian Hello, Dolly!, and parses the messages of social advocacy embedded in minoritarian casting practices of the musical. The story of Hello, Dolly! can be traced back to British playwright John Oxenford’s one-act farce A Day Well Spent (1836). The play depicts a day in the life of an eminent hosier, Mr. C ­ otton, his foreman Bolt, and his apprentice, Mizzle. Bolt and Mizzle sneak off to the city when they should be looking after Cotton’s shop, only to run into him. The story ends as three couples tie the knot: Cotton marries Mrs. Stitchley, an old lady who owns a dress shop; Bolt marries Miss Brown, Mrs. Stitchley’s friend and helper; and Cotton’s daughter Harriet marries the young gentleman Mr. Cutaway.1 In six years the play was adapted as Einen Jux Will Er Sich Machen (He’ll Have Himself a Good Time, 1842) by Austrian playwright Johann Nestroy. About a century later ­Thornton Wilder adapted it into The Merchant of Yonkers (1938) featuring the title character Horace ­Vandergelder—a flop on Broadway; and later The Matchmaker (1954) with the focus shifted to the female lead Dolly Levi—a hit in Edinburgh and London, and then on Broadway, where it was produced by David Merrick. Merrick was, in fact, so successful with the play that in 1961, he began putting together a cast and creative team to musicalize it. Michael Stewart, who wrote the book for what became Hello, Dolly!, strengthened Dolly Levi even further. Levi, a matchmaker for the wealthy Yonkers merchant Horace Vandergelder, plans to marry him herself. Vandergelder comes to New York to participate in the 14th Street parade and meet Dolly at Irene Molloy’s hat shop, where he intends to propose to the proprietor. While he is away, his clerks, Cornelius and Barnaby, decide to seek adventure in New York City. Upon learning of their intentions, Dolly directs them to the 196

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hat shop. When Vandergelder arrives, he is infuriated to find two men with Irene, and cancels his plan to marry her. Dolly promises to introduce Vandergelder to an heiress at the Harmonia ­Gardens restaurant that evening. There, she enters triumphantly, feted adoringly by old friends. A riot ensues, and everyone except Dolly is arrested. In the final scene back in Yonkers, Cornelius and Irene decide to marry and open a store across the street from Vandergelder’s. Vandergelder proposes to Dolly and makes Cornelius his business partner. A widow who is no longer young, Dolly does not fit the conventional gender stereotypes or expectations of a leading lady. Directors initially turned down the musical because they felt that the kind of celebration in the title song “Hello, Dolly!” did not make sense. When Merrick asked Harold Prince to direct the show, Prince passed on the project, and suggested Merrick get rid of the title song: “The ‘Hello, Dolly!’ number has nothing to do with Dolly Levi. She’s a woman who has no money and scrounges around; she’s never been to a place as fancy as the Harmonia Gardens, where the number happens…. The way the number is now, you’re talking about a woman who has lived her life at ’21.’”2 Jerome Robbins also turned down an offer to direct because he couldn’t understand what the title song was about or why Dolly belonged there. “Hello, Dolly!” is indeed isolated from the story of the musical, but the isolation is itself a metaphor of how Dolly as a character doesn’t belong. She doesn’t conform to contemporary age or gender stereotypes; she doesn’t belong to the social class of the heiress or Vandergelder. She is so good at managing other people’s lives that she comes off as both outsider and patronizing manipulator: when everyone else is arrested for instigating a riot, she avoids trouble as if she were on a different planet. It would seem that as a poor widow, she doesn’t belong to Harmonia Gardens, either, but has used wit and charm to work her way up there. As she famously, triumphantly descends the elegant staircase in her sumptuous gown, the restaurant staff gleefully marks her appearance. In his book World of Musical Comedy, Stanley Green posits, “No matter how tightly constructed a musical may be, there is always room enough for at least one number…that is inserted solely as an applause-catching specialty with scant relationship to the plot.”3 To the directors who turned down the show, “Hello, Dolly!” is precisely such a song of irrelevance. However, the fact that the song has been perceived as an irrelevant number runs parallel to the racial and sexual minoritarians’ exclusion in society and lived experience which many regard as peripheral and insignificant. The song is a poignant reminder that minoritarians can and should take center stage and celebrate their difference. “Hello Dolly,” especially when performed by a minoritarian actor, asserts Dolly’s great significance and dismisses the commonly held perception that she is no more than a trivial afterthought inserted to fill the room.

From “Before the Parade Passes By” and “Hello, Dolly!” to Minority Casting Celebrating difference and otherness is, in fact, the central message of Hello, Dolly! The song “­Before the Parade Passes By” both serves as a metaphor for the musical and neatly summarizes Dolly as a character. It is also the key to perceiving minority casting of the musical as a broader celebration of difference. The song takes on new meaning, after all, when sung by a person of color. “Before the Parade Passes By” comes late in act one, when Dolly reflects on her life after the death of her beloved husband Ephraim. She bemoans a dry, colorless existence without him, which resembles a dead oak leaf. She decides with this number to finally “rejoin the human race,” and thus sings of declaration, motivation, celebration, and empowerment. Dolly gives herself a second chance to be alive again—to race with “the parade.” As a metaphor, this “parade” could mean life itself; it could also mean the majority, or the normative. Instead of merely being “in” the parade, Dolly wants to be “out in front” with her “head up high” waving “an old baton”: to embrace herself and to live her life in such a way that the parade has to catch up with her rather than 197

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the other way around. Earlier in act one, Horace reveals that he plans to march in the 14th Street parade with the only people he can trust: 700 men. By moving to the front of such a parade, Dolly honors her own difference and otherness as a woman perceived as past her prime. “Before the Parade Passes By” thus becomes a thrilling celebration by and of the outsider. When a person of color sings it, the song becomes more than mere celebration. It turns, as well, into a declaration of racial pride and a motivational march advocating step-by-step empowerment. The rhythm evokes snare drums in a marching band, forming a rhythmic pattern that is bracing and powerful. The melodic line, too, builds in pitch, representing a gradual elevation toward victory. The number ends on a higher note than it begins on, symbolizing the process of elevation as empowerment through the course of the song. If “Before the Parade Passes By” is a declaration song advocating racial difference and pride, then the title song, “Hello, Dolly!,” is an “outcome song” depicting the victorious result of the outsider’s endeavor. Similar to “Before the Parade Passes By,” “Hello, Dolly!” is a song built on elevation. The melodic line steadily rises in shape, and the phrases follow arcs of elevation. Just like “Before the Parade Passes By,” the song ends higher than it began, again symbolically elevating the character as it progresses. As an outcome song that serves as the production’s eleven o’clock number, “Hello, Dolly!” would not be nearly as effective without the formidable declaration of “Before the Parade Passes By” at the end of act one. It’s important to note that there was little authorial intent toward social activism in the creation of Hello, Dolly! Composer and lyricist Jerry Herman specifically told interviewers that he did not think too deeply beyond his goal to entertain. But a minority cast—especially the all-Asian cast—clearly brings a message of social advocacy into the musical: difference, such casting says, is to be included and celebrated. If the all-Black Hello, Dolly!, with its oft-criticized mercenary casting choices, was socially progressive in any way, it was in its increased Black employment rate on Broadway, its boost at the box office of audiences of color, and its establishment of Pearl Bailey as a beloved leading lady on Broadway. The all-Asian Hello, Dolly!, despite its rather short run, delivered a compelling statement that actors of Asian descent, too, very much belong in the Broadway world.

The All-Black Hello, Dolly! In 1963, the musical, then called Dolly: A Damned Exasperating Woman, had unsuccessful tryouts in Detroit. After intensive rewriting and a change of the show’s title, Hello, Dolly! was a hit in its subsequent Washington DC run. It was such a hot ticket by the time it arrived on Broadway on January 16, 1964 that after initial top prices of $8.80 for weekday and $9.40 for weekend performances, tickets soon rose to $9.60 for all evenings.4 The infectiously cheerful musical seemed to help lift audiences out of the depression brought about by the assassination of President Kennedy months before. The musical garnered publicity during the presidential campaign in 1964, both when Channing sang “Hello, Lyndon!” at the National Democratic Convention and when Merrick threatened to sue anyone who attempted to change it to “Hello, Barry (Goldwater)!”5 Also in 1964, Louis Armstrong released his album titled Hello, Dolly!, in which he interpreted the song “Hello, Dolly!” The album became an instant sensation, and sold three million copies.6 The musical’s ten Tony Awards included Best Musical, Best Original Score, Best Director and Choreographer, Best Producer, and Best Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role for the original Dolly, Carol Channing. By January 1965, the rights to the show had been sold to a dozen different countries. It was equally successful on the road. In 1965 and ‘66, the show was performed before American troops in Korea, Japan, and Vietnam. When women’s rights were in the air in the sixties, the title role Dolly Levi, a capable middle-aged widow who handles love, romance, and marriages by manipulating other people’s lives, spoke to the civil rights movement. Stacy Wolf writes, “The musical does not sexualize [Dolly]; rather, [her] forceful personality reverses 198

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the age-old masculine-active/feminine-passive binary.” 7 Unlike many conventional female roles in the past, Dolly is clearly the master of her own future. In the summer of 1967, while race riots rampaged in American cities including Buffalo, ­M inneapolis, and Detroit, David Merrick saw a new opportunity: why not replace his all-white cast of Hello, Dolly! with an all-Black one? The gimmick, which was possibly the only way to boost the box office, would allow him to cash in on the civil rights movement. At the time, C ­ hanning had been with the road production for almost two years, and Ginger Rogers, who first took over the lead in the Broadway production, had been succeeded by Martha Raye and Betty Grable, respectively. Despite the fact that all these women had offered excellent, distinctly individualized interpretations of Dolly, the hit musical was beginning to fade on Broadway. Merrick, it was often argued, would do anything to ensure a long run. Long before the all-Black Hello Dolly!, theater critic Robert Brustein had accused Merrick of too regularly applying “the shameless hucksterism of a modern Barnum,” in his relentless pursuit of money.8 At the same time, however, Black underemployment on Broadway in the late 1960s was a grave problem. Despite the 1952 endeavor of Actors’ Equity to integrate the theatrical world, integration onstage was rare, and a majority of backstage workers, too, were white. Of the 664 production employees on Broadway in the 1967–1968 season, only 14 (2%) were Black.9 Black performers were expected to constantly prove their worthiness; even when they did, they were most often given menial roles like servants or doormen. And for his difficult reputation, Merrick had a demonstrated interest in working with Black theater artists. In 1955, he hired Black stagehands by threatening the union with “publicizing their delaying tactics.”10 Having successfully worked with Black casts in musicals like Jamaica (1957), Merrick was convinced a Black cast could sell as well as a white one. Hello, Dolly! was not the only show for which he used an all-Black cast; he did it again in 1990 with his revival of Oh, Kay!11 When Merrick first approached Pearl Bailey to portray Dolly, she was reluctant to say yes; she was well aware that Merrick was most likely attempting to capitalize on the civil rights era. Already a well-established performer, Bailey had won a Donaldson Award for her Broadway debut in St. Louis Woman (1946), received top billing in House of Flowers (1954), and appeared in the film versions of St. Louis Blues (1958) and Porgy and Bess (1959). Despite her misgivings, she finally took the role because “she was thrilled at the idea that she would be performing in a theater where, as a child, she would not have been allowed to come through the front door.”12 Bailey brought her own style to the character Dolly (Figure 19.1), imbuing the character with warm, witty, wise asides and interpolations, and ad libs, as well as plenty of curtain-call chitchat.13 Critics and audiences responded with equal warmth and enthusiasm. Richard P. Cooke for the Wall Street Journal called Bailey “a production all of her own. [She] has more show business talents than almost anyone I can think of, perhaps chief among them her ability to take an audience under her wing…Seldom has stage enthusiasm seemed more genuine.”14 Richard Watts Jr. of The New York Post observed, “I have rarely been among so many unaffectedly enthusiastic spectators. In fact, at the end of the performances, it appeared that they were determined to climb onto the stage en masse and embrace the splendid Miss Bailey.”15 Barely two weeks into Bailey’s run, Walter Kerr humorously claimed in The New York Times, “Eventually people are going to stop going back to see Hello, Dolly! They’ll just settle down and live there.”16 One of the most enthusiastic reviews came from Clive Barnes, also for The New York Times: Miss Bailey had no trouble at all in stopping the show—her problem was getting it started again. On her entrance the audience wouldn’t even let her begin. After about a minute’s applause, she cleared her throat …, murmured, “I’ve a few more words to say in this show…” She had, and a few more to sing. … By the second act the audience was not merely eating out of Miss Bailey’s hand, it had started to chew at her fingernails. …[T]he audience would have elected her Governor if she’d only named the state.17 199

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Figure 19.1  P  earl Bailey descending the stairs with a powerful gesture as Dolly Gallagher Levi in Hello, Dolly! Photo Courtesy of New York Public Library for the Performing Arts.

Just like that, a musical that seemed about to close again became the hottest ticket in town. The allBlack Hello, Dolly! ran for two years, until December 20, 1969. Pearl Bailey became the diva that kept the musical going for the longest stretch during its original run. A musical that cost $400,000 to produce eventually made an astounding $27 million on Broadway and $60 million worldwide by 1970.18 The all-Black cast proved controversial from the start. While content that the production supplied so many Broadway jobs for such a long time, Frederick O’Neal, the first African-American president of Actors’ Equity, argued that Hello, Dolly! violated Equity policy by casting according to color rather than ability. Nevertheless, O’Neal stopped short of lodging a formal complaint against Merrick.19 Through the 1960s, and especially after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., one could taste racial tension in the air. Many Black theater makers, such as Douglas Turner Ward, disapproved of the all-Black Dolly.20 The most astute criticism revolved around the exploitative nature of the casting choices, and the notion that Black performers were hired to make profits and set longevity records on Broadway, while ultimately benefiting the white producer and overwhelmingly white audiences. A week before the opening of the all-Black Dolly!, an article in the Philadelphia Tribune pointed out that some people believed “the all-Negro show is a throwback to the Cotton Club–type shows of the thirties and has set the civil rights movement back 30 years.”21 Theater historian Allen Woll argues that the all-Black Dolly! “harked back to the black Mikados of 1939.”22 These criticisms aside, there are positive social outcomes to Merrick’s experiment. Its success challenged critics, producers, and historians to rethink minority casting. The New York Times critic Clive Barnes was quite upfront about how the production changed his mind: “[F]rankly my sensitive white liberal conscience was offended at the idea of a nonintegrated Negro show. It sounded too much like ‘Blackbirds of 1967,’ and all too patronizing for words. But believe me, from the first to the last I was overwhelmed. Maybe Black Power is what some of the other musicals need.”23

The All-Asian Hello, Dolly! Whereas the all-Black Hello, Dolly! was initiated by a powerful white producer with no small interest in profits, the all-Asian Hello, Dolly! was initiated by Asian-American theater artists as an 200

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activist, nonprofit undertaking. The percentage of Asian-American actors on and off Broadway has been historically diminutive: the employment rate of Asian-American actors in the 2010s is even lower than that of Black actors in the late 1960s. Between the 2006 and 2011 theater seasons in New York City, Asian-Americans were cast in only 2% of roles on Broadway and at major Off-Broadway theaters. From 2012 to 2016, successful shows like Here Lies Love and Allegiance caused that percentage to increase, but only to a still-low 3%. In comparison, African-American actors were cast in 14% of roles, while Caucasian American actors appeared in 79% of roles.24 In a city in which 44% of the population is Caucasian, 26% African-American, and 13% Asian-­ American as of 2016, the casting rate of Asian-Americans, despite a small jump from a dismal 1% in the late 1960s, remains alarmingly meager.25 The increase in Asian-American employment in the theater is due in large part to the growth of predominantly Asian and Asian-American productions and companies, rather than mere racial integration. New York-based companies like Pan Asian Repertory Theater (founded in 1977), the National Asian American Theater Company (NAATCO) and the Ma-Yi Theater Company (both founded in 1989), the National Asian Artists Project (NAAP) (founded in 2005), and the Leviathan Lab (founded in 2009) all endeavored to provide more roles for Asian-American performers. Predominantly Asian or Asian-American productions mounted by these companies focus on original works by Asian-­American writers, or produce classics by European and Euro-American writers with predominantly Asian casts. Whereas Pan Asian Rep, Ma-Yi, and Leviathan focused on original works by Asian-Americans, the NAATCO is devoted to adaptations of European and Euro-American classics. The NAAP strikes a balance by producing both canons and original Asian-American works. Asian-American activist organizations also play a crucial role in fighting structural racism in the performing arts. The organization that has been spearheading this mission is the Asian ­A merican Performers Action Coalition (AAPAC), founded by a group of Asian-American actors to increase visibility on New York City’s stages. The AAPAC organizes forums to discuss minority representation in New York theater, and garners statistics that demonstrate and validate their feelings of invisibility. In February 2012 the AAPAC held a roundtable discussion, “Represent Asian: The Changing Face of New York Theater,” featuring notable producers, agents, and casting directors who discussed access to casting opportunities for minority actors, and suggested ways toward a more inclusive theater scene. The AAPAC actively challenges and works to end yellowface and brownface practices (practices in which a non-Asian actor puts on makeup to portray an Asian role) in major US Broadway and Regional theater companies. One example was the group’s condemnation of La Jolla Playhouse’s color-blind casting 26 as a disguise to exclude racial minorities in their 2012 production of The Nightingale, a story set in China. After hearing from Asian-American theater artists, the Artistic Director of La Jolla Playhouse, Christopher Ashley, and The ­Nightingale’s director, Moisés Kaufman, apologized and admitted that they had been unsuccessful at what they tried to do. Color-blind casting has been criticized as well by many scholars, including Neil Gotanda and Brandi Wilkins Catanese.27 Conforming to the nontraditional casting model of marking nonwhite colors as problematic, color blindness ultimately denies racial subordination, represses those who recognize it, and encourages the continuation of racial subjugation. In the context of prevalent exclusive casting practices in mainstream theaters that continuously deny the visibility of the Asian-American theater community, the actor, choreographer, and director Baayork Lee, along with her theater company NAAP, decided to produce Hello, Dolly! with an allAsian cast. Lee was one of the earliest Asian-American stars on Broadway. She made her Broadway debut at five as Princess Ying Yaowolak in the original production of The King and I (1951). After collaborating with Michael Bennett on several Broadway shows, she developed the role of Connie Wong in A Chorus Line (1975) based on her life story. In 2004, Lee became the first Asian-­A merican to direct a nationally renowned company when she directed Cinderella at the New York City Opera. Under her leadership, Cinderella cast the largest number of Asian or Asian-American actors 201

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for a non-Asian specific production in the history of NYCO.28 In 2005, after directing a national tour of The King and I, Lee started a summer musical theater school in New York’s Chinatown. She cofounded NAAP with theater artists Steven Eng and Nina Zoie Lam shortly thereafter. NAAP co-founder Steven Eng has noted that because of Baayork Lee’s lifelong associations with the American musical as an actor, choreographer, and director, she is probably the only Asian-American with the power to produce revivals of classic Broadway musicals in New York.29 No other Asian-American companies, at least in New York, have attempted a revival of a ­Broadway musical. The logical reason is that for Asian-American theater artists who have not developed a close connection with Broadway theater makers, permissions are exceptionally hard to obtain and very costly—especially for production in a New York theater. Lee, however, had plenty of experience: before Hello, Dolly!, she got permission from the Rodgers and Hammerstein Organization to direct successful all-Asian productions of Oklahoma! (2011) at Theater Row’s Acorn Theatre and Carousel (2012) at the Peter Jay Sharp Theater in New York City. Jerry Herman happily gave NAAP permission to produce Hello, Dolly!, but stipulated that he wanted Lee Roy Reams to direct the production.30 Reams had played Cornelius in the 1974 Broadway revival with Carol Channing, had gone on to direct revivals across the country, and directed the Broadway revival in 1994, again starring Carol Channing. He also made an impact playing Dolly himself in drag at the Wicked Theatre in Boca Raton, Florida in 2015. NAAP accepted the stipulation, and Hello, Dolly! therefore became the sole musical in NAAP’s Rediscover Series that was directed by a non-Asian American artist. In the production, Dolly was portrayed by Christine Toy Johnson, co-founder of the AAPAC and the performer Baayork Lee had in mind for the role from the start. Johnson had been featured extensively on and off Broadway, in regional theaters, in film, and on television. As a writer, her plays and musicals have been produced across the country by companies like Prospect Theater and the O’Neill Theater Center. In 2012, Johnson founded the Asian American Composers and Lyricists Project to give voice to new Asian-American talent in the musical theater. Johnson considered Dolly to be one of the most exciting roles in her acting career. When asked about her approach to the character, she stressed that Dolly to her was not “white”: “I did not play Dolly as ‘white.’ I played her as a human being whose qualities and characteristics illuminated a story that was not defined by race or ethnicity. She just happened to look like me.”31 Johnson cherished the significance of “adding a different community experience into the mix of the storytelling” and “representing this particular community that is not usually in this particular show. … The end result is about being inclusive (Figure 19.2).”32

Figure 19.2  Christine Toy Johnson dancing with her all-Asian company as Dolly Gallagher Levi in Hello, Dolly! Photo Courtesy of Eric Bondoc.

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The all-Asian Hello, Dolly! only ran for two performances, on April 29 and May 6, 2013. Unlike David Merrick’s lucrative enterprise, this production was staged by a nonprofit organization with an unpaid staff. All the work behind the NAAP’s productions was performed by highly motivated volunteers who worked either for free or for a humble honorarium. To raise funding, the NAAP held online and mailing fundraising campaigns, school campaigns, self-sustaining programs, and auctions.33 A Kickstarter campaign raised $15,320.34 The box office was a success—the first night was almost filled and the second night was sold out. The ticket sales, however, did not cover production costs. Two Monday nights at the new Signature Theater complex on 42nd Street were ultimately all the NAAP could afford. A Rediscover Series production, the all-Asian Hello, Dolly! did not specifically target Asian-American audiences. On those two nights of performances, the majority of the audience members were white—just like at the all-Black Hello, Dolly! The production represented the collective talents of artists of Asian descent, and sent a collective message to the Broadway world, which so often excluded Asians. Without stringently demarcating between a “white” show and an Asian-American show, the cast and company have strategically navigated porous boundaries to redefine what it means to be simultaneously inclusive and celebratory of difference. On the one hand, NAAP stayed faithful to the sociocultural setting of the musical and did not turn Dolly into a culturally visible Asian or Asian-American character. This is a statement that Asian-Americans were sharing in the inclusive experience articulated in Dolly musical about an outsider using wit and charm to achieve happiness and social status. On the other hand, NAAP disruptively inserted all-Asian presence into a Broadway blockbuster that is traditionally played by white actors and a genre that has been dominantly white, and thus celebrating Asian and Asian-American difference and prominence on and off stage. It is equally crucial for Asian-American theater makers to diversify the Broadway musical by increasing minority representation on Broadway as it is to create works for, about, and by Asian-Americans in the first place. The ability to traverse, however paradoxically, between exceptionality and inclusivity is key to Asian-American theater practitioners’ artistry and social advocacy. Esther Kim Lee writes, “Perhaps when American theater truly includes all ­A mericans, Asian American theater will cease to exist.”35 Nevertheless, even when American theater truly embraces all Americans, it will still be significant that Asian-Americans and other racial and cultural minorities continue to highlight their minoritarian influence and celebrate their exceptionality. In a Hello, Dolly! production with a minority cast, when a minority actor sings the declaration song “Before the Parade Passes By” to celebrate the ways she stands apart from the majority or normative, the musical shifts into a new and profound realm of representation and semantics. “With the rest of them, with the best of them,” Dolly proclaims; here, her solo declaration becomes a collective statement of advocacy. Collectively they “hold [their] head up high”; just as Dolly declares, they will be able to “raise the roof,” and “carry on!” The declaration becomes an opportunity the minority community creates for itself—not one that is handed to them. In 1967, Pearl Bailey created a second chance for herself and some of her fellow Black artists. In 2013, Baayork Lee and NAAP created a similar opportunity for an Asian-American theater company. Hello, Dolly! works well to celebrate both groups. Clearly, Broadway took notice: Pearl Bailey and Baayork Lee were recipients of Special Tonys for their respective achievements. Bailey was awarded a Special Tony in 1968 for her Hello, Dolly! performance and Lee received the Isabelle Stevenson Tony Award in 2017 for her “a substantial contribution of volunteered time and effort on behalf of one or more humanitarian, social service or charitable organizations.” 36 When we parse the musical from the perspective of the outsider, it seems Hello, Dolly! is meant to be performed by minority artists. “Don’t go where you’re tolerated; go where you’re celebrated,” says Christine Toy Johnson. As the world 203

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experiences a global shift to the right, and US immigration policies have begun to tear families apart, it is time for racial, sexual, and other minorities to “move out in front,” and fight for inclusion and the celebration of difference before the parade of justice and equality passes by.

Notes 1 John Oxenford. A Day Well Spent: A Farce in One Act. London: John Miller Publisher, 1836. 2 William Goldman. The Season: A Candid Look at Broadway. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1969. 170. The 21 Club, also known as ’21, is a high-end restaurant and bar where many US Presidents dined. It has held private wine collections for celebrities and hosted pre-ball parties for the biennial International Debutante Ball. 3 Stanley Green. World of Musical Comedy. London: The Tantivy Press, 1980. 2. 4 Ethan Mordden. Open a New Window: The Broadway Musical in the 1960s. New York: Palgrave for St. Marvin’s Press, 2002. 5 Howard Kissel. David Merrick: An Unauthorized Biography. New York: Applause Co., 1993. 6 Stephen Citron. Jerry Herman: Poet of the Showtune. New Haven: Yale UP, 2004. 102. 7 Stacy Wolf. Changed for Good: A Feminist History of the Broadway Musical. New York: Oxford UP, 2011. 73. 8 Robert Brustein. “A Buccaneer on Broadway.” New Public. 2 Feb. 1963, 26–27. 9 Allen Woll. Black Musical Theatre: From Coontown to Dreamgirls. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State U, 1989. 226–227. 10 Woll, 221. In 1952, in response to the alarming data regarding Black employment on Broadway, Actors Equity, together with the League of New York Theaters, the Dramatists’ Guild, the Negro Actors Guild, and the NAACP, attempted to increase Black employment rate and integrate the theatrical world. The backstage life on Broadway, however, continued to be all-white in the following years. Merrick’s insistence on hiring Black stagehands in 1955 may be seen as a continuation of the theatrical organizations’ effort in 1952. 11 Enid Nemy. “Merrick’s Oh, Kay!” New York Times. 1 June 1990, section C, 2:1. 12 Kissel, 364. 13 Citron, 112. 14 Richard P. Cooke. “Pearl as Dolly.” Wall Street Journal. 14 Nov. 1967. 15 Richard Watts Jr., “Pearl Bailey and the New ‘Dolly’.” New York Post. 13 Nov. 1967. 16 Walter Kerr. “Life with ‘Dolly’ Is Delovely.” New York Times. 26 Nov. 1967. 17 Clive Barnes. “All-Negro ‘Hello, Dolly!’ Has Its Premiere.” New York Times. 13 Nov. 1967. 18 McCandlish Phillips. “Broadway Bids Dolly a Fond Adieu.” New York Times. 28 Dec. 1970, 38:1. 19 Woll, 228. 20 Nat Hentoff. “The Negro Celebrates the Negro.” New York Times. 17 Dec. 1967. 21 Walter Bailey. “Pearl Bailey–Cab Calloway ‘Hello, Dolly!’” Philadelphia Tribune. 4 Nov. 1967. 22 Woll, 228. 23 Barnes, “All-Negro ‘Hello, Dolly!’ Has Its Premiere.” 24 “Stats Report.” Asian American Performers Action Coalition Official Website, Web. 18 Feb. 2016. . 25 US Census Official Website, Web. 8 July 2017. . 26 Color-blind casting, one of the four categories of non-traditional casting put forth by the Non-­ Traditional Casting Project in 1986, depicts the practice that actors are cast without regard to their race or ethnicity. Despite its popularity in the late 1980s and early 1990s, color-blind casting has been denounced by many for fostering systematic denial of racial subordination. One of the most famous public denouncements of color-blind casting was presented by August Wilson in his debate with Robert Brustein in 1996. See Angela C. Pao. No Safe Spaces: Re-casting Race, Ethnicity, and Nationality in American Theater. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2010. 27 See Neil Gotanda. “A Critique of ‘Our Constitution Is Color-Blind.’” Critical Race Theory: The Cutting Edge. Ed. Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic. 2nd ed. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 2000, and Brandi Wilkins Catanese. The Problem of the Color[blind]: Racial Transgression and the Politics of Black Performance. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2011. 28 NAAP Official Website, Web. 2 July 2017. . Baayork Lee’s other directorial credits of Broadway musicals on tour include: Bombay Dream, Barnum, Porgy and Bess, Jesus Christ Superstar, and Carmen Jones.

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Skype interview with Steven Eng, 3 July 2017. Ibid. Christine Toy Johnson’s email to the author, 14 May 2017. Phone interview with Christine Toy Johnson, 4 July 2017. Skype interview with Steven Eng, 3 July 2017. “All Asian-American HELLO, DOLLY! in New York City.” Kickstarter Campaigns. Web. 28 May 2017. . 35 Esther Kim Lee. A History of Asian American Theatre. New York: Cambridge UP, 2006. 226. 36 “Special Tony Award.” Tony Awards Official Website, Web. 28 June 2017. .

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20 RACE AND THE CITY Racial Formation in Avenue Q Stefanie A. Jones

Often described as an adult Sesame Street, Avenue Q (music and lyrics by Robert Lopez and Jeff Marx; book by Jeff Whitty) depicts recent college grad Princeton as he moves to a working-class neighborhood in New York and learns how to become an adult. For a show that touts itself as breaking the rules through its open discussion of racism, sex, and schadenfreude, Avenue Q has found remarkable mainstream resonance. It premiered Off Broadway at the Vineyard Theater in February 2003 and ran through mid-May,1 reopening on Broadway in July 2003 and closing in September 2009. It then transferred again Off Broadway, to New World Stages, where it is still running as of this writing.2 Avenue Q received numerous positive reviews and was one of the first musicals in the 2003–2004 season to turn a profit; it remains a commercially successful property.3 In this chapter I assess values espoused by this contradictory work, based on sociological theories of racism. Rather than looking at the show through a “lens of race,” which presumes that there is a nonracial way of encountering the contemporary world and its cultural objects, I focus on the how and why of this musical’s racial work. All plays in a racial society have raced characters; I ask how Avenue Q constructs the social relations of its racialized characters, in order to illuminate the power dynamics of those social relations. By analyzing the relationship between real-world racial hierarchy and the musical’s racial formation (the order, and rules that determine that order, as they exist within the world of the musical) I argue that Avenue Q stabilizes rather than destabilizes racial categories, and uses those categories to disseminate power and flexibility to white people, and to disseminate stereotypes about and power away from people of color. Although “antiracism” is commonly understood as an umbrella term for progressive racial politics, “Everyone’s A Little Bit Racist” as antiracism actually serves the economic interests of Avenue Q’s elite audience members. After reviewing theories of racism and discussing how I will use those within a sociology of theater methodology, I analyze three elements of racial formation within Avenue Q. First I look at how the musical creates racial categories and assigns characters to them, as well as the consequences of those assignments. Next I examine how these racial categories and their relationships to one another are strengthened by how the show depicts racism and delimits the response to it. Finally, I explore how that hierarchy is structurally about urban housing, with symbolic and potentially material implications for resource distribution in New York City.

Theoretical Framework and Methodology While the term has several contested meanings,4 many sociologists operate within the framework of racism as “a system of advantage based on race.”5 This is in contrast to a popular understanding 206

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of racism as individual beliefs about essential biological differences between people that lead to prejudice and discrimination. Eduardo Bonilla-Silva critiques this latter “idealist” approach because, in emphasizing ideas as “the root of social action,” it reduces “racism mostly to psychology, which has produced a simplistic schematic view of the way racism operates in society.”6 Even the institutionalist definition used by Kwame Ture and Charles Hamilton, who in Black Power were some of the earliest thinkers interpreting racism as prejudice coupled with power, depended on the idea that racism reflected conscious, race-based decision-making. While some racism is individual interpersonal prejudice and discrimination, much is left out of this commonsense definition. By rooting understandings of racism in individual beliefs, theorists operating from this position cannot address racism’s structural impacts and forms, its existence in less overtly racist societies than the United States, the rewards that perpetuate it, its foundational role in social structures, and its capacity to change over time in specific ways. Within definitions that focus on racism as systemic rather than personal, there are also various approaches. One major example, Omi and Winant’s racial formation theory, emphasizes society’s “comprehensively racialized…structure,” 7 defining racism as an initiative that “creates or reproduces structures of domination based on essentialist categories of race.”8 Conversely, ­Bonilla-Silva highlights social processes over essentializing ideologies; both camps, however, recognize society’s fundamentally racial shape. Bonilla-Silva defines racism as an independent “organizing principle of social relations” that produces for groups subordination and superordination according to differentials of power and reward distributed in arenas like the economic, political, social, and psychological.9 We thus might use the term “racial hierarchization” synonymously with racism and “racial hierarchy” to refer to the consequences for individuals or groups under racism’s social regimes. Expanding this conversation further, Ruth Wilson Gilmore understands racism as “the production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerabilities to premature death.”10 Although “premature death” may seem like a new part of the definition of racism, Gilmore is merely providing a more detailed analysis of what exactly is entailed in the “advantage” within “a system of advantage based on race.” Gilmore’s definition accounts for ways racism operates beyond individual or group intentions; thus, like Bonilla-Silva’s, it’s a material, not idealist, perspective. Gilmore refuses an economic-reductionist view of the material, insisting on a materiality in the world that is no less real simply because it is not monetary. This definition thus avoids pitfalls of other existing definitions of racism that Bonilla-Silva describes, and is capacious enough to account for racially hierarchized issues as wide-ranging as environmental racism, police violence, and the prison-­industrial complex, as well as the impacts of racial hierarchization that extend across socioeconomic class. A final benefit of this definition is its reflection of the urgency of redressing racial hierarchy: racism truly is, Gilmore stakes, a question of life or death. Theater studies approaches tend to focus on questions of racial representation rather than the particular operation of racism itself. Theater scholars ask questions like, “In what ways are various races represented in this particular musical?”11 or “How does this work innovate from previous racial representation in the theater?”12 While these excellent questions often provide answers that overlap with issues of racial hierarchization within and beyond the theater, I am interested in the relationship between sociological inquiries into racism and the field of sociology of theater studies. These studies ask questions like, “What are the consequences of these policies for theater-makers, including people of color?”13 or “What anxieties about or new understandings of race are managed in these works?”14 My methodology herein takes up an appropriate theater object, the musical Avenue Q, through the earlier-outlined discourse on racism. I examine how the musical produces racial difference and resultant racial groups, how it hierarchizes those groups and the results of that hierarchization, and how that racial structure is entangled with issues of urban housing. As housing is a basic human need, access to it is fundamentally an issue of vulnerability to premature death. 207

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The Racialized Social Relations of Avenue Q Racialization for characters in the musical is accomplished through various factors including the nature and behavior of each character (including how their gender and class are constructed), the way the character is performed, and the physical appearance of the puppets and the bodies of the performers and puppeteers. Accounting for each of these elements reveals that Avenue Q constructs a tight linkage between traditional biological markers of race and the production of raced characters. Those links reproduce stereotypes of blackness and Asianness, and rehash theater’s historical role in the creation of those stereotypes. The first, most obvious way the musical constructs race is through appearance. The puppets are of various colors; yet most are not accompanied by markers of racialization. Princeton is a yellow-orange puppet, Lucy is light pink, Rod is blue, Nicky is green. Some puppets are racially marked, however: a separate group of slightly fuzzier puppets is racialized as “Monsters”; in addition to appearance, the audience can tell that Monsters are a race because of how other characters subject them to racism. The puppets who are not Monsters are marked as white through their very depiction as racially neutral.15 Through their nonhuman coloration (blue, green, orange, etc.) the non-Monster puppets untie race from skin color, but because “raced” Monsters are indicated by a feature of their bodies (having fur), race amongst puppets remains biological. The musical’s connection between race and skin color is strengthened by the fact that the vast majority of puppeteers in the history of the production are white. The Monster puppet characters, whose puppeteers are also typically white, are predominantly marked as racially neutral; the very rare exception is when other characters enact racism upon them. The Monsters’ whiteness is especially evident when compared to the distinctly racially marked black and Asian characters. In addition to the puppets and their operators, the musical features non-puppet characters who are racially scripted in alignment with the appearance of the actors playing them. The first of these is Brian, who is not racially marked (which neutrality marks him as white), and is described in the character list as “a laid-back guy.”16 Another is Gary Coleman. As a reference to and representation of the famous African-American actor of the same name, he is marked as black through a character description that reads “Yes, that Gary Coleman,” and through the script: his lines alone are littered with dropped final “r”s and “g”s, and words like “yo’,” “d’ja,” “ain’t,” and “don’tcha.” Representation of racial stereotype continues throughout the show, as Coleman’s numbers each depend on the performance of stereotypical blackness. For example, Coleman’s big Act 1 number, “You Can Be as Loud as the Hell You Want (When You’re Makin’ Love),” is inflected with jazzy notes, brass, and sexually explicit lyrics, meant to mark it as “black” music.17 The Asian-American non-puppet character Christmas Eve, “a therapist who moved here from Japan,” is described as speaking “with a subtle Japanese dialect. In instances where hitting the dialect is necessary to make a point, comic or otherwise, it’s noted in the script” (ix). This note is unnecessary since this “dialect” is demanded through the script: each of Christmas Eve’s lines is missing propositions or verbs, or contains malapropisms or mispronunciations like “sucka” and “ruv.” Scholar Daphne Brooks positions Avenue Q within a legacy of racist popular theater: “Avenue Q’s critical and box-office success reminded the theater world of the persistently marketable and ever-seductive appeal of minstrel culture at the dawn of the twenty-first century.” Brooks notes further that the show “trad[es] burnt cork for felt marionettes” to reflect minstrelsy’s “resurgent popularity.”18 While Brooks’s critique extends to the show as a whole, Gary Coleman’s depiction is a key part of how the musical relates to minstrelsy. In particular, the show makes Coleman the punch line for its jokes. One example comes before Coleman joins the number “Everyone’s A Little Bit Racist.” Two nonblack characters are about to make a black joke when Coleman appears, catching

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them in the middle of their illicit humor. His first line in this scene is “Whatchoo talkin’ about Kate?” Instead of the joke that was about to be told, this acts as a performative “black joke,” a kind of scriptus interruptus that reveals the playwrights’ and audience’s anxieties about talking about race. While any scripted black joke might lose its humor over time, or be subject to explicit deconstruction or a linchpin fomenting radical rejection, the joke of this performance—particularly because, as a reference to another performance, it relies on meta-theatrical humor—is more likely to remain funny. The performance of the actor playing Coleman is the punch line; an audience member, unable to be singled out from the whole, is safe to laugh at this black joke as part of the crowd.19 By comically re-performing Gary Coleman’s famous line from the late-1970s television sitcom Diff’rent Strokes, the actor playing Coleman is asked to represent simplified, outdated comedic blackness for the audience’s pleasure. The character resonates with and is inextricable from theater’s history as a site of violence against and profit from blackness and black people. Coleman’s minstrel implications are only enhanced when productions cast white actors to play the character behind a black puppet. Much of Avenue Q’s comedy also comes through the depiction of Christmas Eve and the show’s structural entanglements with yellowface. While Avenue Q’s use of yellowface is most clearly demonstrated through its casting practices involving numerous instances of white actors cast as Christmas Eve, it also encompasses dehumanizing depictions of Asian characters performed by actors of any descent because those forms of racial representation are part of the American theater’s legacy of yellowface practices. While some actors do portray her humanity, the performance practices that the script demands of and that many productions direct onto Christmas Eve nonetheless constitute her as a yellowface type: in addition to her “dialect,” the reader can find many visual examples of costuming and makeup choices that produce a caricatured trope of Asianness. In a recent search, for example, I saw the effect created through Orientalized costume (often a kimono), exaggerated makeup that sometimes included white face paint, and/or performance styles like walking with mincing steps and bobbling head, or speaking with widened eyes and over-exaggerated facial expressions. Yet these exact moments are also scripted for comedic purpose. In one example, Christmas Eve encourages a friend to pursue a man: “You go get him! A man respond to an aggressive woman. (To [her fiancé] BRIAN, pushing him) You! Go get job!” The humor of this bit and the pleasure for the audience depend on the juxtaposition between its parts. The first two sentences are relatable: Christmas Eve reaches out in solidarity to a character whose romantic interest is meant to be appealing to the audience. Yet we are quickly distanced from this connection when Christmas Eve acts violently, pushing her fiancé and yelling at him. We are thus pulled away from intimacy with Christmas Eve and into further alignment with her white friend. As Christmas Eve enacts the stereotype of married Asian woman as work-obsessed shrew, this distancing moment, and thus the group-making patterned for the audience, is a moment of distinctly racial group-making.

Racial Hierarchization in Avenue Q The major feature that defines the relations between characters (and the groups they represent) in Avenue Q is the neighborhood in which they live. That the musical is named after their block makes it evident that it’s central to the conceit of the show. Princeton joins the group of Avenue Q residents through “It Sucks to Be Me,” coming across the other major characters comparing their lack of employment and romantic opportunities on the street outside their apartments. What sucks about Princeton’s life is that he can’t afford more convenient housing and must move to Avenue Q; his discussion of housing costs becomes linked to each character’s complaints through song, further inflecting the number with class-based limitations on a fulfilling life. Although the characters agree that Gary Coleman is worst off, the number ends with the characters singing

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together, linking their issues to both their location and their relationship to each other, unified even in their difference. In this way Avenue Q is depicted simultaneously as shared location and shared circumstance. “Everyone’s A Little Bit Racist” builds on this depiction of the characters as on equitable footing because of their similar class position while working through the possibility of racial tension. In this number, characters make or experience judgments based on interpersonal prejudice about their racial group. The verses reflect “discussion” about different, well-known examples of such prejudice, like telling a racist joke, saying “you people,” or using a non-PC term to refer to someone. By “working through” racism, the verses lead to social cohesion expressed through the shared lyrics and harmonious, catchy chorus. Embodying the song’s growing social consensus, the number of characters singing the chorus increases after each verse. The message of the song is that group acceptance of the idea that “Everyone’s A Little Bit Racist” will ease and erase racial conflict. The racist precipitating incidents in the song are as follows: Princeton (non-Monster puppet, white) asks Kate Monster (Monster puppet, white) if she and another Monster character are related; Kate tells Princeton about her desire to open a school for Monsters that would exclude non-Monsters; Gary Coleman (African-American) admits liking Polish jokes; Brian (white) calls Christmas Eve (Asian-American) a racial slur; Christmas Eve critiques white people, Jewish people, and taxi drivers. By focusing on interpersonal harms and presenting them as equal, the show equates the experiences of people of color with those of white people and Monsters, thereby trivializing racism and establishing it as universally experienced. If everyone’s experience of racism is identical, then racism cannot produce different group outcomes.20 This equalization symbolically deauthorizes people of color who might otherwise make uniquely powerful claims about adverse effects of prejudice in order to counteract a history of race-based discrimination against them. At the same time, white people gain more symbolic power through the equation of their experiences of prejudice with “racism” through a rewriting of history. By being classified as “racism,” white experiences become associated with socially rejected examples of racism, like Jim Crow, and with widely recognized historical struggles against racism, like the Civil Rights Movement. Perversely, the contributions of Gary Coleman and Christmas Eve amplify the song’s message that all racisms are the same. Because these characters and their stances are often embodied by actors of color, their participation further legitimates this reinterpretation of the history of racism. Thus, Avenue Q denies that racialization creates inequality, while simultaneously creating inequitable racial categories that resonate with theater’s historically powerful racist representations like minstrel and yellowface depictions. Avenue Q’s double-edged racial project, which we might summarize as disavowed group-making and hierarchizing, itself creates further racial hierarchization. By falsely equating all forms of prejudice to delegitimize critiques of racism alongside its strengthening of racial categories through racist representation, Avenue Q symbolically undermines those positioned within these categories, deauthorizing people of color while symbolically uplifting those positioned as white. We can see this disproportionate, group-differentiated distribution of symbolic power even more starkly through examination of how the musical authorizes whiteness. While the worldviews of black and Asian people are discounted through the plot’s reliance on and justification for stereotype, Princeton’s worldview is legitimated, especially through his position as the protagonist. If shared circumstances, indicated as class, equalize Avenue Q’s racial groups, it’s important to indicate that Princeton’s class is distinct from his neighbors. Princeton’s race and class are invisibilized within the production for those who share his position, as the majority of the audience for Broadway musicals does. In addition, Princeton’s class is obscured because he experiences temporary economic hardship through the musical. Yet from a working 210

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class perspective, it’s obvious that Princeton is middle- or upper-class; the temporary experience of economic hardship, so relatable to educated, white, economically elite spectators, is itself an experience limited to the bourgeoisie. Despite the musical’s attention to his experiences of hardship, Princeton’s preppy dress and Ivy League name, and relationships to family, material goods, and work point toward his class: instead of being fired, Princeton is laid-off; before that, his “parents sen[d] all of [his] stuff from home!” Even when unemployed, he has access to credit cards, the Internet, a cell phone, spending money, furniture, carryout food, clothes, newspapers, magazines, books, television, and his own lethargy. After his job loss Princeton reveals not that he is impoverished, just “almost broke”: he has savings and parents to fall back on. Princeton’s decisions and behavior are the show’s most important indications of his economic position. Early in the musical Princeton moves to a new city and signs a lease (with the implied two to three times the monthly rent for a security deposit), only to learn that the job he moved for does not exist. Instead of fleeing his debts and obligations, turning to relatives or alternative housing options like shelters or the street, seeking temporary or less attractive work, selling possessions or his body, or drowning his sorrows, Princeton copes with this nightmare scenario by turning to the frivolous pastime of seeking his purpose. Work for Princeton, then, is less about survival than to create meaning in his life. This distinctly bourgeois drive, the motivating force of the plot, is the connection between desire, labor, and livelihood, as though one’s labor under capitalism should or could be justified by a higher moral standing central to what gives life meaning and value. His drive for purpose is what moves the musical’s plot forward, and is teasingly idolized in the song “Purpose.” These features of Princeton’s class are recognized by audiences, just not as markers of class. What working-class spectators might see as class distinction is instead familiarized, affirming Princeton’s position as the norm. Princeton’s economic privilege “directly experiences the immediate sanction of the bourgeois public”21; further symbolic power is granted Princeton and his dominant position with respect to the other characters. By positioning Princeton as on equal footing as his less-wealthy neighbors, the show disguises his power over them so that it can demonstrate his belonging among them in the city.

Living in Harmony: Access to the City as Antiracism As we’ve seen, through group formation and hierarchization, white people, especially the bourgeoisie, are positioned as the most legitimate, and black and Asian people are debased and positioned as illegitimate, especially on issues of racism. Avenue Q utilizes that symbolic differential to justify white access to city spaces associated with people of color. The musical’s setting is mostly “on the avenue:” an authentic block in an ungentrified urban neighborhood. Avenue Q’s relationship to New York City is important to its market success; it failed in Las Vegas despite its touted “adult humor.” 22 The show’s brand identity depends on a variety of city-centric components: the title, intertextual connections with other works set in New York, even the brand symbol itself, which mimics the symbol of an MTA subway line. Avenue Q is a liminal space for Princeton, in which his identity can be honed and he can discover himself. Yet it is not his apartment so much as the city itself that is important for this transition. Living on Avenue Q creates shared circumstances and cross-racial contact, but the musical prohibits Avenue Q from being home for most of its characters by positioning “elsewhere”—New York City more broadly—as the place to be, and representing Avenue Q as distant from that elsewhere and liminal (between other parts of these characters’ lives). For example, when Princeton mopes at the top of Act 2, his neighbors comfort him not by inviting him to their homes, but with 211

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the number “There Is Life Outside Your Apartment.” Princeton’s recovery from his breakup and his progress toward somewhat-adulthood is secured during this venture, symbolized by his acquiring a new sexual partner at the end of the group’s jaunt. In another example, when C ­ hristmas Eve and Brian achieve economic stability at the end of the musical, they declare that they are moving to a new neighborhood. The generalized urban space of the show is connected to New York’s specific locational appeal, as emphasized by Avenue Q’s creators. In the script’s afterword, Whitty discusses various changes during the run: Originally, Brian and Christmas Eve moved to the Lower East Side at show’s end. But as Avenue Q continued its run, that neighborhood grew ever chic-er. So we changed it to Hell’s Kitchen for some of the Q companies - a neighborhood that sounded threatening, but then the day came when Hell’s Kitchen also became trendy. Another change was in order! Brian and Christmas Eve’s current destination is Flushing, Queens. (Investment tip: buy property in Flushing immediately, as it’s bound to become the hot new place to live.)23 The work is thus changed over time to fit a particular understanding of and desire for “threatening” if gentrifiable neighborhoods. A sense of urban authenticity, especially through contact with pre-gentrification populations depicted as economically struggling racial others, is central to the show’s appeal. Princeton’s access to these neighborhoods and these populations is prioritized; he operates as a stand-in who can pursue the audience’s desires. Not only does Princeton deserve access to these working-class neighborhoods to facilitate his coming-of-age, but his character is also defined by his capacity to leave for better neighborhoods, and the inevitability of that departure. This deservingness is shaped through Princeton’s stance antiracism. While Princeton’s class position enables him to live on Avenue Q, the symbolic authority the white characters gain from their resolution to racism facilitates and justifies Princeton’s access to the authentic New York. The musical’s characters achieve belonging through common circumstances, and maintain it through their resolution of conflict within their shared space. The white puppet characters’ romantic difficulties provide the major source of conflict that shapes the plot. The only conflict within this community that involves residents of color is resolved as it is broached: the potential for racism raised in “Everyone’s A Little Bit Racist.” By returning to this number, we can see how the white characters are uniquely figured as the solution to racism in a way that not only makes the community open to them, but in a way that makes them needed in the community. In “Everyone’s A Little Bit Racist,” the characters discuss racism and then decide what they should do about it. By accepting the universality of racial prejudice, everyone will be able to relax, get along, and cohabitate harmoniously in opposition to racism’s divisiveness. The process enacted through the song, admitting one’s little bit of racism, is also celebrated as a solution to racism itself. Reading “Everyone’s A Little Bit Racist” as antiracism further reveals how it privileges whiteness and advances the importance of racial contact. Getting beyond racism is necessary, according to this number, because sensitivities about racism are depicted as preventing racial harmony. This is conveyed through the content of the lyrics and the song’s structure: its verses, about racial conflict, interrupt the harmonious chorus. Because racial harmony is the inevitable result of getting beyond racism, the song implies that people’s intentions are good, or at least neutral. Sensitivity about racism prevents the revelation of these good intentions, which will become obvious if people are given enough time and contact to truly express themselves. The internal logic of “Everyone’s A Little Bit Racist” as antiracism depends on increased racial contact between white people and others. The real means of overcoming racism

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takes the form of generating sufficient contact for white people to speak about race to people of color, revealing their genuinely good character without being unjustly attacked. This antiracism presumes and structurally depends on the idea that everyone has good politics and that discussing racism itself is the problem, modeling the idealist perspective on racism that sociologists like Bonilla-Silva critiqued earlier in the chapter. It’s only through racial contact that white people can prove they aren’t racist, by getting beyond the racism they might perform and to their inner benevolence and good politics. The number’s vision of the end of racism is really one about cohabitating without tension. With the song’s final lyrics, living together becomes the goal of resolving racism. While this might read as a vision for desegregation, the symbolic power differential that Avenue Q’s racialization creates prohibits people of color from being able to critique racism. When people of color try to address racism, they are positioned as not accepting the narrative of the song, and therefore as always fomenting racial tension. Even as a vision of desegregation, then, this antiracism still organizes racial groups hierarchically. White people need to access the city to be antiracist, and are needed in the city because of their antiracism. The musical thus always has a place for Princeton; low-income housing is ultimately not in high demand, and the question of who Princeton displaces is never raised. Living together on Avenue Q is only achievable through neutralizing racism; white people are uniquely capable of doing so. Thus Avenue Q authorizes white, bourgeois access to the city, while delegitimizing opposition from people of color in the name of resisting “racism.” It’s no surprise, then, that this particular antiracism is in opposition to material antiracisms in the black radical tradition,24 in particular powerful urban movements against gentrification that have arisen especially after the turn of the millennium. Of various degrees of formality, militancy, and longevity, movements led by black and brown working-class urban-dwelling people push against the very project promoted by Avenue Q under the framework of anti-gentrification. Examples include the B ­ rooklyn ­A nti-Gentrification Network, Community Movement Builders in Atlanta, Defend Boyle Heights in Los Angeles,25 and Defend Our Hoodz in Austin, Texas. Indeed, a significant body of scholarship and activism addresses how white people displace residents rather than desegregate neighborhoods that have historically been occupied by people of color, and critiques connections between gentrification, racism, and police violence.26 By suggesting that development forces and urban actors should invest in current residents and the improvement of their lives, these groups operate under a material antiracist alternative to the racial politics discussed here. Their demands vary over time and location, but seek to address racial inequality through the downward redistribution of resources,27 rather than through market concessions to white gentrification demand like that shaped by Avenue Q.

Conclusion By reproducing anti-black and anti-Asian racism while using the racialization of certain puppets as Monsters to delimit what kind of racialization is legible, Avenue Q reinforces the content and boundaries of racial categories. In addition, the musical symbolically empowers the hierarchized positions of these racial groups within the musical and with respect to the broader field of urban living. The musical uses these hierarchies to create white relocation to nonwhite urban spaces as a form of antiracism, in opposition to the material antiracist positions on housing and the city promoted by anti-gentrification organizers. New York City’s theater scene is deeply entangled with real estate markets. A few examples beyond the scope of this study are the ways theater spaces relate to the commodification of city space more broadly,28 tourism’s impact on the housing market (such as through AirBnB), the large population of professional actors who seek short-term or temporary housing because of touring

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productions, and the displacement of impoverished communities to build theaters like Lincoln Center.29 Although the racial formation within Avenue Q does not distribute housing resources itself, the musical distributes symbolic power disproportionately to groups that it differentiates on the basis of race. This power shapes cultural values about who can want what, why, and how they might get it. While the integration of segregated communities doesn’t result from white-driven gentrification of historically black or Asian city spaces, a commonsense understanding of white relocation as somehow antiracist serves gentrification and stalls wholesale resistance to it. A single musical may not immediately lead to the life or death consequences of being housed or unhoused, but it is inextricable from the costs of gentrification.

Notes 1 Web. 15 Sept. 2016. 2 Dave Itzkoff. “‘Avenue Q’ Won’t Close, Moving Off But Not Out.” New York Times. 15 Sept. 2009. Web. 23 June 2015. . 3 Bruce Weber. “The Puppets Who Made a Profit.” New York Times. 30 May 2004. Web. 20 June 2015. ; Jesse ­McKinley. “To Producers of ‘Avenue Q,’ Puppets Now Mean Profits.” New York Times. 1 May 2014. Web. 23 June 2015. . 4 Carl Hoyt, Jr., “The Pedagogy of the Meaning of Racism: Reconciling a Discordant Discourse.” Social Work 57.3 (2012): 225–234. 5 David Wellman, quoted in Beverly Daniels Tatum. “Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?” and Other Conversations about Race. New York: Basic Books, 1997. 101. 6 Eduardo Bonilla-Silva. White Supremacy & Racism in the Post-Civil Rights Era. Boulder: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2001. 21–22. 7 Michael Omi and Howard Winant. Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1990s. 2nd ed. New York: Routledge, 1994. 190. 8 Omi and Winant, Racial Formation in the United States, 206. 9 Bonilla-Silva, White Supremacy & Racism, 44–45. 10 Ruth Wilson Gilmore. Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California. Berkeley: U of California P, 2007. 28. 11 Warren Hoffman. The Great White Way: Race and the Broadway Musical. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 2014. 12 Jayna Brown. Babylon Girls: Black Women Performers and the Shaping of the Modern. Durham: Duke UP, 2008. 13 Hillary Miller. Drop Dead: Performance in Crisis, 1970s New York. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 2016. 14 David Savran. Highbrow/Lowdown: Theater, Jazz, and the Making of the New Middle Class. Ann Arbor: Michigan UP, 2009. 15 Ruth Frankenberg. “The Mirage of an Unmarked Whiteness.” The Making and Unmaking of Whiteness. Ed. Birgit Brander Rasmussen, Eric Klinenberg, Irene J. Nexica, and Matt Wrey. Durham: Duke UP, 2001. 72–96. 16 This and all other quotations from Avenue Q are from Robert Lopez, Jeff Marx, and Jeff Whitty. Avenue Q The Musical: The Complete Book and Lyrics of the Broadway Musical. Milwaukee: Applause Theatre & Cinema Books, 2010. 17 Portia K. Maultsby. “Soul Music: Its Sociological and Political Significance in American Popular ­Culture.” Journal of Popular Culture 17.2 (1983): 51–60; Guthrie P. Ramsey, Jr., Race Music: Black Cultures from Bebop to Hip-Hop. Berkeley: U of California P, 2003. 106. 18 Daphne Brooks. Bodies in Dissent: Spectacular Performances of Race and Freedom, 1850–1910. Durham: Duke UP, 2006. 345. 19 On audience pleasure and anonymity, see Laura Mulvey. Visual and Other Pleasures. 2nd ed. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009; on the audience as theatrical convention, see Herbert Blau. The Audience. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1990. 20 Only race-based difference is treated this way; while it dismisses the legitimacy of differentiations caused by experiences of racism, the show validates differences between people based on gender and sexuality through happy resolution of Princeton’s love triangle and the number “If You Were Gay.” 21 Pierre Bourdieu. The Field of Cultural Production. New York: Columbia UP, 1993. 51.

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Race and the City 22 Hilary Baker. “From Broadway to Vegas: The Triumphs and Tribulations of Avenue Q.” Studies in Musical Theatre 5.1 (2011): 71–83. 23 Lopez, Marx, and Whitty, Avenue Q, 150, emphasis in original. 24 Robin D. G. Kelley expands on Cedric Robinson’s understanding of this tradition and recuperates its presence in US movements and ideas. Robin D. G. Kelley. Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination. Boston: Beacon Press, 2002; Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists during the Great Depression. Chapel Hill: The U of North Carolina P, 1990; Cedric Robinson. Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. Chapel Hill: The U of North Carolina P, 1983. 25 See Kimberly Welch. “Sideways Fences: Resisting Gentrification in Boyle Heights, a Los Angeles Community.” Lateral 6.2 (2017), . 26 Some work includes Neil Smith. “Toward a Theory of Gentrification: A Back to the City Movement by Capital, not People.” Journal of American Planning Association 45.4 (1979): 538–548; Mason Lorna, Ed Morlock, and Christina Pisano. “Mapping a Changing Brooklyn, Mapping a Changing World: Gentrification and Immigration, 2000–2008.” The World in Brooklyn: Gentrification, Immigration, and Ethnic Politics in a Global City. Ed. Judith DeSena and Timothy Shortell. New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2013. 7–49; David Harvey. Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution. New York: Verso, 2012; Aneta Dybska. “Where the War on Poverty and Black Power Meet: A Right to the City Perspective on American Urban Politics in the 1960s.” European Journal of American Studies 10.3 (2015): 1–14; Cedric Johnson. “Gentrifying New Orleans: Thoughts on Race and the Movement of Capital.” Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society 17.3–4 (2015): 175–200; the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project, . 27 I reflect an opposite to the “upward redistribution of resources” with which Duggan names major economic transitions over the past 25 years. Lisa Duggan. The Twilight of Equality? Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics, and the Attack on Democracy. Boston: Beacon Press, 2003. xii. 28 Elizabeth Wollman. “The Economic Development of the ‘New’ Times Square and Its Impact on the Broadway Musical.” American Music 20.4 (2002): 445–465. 29 Keith Williams. “How Lincoln Center Was Built (It Wasn’t Pretty).” New York Times. 21 Dec. 2017. Web. 6 Jan. 2018. .

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21 CAN WE “LEAVE BEHIND THE WORLD WE KNOW”? Exploring Race and Ethnicity in the Musicals of Lin-Manuel Miranda Elizabeth Titrington Craft In the months leading up to the 2016 Academy and Tony Awards shows, minority representation became a hot-button topic. The list of Academy Awards nominees prompted the hashtag #OscarsSoWhite. In contrast, the list of Tony nominations seemed a shining example of contemporary diversity: nominees for best musical included Hamilton: An American Musical, a show about American history featuring a multicultural cast and hip hop-infused score, and Shuffle Along, Or The Making of the Musical Sensation of 1921 and All That Followed, a reinvention of a famous black-cast musical from Broadway’s early years.1 The contrast gave rise to the counter-hashtag #TonysSoDiverse. The record-setting 2015–2016 season is notable, however, largely for its departure from Broadway’s norm.2 While Broadway musicals have a long history of addressing race and ­ethnicity—as evidenced in classics like Show Boat (1927), South Pacific (1949), and West Side Story (1957)—­Broadway’s creators and audiences continue to be predominantly white.3 While analyzing the data to put the Oscars–Tonys scuffle into historical perspective, the writer, producer, and actor Lee Seymour found that “since the awards began—1929 for the Oscars, 1947 for the Tonys—over 95% of all nominees have been white, with the Tonys recognizing more people of color by 1%.”4 Minority actors continue, in the early twenty-first century, to be underrepresented in New York theater; underrepresentation of minority groups remains an issue offstage as well.5 Regarding the 2015–2016 season, Broadway theater owner and producer Jordan Roth said, “This is the kind of season that we want to continue to support and learn from, but I don’t think we can pat ourselves on the back and say our work here is done.”6 At the same time, many twenty-first-century musicals—including Avenue Q (2003), Passing Strange (2008), The Scottsboro Boys (2010), Hamilton (2015), and Allegiance (2015)—have boldly tackled racial issues using techniques ranging from nontraditional casting to puppetry and referencing musical styles from minstrelsy to hip hop. Moreover, some evidence points to the related trend of increasing diversification of casts, which was visible on the 2016 Tony stage. Examining data from 2006 to 2016, the Asian American Performers Action Coalition found in its 2015–2016 report on “Ethnic Representation on New York City Stages” a “definite upward trend in the casting of minority actors.” 7 Composer, lyricist, and actor Lin-Manuel Miranda has become an emblem of Broadway’s aspirations toward increasing diversity and one of musical theater’s most important voices. Miranda, whose parents both came to the mainland United States from Puerto Rico and who grew up in New York City, wrote his first musical, In the Heights (2008), partly in response to the limited roles 216

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for people like him: “I knew I wanted to have a life in the musical theater. I knew I didn’t dance well enough to play Bernardo [in West Side Story] … [or] Paul [in A Chorus Line]. And that was about it.”8 Miranda has helped reconceive the role of race and ethnicity and expand opportunities for minority actors in musical theater with his shows In the Heights, Bring It On: The Musical (2012), and Hamilton. Although each of these musicals addresses turbulent issues in content and casting, they are hardly homogeneous. Hamilton is set in colonial America, while In the Heights takes place in contemporary Manhattan. Bring It On was written in collaboration with other powerhouse Broadway composers and lyricists; Miranda was sole composer and lyricist for In the Heights and Hamilton, in which he premiered their lead roles. Each also approaches race and ethnicity in different ways: In the Heights depicts an insular but panethnic Latinx community, Bring It On highlights interracial encounters, and Hamilton uses an almost all-minority cast to depict white historical figures.9 Yet crucial commonalities emerge. Each speaks to contemporary social and political issues. Each appeals to traditional Broadway theatergoers while reaching out to new audiences. Each advocates for cross-cultural understanding and solidarity across races and ethnicities in the United States, even while acknowledging different groups’ customs and histories. And each does so using hip hop, combined with other musical styles and traditional musical theater forms, thereby diversifying the Broadway musical aesthetically, musically, and choreographically. Miranda’s shows share a politics of labor, creating a host of roles, including leads, for minority actors. Finally, the musicals share an optimistic vision. The teenage characters of Bring It On sing with youthful idealism, “We can leave behind the world we know.”10 Miranda’s musicals envision a new world of Broadway and US society, one that is not post-racial but racially inclusive and aware.

Pan-Latinoism and the Immigrant Experience in In the Heights In the Heights turned heads with its 2008 Broadway debut. A team of Broadway newcomers helmed the show: director Thomas Kail, book writer Quiara Alegría Hudes, choreographer Andy Blankenbuehler, and Miranda, the composer, lyricist, and star. Many involved would become regular collaborators with Miranda. While critics delivered a mixed verdict, the show’s long Broadway run; multiple Tony Awards, including for Best Musical; popularity with regional, community, and school theaters; and plans for a film adaptation have ensured its secure place in the repertory.11 In the Heights gives voice to contemporary experiences of (im)migration, dramatizing critical issues for (im)migrant communities: the search for identity, struggles of Americanization, possibilities and limits of transnationalism, and challenges of neighborhoods facing gentrification.12 The plot centers on two characters facing major decisions as they question where home is: Nina struggles with whether or not to return to Stanford University after losing her scholarship, and Usnavi contemplates whether to return to the Dominican Republic, the birthplace he left when he was too young to remember. The show’s script incorporates Spanish and Spanglish words and phrases, and its score intermixes hip hop, Latin, and contemporary Broadway musical styles. Set on a single block in Washington Heights, In the Heights immediately positions itself as an introduction to the Latinx community of this northern Manhattan neighborhood. In the opening number, main character-cum-narrator Usnavi raps directly to the audience, inviting them to “take the A train” (a quotation of music and lyrics from the Duke Ellington/Billy Strayhorn jazz standard) to the subway station at 181st Street. Although the Washington Heights/Inwood area in which Miranda grew up is about three-quarters Hispanic, it has been home to many shifting 217

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immigrant and minority populations.13 Miranda explains that with In the Heights, he sought to represent the neighborhood’s various immigrant waves and the pressures of gentrification: That’s why Abuela [Claudia, the grandmotherly figure] is Cuban—Cubans and Puerto R ­ icans got here first; our middle-generation characters…are Puerto Rican, ‘cause that’s the next wave; and then Dominicans in the seventies…so those are the youngest characters…that’s very deliberate, to reflect the waves of immigration. And then the Irish before that, who are just offstage, right? And then hipsters after it, just waiting for their entrance.14 Near the end of the show, Nina’s parents sell their business, Rosario’s Car Service. When they remove the sign, an older one for “O’Hanrahan Car Service” peeks through, a testament to the neighborhood’s cycles of change. By focusing on an ethnic enclave, In the Heights follows in the tradition of shows like Porgy and Bess (1935) and Flower Drum Song (1958), with their respective African-American and ­Chinese-American casts. Dramatically, such depictions reflect the segregated nature of many US neighborhoods. They also allow writers to focus on in-group relationships and avoid dealing with discrimination or with tensions among racial groups in the United States. Indeed, all of the main characters of In the Heights are Latinx, with the exception of the African-American Benny, whose outsider status is thematized within the musical. By including members of multiple immigrant waves, however, In the Heights portrays a panethnic Latinx identity, a choice with distinct political ramifications.15 Because the group designated by the term “Latino” is highly heterogeneous, differing in national origin, race, and political and social experience, “the very ‘group-ness’ of Latinos” is highly contested.16 In the Heights nonetheless embraces the concept of “Latinidad,” the expression of a shared Latinx identity.17 In the opening number, the ensemble sings about hanging flags from their countries of national origin, and Usnavi raps that “we got a lot in common.”18 As other scholars have written, for individuals from Latin American countries, uniting as “Latinos” carries certain strategic political, social, and cultural advantages, especially as a response to discrimination based on vague notions of “brown” skin rather than on specific national identities.19 In the Heights’s pan-Latino characters and themes serve to increase understanding among groups sharing some similar experiences in the United States, while also having the commercial benefit of making the work more broadly marketable. We hear Latinidad represented musically in many of the show’s ensemble numbers, especially “Carnaval del Barrio,” an impromptu Fourth of July celebration in the midst of a neighborhood blackout. In it, Daniela, the spirited, take-charge owner of a local hair salon, rallies the group by leading them in a boisterous song and dance. Marked “bomba-ish” in reference to a traditional Puerto Rican musical genre, the number calls for castanets and congas, and its lyrics are peppered with Spanish phrases.20 Miranda imagined the number as a Puerto Rican parranda, a Christmas tradition in which people go door-to-door playing musical instruments and improvising lyrics.21 Within the song, Usnavi spurs on the celebrations by pulling out the Dominican Republic flag as he asks, “Can we sing so loud and raucous / They can hear us across the bridge in East ­Secaucus?” The group responds by asserting in Spanish their pride and rootedness in national heritage: “Pa’rriba esa bandera! /…/ Esa bonita bandera! / Contiene mi alma entera!”22 As the song reaches its apogee, Usnavi reasserts dedication to pan-Latinoism, exclaiming, “From Puerto Rico to Santo Domingo / Wherever we go, we rep our people and the beat go.” Given its Independence Day setting, this number suggests a melding of national customs old and new, claiming immigrants and their traditions as American. In this song and throughout, In the Heights seeks to tell, as Miranda puts it, a “classic American story”—no less so for the fact that its characters speak in Spanglish and wave the flags of their countries of origin.23

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Racial Encounter in Bring It On Miranda’s next show, Bring It On, seemed on its face to be a complete turnabout: he went from an original story with In the Heights to a loose adaptation of a film; from a story about an intergenerational community to one about high schoolers; and from a project he originated and starred in to a highly collaborative endeavor with co-composer Tom Kitt, co-lyricist Amanda Green, and book writer Jeff Whitty.24 Yet Bring It On’s focus on race and ethnicity and its use of hip hop serve as connecting threads. Bring It On has not had the staying power or recognition of In the Heights— indeed, it began as a touring production and was scheduled for only a limited run on Broadway— but critics found it “unexpectedly charm[ing],” and it, too, has an active life in amateur theater.25 While In the Heights focuses on an almost all-Latinx community, Bring It On shows characters navigating racial, ethnic, and class boundaries. It is part of a small group of musicals—like Show Boat and Ragtime (1998)—featuring as a key theme encounters between a black or minority group and a white group, along with the musical styles of each.26 The story: white cheer captain ­Campbell is redistricted from Truman High to the mostly minority, underprivileged Jackson High, which, to her shock and dismay, does not have a cheerleading squad. She joins Jackson’s dance crew after winning over its leader, Danielle, and convinces them to form a cheerleading squad with the promise of glory and scholarship money—the latter a lie. In the end, Campbell learns that friendship trumps trophies, and Jackson High “crosses the line” in its performance at the Nationals, breaking the official rules but performing in its own unique style. As is typical in musicals with racial tension as a central theme, music draws aural contrast between racially distinct groups. The Truman High cheerleaders perform to the synth-soaked pop typical of cheerleading competitions. The soundscape of Jackson High, on the other hand, is highly percussive, syncopated, and influenced by hip hop and R&B. Miranda describes trying to “Rihanna the hell out of the beat” to create the song “Friday Night, Jackson.”27 It might be easy to dismiss Bring It On as “fluff” (or a “featherweight concoction,” as critic Charles Isherwood described it) because of its movie-inspired plot and ostensibly frivolous subjects of teen girls and cheerleading.28 However, the show tackles complex subjects, often in clever, incisive ways. It comments upon whiteness rather than treating it as the norm, for example, and through the character of La Cienega—Broadway’s first transgender teen character, according to Playbill.com—it also depicts some progressive conceptions of gender.29 In the encounter narrative of Bring It On, stereotypes and missteps abound on both sides. When Danielle tells her the dance group is called a “hip-hop crew,” Campbell responds, “My people call it a squad”—a line that stops the other characters in their tracks. She is horrified moments later when the racial implications are pointed out to her—by “my people,” she had meant cheerleaders. Later, Campbell surprises Danielle by coming to her defense when some customers at the Burger Pagoda call her “Burger Girl,” delivering what Danielle describes as “the whitest beatdown I ever heard.” Indeed, Bring It On treats whiteness as a race with its own cultural and musical associations. In one scene, Danielle issues a challenge: Campbell can prove her commitment to the crew by donning an old mascot outfit from the days when Jackson was in an Irish neighborhood and dancing at the post-homecoming game party. (As with the “O’Hanrahan” sign in In the Heights, we’re reminded here of different waves of immigrant and minority groups.) Campbell delivers in “Friday Night, Jackson,” which highlights her whiteness through her “Lucky McClover” costume, with its huge white head and red beard (see Figure 21.1), and proves her mettle and dance chops. In the show’s final number, Danielle sings, “I thought you were a spoiled rich / uptight little white bitch / now I think you’re just white!” While in those moments whiteness and class are described as benign and ultimately unimportant, upper-class privilege—aligned with whiteness in the musical as it is in US society—is

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Figure 21.1  Photograph of Bring It On: The Musical touring production, 2011, from Craig Schwartz Photography.

treated more critically elsewhere.30 In the revelatory “Eva’s Rant,” the eponymous villain ascends to the triumphal declaration “I’m dazzling! Magnificent! I am the one percent!” This references the language of economic disparity in the news during the musical’s national tour and Broadway opening due to the Occupy Wall Street movement.31 Eva follows the song with a biting indictment of American society: “The fact remains: there is no way you can win. In real life – people like you can’t.” Though spectators—and the other characters—hear her as cruel, the line is also a reminder that the systemic inequities of US society are not as easily resolved in real life as they are in musicals. Bring It On’s narrative is not without problems. It springs from a type of story built on a clichéd trope: that of a white figure saving a minority community.32 Urban schools are a prime location for such stories, whether the “white savior” is changing the lives of at-risk students in the classroom or leading a sports team—or cheerleading squad—to victory.33 The musical makes fun of this trope overtly: when Campbell suggests the dance crew make a cheerleading squad, Danielle replies, “You know what this reminds me of? Those movies, you know what I’m saying, where the white dude or the white lady makes a trip to the scary ‘inner city’ and, you know, fixes dem colored folks right up!” Despite proclamations that “we can leave behind the world we know,” however, Bring It On ultimately fails to fully escape the very storyline it ridicules. Although “Cross the Line,” Jackson’s penultimate number at Nationals, blends music and movement styles of cheerleading and hip hop—of Truman’s musical world and Jackson’s—the show’s closing number, “I Got You,” uses a Broadway pop style.34 The assimilation and accommodation remain lopsided; the story remains Campbell’s. Nonetheless, this show goes further than many in reimagining encounter narratives. It encourages audiences to engage in critique even as they enjoy the high-­ flying stunts and fun music. Perhaps it even points toward a future in which a musical about race can have a more equitable ending.

Rewriting an Inclusive History in Hamilton Miranda is currently most widely known for his third Broadway musical, the cultural juggernaut Hamilton. Upon reading a biography of Alexander Hamilton by historian Ron Chernow, as Miranda tells it, he envisioned Hamilton’s story—“literally wr[iting] his way out of his circumstances”—as akin to the biographies of rappers like Tupac Shakur, Biggie, and Lil Wayne.35 220

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Miranda wrote both music and lyrics for this through-sung musical and played the starring role in the original Off-Broadway and Broadway productions. The production staff, creative team, and cast include many people he had worked with previously, including Kail, Blankenbuehler, and orchestrator and arranger Alex Lacamoire. Since Hamilton’s Off-Broadway premiere in February 2015, the musical has achieved meteoric success: rave reviews; 11 Tony Awards, including one for best musical; and consistently sold-out shows across the nation. Hamilton has been described as “revolutionary,” and indeed it breaks new ground in multiple ways. Building on In the Heights and Bring It On, which use hip hop for select numbers, it is arguably the first critically and commercially successful Broadway hip hop musical.36 It is also remarkable for its use of nontraditional casting: white historical figures are portrayed by a cast composed almost entirely of people of color. Miranda told the New York Times, “This is a story about ­A merica then, told by America now, and…our story should look the way our country looks…. I think it’s a very powerful statement without having to be a statement.”37 Thus, while in subject matter Hamilton is only peripherally about race, its casting and use of hip hop ensure that race is central to the show’s messages and meaning. Given its casting, the show’s multiple references to slavery take on added import. The show’s opening number mentions the practice of slavery in the Caribbean, where Hamilton grew up. In the first of two cabinet-­meeting scenes staged as rap battles, Hamilton retorts to Jefferson, “A civics lesson from a slaver…/ Your debts are paid cuz you don’t pay for labor. / ‘We plant seeds in the South. We create.’ Yeah, keep ranting. / We know who’s really doing the planting.”38 Miranda almost spits the last line in the original-cast recording.39 And Jefferson’s showstopping act-two opener includes a request for “Sally” to “be a lamb, darlin’” and open a letter—this lyrical reference to Sally Hemmings flies by but is punctuated in the staging by the ensemble member’s balletic grand battement, or big kick, on an accented off beat in the music.40 While Miranda has most commonly compared Hamilton to rappers, he also highlights ­Hamilton’s status as an immigrant. In the opening number, Hamilton is described as “another immigrant / Comin’ up from the bottom.” The French Marquis de Lafayette, who came to the United States only temporarily, is identified as an immigrant as well. In the Battle of Yorktown scene, Hamilton and Lafayette proclaim, “Immigrants / we get the job done” and high-five. Although the line comes early in the song, many commentators have noted that audiences break into applause upon hearing it. In these ways, the show responds to and is interpreted through the lens of the contemporary politics of immigration. As in Bring It On, whiteness is also rendered noticeable, in this case by its relative absence onstage: there is only one lead character played by a white actor, King George.41 Through him, whiteness is aligned with Britishness and made comical. King George’s musical numbers are distinctly inspired by 1960s Britpop, his manner is foppish, his gait is stiff, and the staging of his numbers is static. While the rest of the cast is constantly in motion, King George’s movement is minimal: a pout or raised eyebrow becomes a significant gesture. The stereotype of Brits as fops in comparison to more manly Americans is long-standing, but here we see whiteness, generally, painted with a similar brush. Likewise, in the song “Farmer Refuted,” Hamilton outwits a white secondary Loyalist character while arguing for the Revolution, further associating whiteness with Britishness, stagnancy, and repressive authority. Hamilton’s overarching bid for racial and ethnic inclusivity is clear, embedded in its music and choreography as well as its lyrics and casting. Yet the show is also multivalent, with both progressive and problematic messages. Unsurprisingly given its outsized cultural footprint, it has attracted the most media and scholarly attention of any of Miranda’s musicals to date, with outspoken criticism of the show’s racial politics accompanying glowing accolades. Critics have highlighted its perpetuation of “Founders Chic,” its adherence to a bootstrap ideology blind to structural inequalities, and even the politics of color implicit in its original casting decisions.42 As scholar 221

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Lyra D. Monteiro points out, Hamilton’s messages about slavery are all-too-fleeting, and in its most “damning omission,” the momentary portrayal of Sally Hemings aside, “not a single enslaved or free person of color exists as a character in this play.”43 Hamilton’s openness to interpretation and the subtlety of its critiques allow viewers to latch onto the themes they find most appealing. This helps explain the musical’s popularity with wide-ranging constituencies across the ideological spectrum. It thrives on the fact that there are, for audiences, “multiple…Hamiltons.”44 While race and ethnicity are critical yet frequently subtextual issues onstage, they are equally important and more overt in offstage commentary about the show and spin-off products like The Hamilton Mixtape, an album with covers, remixes, and related songs. The Mixtape includes, for example, the incisive “Immigrants (We Get the Job Done),” with new lyrics that directly address contemporary immigration.45 Race and ethnicity have also been central to two high-profile controversies. One erupted over a March 2016 casting call for “nonwhite” performers. In response, producers agreed to change its wording while insisting that “it is essential to the storytelling of Hamilton that the principal roles—which were written for non-white characters (excepting King George)—be performed by non-white actors” and that “we will continue to cast the show with the same multicultural diversity that we have employed thus far.”46 The other controversy developed over a post-curtain call speech the cast delivered to Vice President-elect Mike Pence in November 2016, in which they expressed concern on behalf of a “diverse America” and asked the new administration to “work on behalf of all of us.”47 President-elect Donald Trump subsequently Tweeted that Pence “was harassed…at the theater by the cast of Hamilton…!”48 The unusual, perhaps even unprecedented, curtain call speech and Trump’s response reminded audiences that Hamilton’s cast are members of minority groups living in a fraught present-day society, and not just portraying a past one.

Can We “Leave Behind the World We Know”? Time Magazine wrote in 2008 that In the Heights might “be regarded as the first musical of the Barack Obama era. It represents change on Broadway…. And it has…people who want Broadway to reach out to new audiences with contemporary, heartfelt shows like these—crying ‘Yes, we can.’”49 Indeed, Miranda’s trio of musicals might be seen to represent the Obama era. We can hear resonances of the Obama slogan “yes we can” in the Bring It On lyric, sung by the white and ­A frican-American female leads, “We can leave behind the world we know.” But have we left behind that world—even on Broadway? Can we? Whether Miranda’s musicals and the shows that prompted #TonysSoDiverse will result in lasting change on Broadway is unclear. Moreover, like South Pacific, West Side Story, and other past musicals that tried to address race and ethnicity in progressive ways, Miranda’s musicals will continue to be subject to debate over their cultural messages and impact. Yet these shows, along with many others, are forging new paths as they imagine a Broadway more representative of the nation that houses it. From their content to casting, they challenge audiences to think in new ways about historical and contemporary issues of race and ethnicity. Their impact is extended as regional and community theaters and schools put on productions, giving rise to opportunities for minority performers to play interesting, substantive roles and prompting conversations about race in US theater and society.50 Much is at stake as Broadway and the nation continue to grapple with how race and ethnicity are seen, heard, and experienced, and who is represented both onstage and off. Leslie Odom Jr., who played Aaron Burr in Hamilton’s original cast, remarked of the recent crop of Broadway shows, “The kids being inspired now—they’re going to start writing now, and we’ll see their work in six or seven years.”51 What new worlds might they be able to imagine?

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Acknowledgments My thanks to Joanna Dee Das, Jane Hatter, Hannah Lewis, Catherine Mayes, Anne Searcy, and the editors of this volume for their comments on this chapter; Alyssa Liu for her research assistance; Lin-Manuel Miranda for sharing his time for our 2013 interview; and Craig Schwartz for his help with the featured photograph.

Notes 1 Hamilton: An American Musical also appears as Hamilton, which I use hereafter. 2 An Asian American Performers Action Coalition (AAPAC) report found Broadway had its most diverse season in the ten years for which the organization has data, filling 36% of roles with minority actors: Ethnic Representation on New York City Stages 2015–2016, January 2018, 1–2, 10–11. . 3 Dates are of Broadway premieres. White theatergoers purchased 77% of tickets in the 2015–2016 season: “The Demographics of the Broadway Audience 2016–2017.” New York: The Broadway League, 2018. 24. 4 Lee Seymour. “The Tonys Are Just as White as the Oscars—Here Are the #TonysSoWhite Statistics.” Forbes. 4 Apr. 2016. . 5 See the AAPAC reports on “Ethnic Representation on New York City Stages” available at ; Michael Paulson. “After #OscarsSoWhite, Broadway Seeks a #TonysSoDiverse.” New York Times. 27 Apr. 2016. . 6 Paulson, “After #OscarsSoWhite.” 7 AAPAC, Ethnic Representation 2015–2016, 2. Musicologist Todd Decker similarly found that after the Broadway musical’s especially white period of the late 1980s–early 1990s, casts became more racially integrated in the 2000s: “Jim Crow in Times Square: Racial Segregation as Structural Element of Broadway Musical History” (paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Musicological Society, Vancouver, November 2016). 8 “Go Behind the Curtain,” TeatroStageFest event in conjunction with New York Times “Times Talks” series, 9 June 2008; see also Elizabeth Titrington Craft. “‘Is This What It Takes Just to Make It to Broadway?!’: Marketing In the Heights in the Twenty-First Century.” A Mark, a Yen, a Buck, or a Pound: Money and the Stage Musical at the Millennium. Ed. Jessica Sternfeld and Elizabeth L. Wollman. Special issue of Studies in Musical Theatre 5.1 (2011): 51–53. 9 I use Latinx except when using pre-existing scholarly terms (e.g. pan-Latinoism) or describing characters for whom “Latina” or “Latino” seems most accurate. 10 Bring It On lyrics and dialogue quotations are from Jeff Whitty et al., Bring It On: The Musical Libretto Vocal Book. New York: Bring It On the Musical; distributed by Music Theatre International, n.d. 11 In May 2018, Warner Bros. secured the film rights to the musical: Mike Fleming Jr., “‘In the Heights’: Warner Bros Closing $50M Deal for Movie Rights after Hot Auction.” Deadline Hollywood. 17 May 2018. . 12 My dissertation provides more detail about the issues discussed here: Craft. “Becoming American Onstage: Broadway Narratives of Immigrant Experiences in the United States.” Ph.D. diss., Harvard U, 2014. 274–303. 13 Miranda grew up in Inwood, north of Washington Heights and frequently grouped with it. For demographic information from the period of In the Heights, see Laird W. Bergad. Washington Heights/Inwood Demographic, Economic, and Social Transformations 1990–2005 with a Special Focus on the Dominican Population, Latino Data Project. New York: Center for Latin American, Caribbean and Latino Studies of the City U of New York Graduate Center, 2008. esp. 4, 5. 14 Miranda, interview by author, New York, 5 Nov. 2013. 15 As Todd Decker discusses in his chapter in this volume, “The Multiracial Musical Metropolis: Casting and Race after A Chorus Line,” this diversity of national origins also evokes an idealized multiracial metropolis. 16 Gary M. Segura and Helena Alves Rodrigues. “Comparative Ethnic Politics in the United States: ­Beyond Black and White.” Annual Review of Political Science 9 ( June 2006): 382.

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Elizabeth Titrington Craft 17 On In the Heights as an expression of Latinidad and the ways it challenges conventional gender roles, see Stacy Wolf. Changed for Good: A Feminist History of the Broadway Musical. New York: Oxford UP, 2011. 188–195. 18 In the Heights lyrics and dialogue quotations are from Lin-Manuel Miranda and Quiara Alegría Hudes. “In the Heights”: The Complete Book and Lyrics of the Broadway Musical. Milwaukee: Applause Theatre & Cinema Books, 2013. 19 Nancy Foner and George M. Fredrickson. “Introduction: Immigration, Race, and Ethnicity in the United States: Social Construction and Social Relations in Historical and Contemporary Perspective.” Not Just Black and White: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on Immigration, Race, and Ethnicity in the United States. Ed. Foner and Frederickson. New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2004. esp. 7; G. ­Cristina Mora. Making Hispanics: How Activists, Bureaucrats, and Media Constructed a New American. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2014. On pan-Latinoism in theater, see Alberto Sandoval-Sánchez. José, Can You See?: Latinos On and Off Broadway. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1999. esp. 15; David Román. “Latino Genealogies: Broadway and Beyond—the Case of John Leguizamo.” Performance in America: Contemporary U.S. Culture and the Performing Arts. Durham: Duke UP, 2005. esp. 110, 131–135. 20 Lin-Manuel Miranda. In the Heights Full Score. New York: Williamson Music, 2008; distributed by R&H Theatricals. 358. 21 Miranda, interview by author. 22 “Up with that flag /…/ That beautiful flag / Contains my whole soul.” 23 In the Heights: Chasing Broadway Dreams, Great Performances series, PBS, produced by RadicalMedia, aired 27 May 2009. . 24 The Bring It On film’s screenwriter Jessica Bendinger took legal action against the musical, ending in an undisclosed settlement and a credit noting the musical was inspired by the motion picture. The musical, in fact, more closely resembles Bring It On: All or Nothing (2006), a later, direct-to-DVD film from the series. David Ng. “‘Bring It On’ on Broadway Gives Credit to Movie Screenwriter.” Los Angeles Times. 25 July 2012. . 25 Scott Brown. “Theater Review: The Unexpected Charms of Bring It On: The Musical.” Vulture.com. 1 Aug. 2012. . 26 Todd Decker categorizes such musicals as “interracial shows”: “Jim Crow in Times Square”; Show Boat: Performing Race in an American Musical. New York: Oxford UP, 2012. 4–5. 27 “PLAYBILL EXCLUSIVE: Bring It On’s Lin-Manuel Miranda, Tom Kitt and Amanda Green Sample Their Musical Wares.” 2 July 2012. . 28 Cheerleading is frequently perceived as inauthentic, not a real sport; girls, as Jacqueline Warwick writes, are “generally dismissed and overlooked in cultural analyses…. [T]heir interests and concerns are often regarded with derision (if they are noticed at all).” Charles Isherwood. “‘Bring It On: The Musical’ at Ahmanson Theater.” New York Times. 22 Nov. 2011. ; Warwick. Girl Groups, Girl Culture: Popular Music and Identity in the 1960s. New York: Routledge, 2007. 2. 29 Adam Hetrick. “‘It Ain’t No Thing’: Bring It On: The Musical Cheers On Broadway’s First Transgender Teen Character.” Playbill. 15 Aug. 2012. . The actor who played La Cienega in the original cast is not transgender. On whiteness in musical theater, see Warren Hoffman. The Great White Way: Race and the Broadway Musical. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 2014. 30 See, for example, Lisa A. Keister and Hang Young Lee’s research showing that the wealthiest in the United States in 2010 were largely and disproportionately white and non-Hispanic: “The One Percent: Top Incomes and Wealth in Sociological Research.” Social Currents 1.1 (2014): 18–19. 31 The Occupy Wall Street movement protests formally began after the show’s Atlanta opening but before the national tour and Broadway premiere, raising the question of whether this lyric was added along the way. 32 Matthew W. Hughey defines the “white savior film” as one “in which a white messianic character saves a lower- or working-class, usually urban or isolated, nonwhite character from a sad fate”: The White Savior Film: Content, Critics and Consumption. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 2014. 1. 33 On this sub-genre of the “white savior film,” see Hughey, 52–59. 34 “I Got You” is reminiscent of other songs from teen-focused stage and film musicals from Grease to the High School Musical series.

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Can We “Leave Behind the World We Know”? 35 Rebecca Mead. “All About the Hamiltons.” New Yorker. 9 Feb. 2015. ; Mark Binelli. “‘Hamilton’ Creator Lin-Manuel Miranda: The Rolling Stone Interview.” Rolling Stone. 1 June 2016. . 36 Although not all of Hamilton’s music is hip hop, the moniker of hip hop musical is appropriate, Loren ­Kajikawa writes, because of Hamilton’s broader “engagement with hip hop’s history, culture, and aesthetics.” “‘Young, Scrappy, and Hungry’: Hamilton, Hip Hop, and Race.” American Music 36.4 (2018). 468, 470. 37 Rob Weinert-Kendt. “Rapping a Revolution: Lin-Manuel Miranda and Others from ‘Hamilton’ Talk History.” New York Times. 5 Feb. 2015. . 38 Hamilton lyrics quotations are from Lin-Manuel Miranda and Jeremy McCarter. Hamilton: The Revolution; Being the Complete Libretto of the Broadway Musical, with a True Account of Its Creation, and Concise Remarks on Hip-Hop, the Power of Stories, and the New America. New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2016. 161. 39 Hamilton: An American Musical, Original Broadway Cast Recording, Atlantic 551093-2, 2015, compact disc. 40 As Anne Searcy demonstrates, the show’s dance sometimes offers critique beyond the musical’s spoken text: “Bringing Dance Back to the Center in Hamilton.” American Music 36.4 (2018). 41 The show’s casting call specifies that King George is white. 42 Lyra D. Monteiro argues that certain characters, like Eliza, read as white in addition to making the other ­ iranda’s claims listed here: “Race-Conscious Casting and the Erasure of the Black Past in Lin-Manuel M Hamilton.” The Public Historian 38.1 (2016): 91. See also Ishmael Reed. “‘Hamilton: the Musical’; Black Actors Dress Up like Slave Traders…and It’s Not Halloween.” CounterPunch Magazine. 21 Aug. 2015. ; Donatella Galella. “Racializing the American Revolution: Review of the Broadway Musical Hamilton.” Advocate. 16 Nov. 2015. ; James McMaster. “Why Hamilton Is Not the Revolution You Think It Is.” HowlRound. 23 Feb. 2016. . 43 Monteiro, “Race-Conscious Casting,” 93. 4 4 Elizabeth Titrington Craft, “Headfirst into an Abyss: The Politics and Political Reception of Hamilton.” American Music 36.4 (2018). esp. 430. 45 See Justin A. Williams. “‘We Get the Job Done’: Immigrant Discourse and Mixtape Authenticity in The Hamilton Mixtape.” American Music 36.4 (2018). 46 Nigel M. Smith. “Broadway Hit Hamilton under Fire after Casting Call for ‘Non-White’ Actors.” The Guardian. 31 Mar. 2016. ; Tom Huddleston, Jr., “Broadway Mega-Hit ‘Hamilton’ Criticized Over ‘Non-White’ Casting Call.” Fortune. 30 Mar. 2016. . 47 Brandon Victor Dixon (Aaron Burr in the performance) read the speech, which Miranda, director Thomas Kail, and producer Jeffrey Seller wrote with input from cast members. Christopher Mele and Patrick Healy. “‘Hamilton’ Had Some Unscripted Lines for Pence. Trump Wasn’t Happy.” New York Times. 19 Nov. 2016. . 48 Donald Trump, Twitter posts from 19 Nov. 2016, 5:48am; 19 Nov. 2016, 5:56am; 20 Nov. 2016, 3:22 a.m., . 49 Richard Zoglin. “Life after Rent.” Time. 29 Feb. 2008. . 50 Debates about theatrical casting policies, for example, will continue and likely intensify when the rights to Hamilton become available. Miranda has said that “the note that goes with the school productions” will be: “If this show ends up looking like the actual founding fathers, you messed up”: Weinert-Kendt, “Rapping a Revolution.” 51 Paulson, “After #OscarsSoWhite.”

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22 FALSETTOS AND INDECENT IN THE SHADOW OF FIDDLER ON THE ROOF Reconsidering Jewish Identity on Broadway in the New Millennium Raymond Knapp and Zelda Knapp Between December 2015 and October 2016, two musical revivals and a new play opened in New York, mapping a remarkable century for the representation of and by Jews on Broadway.1 The most commercially successful of the three, Fiddler on the Roof (Joseph Stein, Jerry Bock, and Sheldon Harnick; 1964) ran for over a year, undergoing only modest revision from when it originally appeared at the end of Broadway’s so-called Golden Age. A few months later, Indecent (Paula Vogel, Lisa Gutkin, and Aaron Halva)—a play with musical interludes—illuminated a longer tradition of Jewish theater in New York and retrospectively made Fiddler appear surprisingly conservative, however revolutionary it once seemed. Finally, a daringly staged revival of ­Falsettos (James Lapine and William Finn, 1992)—known more for its quirky confrontation between Jewish traditions and homosexuality and for being the first Broadway musical to engage with the AIDS crisis than for its consideration of Jewish identity as such—offered anew what might be considered Fiddler’s antithesis: a show grounded squarely in current realities of Jewish life in urban America, virtually ignoring Jewry’s European roots. Yet, inescapably, all three productions demonstrate how inseparably intertwined Jewish identity remains with the Holocaust, even well into the twenty-first century. We will consider in this chapter how this constellation of shows newly reconfigures J­ewish identity, both regarding its difficult historical trajectory and its continued relevancy to wider cultural concerns. Fiddler on the Roof tells the story of a Jewish family ca. 1905—Tevye, his wife Golde, and their five daughters—poised between tradition and modernity, just before the entire population of Anatevka, their beloved shtetl, is dispelled by Russian authorities. In situating its story within the larger history of Jewish erasure from Eastern Europe, Fiddler was always indirectly about the Holocaust,2 but the 2015 revival gave that subtext heart-stopping reality by having Tevye enter in modern dress, discover a signpost for the long-vanished village of Anatevka, and then summon the cast, as if from a mass grave, from below the back of the stage. This opening device linked to the show’s concluding reference to the current refugee crisis, with Tevye back in his red parka amid a never-ending cyclical march of refugees. Arguably, the revival also reinforced a conservative tendency that had already set in by the early 1970s, when the somewhat stodgy film version appeared and the show’s record-breaking Broadway run ended. By then, the show’s aspirations toward more universal themes (generational conflict, persecution, diaspora, assimilation versus

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cultural traditions, feminism versus patriarchy), along with its indulgent celebration of Jewish humor, had yielded to a ferocious emphasis on its specifically Jewish character, and to a somberness that rendered its humor bittersweet and quasi-ritualistic. These are slippery claims, to be sure, since Fiddler’s humor does not simply disappear as its quality shifts, and since its Jewish themes had been there from the beginning, fundamental to the show’s agenda to universalize its Jewish perspective.3 Moreover, Fiddler has worn its progressive tendencies proudly, allowing Tevye’s three older daughters to seek their futures outside the patriarchal traditions celebrated (and slyly mocked) in the opening number, “Tradition,” with each daughter reaching farther afield than the last. But even with that quasi-feminist leaning against tradition, the women are given little musical agency. Hodel may sing of her love, in the duet “Now I Have Everything,” but she sings also of the heavy price it exacts, in “Far from the Home I Love.” This may have been enough in the 1960s, when Tevye’s rueful soliloquys about his lessened p­ atriarchal role could allow a newly balanced consideration of key plot elements to emerge regarding female choice and intermarriage.4 Yet, as with many other Broadway revivals that adhere to venerated texts, even when revised according to present-day sensibilities, the politics remain intractably those of the original show, entrenched within its structure and very fabric. With Fiddler’s evocation of traditional Jewish music and its fatherly narrative perspective, the deck was always stacked against its gestures toward rebalancing societal hierarchies, always already conservatively, reassuringly patriarchal in its presentational mode.

In Fiddler’s Shadow A closer look at [Fiddler and God of Vengeance] reveals that they do, in spite of obvious differences in tone and sensibility, share a central theme: Both are father-daughter stories about men destabilized by their little girls’ sexual ripening. (Susan Reimer-Torn) 5 Indecent recounts a story based on historical events: Sholem Asch’s Yiddish play, God of Vengeance, despite controversies regarding its setting in a brothel, its lesbian love story (between the brothel owner’s daughter and a prostitute), and its sacrilegious treatment of the Torah, is mounted successfully in Berlin (1907) and then tours Eastern Europe before being staged for Yiddish-­speaking audiences in New York. But the play’s triumphant march is abruptly halted in 1923 when it transfers to Broadway in a bowdlerized English version, at which point its cast and crew are arrested on charges of obscenity, effectively destroying their professional careers. At the center of Indecent’s action, Sholem Asch writes God of Vengeance while Jews in Europe face persecution and pogroms but not yet genocide. By the time the Broadway cast is prosecuted for obscenity, Asch has withdrawn from playwriting and from society, bitter over the increasingly dire circumstances facing European Jews—including the original European cast of Vengeance—and the American government’s response to his report of atrocities against Jews in Europe, which ironically echoes a line delivered by the brothel owner’s cynical wife in the bowdlerized version of Vengeance: “These things happen.” Just by telling this story, Indecent offers compelling evidence that the conservative patriarchal bent evidenced by Fiddler and its latter-day reception was not the only option for twentieth-­ century Jewish theater. Indeed, a pointed allusion to Fiddler at the beginning of Indecent insists on this comparison, as a solo violin leaps up a fourth to launch the play’s action and introduce musicand dance-styles redolent of East-European Jewry (“Ale Brider”),6 styles that recur episodically throughout the play. As might be expected given the play’s historical span, Indecent’s evocations of the Holocaust are much more overt than Fiddler’s. Projected supertitles in Yiddish and English summon the players (identified as the “Dead Troupe” in the script)7 from the ashes, which spill from their coatsleeves as they begin the play and again near the end, at which point they fall with

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stark finality as the cast joins an “impossibly long line” to the death camps and gas chambers. Falling ash thus frames the main action of the play, bleakly emphasizing the title’s ironic twist regarding what may be deemed “indecent.” Even more pointedly, the device recalls the familiar Biblical phrase, “ashes to ashes” (replaced in the play’s bilingual supertitles by the more optimistic “from ashes they rise”), while offering a grim visual pun on the principal subject’s name. This striking visual reference to the Holocaust—hauntingly poetic, inevitable in its reprise—is then reinforced with stark verbal brutality in the play’s final sequence, as an aging Asch, an accused Communist making his own forced exodus from America to London in 1952, rebukes a young producer who wants to mount his play: “I, too, have lost audience members. Six million … have left the theater.”8 Despite Asch’s bitterness and the fate of his play’s cast and crew, Indecent allows the inner romantic core of Vengeance—its lesbian love story—to emerge with some sense of triumph as the play’s enduring legacy. This romance is spotlighted through the recurring motif of the “Rain Scene,” and its torch is carried by Lemml, whose fierce devotion to their story begins the moment he reads Rif kele’s lines aloud in the salon, follows him to his bitter confrontation with Asch prior to his departure for Europe, and concludes with his despairing wish that the lovers escape (which they do, if only in his mind). The love story lays lasting claim to the narrative as the two women share the final scene together, risen from the ashes, dancing joyously in the rain. The core lesbian story in Indecent is nevertheless dominated by the concerns of men. The internal play, God of Vengeance, was written by a man and focuses more on the brothel owner Yekel than on his daughter Rif kele’s love affair with Manke. But the reclamation of Vengeance by playwright Paula Vogel and director Rebecca Taichman reaffirms the central importance of the lesbian relationship, both the pure innocence of first love and the earthy sensuality of their sexual awakening in the “Rain Scene,” performed first by two men in a salon reading aloud from a script and frequently evoked throughout Indecent as Vengeance’s most important moment. Thus, Madje Asch tells her husband, “You make me feel the desire between these two women is the purest, most chaste, most spiritual—,” a sentiment confirmed subsequently by the Yiddish and American actors who perform it, the stage manager Lemml, and even Eugene O’Neill. Near the end of Indecent, the two young women play the scene with striking variations: shivering and starving in the attic of a Polish ghetto, but then, beautifully, in its original Yiddish while actual stage rain falls upon them, dancing and embracing while an aged Asch looks on wonderingly, the cleansing rain figuratively washing away the ashes that had fallen with such finality just moments before. ­Indecent—unlike Fiddler, which ends resigned to its characters’ displacement—is defiant in its survival. The players may turn to ash, and Asch himself may turn away from the world, but the story and its c­ haracters—and the Jewish people—survive beyond ash and death. Embodying Indecent’s defiant stance, eventually against even the playwright Asch, is its evocative, pointed use of dance music and songs from the period. The songs, in particular, locate the dramatic point somewhat outside the drama we are watching, within an enduring public space that celebrates human connection in its many forms, and echoes that connection long after the humans involved are gone. Unlike songs in a traditional musical, which delineate the specific experiences of the players themselves, the songs and song-fragments in Indecent offer a lens of edgy nostalgia through which we contemplate the stages of the action. Sometimes the numbers are deployed straightforwardly, as in “Ale Brider” and “Vot Ken You Makh in America?” (“What Can You Do in America?,” about accommodating to American behavioral expectations). And they are sometimes ironic, as in “Ain’t We Got Fun?” or when a recording of the title song from Oklahoma! superimposes on the nearly contemporary destruction of the Łódź ghetto. But they can also be much subtler in their delivery, as when “Suitcase in Berlin” is staged to suggest same-sex entanglements with casual frankness. More poignantly, “Bei Mir Bist Du Sheyn” initially delights

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for the nostalgic sound of its blended female voices, redolent of its most popular recorded form in the United States by the Andrews Sisters (1937), but then reverts to Yiddish and a slower tempo with subdued blue lighting, adding a tinge of seduction to its minor mode as the song’s tender celebration of an unorthodox love comes to the fore (thus: “bei mir”), resonating with the play’s lesbian story as a locus of connection. Although it is subtly rendered on stage, the script makes the intention behind this resonance clear, as the “Bagelman Sisters” transition to become Chana and Halina, members of the Dead Troupe.9 And the specific resonance with the play’s lesbian couple is visually confirmed later, when similar lighting and dance moves—with intertwined and encircling arms—bring Manke and Rif kele together in the rain. Here, however, as the two singers walk off, arms entwined, the accompaniment retreats to the background as if in defeat, its residual strains providing a sad underscore to an already unfolding montage of brokenness, which takes us from 1938 to an attic in the Łód ź ghetto five years later. During this montage, an embittered Lemml makes his determined trek back to Poland, slowly walking the perimeter of the stage; the isolated Asch writes his novels at the typewriter (rhythmically punctuating the song); Asch’s friends write to him from Poland, asking for assistance; and a desperate Nakhmen (Lemml’s cousin, a harshly critical voice at the initial reading of Vengeance) fruitlessly attempts to trade on his connection to Asch to secure a visa. When the Dead Troupe at last perform the “Rain Scene” in its entirety in the attic, the emotional climax of requited love is broken off, as the two girls begin singing the lullaby “Wiegala” and take their place with the others in line, with “the smell of smoke and ash”—as the supertitles inform us—“thick in the air.”10 Falsettos arrived on Broadway in 1992 as a two-act musical created by combining two earlier off-Broadway one-acts: March of the Falsettos (1981) and Falsettoland (1990), themselves part of a trilogy of one-act musicals beginning with In Trousers (Off-Broadway, 1979). Each one-act chronicles a different stage in Marvin’s journey of sexual discovery, as he struggles to manage the consequences of his choices. March of the Falsettos picks up where In Trousers leaves off: with Marvin divorcing his wife, Trina, for his male lover, Whizzer, while insisting on maintaining an extended nuclear family involving Trina, Whizzer, and his pre-teen son, Jason. Meanwhile, his therapist Mendel woos and wins Trina, eventually triggering a tantrum from Marvin that dissolves his relationships with both. Since he has already broken up with Whizzer, he is left trying to salvage his remaining connection, to Jason. Falsettoland, set two years later, overlaps the early stages of medical investigations into AIDS and HIV, anticipating the inexorable death-march the disease enacted within the gay community. Marvin and Whizzer reunite, but Whizzer soon shows signs of an unidentified illness (“Something Bad Is Happening,” sung by their doctor friend Charlotte), which is killing him and pushing Marvin to a new level of maturity. The combining of March and Falsettoland into one evening effectively bookends the beginning of the AIDS crisis with the comparatively innocent before and the grim after, offering implicit echoes of the Jewish experience pre- and post-Holocaust.11 Taken together, Indecent and Falsettos delineate a history of twentieth-century Jewish theater in which Fiddler on the Roof is as much aberration as mainstream. True, Fiddler’s place on Broadway was forged by the developments that Andrea Most traces in Theatrical Liberalism and her earlier Making Americans,12 through which Jewish elements became core to the American musical. But if Fiddler seems a culmination, it also stands apart from these developments. As Most argues in Making Americans, by the early 1960s, Jewish musical writers on Broadway “no longer engaged directly with Jewish anxieties about belonging. … [and] began to experiment with musicals involving historical Jewish characters such as Fanny Brice and Tevye. … Historical distance … allowed [them] to sentimentalize the Jewish immigrant without endangering their own highly assimilated identities.”13 Thus, Fiddler cashes in on decades of Broadway’s more subtle advancement of Jewish values and causes, for a long time constituting the closing chapter of a successful quest by Jews

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to secure a place within an institution central to American national identity. More specifically, ­Fiddler’s universalizing themes built on generations of Jewish intersectionality, which created a space in which the problems of marginalized groups could combine forces, in an effort to overturn the exclusionary impulses of xenophobia and nationalism. Emblematic of the period with which Making Americans is most concerned (1925–1950), many Jews working on Broadway made common cause with African-Americans and other minorities, and contributed to strongly liberal trends in musical theater.14 In this, they echoed the spirit of inclusion that informs God of Vengeance, at least as it is celebrated and mourned in Indecent. These alliances, especially with African-Americans, began to break down at precisely the time Fiddler and Funny Girl (1964) began to treat Jews more directly, notwithstanding the prominent role Jews were then playing within the Civil Rights movement. The arrival embodied by these shows, especially Fiddler, served as an overture of sorts, establishing a defensible Jewish homeland on Broadway three years before the Six-Day War would seemingly secure its real-world equivalent. If the rise of Black Power and related movements in the 1960s began simultaneously to tear at Jewish intersectionality, the full price of these arrivals, and their attendant encouragement of more conservative sentiments, has taken a long time to be fully recognized. But by 2016, the rifts were unmistakable, and not just in those Broadway shows that had troubled the relationship between Jews and African-Americans such as Parade (1998) or Caroline, or Change (2004). While many American Jews have made common cause with Black Lives Matter and other groups advocating for minority rights, Israel itself has been increasingly denounced within academia and in the liberal press, in what many would see as a resurgence of anti-Semitism, but is surely more complicated than that. It is in this context that the conservatism of Fiddler—which cleaves to a past world the show itself understands as gone forever—can seem particularly problematic and the cultural work of Indecent and Falsettos can seem so very important, insisting on a continuation of the agenda that had produced a secure space on Broadway for Fiddler in the first place.

Falsettos and Jewish Intersectionality When [Zero Mostel] entered his little house during rehearsals, he would kiss the mezuzah. … Jerry Robbins … said, “Z, you don’t have to kiss the mezuzah.” “I don’t have to kiss the mezuzah?” he muttered. The next time he entered, he crossed himself. From then on, he kissed the mezuzah. –Jerry Zaks15 Both Fiddler on the Roof and Indecent are set in highly profiled pre-World War II Jewish settings, a guarantee in itself to trigger nostalgia and the intense ache of loss that all evocations of pre-­Holocaust Jewish life in Europe evoke, especially among Jews, and most especially among those who lost family in the Holocaust. Both assimilation narratives and intersectionality are necessarily undermined by such settings; in these worlds, Jewish life is in itself uniquely valuable. Falsettos, contrariwise, begins with a bit of hilarious anti-nostalgia, “Four Jews in a Room ­Bitching,” and aside from the Bar Mitzvah that, along with the AIDS crisis, drives the plot in Act II (­“Falsettoland”), little else in the show feels particularly Jewish, or at least the kind of Jewish that remembers its roots, that kisses the mezuzah. Tokens of Falsettos’s differentiation from Fiddler are not hard to find. There is no Tevye to preside over Falsettos. Characters take turns playing the narrator, whose function is minimal, sometimes setting a sardonic tone by acknowledging the constructed nature of musical drama and the voyeuristic act of watching it. But to begin with their beginnings: the revival of Falsettos makes precisely the opposite opening gesture as the revival of Fiddler, where the actor playing Tevye assumes the role only after appearing in modern dress. In “Four Jews,” the four male characters (including ten-year-old Jason) are initially costumed like shepherds “back in biblical times,” then 230

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strip down midway through the number to reveal contemporary clothes beneath their robes and to introduce themselves. Before this point, they evoke through lyrics and choreography several biblical scenes and stories, presented more playfully than reverently, climaxing, in one of the central “miracles of Judaism,” with the parting of the Red Sea. The latter mini-scene happens at the instigation of Trina, the first act’s sole female character, who crosses the stage intoning “Slavery, slavery” while collecting the shepherd’s crooks and staffs, props that the “Four Jews” have just used, with tongues firmly planted in cheeks, to suggest other scenes and characters from the Bible. The most clearly evoked characters in this oddly eclectic quartet are Whizzer’s Samson, combing out his hair with his staff-comb, and Jason’s David slaying Goliath, his crook becoming first a sling and then, with playful anachronism, a bow. Marvin seems to be claiming membership in another biblical quartet, riding his crook-horse toward the apocalypse, while Mendel, more generically, plays a flute and dances. But if the latter point of reference is vague, Mendel is more graphically pointed earlier, when, while singing the show’s first solo lyric, “Whadda they do for love?,” he assumes the pose of Jesus on the cross, his shepherd’s crook the cross-beam, his head tilted, his three companions grouped like those gathered at the foot of the cross in countless paintings. While we may observe that the costuming in both Fiddler and Falsettos seeks to connect the distant past and the present, we must also wonder why the Jews in Falsettos, in evoking that past, would call out, however playfully, such extreme moments in Christian mythology as the Crucifixion and the apocalypse. Because these evocations are layered onto a number that does not refer to Christianity in its lyrics (nor to any other biblical scenes other than the Exodus), we may assume they are inspired by the themes of Act II, and are meant to point obliquely to the apocalypse of the AIDS epidemic, the martyrdom of its victims, and the helplessness of their observers. Indeed, even the use of a red swath of fabric to represent the Red Sea, however playfully literalist, can seem a deeply disturbing presentiment of the AIDS crisis, particularly for the long moment, prior to its “parting,” when red extends across the entire stage. The opening to Act II, on the other hand, does not refer at all to Jews, as Mendel calls out instead to “Homosexuals, women with children, [and] short insomniacs,” categories that may include Jews but need not, and that also accommodate the act’s two new characters, who are not Jewish: Dr. Charlotte and Cordelia, who, as “the lesbians next door,” also fit into the first of Mendel’s categories.16 This reorientation of perspective sets up the show’s main gestures toward intersectionality, through establishing a dialectic between a core Jewish component and a broadened perspective; thus, the AIDS plot will operate, across the act, in dynamic dialog with the Bar Mitzvah plot. Indeed, the addition of Charlotte and Cordelia constitutes a separate gesture toward intersectionality, given the level of tension between gays and lesbians in the early 1990s. For the revival, Charlotte was cast as a woman of color (Tracie Thoms), conforming to the interracial practices cited earlier. Act II also extends and resolves the central problem of Act I, which enacts a kind of human-scale puzzle game wherein the adults are both players and tokens. For Marvin, the game-playing symbolizes an extended refusal to grow up. For Jason it reflects an evolving childhood that will by the end of the act partly displace chess with girls. For Mendel—Marvin’s therapist and his ex-wife’s future husband—it points to his presumptuous tendency to rationalize inappropriate behavior. And for Whizzer it represents something between Jason’s youthful changeability and Marvin’s refusal of adulthood. In “I’m Breaking Down,” Trina plays, too, if ruefully, indulging the phallic imagery of her “banana-carrot surprise” (a sequence omitted from the cast album).17 But, more typically, she plays the grownup, complaining in “Trina’s Song” (just after accepting Mendel’s proposal), “They grow, but don’t mature … Their toys are people’s lives. … I’m tired of all the happy frightened men who rule the world. Stupid, charming men. Silly, childish jerks.” The basis for her plaint is immediately confirmed by the men themselves, who, in “March of the Falsettos,” seem simultaneously figments of Trina’s fantasies and true to their characters’ own inclinations, describing themselves as 231

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“Four men swaying in phosphorescence, … replaying their adolescence. … It’s a goddamn surety we’re lacking in maturity,” enacting their childishness through every absurd move. Growing up involves pain; the beginning stages of that process are driven, in Act I, by failure. Marvin’s games with Whizzer fail—literally, during a chess game between two manipulative people that is neither taken seriously nor entirely a game—and they break up. Marvin’s high-stakes game with Trina fails when he cannot accept her marriage to Mendel and strikes her in front of their son and her fiancé. But at the end of the act, these isolating failures lead him to a new maturity, expressed poignantly in “Father to Son” and given gestural focus when he gently pushes Jason’s chess set to the side in response to his son’s effort to escape. Marvin, through this gesture and the controlled intensity of the song, insists instead that they focus on each other, without mediation, as he tries to chart Jason’s path to adulthood. Maturity in Falsettos connects directly to the capacity to love, and before the final number of Act I, the latter receives very little expression. Instead, Jason withdraws; Marvin spars with Whizzer and Trina; Mendel manipulates, then awkwardly proposes marriage; Trina accepts a marriage of convenience; the new couple sets up a household around an unhappy Jason, as if they are playing a board game. In Act II, however, the lesbians next door and Whizzer’s return provide occasions for new models of expressed love before disaster strikes. The upbeat tone of Charlotte and Cordelia’s portions of “A Day in Falsettoland” and the sentimental sweetness of Marvin’s “What More Can I Say” are so strikingly new that they would be cloying without the counterpoint of Mendel and Trina’s discontent, the squabbling over Jason’s Bar Mitzvah, the fact that “What More” is sung in bed, nude, one man about the other asleep in his arms, or without our background awareness that such happiness comes too early in the act not to be the prelude to tragedy. Importantly, too, baseball replaces chess for Jason (conveniently bringing Whizzer back aboard, just in time to coach him to success), and a round of racquetball shows Marvin and Whizzer managing their differing abilities with greater equanimity than they had in their earlier round of chess. A new stage of maturity—or capacity to love—comes with more difficulty for the others. Mendel makes little if any progress, although Trina achieves a breakthrough in “Holding to the Ground,” as does Jason, who—right on cue with his official progression to adulthood—­ decides not to cancel his Bar Mitzvah, but rather to hold it in Whizzer’s hospital room. The onset and progression of AIDS functions, through the pain it brings, as the direct agent of Trina’s and Jason’s maturation, and of Marvin’s full arrival to adulthood, an aspect of the plotting that is given crucial reinforcement through staging. Throughout Act I, all the stage furniture is pulled from a large, gray puzzle cube, reassembled to create the required individual settings, each step reinforcing the act’s thematic use of games and game-playing, culminating in Mendel and Trina’s “Making a Home.” But when, at the beginning of Act II, the cityscape created through these shapes tumbles to the ground, the game-playing is essentially over. The shapes gradually disappear from the stage, cleared to make room for the racquetball court, used minimalistically to suggest the lesbians’ apartment or Mendel’s office, and reduced by the onset of the crisis to a single bench-like shape. Immediately after, when Whizzer collapses on the court, Trina brings on the show’s first actual furniture—a chair—as she begins “Holding to the Ground,” providing the first component of what will be Whizzer’s final reality: the hospital room. In the final sequence, after the Bar Mitzvah celebration and Marvin’s farewell to Whizzer (“What Would I Do?”), the large puzzle cube returns to the stage, and from it a single shape is removed to serve as Whizzer’s headstone, leaving a disturbingly deep void in the cube’s face, directly evoking, like the ­Homosexuellen-Denkmal in Berlin, the opening of a mausoleum, a World War II bunker—or an oven, an all-too-familiar image from the Holocaust.18 If at the beginning of the show Trina can play the intersectionality card with immunity, as a playful engagement with ritual (“Slavery, slavery”), we are here, in the end, at the grim intersection of human tragedy.

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In creating a musical setting that reflects modern Jewish life without overemphasizing its J­ewishness, Finn in Falsettos parallels Sondheim, who despite a strongly etched Jewish sensibility only rarely makes a point of Jewishness itself—a parallel reinforced by an often observed stylistic affinity, involving a “brittle” musical style overlaid with conversational and clever lyrics.19 Yet, despite these affinities, Finn is considerably more willing than Sondheim to activate Jewishness, to evoke Jewish intersectionality, and, more generally, to impose his own experiences and attitudes on his characters. It is in this context of partial affinities with an earlier generation of Broadway composers that Falsettos might be seen not as opposing Fiddler’s encrusted conservatism, but as adapting its structural features to different ends, already observed in its reversal of Fiddler’s opening device. But the parallels run much deeper, evident even before these revivals brought a new focus to them. Both shows open with a number that establishes a seemingly secure world in which Jews squabble as a way of life. Both include a character who speaks confrontationally to God, although with another neat reversal, since that character is the father in Fiddler and the son in Falsettos. The wives in both shows attempt to find love within a marriage whose rationale is, initially, decidedly not love. Both shows, after their opening numbers, proceed to undercut the traditions that provide stability to their respective worlds, and then partially to restore tradition around the very thing that has upset it. Thus, Fiddler presents a traditional wedding around Tzeitel’s untraditional act of choosing her own husband, whereas Marvin attempts to create an extended family unit after his divorce, including both his previous family and Whizzer. By the end of the first act, in both, these attempts end in disaster, but retain some basis for continued hope. In their second acts, however, they each confront an implacable enemy while holding to Jewish traditions as a means for extending family to a sustaining larger community, even in the face of the sure knowledge—in the audience, at least—of a grim fate awaiting large numbers in that extended community. Thus, given Marvin’s renewed sexual relationship with Whizzer earlier in the act and Dr. Charlotte’s chilling reprise of “Something Bad” (“something … that spreads from one man to another”) we end the show knowing Marvin’s extreme risk without knowing his actual fate, just as, with Fiddler, we must imagine what awaits those who leave for Siberia, for Kraków, for America, for Jerusalem. Falsettos’s story of AIDS in the context of Jewish homosexuality thus runs in direct parallel to Fiddler’s story of Anatevka’s destruction as a foreshadowing of the Holocaust, whether by intention or by some invisible hand directing how Jewish stories ought to be told. Arguably, however, Falsettos reengages Jewish intersectionality, with the AIDS crisis displacing older intersections based on shared histories of slavery or diaspora. These structural affinities obliquely reinforce this reengagement, taking full advantage not only of the ways that Fiddler has become the single most important emblem of Jewish culture relevant to Broadway, but also of that show’s capacity to stand in for Jewish loss more generally, as it surely does in the haunting opening of Indecent.

Notes 1 Fiddler on the Roof opened December 20, 2015 and closed December 31, 2016; Indecent opened off-­ Broadway May 17, 2016, transferred to Broadway April 18, 2017, and closed August 6, 2017; Falsettos opened October 27, 2016 and closed January 8, 2017. Drafts of this chapter were read at “American Culture and the Jewish Experience in Music” (UCLA 5–7 Nov. 2017), and at UT, Austin (8 Dec. 2017); the authors wish to thank audience members, along with the editors, for their useful interventions. 2 See, e.g., Raymond Knapp. The American Musical and National Identity. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton UP, 2005. 215–216. 3 Reaching for universality in this way can backfire. Early editions of Anne Frank’s The Diary of a Young Girl (including the 1959 film) were seen to efface much of the title character’s Jewish identity in attempting to universalize her story (Ruth Franklin. “Did Anne Frank Really Have An ‘Infinite Human Spirit’?” The New Republic. 8 Mar. 2011. Web. 4 Aug. 2017. ). Similarly, the 2004 revival of Fiddler was seen to have lost its “Jewish soul” (Thane Rosenbaum. “A Legacy Cut Loose.” Los Angeles Times. 15 Feb. 2004). For related discussions, see Jill Dolan. “Wondering about Fiddler on the Roof at Arena Stage.” The Feminist Spectator. 17 Dec. 2014. Web. 4 Aug. 2017. . 4 See Andrea Most. Theatrical Liberalism: Jews and Popular Entertainment in America. New York: New York UP, 2013. 152–160, who concludes, “while the daughters stride confidently into the future on paths dictated by their hearts, the play is ultimately unsure whether parents or children will have the better life” (159). 5 Susan Reimer-Torn. “The Brothel Owner and the Milkman.” Jewish Currents. 28 Apr. 2017. Web. 19 June 2018. . 6 “Ale Brider” (“Brothers All”), a Yiddish workers’ song, flips gender for a later verse, which, had it been included, would have called out the brothel owner’s wife and daughter by name (Sarah and Rif kele), along with the Americanized name of the actress playing the latter (Ruth): “Sore, Riveke, Rut un Ester.” 7 Paula Vogel. Indecent. New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2017. All references to Indecent, including Yiddish spellings, are to the published script unless noted. 8 Asch’s reference to an extended audience, now gone, recalls an earlier scene, when Peretz, the host for the salon reading of the play, asks, “Asch. Asch. Who is your audience?” and Asch replies, “I want to write for everyone.” 9 The Bagelman Sisters (later, the Barry Sisters) capitalized on the Andrews Sisters’ success with “Bei Mir” to take their own careers mainstream, as performers of Yiddish songs in swing style. 10 As the script explains, “‘Wiegala’ was written by Ilse Weber, a nurse at the Children’s Hospital at ­Theresienstadt … for the children in the wards. When it came time for the children to be transported to Auschwitz, Ilse volunteered to go with them. It is said she sang this song in line to the chambers: ‘The wind plays on the lyre, the nightingale sings, the moon is a lantern … sleep, my little child, sleep.’” 11 This connection was made earlier and more explicitly in Larry Kramer’s The Normal Heart (1985); Kramer’s stand-in Ned Weeks asks, with irrepressible fury, “What causes silence like that?” and laments, “It’s happened before. It’s all happened before.” Other plays that address the AIDS crisis early on include William M. Hoffman’s As Is (1985), Tony Kushner’s Angels in America (1991/1993), and Larry Kramer’s The Destiny of Me (1992), while other plays, including Lanford Wilson’s Burn This (1987), Scott McPherson’s Marvin’s Room (1990), and Paula Vogel’s The Baltimore Waltz (1992), respond more obliquely to the crisis. 12 Andrea Most. Making Americans: Jews and the Broadway Musical. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2004. 13 Ibid., 196. 14 At the same time, Jews on Broadway and in Hollywood continued to proliferate African-American stereotypes through blackface, and employed business practices that marginalized their contributions. Core here is the articulation between assimilation and intersectionality, strategies that could be opposed to each other (as in the practice of blackface), but were at other times closely allied, as in much of the work of Rodgers and Hammerstein. ­ ostel’s 15 Jeremy Gerard. “Director Jerry Zaks on the Love Stories behind ‘Hello, Dolly!’ – And Zero M Mezuzah.” Deadline Hollywood. 24 May 2017. Web. 6 Aug. 2017. . 16 Mendel’s list concludes with “and a teeny tiny band,” referring first to the orchestra, later to the cast and Mendel’s wedding ring, and, finally, to those who remain to mourn Whizzer. 17 The symbolism specifically targets the three men in Trina’s life: she chops two bananas, one unpeeled (Whizzer is only half-Jewish), then inspects a pathetically limp carrot. 18 See (Web. 1 July, 2019). This visual allusion topically parallels the huge AIDS Quilt backdrop at the ending of the first full staging of Falsettos (Howard Sherman. “Before Broadway’s ‘Falsettos,’ Hartford Stage’s Changed Lives.” Web. 12 June 2018. ). 19 See, e.g., Thomas S. Hischak’s. “William Finn (1952–).”Contemporary Gay American Poets and Playwrights: An A-to-Z Guide. Ed. Emmanuel S. Nelson. Westport and London: Greenwood Press, 2003. 162–171, 168–169.

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PART 6

Reading the Musical through Dance

This collection of chapters focuses on bodies in motion. Dancing is often undervalued as a key factor in musical theater meaning and history, despite its centrality to many productions and its status as one of the three elements that create a “triple threat” performer. Thanks to a growing number of committed musical theater scholars like the ones featured herein—as well as the recent return in popularity of dance- and movement-heavy shows like Hamilton—our field is finally beginning to address the layered, culturally loaded meanings of dance on the musical theater stage. What is dance in musical theater? How has it functioned in the past, and how has it changed at present? How does it relate to other dance genres, including historical dance, social dance, or dance styles associated with pop and rock music? How do choreographers enforce, undermine, or otherwise interpret the meaning of a show with their contributions? In this section, Joanna Dee Das uses the 2000 dance musical Contact to question the very definition of a musical. A show consisting of constant dance, but no singing or original or live music, Contact was critically and commercially successful, but it still confused plenty of critics, audiences, and Tony voters when it appeared on Broadway. In her chapter, Das explores the controversy surrounding Contact, not with the goal of pinning down a genre label for the piece, but rather to explore what is at stake when a piece pushes the boundaries of what a musical is supposed to be by prioritizing dance so boldly. Next, Liza Gennaro examines the ways dance is approached in revivals: what choices does a choreographer have with the revival of a dance-heavy musical? How do new choreographers balance cultural memory with the need to freshen up old chestnuts—do they retain the original choreography, modify and update it, or toss it out completely and start anew, despite audience familiarity with the original moves? Finally, Phoebe Rumsey explores the impressive range of dance styles presented in Hamilton, arguing that choreographer Andy Blankenbuehler’s nearly perpetual movement vocabulary carries the story at least as much as the music and lyrics do. The dance and gestures create a parallel, informative historical narrative that reinforces and comments on the storyline. Any musical, whether dance-heavy or not, presents bodies on stage for audiences to look at. Those bodies might be healthy, typical, disabled, or atypical, whether they are in constant motion or barely moving at all. All choices by any creative team, about any body or mind at work onstage, have a significant impact on how we understand what we are taking in.

23 WHAT MAKES A MUSICAL? Contact (2000) and Debates About Genre at the Dawn of the Twenty-First Century Joanna Dee Das

In her introduction to The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Theater, Nadine George-Graves questions why people in the twenty-first century still seem to care so deeply about defining a performance as either dance or theater.1 As her primary example of a show that blurred these genres, GeorgeGraves discusses Contact. Contact won the 2000 Tony Award for Best Musical despite having no singing, no live music, no original score, and almost no dialogue. Instead, dance was the show’s primary medium of communication. After the Tony Awards, New York Post critic Clive Barnes remarked that Contact was the “luckiest” show of the Broadway season, given that “the entire musical is in effect nothing but three ballets.”2 Bestowing the Best Musical designation on Contact—during the first Tony Award ceremony of the new millennium, no less—sparked enormous debate. Those who weighed in generally framed their arguments in aesthetic or philosophical terms. Musicians, composers, orchestrators, and librettists argued that Contact was not a musical given its lack of musical elements. Theater critics defended Contact’s categorization because the show’s music and dance transported audiences to another world, and thus served the genre’s existential purpose. George-Graves underscored the theatrical nature of Contact, given that the show incorporated character, plot, and “silent method acting,” but also recognized that it “substitute[ed] orality with corporeality.”3 When viewed through an aesthetic lens, Contact comes across as a fairly clear-cut dance production: the show’s performers respond to recorded music with movement, which is standard practice in dance concerts but anomalous in the live-music world of musical theater. The limited theatrical techniques employed, even the snippets of dialogue, have been part of concert dance for decades. Its format was three short acts connected not by plot but by theme—again, a typical format for concert dance but rare for musicals. What the aesthetic debates miss is that economic and political motivations influence genre categorization. Pamyla Stiehl argues that a musical is a “Golden Triangle” comprised of music, dance, and text.4 If we think of that triangle instead as a three-legged stool, then commercial enterprise is, in Elizabeth Craft’s words, the “foundation”—the floor upon which the stool sits.5 Creators Susan Stroman and John Weidman originally described Contact as a “dance play,” but soon after its Off-Broadway debut at the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater of Lincoln Center, Contact was rebranded as a musical. Within months the show moved to the Vivian Beaumont Theater, the official Broadway playhouse of Lincoln Center, making it Tony-eligible. As a genre, musicals have a wider audience and make more money than dance productions. During the 2002 fiscal year—the first such year that data were collected for dance performances in New York, and a year 236

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during which Contact was still running on Broadway—one million people saw shows classified as dance concerts in New York City, spending $61 million on tickets. In contrast, 11 million people attended Broadway productions that season, and ticket sales grossed $643 million.6 The Tony Awards offer greater recognition than the New York Dance and Performance Awards, known as the “Bessies.” By marketing itself as a Broadway show and winning the Tony for Best Musical, Contact was able to achieve a different level of financial success and stature. There was also a political consideration. Beginning in the early 1980s and accelerating in the 1990s under Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, multinational corporations became heavily involved in the real estate of Times Square and the financing of musicals. Instead of individual producers, whose idiosyncratic artistic visions could lead them to take chances on new ideas, corporate production teams like Disney Theatrical Productions proceeded more conservatively, putting money into revivals, musicals based on successful films, and productions that had established themselves in Europe. Many such shows relied more on technological effects and less on the power of embodied performance. Les Misérables and Phantom of the Opera, which had almost no dancing, became international sensations for which Broadway was less an end goal than a launching pad for even greater global profits. The smash-hit success of two Disney endeavors, Beauty and the Beast (1994) and The Lion King (1997)—the latter which as of 2019 is the ­h ighest-grossing musical of all time—seemed to cement the trend of corporate dominance by the late 1990s.7 The debate about Contact’s legitimacy as a musical, therefore, quickly became a proxy for larger debates about who had power over Broadway’s future at the dawn of the new millennium. Was Contact, developed in a basement rehearsal room at the nonprofit Lincoln Center complex, an artistic David that challenged the commercial Goliath of Disney? Or, conversely, in its exclusion of singers, musicians, orchestrators, and other personnel typically associated with Broadway, was Contact’s creative team ultimately not much different than the corporate producers whom many felt were “destroying” the artistic integrity of the American stage musical? Less explicitly, was the debate over Contact a missed opportunity for the field of dance? Instead of claiming ownership of Contact and thus demonstrating the power of dance to reach and profit from a broader audience, many dance critics disparaged the show, expressing wonderment that audiences and theater critics seemed to enjoy it. Nor did others in the dance community make much effort to capitalize on the show’s success, confirming social theorist Pierre Bourdieu’s claim that those who see themselves in the realm of “high” culture “inver[t]…the logic of the larger economy of the society.”8 Furthermore, though Lincoln Center has historically been a site for concert dance, the specific venues for Contact within the performing arts complex typically showcased plays and musicals, not dance concerts. Popularity, profits, and expansion into new spaces lowered, rather than raised, Contact’s cultural capital.

The Creation of Contact: Not Just Another Dansical Contact was not the first show on Broadway to feature dance as its dominant communicative medium. Bob Fosse’s Dancin’ (1978) was the first that Stiehl considers a fully realized “dansical,” which she defines as “an all-dance production created by a recognized, authoritative Broadway choreographer/director and intended as a musical theater work for a Broadway audience,” which “puts choreography and dance at the forefront.”9 After Dancin’, the dansical disappeared for 21 years, until a cluster of shows emerged in the late 1990s and early 2000s: Fosse (1999), which won the Tony for Best Musical, Swing! (1999), Contact (2000), and Movin’ Out (2002). During those years, the Tony administrative committee also decided to count two all-dance productions— Matthew Bourne’s Swan Lake (1998) and Riverdance (1999)—as musicals, with Bourne winning Tonys for Best Choreography and Best Direction of a Musical in 1999. 237

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Given that the “dansification” of Broadway was in full swing, why did Contact alone become so controversial?10 Despite sharing several characteristics with these other productions, Contact uniquely had no live music. Swing!, Fosse, and Movin’ Out were fully sung and orchestrated; Riverdance and Swan Lake, which had no singing, nevertheless used live orchestras. Furthermore, Contact was neither a revue nor a cohesive narrative, the two primary structural forms of musical theater, but instead built of vignettes. These differences not only altered its aesthetic qualities but also its relationship to the economy of Broadway. Contact’s uniqueness was linked to its creation story, which unfolds like an artist’s fantasy and contributed to its championing as a “pure” process in contrast to the corporate culture of late 1990s Broadway.11 A nonprofit institution has such faith in an artist that it gives her free rein to create whatever she wants. She gathers the perfect group of people, intentionally diverse in look and movement style, who magically fit synergistically together. She gives them agency to be co-creators, investing them in the process. She encourages dancers to find their inner actors and actors to find their inner dancers. Paid a modest $300 or so a week, with no guarantee of r­ eaching the stage, the performers create “something out of nothing” in a concrete basement rehearsal room.12 Improbably, in the era of corporate bankrolling and spectacular special effects, the modest production built on the simple idea of human contact wins the first Tony for Best Musical of the new millennium. Contact’s creation was not entirely a Cinderella story, however. The artist in question was Susan Stroman, Tony Award-winning choreographer for Crazy for You (1992) and the 1994 revival of Show Boat. When the executive directors of Lincoln Center offered her this workshop opportunity, they were hardly betting on an unknown entity. While Stroman’s aesthetic does not have a definitive movement style associated with it like Fosse, she is known for incorporating props and lots of classic “showstopping” numbers like synchronized line dances. In a synchronized line dance, performers execute identical steps simultaneously, with the same quality and lines of the body (i.e. they will all kick their right leg at the same height), to the same rhythm. The repetition and mirroring, the exactitude and coordination of body positions, transform human beings into a visual spectacle of movement machines. Paradoxically, this detachment from the human gives audiences an affective feeling of joy and wonder. Stroman is also acclaimed for giving her dancers depth of character, which seems to contradict her tendency to include machine-like precision and prop interaction in her choreography.13 It also makes her the perfect director-choreographer for a show that blurs theater and dance. Journalists lauded Stroman’s methodology of “researching” backstories for the characters in Contact as further evidence of the show’s uniqueness.14 Earlier in the twentieth century, choreographers Agnes de Mille and Jerome Robbins similarly asked dancers to flesh out motivations and emotions to inform their dancing; Stroman has cited Robbins as an inspiration for her character-driven work.15 The surprise critics expressed that Stroman would ask a dancer to have ­emotional depth points to historical amnesia about these earlier efforts. Furthermore, many people still think of dance productions as either too abstract or stuck in an outmoded form of storytelling to have the same gravitas as theatrical productions.16 While perhaps unfair, this assertion contains a grain of truth, since anti-theatrical bias still exists in dance. Dancers in the United States have been telling stories and communicating truths about the human condition for well over a century, but until recently few of them received training in acting. Within newer musical theater productions, dancers may collectively convey a certain emotion or mood, but often do not express anything individually. Choreographer George Balanchine’s famous quotes, “Don’t think, dear, do,” and “don’t act, just dance,” have permeated dance studios across the United States, where students are told to get “out of their heads” and into their bodies, as if the two were separate entities. Multiple cast members in Contact confirmed in interviews that they experienced these injunctions against individual expressivity as dancers until working with Stroman on the show.17 238

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Stroman’s story of her inspiration for Contact, which sounds unbelievable and makes for a good tale, also contributed to the emotionally compelling effect of its creation myth. While doing research for a film project, she happened into a pool parlor in SoHo (a neighborhood in lower Manhattan) that became a swing dance club after midnight. Stroman observed as a woman in a yellow dress walked onto the dance floor and “stared down prospective dance partners.” When men approached her to dance, this mysterious woman would accept or reject them with a quick motion of her head. She refused to dance with anyone for more than one song, either moving on to the next partner or leaving the floor.18 Stroman told writer John Weidman (of Assassins and Pacific Overtures renown) the story, and they both fell in love with the idea that a girl in a yellow dress “was gonna change somebody’s life” through the singular experience of a three-minute dance. Weidman was further intrigued by the strict limitations imposed on the encounter: “My experience as a kid was that you hoped dancing would be a prelude to something else—a date, necking, something. The notion that this person was using dance as a very limited and defined way of making contact with other people seemed like a riveting image to me.”19 The yellow dress, whether actually seen by Stroman or borne from her imagination, seemed a perfect costume choice. Red or black would too easily suggest willful seduction; blue, a sense of melancholy; pink, lighthearted flirtatiousness. Yellow could be sexy but more importantly, vibrant and life-affirming.

From Workshop to Broadway Building from the central theme of physical contact through dance as a life-giving force, Stroman and Weidman created a one-hour dance piece. The main character is a middle-aged advertising executive named Michael Wiley (created by Boyd Gaines), who wins awards and drinks with friends, but whose life lacks deep meaning. He tries and fails to commit suicide. In a dream, he stumbles around the streets of New York and happens upon a swing club. He watches, mesmerized, as the Girl in the Yellow Dress (created by Deborah Yates) commands the dance floor among couples clad in black. Wiley works up the courage to ask her to dance. Their climactic moment of physical connection happens during the clarinet solo of Benny Goodman’s “Sing, Sing, Sing.” This dance gives Wiley liberation, redemption, and a reason to live. When he awakes from this dream, his downstairs neighbor appears—a woman in yellow pajamas, also played by Yates—and together they dance as the lights fade.20 After attendees at a workshop performance on February 13, 1999 “went nuts” over “Contact,” 21 Lincoln Center gave the green light to develop the one-hour piece into a full show. Slightly confusingly, “Contact” remained the title for the second act of Contact, and two new scenes comprised a first act. Scene one, “Swinging,” is based on Jean-Honoré Fragonard’s painting The Swing (1768). An instrumental jazz recording of Rodgers and Hart’s “My Heart Stood Still” provides the soundtrack. As the lights come up, a servant pushes a woman on a swing as she flirts with a male aristocrat lounging on the ground. When she sends her suitor offstage to procure more champagne, she and the servant copulate in various positions on the swing. When the aristocrat returns, a twist occurs: he and the servant switch jackets. 22 The whole escapade has been a play on the idea of “swinging,” with the theme of contact taken quite literally. Scene two, “Did You Move?”, has no obvious relationship to the “swing” theme but does express the yearning for human connection. At an Italian restaurant in Queens in 1954, an abusive husband ( Jason Antoon) and his nervous, chattering wife (Karen Ziemba) sit down to dinner. When he rises to go to the buffet table, he commands her, “Don’t fuckin’ move.”23 In a staged fantasy (signaled by dimmed lights) she escapes his strictures by dancing balletically to music by Tchaikovsky and Bizet. Eventually, one of the waiters joins her for an amorous pas de deux. The 239

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scene demonstrates Stroman’s facility with props choreography: the duo navigates food carts, tables, chairs, and patrons as they leap and pirouette. The fantasy dissolves when the husband returns and asks suspiciously, “Did you fucking move?”24 In both this scene and the second act “Contact,” dance provides a lifeline. When the show opened at the Newhouse on October 7, 1999, critics extended the notion of dancing to save one’s life as metaphor for the show itself: the dance-centric Contact would save the dying genre of musical theater, even though its creators and the Playbill called it a “dance play.” Ben Brantley of the New York Times wrote that Contact’s “timing is merciful indeed. It had been looking as if the red-blooded American musical would succumb to fatal anemia before the century’s end…‘Contact’ achieves what few musicals do these days: a sense of euphoric connection between the audience and what is happening on the stage.”25 In the New York Post, Donald Lyons stated, “what’s been lost on Broadway is found at Lincoln Center.”26 In the New Yorker, John Lahr criticized dominant musical trends, namely revivals that had “spread like kudzu over the theater district” and shows that sucked the “fun” out of musicals by carrying “more intellectual baggage than [they] can successfully bear.” He posited that “the effect [of the dancing in Contact] is startling and fresh and free from the infernal pretentiousness of so much Broadway spectacle.”27 Some questionable assumptions underpinned these critics’ responses. The first was that the musical was a dying genre. Declension narratives about the musical had existed for decades, with the chorus of voices mourning its demise grown louder since the end of the putative “Golden Era” in the early 1960s. If true, however, Broadway had either been on life support for over 30 years (a rather attenuated death), or the axiom was simply a cliché spoken so often that it took on the ­veneer of truth. The latter seems more likely: Broadway attendance figures increased from the 1970s to the year 2000, and have continued to rise in the twenty-first century.28 The second assumption was that one can categorize a musical not by aesthetic form, but rather by feeling. Brantley indicated that a musical should create euphoria; Lahr that it should be “fun.” The effusive praise from critics, as well as their designation of Contact as a musical, changed its trajectory. Brantley’s glowing review inspired producers to declare the very next day that they planned to move the show to Broadway. Within 48 hours, Contact had sold out its entire extended run. Some aspects of Contact did not seem to warrant such adoration. Much about the show’s premise lacked originality, especially in the second-act “Contact.” A single, white, male, ­m iddle-aged advertising executive is certainly a clichéd symbol of an empty life. Similarly, it is hardly original to use “Sing, Sing, Sing” as a climactic dance number: Goodman’s tune is also featured in Dancin’, Fosse, and Swing!, the last two of which were running on Broadway as Stroman was developing Contact. Nevertheless, Contact’s almost-exclusive use of embodiment to tell stories was unique for Lincoln Center Theater subscribers and audiences accustomed to musical theater. Beyond mere embodiment, furthermore, the relentless kineticism was a departure from a typical theatrical production. At the restaurant and swing club, patrons kept moving and dancing as the plots developed. Furthering the kinetic intensity, Contact transformed spectators into participants. At the Newhouse, the audience surrounded the thrust stage, sitting close enough for the performers to fling sweat and spit on them. In Act II, spectators were in many ways in the swing club, looking not only at the dancers, but also at audience members sitting across from them. People bought tickets to see the show multiple times from different vantage points, catching different individualized moments of connection. Stroman’s meticulous, precise choreography filled the tiny space. Dancers flipped off of chairs, partnered each other on a pool table, and kept in constant motion, even when props whizzed around them. The kinetic vibrancy would be impressive on a stage of any size, but to experience what Contact cast member Nina Goldman calls a “high energy, high-octane” environment so close up elicited an overwhelming affective response from the 240

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audience.29 While the theme of “making contact” with other human beings is perhaps so broad as to be potentially meaningless, Stroman’s unique way of conveying that message struck a chord. In March 2000, Contact moved to Broadway. This migration was more metaphorical than physical: the production traded in the Newhouse for the Beaumont Theater, located just one floor above in the same Lincoln Center building. While less intimate than the Newhouse, the B ­ eaumont still featured the thrust stage that immersed the audience in the production. Nevertheless, the metaphorical move had concrete consequences. Contact resided uptown at Lincoln Center along with the Metropolitan Opera, the New York Philharmonic, and New York City Ballet—a triumvirate of highbrow art. At the same time, Contact was now officially a Broadway musical, and thus the essence of middlebrow entertainment. The attempt to have it both ways caused some problems. Contact ran for 1,010 performances, closing on September 1, 2002. While a decent run, cast member Seán Martin Hingston posits that given how much audiences loved it, the show C ­ ontact could have had a longer life had it relocated to Times Square, Broadway’s geographic and economic heart.30 Then again, becoming a Broadway musical heightened expectations. A backlash occurred among some critics who complained that the vaunting of Contact was overblown hype.31 The show’s new genre designation also increased scrutiny. An Off-Broadway dance production in a nonprofit theater could be applauded for its uniqueness; now that it competed with other ­Broadway musicals for market share, questions arose about the appropriateness of calling it a musical.

Genre Trouble Such questions multiplied in April 2000 when the Tony Award Administration Committee announced that Contact would be eligible for nomination as Best Musical. The musicians’ union, Local 802, officially objected. One member of the Tony nominating committee resigned in protest, calling the decision a “disinvestment in the future of the art form.”32 A few weeks later, nine orchestrators sent a letter to American Theater Wing president Roy Somlyo, League of American Theaters and Producers Executive Director Jed Bernstein, and Edgar Dobie, managing producer of the 2000 Tony Awards, urging “in the strongest terms to reconsider” the decision. The letter argued, to “allow a dance play utilizing recorded standards to be considered denigrates the live theatrical art form of the musical. Having participated as members of the creative team on numerous Broadway musicals, we are disturbed at the lack of recognition for the musical creativity implicit in your decision.”33 Stroman and Weidman, who had decided to call Contact a dance play when it originally premiered, now defended their “musical” against these accusations. Stroman stated, I love musicians….What I haven’t heard mentioned is that we are paying royalties for every song we use, which means that all those musicians are earning money, and probably enough to pay for seven orchestras. Overall, though, I think these controversies are blown out of proportion. ‘Les Mis’ has no dance at all. Does that mean it’s not a musical? I think it doesn’t matter, all these definitions.34 Stroman overlooked the fact that paying royalties for recorded music was not the same as paying working musicians whose livelihoods depended on Broadway productions. Nor did she acknowledge that the three-legged stool of a musical is undeniably uneven: most people assume that a musical will contain singing, but not necessarily dancing. Instead of bolstering her argument that she cared about musicians, her point that it cost even more money to pay the royalties only seemed to reinforce her flouting of the genre’s traditions: it was expensive to break the rules, but she did so anyway. She and cast members insisted that live music would destroy the creative integrity of the show. The score for the second-act “Contact” came from the main character Wiley’s CD 241

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collection; songs from his life fueled his fantasy of the club. Ironically, of course, swing clubs typically feature live bands and singers. A fundamental premise of the swing form is its intimate, improvisatory interaction between musicians and dancers.35 But because of the creative choice to infuse this particular club with the pop tunes of Wiley’s CD rack, Stroman and Weidman felt that the two scenes in the first act should also have recorded music.36 Theater critics rose to Stroman’s defense, arguing that challenging Broadway tradition gives the industry its creative vitality. Jeremy Gerard wrote in New York magazine that Stroman’s work “all but screams Break the rules!…The result may be a hybrid, but it’s original and completely exhilarating.”37 Margo Jefferson argued, “Its form was unusual, but its impulse was primal. It showed us that musicals…exist to convince us that the people onstage always feel a song coming on, and therefore, in the succinct words of Gene Kelly, ‘Gotta dance, gotta dance, gotta dance.’”38 Like Brantley in his review of Contact from the year before, Jefferson defined a musical based on the feeling it created. Dissenting voices came from dance critics, who, as John Heilman noted, “haven’t seen anything new, let alone revolutionary, in Contact at all.”39 The Wall Street Journal’s Robert Greskovic criticized the “canned, clichéd music,” the “uninspired writing,” the “gross obviousness” of the plots, and the choreography, which he wrote “has all the subtlety and originality of whimsical improvisations in front of a dressing mirror.” He surmised that the “hyperbolic” praise of the show meant that “aficionados of Broadway musical theater don’t get out enough to dance performances.”40 A few months earlier, Anna Kisselgoff, then-chief dance critic at the New York Times, had had voiced similar sentiments about Contact, albeit somewhat more gently: “If you want dance with artistic quality, why not just go to ballet and modern-dance performances?”41 Instead of attempting to pull Contact into the fold of the dance world, there seemed to be an aggrieved sense among its critics that audiences were overlooking what dance could offer in favor of ­watered-down versions labeled musicals. When Contact opened in London’s West End in October 2002, theater critics split while dance critics offered unilaterally harsh words. Barbara Newman of the Dancing Times stated acerbically that Contact’s Tony, Drama Desk, Outer Critics Circle, and Lucille Lortel awards “either [prove] that 2000 was a dud year for musicals or that you can fool all the people some of the time.” She bemoaned the predictability of both the choreography and plot but conceded, “the non-dance audience enjoys every minute of Contact.”42 For the Financial Times, Alistair Macaulay wrote, “it’s as if [Stroman] has an appetite only for clichés.”43 Newman and ­M acaulay’s elitist perspectives cordoned dance off as an art form whose quality depended on a certain difficulty of comprehension. Anything too easily understood by the general public received derision. Such gatekeeping reinforced perceptions of dance as too esoteric to be popular or commercially successful. External factors affected Contact’s critical reception and limited run in England (it closed on May 10, 2003, less than seven months after opening). Hingston posits that the show lost some of its magic when moved into a traditional proscenium space, creating greater distance between the audience and cast.44 Much of the show’s success had been based on the kinesthetic empathy developed between spectator and performer in Lincoln Center’s comparatively intimate spaces. Sheridan Morley of Playbill suggested that London audiences had less “reverence” for ­choreographers—after all, the megamusicals Phantom of the Opera and Les Misérables, which emerged from London’s West End, featured virtually no dancing.45 Morley’s thesis ignores the facts that the revival of Chicago, a dance-heavy musical, enjoyed success in the West End, and that ­L ondon is one of Europe’s major dance centers. Certainly the dance-going public has an appreciation for quality choreography. Perhaps the West End was not suffering from the same existential crises as Broadway and was thus less inclined to embrace Contact as a savior show. Without as much investment in the

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backstory of Contact’s creation or the backdrop of Disney’s takeover of Times Square, London critics judged the show more on its aesthetic merits—and found it wanting. Nor did Contact have much of an afterlife beyond London. With an R-rated first scene, a dependence on virtuosic dancing, and formidable licensing fees for the recorded music, the show found little traction as a high school or community theater production.

The Legacy of Contact Despite its relatively brief onstage life, Contact has continued to influence musical theater. In the short term, in response to the nomination controversy, the Tony committee created a new category, “Special Theatrical Event,” for shows that did not fit comfortably into the straight play or musical genres. The “Special Theatrical Event” category was discontinued in 2009, however, due to lack of such shows to nominate for the award. Contact’s success also paved the way for Twyla Tharp’s Movin’ Out (2002), which enjoyed a run of 1,303 performances. Alternately called a “rock ballet” or “jukebox musical,” depending on whether one wanted to emphasize Tharp’s choreography or Billy Joel’s music, the show had no dialogue, instead telling its story through the dancing cast, a live orchestra, and a Piano Man who sang Joel’s music from a perch above the stage. Movin’ Out was nominated for nine Tony Awards, including Best Musical (tellingly, not “Special Theatrical Event”) and won two, for Best Choreography and Best Orchestrations. After the show closed in 2005, however, the dansical cycled out of favor. Contact has had a more subtle long-term impact. Its creation story echoes that of A Chorus Line from 25 years earlier: an intimate group of dancers develops a show in a workshop for a nonprofit, Off-Broadway theater and then achieves remarkable success on the Great White Way. The idea of bodies in a room together making performative magic forges a toehold for artistic idealism to survive in the commercial marketplace of Broadway. Contact extended that toehold into the twenty-first century. Yet to draw too sharp a distinction between nonprofit and commercial theater oversimplifies the situation. Corporate productions are not devoid of artistry, and the switch to promoting Contact as a musical soon after its premiere as a dance play reveals that productions developed in “pure” artistic settings are still shaped by marketing decisions. Most importantly, the genre trouble caused by Contact reveals that aesthetic considerations never exist in a vacuum. The economic and ­political circumstances of Broadway at the turn of the twenty-first century inevitably influenced perceptions of the show and its place in the artistic landscape. Future debates over the genre of musical theater may continue to be voiced in the language of aesthetics—but we cannot ignore the economic and political motors running beneath.

Notes 1 Nadine George-Graves. “Magnetic theat Fields: Too Dance for Theater, Too Theater for Dance.” The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Theater. Ed. Nadine George-Graves. New York: Oxford UP, 2015. 2. 2 Clive Barnes. “Contact Has More Luck than Live Music.” New York Post. 17 May 2002. 44. 3 George-Graves, “Magnetic Fields,” 2; see also Mary Jo Lodge. “Special Theatrical Event: Every Good Boy Deserves Favour.” Studies in Musical Theatre 3.2 (2009): 213–218. 4 Pamyla Alayne Stiehl. “The Dansical: American Musical Theatre Reconfigured as a Choreographer’s Expression and Domain.” PhD diss., University of Colorado, Boulder, 2008. 28. 5 Elizabeth Craft, electronic communication with author, 30 Dec. 2016. 6 “The Economic Activity of Dance in New York City.” Dance/NYC. March 2004 Report, ; “Statistics – Broadway in NYC.” 2001–2002 Season, The Broadway League, Web. 10 Mar. 2017. .

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Joanna Dee Das 7 Between 1989 and 1994, there were 35 original shows produced on Broadway and 22 revivals. Prior to 1989, several Broadway seasons did not have more than one revival. See Bryan Vandevender. “Kiss Today Goodbye, and Point Me toward Tomorrow: Reviving the Time-Bound Musical, 1968–1975.” PhD diss., University of Missouri, 2014. For more on Broadway trends of the 1980s and 1990s, see Bud Coleman. “New Horizons: The Musical at the Dawn of the Twenty-First Century.” The Cambridge Companion to the Musical. Ed. William A. Everett and Paul R. Laird. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2008. 296, 298. For more on the “Disneyfication” of Broadway, see Elizabeth Wollman. “The Economic Development of the ‘New’ Times Square and Its Impact on the Broadway Musical.” American Music 20.4 (2002): 445–465. 8 Pierre Bourdieu. “The Field of Cultural Production, Or: The Economic World Reversed.” Poetics 12 (1983): 311. 9 Stiehl, “The Dansical,” 8, 22. 10 Stiehl notes that there was also some grumbling about the categorization of Swan Lake as a musical, but the new orchestration of Tchaikovsky’s music and presence of live musicians mitigated the criticism. See “The Dansical,” 324–335. I also contend that Swan Lake’s limited run of 124 performances dampened debate because it was not seen as a threat to other Broadway shows. 11 The word “pure” came up repeatedly in articles about Contact’s creation process. See Robin Pogrebin. “Making ‘Contact’ Without Conflict; How a Hit Play Evolved, Cordially.” New York Times. 18 Oct. 1999, E1; Irene Backalenick. “Making ‘Contact’ at ATW.” Back Stage. 12–18 Nov. 1999, 5; Sylviane Gold. “Choreographer Stroman Makes Contact with Vision in Yellow.” Dance Magazine. February 2000, 64. 12 Nina Goldman, telephone interview by author, 8 Dec. 2016. 13 Stiehl also notes this contradiction; “The Dansical,” 367. 14 Tony Vellela. “Susan Stroman: Choreographer’s Got Broadway Rhythm.” Christian Science Monitor. 30 June 2000, 20. 15 Susan Stroman, interview by Michael Kantor for WNET Broadway Film Project, 30 Sept. 2003, Theatre on Film and Tape Archive (hereafter TOFT), NYPL. 16 George-Graves, “Magnetic Fields,” 2; Ellie Kusner. “The Actor’s Edge.” Pointe Magazine Online. 1 Aug. 2016. . 17 Arlene Croce. “Balanchine Said.” The New Yorker. 26 Jan. 2009, 36; Catherine Kodat. Don’t Act, Just Dance: The Metapolitics of Cold War Culture. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 2015. 61; Michael Riedel. “B’way’s Hot New Leading Lady.” New York Post. 12 Oct. 1999, 83; Goldman, interview. 18 Steven Suskin, quoted in Stiehl, “The Dansical,” 370. 19 Gold, “Choreographer Stroman Makes Contact with Vision in Yellow,” 64. 20 Descriptions come from my viewing of a DVD of Contact, dir. by Susan Stroman, 22 Dec. 1999 at the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater at Lincoln Center, filmed for TOFT, as well as from Goldman, interview. 21 Goldman, interview. 22 Contact, TOFT. 23 Susan Stroman. “Contact: Typescript, 1999.” 6 Nov. 1999, Performing Arts Research Collections, NYPL. 24 Contact, TOFT; Stroman, “Contact: Typescript, 1999.” 25 Ben Brantley. “Musical Elixir Afoot.” New York Times. 8 Oct. 1999, E1. 26 Donald Lyons. “Sexy Dance Moves Intensify ‘Contact’.” New York Post. 8 Oct. 1999, 44. 27 John Lahr. “Gotta Dance: ‘Contact’ Finds Narrative in the Sweet Melee of the Dance Floor.” New Yorker. 18 Oct. 1999, 239. 28 Bud Coleman, “New Horizons,” 284; For more on the marketing of Broadway musicals after the ­corporate turn, see Wollman, “The Economic Development of the ‘New’ Times Square,” 450–451. 29 Goldman, interview. 30 Hingston, interview. 31 John Heilpern. “The Girl in the Yellow Dress Gotta Sing, Gotta Sing, Too.” The Observer. 19 June 2000. Web. 24 Mar. 2017. . 32 Jesse McKinley. “On Stage and Off.” New York Times. 21 Apr. 2000, E2. 33 Mike Salinas. “Orchestrators Blast Tony ‘Contact’ Decision.” Back Stage. 5 May 2000, 3. 34 Tony Vellela. “‘Contact’ Sport: Tony’s Tussle over Musical Categories: Broadway’s Best Compete for Awards Sunday.” Christian Science Monitor. 2 June 2000, 18. 35 Jacqui Malone, Steppin’ on the Blues: The Visible Rhythms of African American Dance. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1996. 91–110.

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What Makes a Musical? 36 Gold, “Choreographer Stroman Makes Contact with Vision in Yellow,” 64; Goldman, interview; Hingston, interview. 37 Jeremy Gerard. “Susan Stroman: Contact High.” New York Magazine. ca. Dec. 1999, Susan Stroman Clippings File, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. 38 Margo Jefferson. “REVISIONS: Let Artistic Gray Areas Be, as Long as Truth Is Out.” New York Times. 12 June 2000, E2. 39 Heilpern, “The Girl in the Yellow Dress Gotta Sing, Gotta Sing, Too.” 40 Robert Greskovic. “Dance: She’s Here, There, Everywhere.” Wall Street Journal. ND (circa June 2000) A24, Susan Stroman Clipping File, NYPL. 41 Anna Kisselgoff. “Broadway’s Dance Card Is Full: A New Challenge to Conventional Musicals.” New York Times. 7 Jan. 2000, E1, E8. 42 Barbara Newman. “Another Opening Another Show: Contact and Our House in the West End; ­Hashirigaki and The Maids at the Barbican.” The Dancing Times. Jan. 2003, 27, 29. 43 Alistair Macaulay. Review of Contact, Financial Times. 25 Oct. 2002, in Theatre Record, 1414. 4 4 Hingston, interview. 45 Sheridan Morley. “London News: A Glance at the West End: ‘Contact.’” Playbill 21.4 (2002): 25; in agreement was Matt Wolf. “Legit Reviews: Abroad: ‘Contact’.” Variety. 11–17 Nov. 2002, 34.

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24 DANCE IN MUSICAL THEATER REVIVAL AND ADAPTATION Engaging with the Past While Creating Dances for the Present Liza Gennaro Musical theater choreographers tell stories in movement and gesture, in response to text and plot and in collaboration with music. Working closely with a theater director, or in some cases serving as director and choreographer, a dance maker’s job is to translate the ideas of the libretto into movement. In the case of original shows, there is no burden of reckoning with past productions. But when it comes to revivals and adaptations, the ghosts of choreographers past loom heavily just about everywhere: in stage directions, dance arrangements, sound recordings, and cultural memory. The decision whether to recreate original dances, come up with a hybrid of original and new dances, or create an entirely new set of dances is a conceptual choice. It’s also not to be underestimated: it’s among the most important decisions when it comes to setting the style and tone of a production. In the same way that book rewrites and score reorchestrations honor the work of original writers and composers, a breed of new choreographers and directors are bringing classic musical theater dances to new audiences, not as static museum pieces but as living, changing creations that can absorb modern ideas while retaining their original integrity. This chapter examines how choreographers use dance to contemporize classic musical theater texts. In doing so, it considers two musical revivals, Fiddler on the Roof (2015) and The King and I (2015), which utilize hybrid choreography, and one film-to-stage adaptation, An American in Paris, which uses entirely new choreography.

Fiddler on the Roof (2015) For the 2015 revival of Fiddler on the Roof, director Bartlett Sher chose the internationally acclaimed contemporary choreographer Hofesh Shechter to reinvent Jerome Robbins’ original dances used in the 1964 Broadway production. Fiddler is often revived with its original choreography, the use of which requires permission from the Jerome Robbins Foundation, though “such use is not necessarily required.”1,2 Permission from the Foundation is also required to alter Robbins’ choreography—that is, to use portions of the original dances with changes to the actual dance steps or patterns. In the case of the 2015 revival, the Foundation “felt that Bart and Hofesh could be trusted to serve the material appropriately and deserved an opportunity to do so.” Sher directed Shechter to base his choreography on Robbins’ dances, but otherwise gave him free reign to do whatever he wished. Shechter admitted that initially, “I didn’t know exactly what that meant.”

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Basing new choreography on original choreography, especially in the case of Robbins—whose dances are highly specific in terms of character, time, and place—can be creatively stifling. It’s no wonder that Sher’s directive to draw from Robbins’ original dances while at the same time creating freely would be confusing. Born and raised in Israel, Shechter, who considers Jewish folk dances “the DNA” of his dance education, was an ideal choice for the revival. For the “Bottle Dance,” which occurs at the wedding of Tevye’s daughter Tzeitel, Shechter felt that Robbins’ choreography was fresh and interesting enough to retain.3 He added some new movements, but acknowledged that “so much of it is actually Jerome.” Shechter believed that the remaining dances in the show, however, were “not energetic enough.”4 One number that he chose to rechoreograph was “To Life,” during which Tevye celebrates the engagement of his eldest daughter to the wealthy butcher Lazar Wolf. The two men toast the impending wedding with other men from their shtetl at the local inn.5 As originally choreographed by Robbins, “To Life” begins when the celebrants move two tables together to create one large one for their festivities, thereby separating themselves from a group of Russians also patronizing the inn. As their celebration erupts into dance, they move the tables a second time to create floor space. A Russian who sings a long, held note interrupts their dancing. The tension between the Jews and Russians—a recurring theme in the show—is highlighted in this moment: is the interruption a threatening act of intimidation? Or is the Russian man merely hoping to join the celebration? Taking over the dance floor, one of the Russians bumps into Tevye. The bump is initially perceived as intentionally hostile, but after a tension-filled moment, the Russian offers Tevye his hand. Tevye tentatively accepts it, reinforcing his character as a man willing to consider new ideas. The Russian then begins teaching Tevye his dance, and Tevye remarks, “I’m dancing with a gentile!” The Jews and Russians all begin to dance together, and a friendly competition ensues. At one point, the Jews perform a daisy chain, hands held high as the Russians splice between them in a deep plié-traveling step. The moment offers a physicalized representation of coexistence. “To Life” ends with Tevye in the center of two big circles of dancing Jews and Russians, one rotating clockwise and the other counter-clockwise. They peel away from the circle toward the bar, where they all collapse in a drunken heap. Considering the dance as a scene with narrative beats on which the structure, or arc of the number, is built can be informative: the first time the celebrants move tables, the act serves to isolate them. But the second time, the men demonstrate the act of taking over a public space. Next, the vocal interruption by the Russian observer underlines tensions between the two communities. Yet Tevye’s willingness to dance with the man highlights his ability to challenge his belief system and, ultimately, to grow and change. The unity of the Jews in the daisy chain as the Russians splice through the line depicts a willing if tenuous coexistence. The concentric circles surrounding Tevye in the final moments of the number position him physically as a central figure, remind­ ussians ing spectators that this is his story. And the final button of the number, with Jews and R collapsing together in drunkenness after an exhilarating celebration, allows a momentary respite from tribal conflicts. Shechter’s reworking of the number follows the same basic model established by Robbins. However, the primary narrative point—Tevye’s willingness to dance with the Russian—is eliminated. Also missing is Robbins’ powerful use of formations: gone are the table moves, the daisy chain, and the circles Robbins employed as narrative devices. In Shechter’s version, Tevye and Lazar Wolf move to the side of the stage while the dancers take focus, and the movement styles of the Jews and Russians are less clearly defined. Robbins’ Russian dancing, while not meant to be ethnographic, takes the form of character dance as utilized in classical ballet, while his Jewish dance is informed by his observations at

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Orthodox weddings in Brooklyn.6 As with most of Robbins’ musical theater choreography, the dances do not represent his individual choreographic voice, which is more readily apparent in his ballets.7 Instead, they present the “where, when and why” of the dances in relation to the libretto. Conversely, Shechter’s movement style is highly identifiable in his version of Fiddler: it is glorious in a liquid fluidity that is, paradoxically, grounded to the floor. As a product of contemporary dance training, specifically Ohad Naharin’s Gaga, Shechter’s focus is not the creation of a legible, narrative dance, but instead of movement exploration.8 Musical theater dance in 1964 was still practiced in the style of George Balanchine, Agnes de Mille, and Robbins, with a focus on storytelling that was legible to the point of employing pantomime and period-appropriate movement to signal actor intent and embodied character. In comparison, Shechter’s Fiddler dancers perform loose-limbed, flowing movements associated with his specific contemporary movement style, rather than strict character- and period-­ appropriate movement. Robbins’ choreographic legibility is evident in the different movement styles his characters inhabit. His Russians perform character dance-inspired lunges, turns, leaps, and squats; his Jews, upright and linked, shake their shoulders as they focus upward, calling on the attention of their creator and thus always placing their religion at the forefront of their actions. Robbins’ movement style distinctions are thus character-driven and narratively informative, whereas Shechter’s lasting dance impression, in both groups, lies more firmly in his own movement style. Linda Winer, writing for Newsday, critiqued Shechter’s “busy, wiggly-armed, contorted dances,” adding, “You have to be better than this to get flexible with Jerome Robbins.” Her focus on the movement vocabulary as a point of criticism would have been valuable if the production had aimed to be a strict recreation, but clearly, it was not. Sher chose Shechter—known for choreography that is inventive and filled with rich, powerful movement and imagery—to infuse the production with a contemporary movement sensibility. In describing his work, Shechter avoids concrete descriptions. Rather, he uses phrases like, “it’s perhaps about the slipperiness of life…it has a smokiness… it’s a series of events…it’s thoughts…you’re like a story-teller and your arms are the mouth that tells the words.”9 He trades in a landscape of emotion rendered in his unique movement style, which views the body holistically: a completely unified entity that rejects the isolation of individual body parts. How his ideas translate onto the body through his technique, which is motivated by imagery, prompts directions like, “you’re in a web of strings…you’re dancing in a bubble…someone is using you like a puppet.” This use of imagery is central to his creative practice, and more connected to contemporary movement innovation than to embodied character development. Robbins, of course, was from an entirely different era of dance. A member of the 1940s New York dance elite, he danced for and with some of the greatest narrative dance makers of the twentieth century, including Michel Fokine, George Balanchine, Antony Tudor, and Agnes de Mille. He honed a style that epitomized explicitly legible narrative dance, and became a hallmark of “Golden Age” musical theater choreography. Movement innovation in his musical theater choreography took a backseat to a Stanislavski-inspired dance authenticity, which adhered to the parameters of time, place, and character. Shechter’s Fiddler choreography is innovative: the dancing is invigorating and fresh, far removed from other current Broadway lexicons; however while thrilling to watch, the definitive element of musical theater dance—explicitly legible ­narrative— is missing. Given the success of the 2015 Fiddler revival, one might ask if Robbins’ organic dance narrative is necessary in the current musical theater scene. Do audiences care that Tevye is not central to the “To Life” number? Are they satisfied with the spectacular movement vocabulary Shechter provides, despite a lack of clear dramatic intent? Has contemporary musical theater outgrown the dramaturgical aspect of choreography? A look at another successful revival that engages with Robbins’ original choreography helps to offer some answers. 248

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The King and I (2015) The Tony Award-winning choreographer Christopher Gattelli collaborated with director Bartlett Sher on the 2015 revival of The King and I, and created several sequences of original movement and staging. In the case of Robbins’ ballet “Small House of Uncle Thomas,” Sher chose to retain Robbins’ choreography, but told Gattelli that he wanted “to do the ballet but on steroids.”10 Part of Gattelli’s assignment was to adapt the ballet, originally created for a proscenium stage, for the thrust stage in the Vivian Beaumont Theater at Lincoln Center. Sher told Gattelli, “I want to do what [Robbins] did, but because of the thrust and how I want the piece as a whole to move, I want it to have momentum and an undercurrent of the King and the atmosphere around the palace… I want to figure out a way to feel that tension even more during the ballet and how to weave Tuptim in.”11 In a ten-day pre-production lab with the full cast, Gattelli and Sher experimented. Gattelli explains, It was really great because the company came in and every day, all of the dancers learned every step of the ballet…We were able to take that vocabulary and try it all different ways on diagonals, and with the thrust, and how does it elongate this way, and do they run in from the voms?12 It was a really luxurious process to have that time isolated to just work on the ballet because of the level of detail and because of how we had to expand and contract it and explode it.13 Adapting dance invariably means contending with original dance music, created by dance arrangers who work side-by-side with choreographers to translate dance ideas into music. Dance arrangements and how to interact with them are essential pieces of the puzzle when rechoreographing or adapting. Depending on the scale of a production and its venue—as well as requirements from the composer, lyricist, and book writer estates—dance arrangements are often rewritten or adjusted to accommodate a new choreographer’s vision. When they remain unchanged, they can lock choreographers into an original choreographer’s dance structure and can—especially since music serves as an emotional map for narrative dance—limit a choreographer’s creativity. However, Gattelli embraces the challenge: People ask me, do you prefer choreographing original shows or revivals? And I have to say, even with revivals with regards to dance breaks, I love sometimes not changing them, because I think, ‘wow, well, there must be something in there.’ If I want to change it, how would I interpret it? It’s an interesting game to story-tell in a different way using the same components. I love going back to the classics and getting a crack at them… I try to be egoless if there’s something iconic, the care that went into the gongs and the instruments; it’s for a reason, so I always try to honor that…to hit those touchstones. “Shall We Dance” was another number that Sher and Gattelli felt needed revising. In the original Robbins’ version Anna sings the number, which occurs in Act II after a visit by British dignitaries, in order to explain the British custom of partner dancing to the King. She gently raises her skirt above the ankle and demonstrates a delicate polka hop pattern. When she realizes the King is watching her, she stops to explain that in her country, a proper woman would not dance with a man watching. The King questions why, then, would she dance with a strange man? Anna retorts that she wouldn’t dance with a strange man, but would with a friend. The King then asks her to teach him to dance. Anna explains the Polka rhythm, “1, 2, 3, and,” as she sings a second chorus while the King counts aloud. He performs the hop step in a distinctly Siamese dance fashion: feet flat and flexed, body upright as he steps in place, right, left, right, lifting his flexed foot on the “and” counts. His 249

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execution is a specific choice that tells us a great deal about his and Anna’s clash of cultures, as well as his willingness to try something foreign. They then sing a chorus together, which ends with the King offering Anna his hands, one at a time in rhythm on the final two iterations of “Shall we dance, shall we dance.” The lesson continues as Anna counts steps; the King tries to keep up but is out of synch with her. Realizing he is forgetting the “and,” he starts again. As he improves they both respond with delight until he missteps. Because the King never admits that he is wrong, he accuses Anna of throwing him off count. They start again, but this time he and the music abruptly stop. He says something is not right: this was not how he saw the English dance. Anna insists that it is exactly how they danced, until she realizes that he is referring to their arm position. The King insists that the British men did not hold her with outstretched arms; Anna grudgingly admits that he is correct. Never losing eye contact with her, the King slowly steps toward Anna, reaching for her waist with his right (downstage) hand. When his hand is placed, he asks if the position is correct. She nods and he offers his left hand to her. He then commands that they begin the dance. Anna responds by taking his hand. The orchestra plays the dance break and Anna leans over to take hold of her skirt on the word “we”; she picks up her skirt as he lifts his foot, flexed Siamese-style, on the word “dance.” They begin to polka in a circle around the stage. The sequence of movements with dialogue creates intense sexual tension, which erupts in the abandon of the polka. Robbins’ infatuation with the stillness and elegance of Siamese dance informs the economy of the movement interaction between Anna and the King. The exuberance of the polka erupts in stark contrast, as both a metaphor for sex and a demonstration of western power. Structurally and dramatically, “Shall We Dance” as choreographed by Gattelli for Sher’s revival follows Robbins’ template but offers a more contemporary narrative. Gattelli describes the critical importance of the dramatic moment just before the polka begins: He offered, she took his hand, and then he pulled her in and said, “come.” Then she picked up her skirt and then went into the polka. So it wasn’t like an order, it was more that she acquiesced … for us, the lifting of the skirt happened only after she acquiesced…with regards to who offers who a hand, we went through a bunch of different options, but with ours she only lifted the skirt to go after he pulls her in and she agrees. We purposefully made Kelly [O’Hara] feel like his equal. We spent hours talking about this. Those little things do make a difference. While both versions thus depict physical attraction between the characters, Robbins’ choreography also emphasizes the King’s power and his attitude toward women. The King demands that Anna dance with him in the original version. In Gattelli’s version, however, the characters are equally engaged in the physical touch of the dance moment; the heightened physicality of ­Robbins’ staging is subdued and made more naturalistic. The point at which Anna picks up her skirt in Robbins’ version tell us that she is responding to the King’s demand not only because she must but because she wants to. Her compliance implies both that she is attracted to him and that as a woman, she knows her place. In the Gattelli version, Anna and the King are less formal with each other. There’s no hesitancy on the King’s part: he offers his hand, she chooses to take it, and then he takes her waist, moving into her tightly and aggressively. In a decidedly postfeminist version of the moment, Anna has not been commanded. Rather, she chooses to dance with the King. Do these differences undercut the dramatic arc of the number? Is it more important in 2015 to demonstrate Anna’s independence? Would the King’s dominance of Anna make twenty-first-­ century audiences uncomfortable? Is it better to forgo the reality of time and place in relation to Anna and the King’s relationship in order to speak to a contemporary audience? Bruce Kirle, in Unfinished Show Business: Broadway Musicals as Works-In-Progress, reminds us that there is “no 250

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definitive production of a musical apart from a given cultural moment and that, consequently, the texts of musicals are in themselves necessarily incomplete…Rather than closed, the texts become unfinished, because the characters must be played to conform to changing societal conventions and audience tastes.” Kirle’s assessment applies to dance as well, though purists continue to argue for strict recreations. If Anna is depicted as a woman of her time, subservient to men, she can maintain a pretense of independence, but ultimately is not terribly different from Tuptim, who is completely without agency and forced to marry the King. From a dramaturgical perspective, Anna’s cultural limitations as a woman make her strength and ability to alter the King’s thinking all the more impressive, and arguably more dramatic. This was all acceptable to audiences in 1951, but repositioning Anna as the King’s equal makes her more palatable and relatable in 2015. If we agree with Kirle that “popular culture is a product of its given cultural moment,” fully “dependent on historical relativism,” then we must agree that the alteration of musical theater dance texts is as necessary as changes to spoken text and performance.

An American in Paris (2015) While both Shechter and Gattelli were charged with revising Robbins’ choreography for their respective revivals, the classical ballet choreographer Christopher Wheeldon became responsible for taking on of the collective memory of An American in Paris (1951) when adapting that Hollywood film for Broadway in 2015. The film starred and was choreographed by Gene Kelly, and remains part of America’s cultural fabric as a cherished classic. As both director and choreographer of the stage adaptation, Wheeldon worked closely with the book writer Craig Lucas, and the music supervisor Rob Fisher, who adapted the iconic Gershwin score. Rather than imitate the film, the musical’s plot was altered and set immediately following the liberation of Paris. A few additional Gershwin songs that were not in the film were interpolated. These changes helped free Wheeldon from the strongest associations with the movie, and allowed him to create contemporary choreography that was comparatively unburdened by the past.14 The following close analysis of the Wheeldon’s choreography reveals the choreographic process, and highlights how choreographers with differing dance backgrounds (Shechter, contemporary dance; Gattelli, musical theater dance; Wheeldon, ballet) prioritize methodological approaches, including movement innovation and narrative. Wheeldon tells his story through universally understood narrative actions: pushing, grabbing, caressing, turning away. He also employs scenic elements, lights, costumes, and, of course, music. It’s no surprise that his training at the Royal Ballet—home of Frederick Ashton and Kenneth MacMillan, two of the greatest ballet storytellers of the twentieth century—has made Wheeldon highly sensitive to the narrative qualities of music and dance.15 He emerges from a tradition that believed “ballet could tell a story better than word, that it could express some essential human truth with a moral force that words simply could not convey.”16 He knows how to translate musical themes, whether jazzy, lyrical, romantic, buoyant, pensive, aggressive, humorous, tragic, or uplifting, into expressive dance phrases. And he understands that the narrative potency of dance must never be underestimated. It reveals itself in the choice of dance vocabulary, the participation or absence of characters, the design of dance music, the arrangement of formations, the utilization of movement signifiers, the lift of a skirt, the touch of a hand, or the turn of a back. These elements, no matter how small, help transmit ideas across age, gender, culture, class, and racial boundaries. The stage version of An American in Paris opens with a choreographed prologue that establishes dance as a storytelling device. As the orchestra plays the second movement of Gershwin’s Concerto in F, an enormous Nazi flag is pulled down toward the audience like a wave hitting the shore. It is then turned over and run upstage; its underside reveals the French flag. The scene thus very quickly signifies the liberation of Paris, and also introduces the audience to Jerry Mulligan, originated by Robert Fairchild onstage and Gene Kelly in the film.17 As the French flag rises, a 251

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projection of the Arc de Triomphe with three American fighter jets zooming above it appears. Jerry watches as the planes fly by, and then performs a danced gesture of sketching on a pad, which establishes his identity as an artist. In a nod to the film, which featured mirrors in the “American in Paris” ballet, dancers in choreographed patterns that create defined spaces enter, moving a group of tall mirrors on wheels. As the mirrors move, Liza, the woman who will become Jerry’s romantic obsession, crosses the stage. The following danced narrative then takes place:18 First, Jerry marches from stage right to stage left in an exaggerated, tin-soldier style that telegraphs his military status. As he does so, he bumps into another soldier who gives him a ticket to go home. He sketches some soldiers who dance in a romantic pas de deux with French women. The music becomes more dissonant as strings perform an extended tremolo, and a breadline forms downstage left. Bodies are bent as dancers hold their coats tightly, as if against bitter cold. One woman faints, while another cuts the line. She is thrown to the ground. As the music intensifies, Liza enters and witnesses the violent scene. She helps the woman to her feet and gives her a piece of bread. Jerry sees Liza performing this act of kindness, and as the music returns to the theme used when we first meet him, dancers from the breadline surround her. In a purely classical pose suspended in time, the dancers create a frame around her as light bathes down. Breaking the spell, a soldier bumps into Jerry. Smoke appears from upstage center, and a train is heard. Soldiers rush to it, waving and leaving women behind. The mood changes as two soldiers descend from the train. One tells the other, “Have a good time!” As they disappear into the Paris streets, a solo piano plays a jazzy theme and two women enter performing sexy, flirtatious movements. The stage fills with soldiers and women who all dance, executing the following signifying dance-pantomime movements: a toy soldier march, arms held as if pointing guns and, finally, arms extended forward, one higher than the other, in a modified “Heil Hitler” salute that morphs into a partner dance position. The musical texture becomes less percussive and more legato as four menacing men surround the frightened Liza. As they lift her, Jerry enters, yelling, “What’s going on?” The men flee and Liza runs away. Jerry follows her. Strings and French horns accompany three soldiers returning from war, who are met by three women who embrace them. One woman is left alone, fearful that her man will not return. When he does, they dance to a sweeping, romantic cello line as Liza and Jerry watch. This moment in particular references the emotional wartime reunion choreographed by ­Agnes de Mille for the “Civil War Ballet” from Bloomer Girl (1944). The similarity in gesture and movement between the reunion created in 1944 and the same scenario created in 2015 speaks to the narrative power of dance and how a simple pantomimed gesture, when employed expertly, can convey complex feelings. In the third section of de Mille’s ballet, soldiers return home and a pas de deux between a “returning soldier” and “his girl” takes place. De Mille digs deep to locate behavior that is true to the dramatic moment as the couple begins the task of resuming their relationship after a long separation: standing face to face, the woman takes the man’s hat off his head and attempts to caress his cheek. Overcome with emotion, she turns away, clutching the hat to her breast. He turns her toward him, takes the hat with his right hand, and tosses it away. The gesture suggests that she no longer needs an object—a lock of hair, article of clothing, letter, or photograph—to evoke him. He is home. He begins a sensual bounce while swinging his left arm backward and forward, beckoning her to dance. She responds by matching his movement: he offers her both hands to dance a promenade, and she accepts. In Wheeldon’s reunion, the woman runs to the man and leaps into his arms. He holds her foot, supporting her as she runs through the air horizontally, her feet not touching the ground in the joy of the moment. He sets her down to face him and she touches his cheek and chest. She looks down 252

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and steps away with her back to him, placing her hand to her mouth. He takes hold of her shoulders, gently lifting her against his body. Coaxing her to face him, he lifts her again, this time above his shoulder. He then releases her and draws her into an embrace as her legs swing free in a playful, rocking motion. He puts her on her feet and they sway in tandem, reaching their arms in sequence around each other before he lifts her, first horizontally, like a body floating in space, and then higher as she opens her legs to an extended V, after which he catches her in a cradle lift and exits. Wheeldon’s movement is denser than de Mille’s and comes faster, one movement immediately transitioning to the next. His is a ballet of the new millennium, with new values, dynamics and tempi, but in its rendering of a shared scenario of reunion after a long and stressful separation, it says what de Mille’s did, with similar gestures: the touch of the cheek, the need to turn away when overcome with emotion, the swinging in tandem, the reaching of arms all telegraphing reunion. Wheeldon’s ability to utilize contemporary ballet, which generally eschews legible narrative, to depict a story of reunion feels fresh and current. De Mille’s 1944 “Civil War Ballet” contains the charm and depth of Americana Ballet19 and reflects influences of Martha Graham, thereby evoking the 1940s. Nonetheless, de Mille and Wheeldon address the same project with similar results, albeit employing different movement lexicons. The dance narrative of “An American in Paris” continues when the music quickens to a driving, pianistic cacophony. An angry crowd chases a woman with a shaved head and a Nazi armband. They attack her, lift her overhead, and carry her away. Liza is knocked down in the chaos. Jerry sees her, runs to her on the full orchestral return, and their eyes lock on a big orchestral downbeat. They take hands as he helps her to her feet, motions for her to stay, and then turns to get his bag as she runs off. The crowd enters and freezes on a pause as Jerry runs among them in search of her. High woodwinds and strings return as the crowd takes three unison breaths and faces upstage to watch as the scenic drop depicting the Eiffel Tower begins to glow with light. All exit to a solo flute, and a single bike rider circles the stage. Normalcy has resumed to the war-torn city. The fast piano theme returns as Jerry tears up his train ticket home, the café set appears, and dialogue begins. What has the ballet told us, and how has Wheeldon used dance and narrative action or pantomime to communicate a legible story? To be fair, the audience is informed about the Parisian setting at the very top of the show, when Jerry’s American buddy, Adam Hochberg, stands at a piano and says, “It was the day Jerry Mulligan decided to stay in Paris and it started like this.” He then sits at the piano and begins to play as the lights black out on him and focus instead on the Nazi flag as described earlier. We learn almost instantly that Jerry is an American soldier, as indicated by his costume and toy-soldier march. But we intuit much more about him through the extensive dance sequence that follows. We learn, for example, that he is an artist, and that he is attracted to a French woman, Liza, whom he follows around the city. Liza, too, is highlighted in the dance, and we learn about her as well. She is clearly important to the musical: Wheeldon isolates her spatially in light, and often surrounds her with dancers who create a frame that momentarily suspends time. Finally, we also learn that postwar Paris is a frightening, desperate city, as depicted by the breadline events, the attempted attack on Liza, and the mob attack on a Nazi collaborator. Later in the dance, however, we see Paris begins to heal, which is communicated through the population’s ability to breathe together, as well as the ordinary occurrence of a single bike rider moving through the streets.

Conclusion In many contemporary musicals, whether revival or adaptation, the decision to recreate, alter, or rechoreograph classic musical theater dances is a defining, conceptual commitment that affects the tone and style of productions. Contemporary directors and choreographers do not take the task 253

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of remaking or altering classic choreography lightly. They painstakingly study original notes and recordings, and make respectful decisions about altering dances. Under the creative leadership of Wheeldon, An American in Paris became a fresh theatrical experience that nevertheless employed traditional dance storytelling techniques combined with contemporary ballet. With Fiddler on the Roof and The King and I, Sher chose a hybrid approach engaging Shechter and Gattelli to reinvestigate Robbins’ original work. These decisions and approaches honor dance as an art form that is not static, stuck in time, or rooted to the purview of a single artist. Rather, musical theater dance, like the musical theater itself, is forever changing and growing, capable always of developing and remaining fresh and current.

Notes 1 For information regarding the Stage Directors and Choreographers Society, a “theatrical union that unites, empowers, and protects professional Stage Directors and Choreographers throughout the United States,” please visit www.sdc.org—“Rights and Responsibilities.” 2 Brian Seibert. “In ‘Fiddler’ a Balancing Act to Rival Tevye’s.” The New York Times. 2016, 2. 3 Ruthie Fierberg. “Hofesh Shechter, Fiddler on the Roof and a Choreographic Match Made in Heaven. 2016. Web. 25 Mar. 2017. . 4 Seibert. “In ‘Fiddler’ a Balancing Act to Rival Tevye’s.” 5 My analysis is based on viewing the 1977 Broadway revival starring Zero Mostel held at the Theatre on Film and Tape archives at the New York Public Library, the 1971 film version, and an interview with Gary John La Rosa, a re-creator of Robbins’ Fiddler on the Roof choreography. 6 Character dance, as offered at the School of American Ballet, includes “the polonaise, mazurka, and other formal and folk dances of the past that appear not only in the classical repertory such as Coppélia, The Nutcracker, and The Sleeping Beauty, but also in contemporary works.” . 7 For examples of Robbins’ original choreographic voice, see The Cage (1951), Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun (1953), The Concert (1956), and Dances at a Gathering (1969). 8 Gaga is the movement language developed by Ohad Naharin, choreographer and artistic director of Batsheva Dance Company. . 9 Hofesh Shechter Company Barbarians. Web. . 10 Liza Gennaro. Gattelli interview with author, 2017. 11 Tuptim is a slave girl sent to the King of Siam as a gift from the King of Burma. 12 The stage term “vom” comes from the Roman vomitorium. It is a stadium exit or entrance that facilitates quick passage of large crowds, and is also used for actor entrance and exits. Modern-day thrust or three-quarter stages utilize voms for actor entrances and exits. 13 The ballet recreation had solid provenance with Gattelli’s associate Greg Zane, who had learned it as a dancer in the 1996 Broadway revival from Susan Kikuchi, daughter of Yuriko, the original Eliza. 14 The person who bore the heaviest burden of memory was Robert Fairchild in Kelly’s role, Jerry ­Mulligan. Young audiences may not be familiar with An American in Paris, but Kelly, part of the cultural heritage as a quintessential American song-and-dance man, is widely known across generations. Fortunately, Fairchild was up to the challenge and his performance, while evoking Kelly’s, remained very much his own. 15 See Sir Frederick Ashton (1904–1988), and Kenneth MacMillan (1929–1992), . 16 Jennifer Homans. Apollo’s Angels A History of Ballet. New York: Random House, 2010. 17 The China silk effect was also used by Jiri Kylian in his 1989 Black and White Ballets, created for ­Nederlands Dans Theater. 18 Indiana University assistant professor and musical director Ray Fellman assisted with the musical analysis. 19 Americana Ballet popular in the 1930–1940s employed classical ballet to express American themes. Catherine Littlefield, Ruth Page, Eugene Loring, and Agnes de Mille were among the most influential choreographers working in the Americana style.

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25 THE CONVERGENCE OF DANCE STYLES IN HAMILTON: AN AMERICAN MUSICAL Phoebe Rumsey

Bodies, boots, and beats fill the stage at Broadway’s Richard Rodgers Theatre, as Aaron Burr (Leslie Odom Jr.) raps of young Alexander Hamilton fleeing the West Indies and arriving in New York City. Ensemble performers join him, staking their ground on stage with wide stances and big attitudes. No one’s presence is larger than the composer, creator, and actor in the titular role, Lin-Manuel Miranda. Miranda enters upstage center, walks downstage, thrusts his chest out, points his shoulder to the balcony, and declares, “My name is Alexander ­H amilton.” Men and women, dressed as soldiers, wearing flat heavy-heeled boots, take purposeful strides to position themselves at his side. Their swagger and cool athleticism express the hip style the show has become known for. Hamilton’s ambition does not relent, and neither does the choreography. Fast forward two-and-a-half hours in the show and over 20 years in the narrative: Burr shoots Hamilton. As Hamilton dies, all movement stops; performers and audiences alike exhale after his death. The cast sings the final song, “Who Lives, Who Dies, Who Tells Your Story,” in stillness. This chapter considers the mix of hip-hop, street dance, and more traditional dance styles in the choreography of the 2016 musical Hamilton. The mix of styles produces an eclectic but effective movement signature, which propels the show from beginning to end. I shed light on how the choreography in Hamilton, popularly called a “hip-hop musical,” is not solely derived from hiphop dance modalities, but is a complex mélange of dance styles that also include social dances such as swing and Lindy Hop, along with jazz and contemporary dance. Investigating the complexity inherent in the choreography in Hamilton helps reveal the musical’s intervention in contemporary culture and brings considerable critical attention to the American stage musical. I explore the connection between dance, music, and historical narratives, and how choreographer Andy Blankenbuehler’s specific movement choices and precise physicality, in stride with Miranda’s score, create a kinetic and compelling historical sojourn. Whether an ensemble member is guiding the bullet that eventually kills Hamilton with her hand and body, or dancers moving in retrograde to wind back time when Angelica Schuyler reconsiders her choices, dance carries enormous weight in the show. Markedly, Blankenbuehler stops just short in his choreographic input before the perpetually circulating gestures accompanying nearly every scene risk overwhelming the narrative. An excess of movement in a musical, after all, can draw away from the narrative momentum. Skirting this very fine line, between physical sensation and redundancy, can be the key to the success of a musical; evaluating how a choreographer negotiates this balance offers a method to assess dance in musical theater. 255

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To begin, I describe Blankenbuehler’s overall choreographic style and strategies. I then trace how Miranda and Blankenbuehler create the world of the play in the opening prologue. Next, I examine Blankenbuehler’s democratic use of male and female dancers, a choice that from the start disrupts stereotypes about particular sexes doing particular dance styles in musical theater. I then clarify how hip-hop is only one of many movement threads in the highly concentrated tapestry of choreography, followed by a consideration of the challenges of merging various dance styles together in the musical theater. To close, I analyze a handful of critical responses to the dance in Hamilton in order to assess the ways the dances enhance but do not overpower the piece.

Choreographic Strategies Three-time Tony Award-winning choreographer Andy Blankenbuehler’s greatest achievement in Hamilton is his assemblage of both original and traditional movements and gestures that connect directly to the show’s narrative, and build a sophisticated, moving stage picture on the relatively simple wooden boardwalk set. Blankenbuehler achieves this magnetic effect by juxtaposing a myriad of movement styles that together offer a spectrum of meanings put forth by the body. The dance styles, body language, and nonverbal communication of the ensemble come to both support and tell the story. A few examples of Hamilton’s diverse dance styles help demonstrate the wide range of dance vocabulary at work here. We can see, for example, the waltz in the movement and dramaturgical structure of the scene depicting Hamilton’s wedding to Eliza Schuyler, and playful R&Bstyled step-touches and hip sways when the Schuyler sisters are out “slumming” in the city (“The ­Schuyler Sisters”) as well as during Hamilton and Eliza’s brief, playful courtship (“Helpless”). When Thomas Jefferson returns from France to Virginia after the Revolutionary War, variations on energetic swing dances are used to establish America’s fresh start, Jefferson’s charismatic personality, and his self-important participation in the community that enthusiastically welcomes him home (“What’d I Miss”). The aggression and chaos of various military battles, culminating in “Yorktown (The World Turned Upside Down),” are displayed by a fusion of antagonistic hip-hop styles. Krumping, an exaggerated style of physical expression based in gestures, can be seen in the more intense moments in the battles of the show. Popping (a jerk in the body as it hits its pose) and locking (a sharp freeze in a fast move before continuing again up tempo) help emphasize meanings of words in the fast-paced rapping moments. These hard-hitting urban gesticulations combine to give a certain funk and groove to the beats that fit Miranda’s music choices, particularly during the gun duels (“Ten Duel Commandments”). In contrast, contemporary dance gestures and sensibilities are used throughout to physically interpret the turmoil and chaos of the overarching narrative. Changes in movement—from fast-paced to slow motion, transitions of the body down to the floor and up again, and deep core contractions, as though one is reacting to a punch in the stomach—help physicalize the angst and turmoil the characters experience. Backs arching to avoid kicks or swinging arms, and a sense of off-balancedness that can be part of contemporary dance help show how precarious Hamilton’s choices are at times, whether he is taking risks on modes of governing or engaging in adultery. The contrast of contemporary dance with the force and focus of hip-hop moves helps demonstrate the intensity and desperation during and just after the Revolution. This tension between the expressive nature of both styles—the invincibility of hip-hop set against the vulnerability or openness of contemporary dance—suits the character conflicts in the musical and more broadly emphasizes the multifaceted moods of today’s ever-shifting culture. Furthermore, the dancers remain active and involved throughout the show. For example, after the final duel, the near-dead Hamilton is rowed back across the Hudson River and two men sit on the floor and embody both the boat and rowers. Likewise, in regards to the management of 256

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props in the show, the ensemble moves the set pieces in and around the characters, making what would be an ordinary interaction with a set or prop come to life for a moment before disappearing into the shadows. Whether a spiraling kick to deliver a letter to Thomas Jefferson or swooping in using a low lunge while holding a chair high above one’s head to place it moments before another character sits, ensemble efforts are vivid throughout. The rotating stage enhances the feeling of bodies assembling to form images of the narrative action before circling downstage to disappear as quickly as they appeared. In all, the weave of dance into the dramaturgical structure of the musical sets Hamilton up in the tradition of many musicals that use dance as a dramatic tool.1

The Prologue: Musical and Choreographic World-Making Hamilton opens with the backstory of how orphaned Alexander Hamilton, living in the West Indies with his cousin, comes to live in New York City. There, he makes inroads, initially by pestering fellow orphan and eventual rival Aaron Burr about how to finish college in two years. The opening prologue, titled simply “Alexander Hamilton,” sums up Hamilton’s formative years prior to his arrival in the United States. Miranda strategically uses the four-minute opening number to summarize approximately the first 400 pages of Ron Chernow’s 2004 Hamilton biography, which inspired the musical. The thoroughly choreographed prologue serves several functions. First, it establishes the overall style of the show and the mode of communication to be used: Hamilton is essentially structured as a “sung-through” musical that explores the life of one man. This performance style is akin to other successful commercial musicals, for example Alain Boublil and Claude-Michel Schönberg’s Les Misérables, which focuses on the life of Jean Valjean, and which Miranda has acknowledged was a big influence on Hamilton. Second, the opening number, owing to the precise work of Blankenbuehler, introduces a specific movement palette anchored by gestural choreography that is actively used to tell the story. Gestural choreography refers to the formation of poses and shapes that allude to the narrative through a miming quality. Gestures range from simple military salutes to more indirect gestures which, when paired with the lyrics, resonate meaning. For example, Hamilton describes the memories of death that have plagued him through his life. In this instance, the ensemble, in a wedge-like structure fanned out behind him, sharply frames their faces with their hands, telling of a sort of cerebral angst, then nods sharply and burst into the following movement thread. The movement emphasis is subtle but effective. It is established from the start that the poetics and language intonations of rap will strongly contribute to the sonic world of the show. The rhythms and the accompanying lyrics of “­A lexander Hamilton” detailing Hamilton’s early life are shared among the main characters. The choice to use the contemporary sounds and rhythms of rap sets up from the start the interpretation of history through the lens of the present. The sophisticated rhymes and wily wording are launched from the start as a mode of communication. Anyone familiar with Miranda’s In The Heights will note commonalities in vocal style and recognize his penchant for clever word choices filled with popular culture references and riffs on other artists’ songs.2 Just as the movement in Hamilton visually connects history to the present through its varied dance styles, so too does the musical’s beginning create a world that pulls the audience back in time to 1776 using the familiarity of contemporary sounds. Hamilton thus indicates from its very start that it will not offer a dusty retelling of the lives of America’s Founding Generation.

Gender Roles in the Ensemble The opening of Hamilton introduces the ensemble members and establishes their dramaturgical role as physical storytellers and purveyors of the musical’s physical community. The ensemble 257

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is made up of men and women of various ethnicities, and despite obvious differences in physical stature, all perform the same complex skills, which require considerable strength, dexterity, and cohesiveness. Examining the roles of men and women in the prologue and elsewhere helps demonstrate how Hamilton disrupts expectations about how particular sexes do specific dance styles in the musical theater. The ensemble both takes part in and observes the events of ­Hamilton’s life. Whether male or female, the dance ensemble is dressed uniformly, in eighteenth-centurystyled knee-high boots, riding pants, shirts, and neckties. There are slight distinctions in the garments—women, for example, wear more fitted tops—but overall, there is a uniformity to the costumes. The pants and flat boots allow for movement that is low to the ground, enabling the dancers to travel from one side of the stage to the other with confident strides or long low lunges, which they use at various times to dodge soldiers, weapons, and a variety of other obstacles. Their opening moves are most recognizable as a mix of hip-hop styles with a grounded sense of weight, deep knee bends, sharp accents, and the locking of limbs in quasi-mimetic gestures that coincide with word emphasis. Characteristically, Blankenbuehler builds his pieces by adding bodies to a movement thread or sequence and building physical intensity and complexity toward the moment of strongest dramatic impact in tight correspondence with the narrative. Hamilton is no different in this respect. Blankenbuehler alternates between the sharp forming of shapes with more fluid traveling steps that propel the dancers across the stage, onto the rotating center stage turntable and off. It is made apparent by the ensemble’s expert execution of complex steps that both sexes are equally skilled in terms of strength and dexterity. There is not a separation in dance styles drawn along gender lines that can be common in more traditional musicals such as Oklahoma! or Guys and Dolls. Using this egalitarian mode of choreography in Hamilton the cohesiveness and impact of the ensemble as a whole are enhanced. The concept of equal competence for both male and female dancers contrasts with the relationship between the main male and female characters in the narrative. Hamilton has been criticized for its less-than-inspirational or in-depth exploration of the main female characters, its emphasis on the men, and in particular the adulation of Hamilton despite his shortcomings. Though strong and ­ oldsberry, accomplished Broadway stars originated the roles of the Schuyler sisters (Renée Elise G Phillipa Soo, and Jasmine Cephas Jones were Angelica, Eliza, and Peggy, respectively), the women spend most of the narrative looking for men, waiting for men, or reacting to men’s behaviors. Miranda could only do so much, given the real historical place of women in the American Revolution Era, so the idea of representing strong women in other ways is an interesting method of counteracting the limits of history. The equal physical consideration of male and female bodies in the ensemble is made apparent from the start through Blankenbuehler’s choreographic style. This physical commonality is at its strongest in “The Battle of Yorktown (The World Turned Upside Down).” The singular energy of the revolutionaries in the Battle of Yorktown is brought to the surface by the movement lexicon provided by Blankenbuehler. The ensemble enters with a series of lunges where the dancers pulse or flex their feet before stepping deeper into the battle. A wave or canon of strong poses passes among the group, akin to stop animation. At times, bodies move through battle gestures (holding guns, swinging fists, ducking and diving from adversity) in slow motion, and then speed up, articulating hands into fists and shifting head positions with sharp focus changes, to enhance a sense of the bravery and cockiness needed to pull off the victory. Overall, through a combined effort to work in unison, find specific spacing marks, hit movement accents, and display sharp changes in energy dynamics, the ensemble achieves a sense of group strength and solidarity. Though there are many musicals where dancers execute challenging dances together (Cats or Chorus Line for example), the stark contrast between the female lead characters, who essentially fall into a variety of feminine stereotypes and the female ensemble 258

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members who do not, opens a space (amped up by the ensemble’s overall athletic and unison dancing) to consider the possibility or a promise of futurity for more equal gender relations. It is important to note the gender equality is only in one direction: women take on male roles or mannerisms, but not the other way around. Women dance in the army as soldiers; the men, however, never dance or act as women. Though the production has not changed casting on the professional front perhaps the many eventual school productions may consider greater gender fluidity? How would a woman in the role of George Washington or a man in the role of Angelica Schuyler shift meanings?

Hamilton—Not Just Hip-Hop Along with rap and hip-hop modes, traditional musical theater styles are also very purposely woven into the moving images and sounds of the musical. Upbeat jazz and tap sensibilities redolent of common Broadway dance styles are recognizable alongside original moves developed by Blankenbuehler. This choice provides a variety of styles to a popular audience and avoids overwhelming spectators with too much “in your face” rap—a style of urban preaching that can dissuade members of the white, upper-and middle-class Broadway demographic if overused.3 Miranda is well-attuned to a wide variety of other music styles as part of his dramaturgical weave. He explains how he consciously measured the amount of rapping: “No one wants to listen to hiphop all night, and we are not going to give it to him all night.”4 Miranda treads carefully with his composition, striking a balance between garnering an interest for current issues inside and outside the musical; he explains that the inclusion of rap in In The Heights (2008) and the labeling of the show by media as a “hip-hop musical” may have led to its early closure. “…if it didn’t have that label of hip-hop painted on it all the time it would still be running, because it was a beautiful, emotionally satisfying show.”5 The collaboration with Blankenbuehler, also the choreographer of In the Heights, follows suit. A full evening of hip-hop or street dancing on Broadway risks alienating mainstream Broadway audiences. The way Hamilton includes hip-hop and street styles, while also catering to the typical Broadway demographic, can be considered part of the show’s diversity. Miranda’s grasp of the complexity in presenting accessible work in the Broadway environment is apparent in the song “What’d I Miss” which opens the second act of Hamilton. The swing-style jazz dance provides a fresh sound and style that helps to propel time in the narrative, as well as to introduce the character of Thomas Jefferson. Now that there is a new beginning for the country and a new act, this shift in tone helps move the story forward. The upbeat song and dance also help establish the particular dimensions of Jefferson’s personality as different from that of the Marquis de Lafayette. This choice is integral, since the same actor plays both roles. Blankenbuehler follows Miranda’s change in rhythms, and fulfills the needs of the narrative by offering a dance style that is light, lifted, and that contrasts with the previous moves in the first act, which had Lafayette striking more defiant postures—such as a thrust chest and fisted hands—as part of Hamilton’s group of confrères. In “What’d I Miss,” Jefferson and a handful of ensemble members (the women now in lowheeled shoes) execute a bouncy swing-like movement style. The structure of this movement involves many low, fast kicks, ball-changes (changes of weight from foot to foot), and spring backs, or individual “breakaways” from one’s dance partner that are characteristic of the Lindy Hop or jive. Using these social dance moves suggests a sense of belonging to a community, and as such the Jefferson character (and actor playing him) is easily able to slide into the narrative, after having been absent for the events of the entire first act. This fusing or hybridizing dance styles can be a provocative mode of physical storytelling. This sort of undertaking is not unique to Hamilton, as Liza Gennaro points out in “Evolution of Dance in the Golden Age of the American ‘Book Musical.’” Choreographers have used dance styles from 259

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eras that differ from the narrative’s setting since the 1940s, when dance began to take on a more prominent role in musical theater. Gennaro finds that the mixing of genres, particularly with minimal historically accuracy, draws attention to the dance. She explains, “The tension between a drive toward authenticity and a disregard for it at the same time is a central element in musical theater dance creation.”6 In Hamilton, Blankenbuehler makes no attempt to provide historically correct movement. Gennaro contends that exploring anachronism in dance is “one area in which the musical theater choreographer demonstrates artistic vision and creative choice.” 7 ­Blankenbuehler’s wide-ranging use of dance styles and movement flows is firmly established in Hamilton as one of the cornerstones of his style. Blankenbuehler is adaptable to music; he is able to morph traditional moves into a visual and visceral journey. This blending style anachronistically draws attention to the dance and provides momentum to the narrative action. Blankenbuehler’s first Broadway success, as part of the collaborative team of Miranda’s In the Heights, required him to bring to life the communities living in New York City’s Washington Heights. Blankenbuehler showcased a variety of Latin dances, while also incorporating hip-hop dance styles. In transitioning skillfully between Latin and urban dance modes, Blankenbuehler successfully incorporated several dance styles into the musical. Gennaro describes ­Blankenbuehler’s ­ amilton, choreography in In the Heights as a “joyously innovative fusion.”8 In the narrative of H there are fewer cultures to draw from; all the characters are colonial American. In order to create the thrill of which Gennaro speaks, Blankenbuehler is more challenged to provide a broad spectrum of dance styles without the cultural richness of the communities in In the Heights.

Critical Reception The ways critics describe and interpret the movement in musicals provide a jumping-off point toward further analysis of movement in musical theater. Moreover, as critics are highly concerned with the success of dramaturgical strategies, they must contend with the inclusion of dance and this grappling can be highly informative as to what dance is doing in musical theater.9 Critics’ reviews of Hamilton thus provide information on the ways dance functions in the musical. Ben Brantley, reviewing the Public Theater run, describes the dance in Hamilton as having a “wide-ranging vocabulary that eludes stylistic ruts.” He continues, “the large ensemble (clad in witty, shorthand period costumes by Paul Tazewell) becomes a perpetual-motion machine. Even during solo numbers, we’re aware of other people onstage, exhaling the sense of varied and multiple lives contingent upon one another.”10 Peter Marks of The Washington Post acknowledges Blankenbuehler’s “supercharged choreography,”11 while Jesse Green for The Vulture counters, “I still wonder, too, if the manic staging by director Thomas Kail and choreographer Andy ­Blankenbuehler, fun as it is, may sometimes get in the way of the action instead of enhancing it.”12 These reviews differ in their opinions of the success of the choreography, though Brantley does emphasize the sheer presence the ensemble represents in the piece, and how the dancers’ physicality is powerfully connected to the complex interweaving of individual stories. Green voices apprehension as to whether the highly physical, “supercharged” choreography overwhelms the piece, and this is a valid question. His observation does two things. First, it points out the status of the ensemble in the piece: they are not in the background working to dress up a star performer, but are instead mixed into the story, almost to the point of overshadowing the narrative. Even when not dancing in a highly choreographed numbers, bodies take the place of objects or manipulate them in accordance with narrative requirements. Yet is Green correct? Does the choreography overwhelm the action of the musical at times? I would argue that the dance is particularly apropos, building gradually and in tandem with the narrative. Take, for example, its use in the fiery “The Room Where It Happens.” This number starts with a slow-paced burn as Burr explores his suspicions and questions his conflict of ego. His growing paranoia builds explosively in ways that cut 260

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to the heart of conflicts in the show: inclusion versus exclusion, knowledge versus ignorance, opportunity versus misfortune. The success of ”The Room Where It Happens” breaks from the rap dominating the narrative, offering instead a banjo-heavy, ragtime/early New Orleans jazz-styled song and dance number. The piece with its limited melodic range and various minor tonalities effectively works to match the bouncy tempo with a dark, menacing atmosphere that encapsulates Burr’s rage, embarrassment, and bruised ego. The choreography is an example of classic Broadway dance, which combines slow rising arms and composed upper body movement with fast, hot modern jazz dance steps such as grapevines, chassés (gallops side to side), and low kicks with bent supporting legs. While these steps occur in other numbers, Blankenbuehler’s addition of more movement and dancers creates a sense of anticipation and suspense unique from the other songs. Michael Schulman for The New Yorker describes the trajectory of the piece: “What starts off as Burr’s sidelined summation of the backroom deal that determined the location of the United States’ capital builds into an epiphany about his own hunger for influence, which then propels the action (and Hamilton’s life) to its tragic conclusion.”13 The specific choreographic language Blankenbuehler uses in “The Room Where It Happens” brings the necessary complexity and theatricalization to the moment when Burr recognizes he must take bolder actions, resulting in his shooting of Hamilton. In this number, then, the choreography becomes fundamental to the song’s meaning, and its prominence is justified.

Conclusion In all, the movement in Hamilton comes very close to overpowering the narrative. Blankenbuehler stops, however, just short before the perpetually circulating gestures accompanying nearly every scene desensitize spectators. After close to three hours and the death of Hamilton, the ensemble stands motionless surrounding Eliza Hamilton. The emotional impact is palpable. By simply walking on stage into position, a sense of vulnerability emerges from the ensemble. This stillness and openness redress a show that had blustered and bragged, albeit with considerable panache, humor, and style, for two long acts. Violins play the opening bars of the final number, “Who Lives, Who Dies, Who Tells Your Story,” and the conclusion of the musical begins—though, pointedly, not with rap. Characters speak frankly of Hamilton’s achievements without urban rhythms or witticisms. Harmonies are rich and the piece takes on an epic, anthemic feel more common to final numbers in musical theater, and then the musical ends. The closing is certainly not characteristic of what one would think of as a “hip-hop” musical. In its final moments, Hamilton aesthetically references traditional musicals such as Carousel or The Sound of Music, with their respective and similarly stirring finales, “You’ll Never Walk Alone” and “Climb Ev’ry Mountain.” The choice not to have an active closing number saves the musical from movement oversaturation. Instead, the impression of the entire evening is imprinted in this moment of stillness. The construction of Hamilton is not transcendent or revolutionary. As this chapter has attempted to show, the musical’s complex use of traditional structures, conventions, and musical theater lenses broadens the form’s parameters. The many dance styles incorporated in the show support the goal of looking back at the past through a contemporary lens. By creating a diverse movement palette, Miranda and Kail’s dramaturgical imperative becomes possible.

Notes 1 In the case of Hamilton, comparisons with West Side Story (1957) come to mind. There is a similar use of dance to show conflict between factions, and the inclusion of a dance-laden opening prologue. This mode storytelling is often connected to the “dream-ballet” concept, and can be traced back to the work

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Phoebe Rumsey of Albertina Rasch, beginning with The Band Wagon (1931) and other early musicals, culminating in her greatest success with Lady in the Dark (1941). Agnes DeMille developed the dream ballet concept further in Oklahoma! (1943) and Carousel (1945). Traditionally, the dream ballet has no singing, though the dance (not necessarily ballet), mimetic gestures, and tableaux-like formations forward the plot in most parts, and provide psychological insight into the characters. 2 One of the most obvious connections is “The Ten Duel Commandments,” an homage to Notorious B.I.G.’s “Ten Crack Commandments” (1997). 3 Holler If Ya Hear Me is an example of such a situation. The hip-hop musical, built using the lyrics of rapper Tupac Shakur to tell his story, with a book by Todd Kreidler, opened on Broadway in the summer of 2014 and lasted less than 6 weeks. For more information on why the show closed see Jason Newman’s. “Saul Williams: Why Broadway’s Tupac Musical Closed Early.” Rolling Stone. 21 July 2014. Web. 20 May 2015. . 4 Rebecca Mead. “All About The Hamiltons.” The New Yorker. 9 Feb. 2015, 48. 5 Mead, 56. 6 Liza Gennaro. “Evolution of Dance in The Golden Age of the American ‘Book Musical’.” The Oxford Handbook of The American Musical. Ed. Knapp Raymond, Mitchell Morris, and Stacy Wolf. New York: Oxford UP, 2011. 54. 7 Gennaro, 54. She explains that Jack Cole was a master at turning away from historical authenticity in his choreography: “it was in the anachronistic and absurd facts of Cole’s work that his choreographic voice emerged,” 54. 8 Gennaro, 59. 9 In “Dance and Choreography,” Zach Dorsey explains that to comprehend the use of dance is to investigate how reviewers contend with it. The Oxford Handbook of The American Musical. Ed. Raymond Knapp, Mitchell Morris, and Stacy Wolf. New York: Oxford UP, 2011. 10 Ben Brantley. “In Hamilton Lin-Miranda Forges Democracy through Rap.” New York Times. 17 Feb. 2015. Web. April 1, 2017. . 11 Peter Marks. “History as You’ve Never Heard It Before.” Washington Post. 17 Feb. 2015. Web. 1 May 2017. . 12 Jesse Green. “Theater Review: Is Hamilton Even Better Than It Was?” Vulture. Web. 18 May 2017. . 13 Michael Shulman. “Top Ten Show Stoppers of 2015.” The New Yorker. 17 Dec. 2015. Web. 26 June 2017. .

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PART 7

Reading the Musical through Interdisciplinary Lenses

The musical is, by definition, a thoroughly interdisciplinary endeavor. The image of a composer isolated in a chilly room, trying to churn out inspired art, may sound like Rent but dates back to Beethoven—and it’s a romantic but false image in both cases. Art is created by its social context and, in turn, shapes it: Beethoven required performers, conductors, producers, and supporters to make music; Roger had to get out of his apartment and into the world before he was able to write a song. A musical needs a composer, lyricist, and bookwriter (these three jobs can be done by one, two, three, or more people), not to mention a director, producer, choreographer, designers, performers, musicians, and an audience in order to be fully formed. A musical, then, is a lived experience—not a script or a score. Studying musicals thus requires at least some familiarity with multiple fields. A musicologist working on musical theater scholarship may need to learn something about choreography along the way; a sociologist might need to dig a little into the history of lighting design. Every chapter in this book is, to varying degrees, an interdisciplinary study. Other sections have already gathered chapters that find musicologists using a gender lens, or theater historians using a race/ethnicity lens, or performance studies scholars using a philosophy lens, for example. These chapters in particular, though, might be thought of as intentionally bringing together two or more fields—some of them unlikely or rare, others more traditional—as the fundamental approach. The scholars in this group model how to apply one discipline to another, or fuse the two, or allow the two to inform each other. Here, the musical meets the study of the sci-fi narrative, or historiography, or psychoanalysis, thereby giving us unusual and insightful perspectives. Jake Johnson looks at the role of religion in musical theater, combining it with thoughts on “fake news” and other notions of what’s true in a “post-truth” world; he explores Bernstein’s Mass and The Book of Mormon, revealing a tension in reception history between secular and faith-based audiences. Sarah Taylor Ellis applies the notion of the time warp—borrowed from science fiction or fantasy stories—to the musical in order to explore how songs in musicals can bend, stop, speed up, or otherwise affect time in ways similar to those found in sci-fi. She links the notion of bent time to queer narrative strategies, opening up nonlinear and non-stable possibilities of storytelling. Aleksei Grinenko gives us an in-depth reading of Next to Normal via psychoanalysis, placing the show in the history of that field and demonstrating how the two disciplines—musical theater and psychoanalysis—inform each other in a musical that boldly avoids a tidy ending or a definitive “cure” to the main character’s mental illness.

Reading the Musical

Surveying the work of Stephen Schwartz, one of the most successful composers of the last 40 years, Paul Laird invokes narrative analysis and traces the theme of parent/child relationships, revealing how the topic arises again and again in various guises in Schwartz’s work. Taking another composer who has been successful for decades, James Leve analyzes the recent work of John Kander, proposing a “late style” of music and subject matter that dwells on themes of personal reflection, and demonstrates impressively experimental musical and narrative style components. Elissa Harbert takes history as her subject, running parallel with an exploration of the role of critics, to reveal that musicals about history are often reviewed with particular expectations—­ often harsh, judgmental ones at that. She asks how musicals about history are different from those with other narratives, and then demonstrates how critics approach such musicals with a preconceived set of criteria and expectations in mind. Thus, the lens of historiography gives us not only an understanding of these (supposedly, sort of ) true musicals but also an understanding of critics’ self-defined roles as receivers of the works both as history and as entertainment.

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26 POST-SECULAR MUSICALS IN A POST-TRUTH WORLD Jake Johnson

On September 8, 1971, the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts opened in ­Washington, DC. That the slain president should be memorialized with a performing arts center was a tribute both to increased government support for the arts under his administration and to the musical-theatrical sensibility in which his political ideology would be framed after his death. Jacqueline Kennedy infamously orchestrated her late husband’s legacy by reference to the 1960 musical Camelot—which premiered on Broadway three years before Kennedy was shot and killed in Dallas, Texas—telling reporters that he frequently listened with fondness to the cast recording, reflecting especially on the show’s closing lyrics.1 It is fitting, then, that the opening of the Kennedy Center included the premiere of a musicaltheatrical piece, Mass, composed by Leonard Bernstein with lyrics by Stephen Schwartz and Paul Simon, and commissioned by Jackie Kennedy herself. In stark contrast to the lithe tone and values of America’s Camelot past, however, Bernstein’s Mass captures the increasingly fractured, upside-down America ushered in by Kennedy’s death. This musical is a dark commentary on what Jimmy Carter would, later in the decade, call America’s “crisis of confidence”: a losing existential battle where America’s identity as benevolent savior, enforcer of good, global economic provider, and carrier of divine truth was increasingly held in suspicion by Americans themselves.2 Even ­Bernstein’s choice of genre—obviously modeled on the Roman Catholic Mass in a nod to ­Kennedy’s faith, and heavily inflected with numerous styles and idioms including popular music, opera, and American musical theater—relays the uneasy, shifting identity of Civil Rights-era America. When the Celebrant comes forward in the opening number wearing plain clothes to tell those gathered that he will “sing the Lord a new song” that is “simple,” he alludes to the recognizable ninety-sixth psalm while also encapsulating the ideology of religious fundamentalism that was then encroaching upon American politics—largely one that continues to see the world’s problems as uncomplicated, and their solutions simple. Yet the Christ-like Celebrant’s hopeful message and unapologetic faith are also mired in symbols of what could be an acerbic counterculture when, in his first appearance, he is accompanied by guitar chords. In some productions, the Celebrant even carries a guitar with him while praising God, “the simplest of all,” with a new, uncomplicated message of renewal, optimism, and faith. A few years earlier, Godspell used popular idioms, as well as the guitar, to draw a somewhat haphazard connection between Jesus’ disciples and a tame version of the 1960s counterculture. But Bernstein’s Celebrant operates in a musical and cultural milieu that is much less optimistic and rosy, and that is thus perhaps a more apt representation of the gritty, aggressive corners of the 1960s counterculture movement. Inasmuch as the Celebrant’s 265

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everyday, folksy character was visually and sonically at odds with Catholic conventions of priestly conduct during the liturgy, his attempts to gain access to a simple God using a complex, heavily ritualized religious service also did not resonate with the sentiments of the secular and often agnostic principles of the counterculture he so obviously evoked. This was something new. In this chapter, I make two interconnected observations. I first consider how musicals inhabit and promote a “post-truth” worldview similar to those reflected in current populist resurgences throughout the West. I argue that it is musical theater’s penchant for the unreal that in recent decades has given it traction within both secular, liberalized communities and fundamentalist religious ones. Further, as an important point of confluence between these groups, contemporary musicals may help open a space for constructive dialogue among people with increasingly disparate worldviews. Second, I use two musicals—Leonard Bernstein’s Mass, described earlier, and the 2011 Broadway hit The Book of Mormon—to build a framework for understanding how contemporary musicals hold in tension secular ideals and belief or faith, in a way that celebrates the current post-secular desire to use religious optimism to mitigate secular pragmatism. I will return to the Celebrant and the Mass later; for now, it will suffice for me to point out that the wounded edges of American ideals triggered by Kennedy’s death and the subsequent conspiratorial atmosphere that corrupted America’s faith in its government were sutured in part by musical theater. On one side of the divide lies Camelot, Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe’s continuation of the so-called Golden Age aesthetic of musical theater, penned at the dawn of a new and optimistic decade; on the other side, Bernstein’s Mass, a bare-knuckled exploration of the American faith crisis, whose appearance at the beginning of the 1970s emblematized the fractured postmodern musical theater aesthetic, and offers a testament to the difference a decade can mean in the identity of a nation. In both cases, musicals serve as handmaidens to very different realities. Camelot was useful to Jackie Kennedy as a backward-looking reality, framing what was just briefly a “shining moment” of American prosperity and civility. Mass looks forward, using the same musical conventions as Camelot, to illustrate America’s turmoil and question once-sacred political and religious institutions that were increasingly understood as causes of and not solutions for America’s post-Kennedy hardships. Given the current political climate around the world, it is not difficult to feel pangs of familiarity with this scenario. Populist movements in America and Europe have signaled a renewed interest in the backward-looking reality represented by Kennedy’s Camelot. One of the world’s more distressing neologisms, “post-truth,” appears to have held liberal elites and progressives tongue-tied and aghast as once-trusted platforms of liberal ideals—journalism and higher education chief among them—seem neutered in a seismic shift of public opinion away from objectivity and toward emotional and personal belief as the most influential tenets shaping our reality. Musicals, too, have become a promulgator of progressive ideals, if inconsistently so: in the years since Camelot, they are often viewed as left-leaning, and the people who make and consume them as diverse and enormously accepting. This is the case despite the fact that in many respects, the liberal qualities of musical theater are a thin veneer covering a genre that remains very stubbornly tethered to tradition, and an audience that remains stubbornly homogenous. There have been strong examples of progressivism on the Broadway stage, but for the most part it takes a degree of reality-suspension beyond that required even for musical theater to imagine the musical stage as a bastion of progressive ideals and values. Even the most politically ambitious and liberally motivated musical of recent memory, Lin-Manuel Miranda’s 2015 monster hit Hamilton, is dependent upon a liberal spinning of the life of the real Alexander Hamilton. Hamilton projects liberal ideals onto the past by cherry-picking aspects of Hamilton’s life (particularly the musical’s construction of him as benevolent immigrant) that are seemingly in line with current liberalized ideologies, yet out of line with historical fact. Crucially, the musical plays up the importance of America’s societal underbelly in shaping the 266

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early nation, even though the financial system the real Hamilton constructed arguably has led to the disparities of wealth in America that create that social underclass in the first place. Conservatism and neoliberal ideologies therefore are baked into Hamilton, and it is entirely possible that the populist right will recognize Hamilton as their own story and wrench it out of liberal hands for their own purposes. This points to an uncomfortable admission: musical theater has long been a source and promoter of what might be called a post-truth reality. You don’t have to look very far to find examples of unreality in musicals; the very act of people bursting into song and dance defies realness in most senses of the term. The reconciliatory fantasy where all loose ends tie up, the hero gets the girl, and the villains get their comeuppance is categorically American and unabashedly escapist— and a more mundane but equally pernicious flavor of the desperate escapism heard within recent mantras like “Make America Great Again.” The protagonists in musicals are rarely complicated and their songs reflect basic, straightforward desires (the ever-present “I am” and “I want” song types, such as “I’m Alive” from Next to Normal and “Somewhere That’s Green” from Little Shop of Horrors, for example), while antagonists struggle with and sing about complex feelings and behaviors. Audiences watching Oklahoma!, for example, are perhaps better primed to understand protagonist Curley’s simple, if not arrogant, desire to court Laurey than to sympathize with his nemesis Jud’s brooding revenge plot in his number “Lonely Room.” As a result, a mild anti-intellectualism pervades musical theater, which perhaps inadvertently undermines liberal values of critical thinking and reason in order to make for good drama. So while musicals have enjoyed a reputation as a somewhat-liberalized platform for political ideals not yet in place, they likewise dally in a post-truth sensibility that places liberal communities in much closer proximity to the current populist uprising than many would care to admit. Musical theater’s reach into the far corners of America’s social fabric impels us to consider how contemporary musicals matter to increasingly entrenched ideological communities, which perhaps will lead to a cautious optimism that even this single point of confluence is enough to begin a dialogue between them. One way to begin understanding how musicals help construct a post-secular worldview is to consider the genre’s religious roots. Alexander Saxton points out that blackface minstrelsy, an early predecessor to musical comedy, emerged in upstate New York as a form of national entertainment in the mid-nineteenth century that reflected Jacksonian principles of self-fashioning and white supremacy.3 Mormonism, Adventism, and other restorative faiths emerge from this same time, place, and ideological current, carrying forward the performative and theatrical inclinations of fundamentalist religion such as tongue-speaking and speaking on behalf of God. Early American fundamentalism and early American musical theater are cut from the same ideological cloth—one that often drapes outside the realm of veracity. They both are concerned with worlds yet unseen or unattainable, and both put a lot of weight on the necessities of vocal theatricality in order to access those worlds. The result is that the musical has retained a pious identity, never quite shaken from its ideological tethering to the religious impulses used to justify nineteenth-century white supremacy despite its often wanton and lewd subject matter. By the early twentieth century, musicals were considered a wholesome, white, middle-class genre replete with religious values inscribed within reconciliatory, redemptive stories, where right and wrong were clearly demarcated and good always triumphed over evil.4 This Protestant religiosity pervades musicals overtly in times past: Cole Porter famously referred to Richard Rodgers’s tunes as having a certain “holiness” about them, and Oscar Hammerstein II’s liberal Jewish and Protestant upbringing clearly impelled him to imbue his stories with strong moral resonances.5 Musicals now operate more covertly, with gospel-inflected eleventh-hour numbers like “I Know Where I’ve Been” from Hairspray (2002) representing so common a trope in contemporary 267

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musicals that many shows barely evade becoming staged sermons.6 Perhaps it is for these reasons that Mormons, evangelical Christians, Jews, Scientologists, and other religious communities who otherwise have little in common embrace the musical stage as a convenient space to explore and express spiritual values. It’s not difficult to see how musicals as a genre are beholden to tradition, a rare expression of popular culture that remains steadfastly committed to spreading good news and modeling a hope in reconciliation without feeling preachy or overbearing. Musicals both implicitly and explicitly project religious values, and it’s no small wonder that religious fundamentalists from Branson, Missouri to Colorado City, Utah have used musicals as vehicles to evangelize among others and comfort their own.7 If musicals are framed by religion in various ways, that framework can sometimes appear disjointed when the subject of the musical appears to be at odds with purported religious values. When musicals turned to more overtly religious topics in the 1970s, as with Jesus Christ Superstar and Godspell, they usually did so with the secular intention of humanizing divine figures. The rise of the concept musical during this time, most notably in musicals by Stephen Sondheim, gave audiences fractured plots and uneasy resolutions rather than the more preachy morality of musicals from previous generations. As John Bush Jones has argued, the fragmented plots of concept musicals “mirrored the fragmented American society of the 1970s and the anxieties of inward-turning individuals.”8 Still, even the most stridently critical and irreverent musicals of all eras maintain at heart an idealism, in which powerful emotions like hope and love generate their own logic. Even the Jacksonian ideology of white supremacy rested on a nationalist fervor and excited optimism for an expanding frontier, while also sentimentalizing through minstrelsy the mythic journey of the slave who desperately clung to what was being left behind. It is on the axis of empathy, then, that musicals pivot from one topic to another, never fully escaping the religious and political idealism from which the genre was born.

The Book of Mormon The musical The Book of Mormon makes for a compelling case study of this phenomenon, not least because of the great theological prominence actual Mormons afford to American musical theater. Mormonism was born in upstate New York, alongside blackface minstrelsy. As Mormons slowly developed from a fringe polygamist sect to an iconic American religion (what Harold Bloom called “the American religion”), they attached themselves to a musical theater aesthetic to help garner white, middle-class respectability. Even more, because of the ideological roots ­Mormonism and musical theater share, musicals have served both a pragmatic and theological need for M ­ ormons, even today. Mormons in the twentieth century used musicals to change their popular image from un-American and racially suspect to ideal Americans: solid representatives of white, middle-class sensibilities. That remarkable transformation was all the more remarkable since it was musical theater that became a primary conduit for Mormons to change the tune, so to speak.9 Mormons eventually paid a price for their close association with musical theater. The Book of Mormon creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone grew up around Mormons and noted that ­Mormons seem so musical theater-like that the two iconic American institutions actually have a lot in common. In their minds, Mormons, Rodgers and Hammerstein, and Disney were different words for the same idea.10 Lampooning Mormons on stage may have been convenient for those reasons, but Mormonism is such an emblem of homegrown Americana that it also becomes in the show a synecdoche for religious Americans more broadly. While The Book of Mormon is satirical and gets laughs at the expense of real Mormons and some of the beliefs they hold sacred, it is easy to read the musical as not defaming the religious but celebrating them. In fact, the musical—a self-­ described “atheist love letter to religion”—concludes by suggesting that religious beliefs are a good thing, no matter how ridiculous they may be, if they help people deal with the complexities of 268

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being human.11 Distinguishing fact from fiction isn’t always a useful task, the musical insists; as John Updike writes, “The crucial question isn’t Can you prove it? but Does it give us a handle on the reality that otherwise would overwhelm us?”12 To be sure, The Book of Mormon mercilessly critiques the dogmatic principles young Mormon missionaries naively extend to people and places they cannot fully understand, but it also tacitly admits that the problems facing the Ugandans—abusive warlords, impoverishment, an unchecked AIDS epidemic—represent some of the many failures of secular, neoliberal policies. Scholars refer to such admissions of the secular worldview’s limitations as post-secularism. In his seminal book Partial Faiths, John McClure analyzes post-secular novels and observes that one constant feature is that characters are not rescued from the secular world and brought to safety on the other side of a religious conversion. Rather, these characters often become stranded in “the ideologically mixed and confusing middle zones of the conventional conversion narrative.” McClure notes that this liminal space does not discomfit the characters, who are content to remain outside of a “fully elaborated form of belief and practice.”13 For McClure, as well as thinkers as diverse as Jürgen Habermas, Charles Taylor, and Richard Rorty, our post-secular fictions (which undoubtedly include musicals) capture a liminality in contemporary life, where people are caught somewhere between faith and reason, yet remain satisfied in their in-between-ness because the limitations of both secular and religious ideals are now so apparent. Scholars, artists, and writers seem to suggest, then, that the critical combination of the two is what offers a more promising and happy future. This post-secular aesthetic is evident in The Book of Mormon. Elder Price sings the anthem “I ­Believe” in a retrenchment move to hold onto his faith, keeping doubt at bay by repressing f­eelings of insecurity and shaken confidence in his and God’s power. The song is comical because of how sincerely the missionary believes what sounds like ridiculous dogma. In fact, all the things Elder Price mentions as being important tenets of his faith—things like the Garden of Eden being in Jackson County, Missouri or ancient Jews sailing to America—are empirically false by secular standards; science has disproven most of Elder Price’s beliefs, and the rest quickly crumble under the scrutiny of reason. Nonetheless, the audience is easily charmed by how these goofy admissions so easily roll off Elder Price’s tongue. We want Elder Price to succeed—he is our hero, after all—even though we find it hard to take his beliefs seriously. In this song, perhaps more than others in the musical, the post-secular balance of faith and reason is put on display. Importantly, the audience maintains part of that balance: we hold Elder Price accountable for his naiveté, something of which he is completely unaware. As a community of theatrical participants, then, both Elder Price and the audience create a reality where faith’s idealism and secular pragmatism coexist productively. Ironically for Mormons, this faith-affirming message is at odds with Mormonism’s mid-­ twentieth-century turn away from statements like “I believe” and toward the more empirical “I know”—slight changes with significant repercussions. As the Mormon Church attempted to distance itself from its sometimes unsavory and un-American past (e.g. polygamy and proto-­socialist communities), Church leaders began pruning back some of the more unruly aspects of the faith to make it more manageable, easier to standardize, and therefore more readily transplanted to other parts of the world. One result of intense standardization, however, is an overemphasis on obedience to rules and standards, rather than more fluid principles of individual faith experiences. Knowledge of Mormon values and principles, then, was placed at a premium. Today, Mormons rarely speak of “believing” one thing or another, preferring instead to state objectively that, through the confirmation of the Holy Spirit, they “know” various Mormon truth claims are true. The nature of knowledge is that it is the antithesis of faith—Paul admits as much when he writes that “faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen” (Hebrews 11:1). That said, Mormons today bandy about a surety of their convictions that actually dispels faith in favor of reason. The implication of using “I know” to articulate what is typically phrased by the religious as “I believe” is that objective reality exists alongside a faith-based one of “things not seen.” Mormons 269

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therefore exemplify a post-secular worldview in that they find the tension between facts and belief to be productive, and the differences between the two to be fluid. This helps explain why Elder Price’s push against encroaching doubt in “I Believe” ultimately fails him. By singing that “a ­Mormon just believes,” he is getting his theology wrong; it is he in this instance, not the bumbling Elder ­Cunningham, who gets caught “making things up.”14 A modern Mormon missionary may “believe” all the things Elder Price mentions about Jews sailing to America or the concept of eternal progression on distant planets, but he would articulate them in objective, rather than subjective, terms. The moral of The Book of Mormon is that beliefs are powerful precisely because they aren’t rigidly true; they can be molded to fit different needs at different times for different people. When Elder Price sees the fruits of Elder Cunningham’s labor—that the Ugandan villagers have been converted to a bastardized Mormonism, as demonstrated in their pageant “Joseph Smith ­A merican Moses”—he finally gets it. “That play was the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen,” he tells Elder Cunningham. “Scripture isn’t that important. I was losing my faith and you went out and did something incredible…for a people who had nowhere else to go. I thought they were unreachable, but then they were happy, and hopeful, and wearing costumes.” We might distill Elder Price’s revelation as learning that the ends justify the means. Giving people hope and a sense of purpose is important, even vital, even if the stories they teach aren’t true in a factual sense. Truth, the missionaries learn, is not a quality of the doctrine but a measure of how effectively their stories help people lead better lives. To put it another, more slanted way, there are times when what is objectively true may be less important than what feels right.

A Simple Song So, what of the Celebrant in Bernstein’s Mass, singing the opening number “Simple Song”? “Make it up as you go along” and “sing like you like to sing,” he proclaims, adding “God loves all simple things / For God is the simplest of all.” He goes on to sing what becomes a trope throughout the song and even a musical moral of the entire story: lauda, laude. Lauda refers to a sacred vernacular song style popular in Italy in the late medieval period that was especially associated with mendicant, or traveling, preachers. Laude is Latin for “with highest honor.” We know from his text, then, that the Celebrant is itinerant, entering our musical world as a stranger in a strange land, and that his theology is centered around song—an auspicious beginning for a musical, so it seems. The Celebrant preaches one thing, but the music says something else. As composer Daron ­Hagen has observed, the open G and D guitar chords at the song’s start sound about as simple as can be—and cleverly refer to God, “G-D,” without the middle note of the chord. Yet the ­Celebrant’s slowly descending melodic line (“Sing God a simple song”) pauses momentarily at the C-sharp on the word “God,” creating over the G major bass a piercing tritone, a sonic signifier long associated with the devil.15 The precarious nature of having faith in a secular age is captured in that single moment of clashing harmonies—a sonic corollary to Anne Sexton’s poetic line, “My faith / is a great weight / hung on a small wire.”16 Indeed, the Celebrant seems haunted by both good and evil spirits during the Mass as he slowly gets crushed beneath taunting and humiliating jests from the 16 “street singers” who, like him, never leave the stage. In fact, the Celebrant seems more in keeping with the unstable preachers of Flannery O’Connor’s imagination than with the strong, confident protagonist we expect in musical theater. The Celebrant attempts to administer the sacraments throughout the service, but is regularly interrupted by his stage companions, who hurl pithy asides like “I believe in God, but does God believe in me?” and offer tender reflections on their own loss of faith. They are keen critics of contemporary life, singing at one point—presciently, from today’s perspective—that “half of the people are stoned and the other half are waiting for the next election. Half the people are drowned and the other half are swimming in the wrong direction.”17 270

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By the end of Mass, the Celebrant, like Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane, carries the scorn and mockery of the crowd until he can no longer bear it. He has a breakdown, reflecting upon the retreat of religious principles from public life, “how easily things get broken.” The crowd watches in silence, unable to look away from a man in the midst of what is obviously a psychological crisis. Finally, a young boy soprano enters; his character is named simply “Young Celebrant,” and he picks up the strains of the Celebrant’s opening number. The rest of the ensemble slowly joins in, but they don’t sing in unison. Rather, the Celebrant’s simple song is turned into a canon, with voices entering and exiting the texture with increasing rapture. The most prominent words in the text are lauda laude. Amid these cacophonous voices, the lauda seems both stylistically and dramatically appropriate. The simple monophonic song style that began in the medieval era gradually evolved into a more complex polyphonic texture in the centuries that followed. Similarly, the simple song that begins this ancient service transforms by the end of the musical. The street singers acknowledge in the end the usefulness, even the necessity, of the Celebrant’s faith by placing his simple message within the intellectual complexity of a canon—his simple song growing from an invitation to join to a statement on belonging. This scene evocatively unites the religious message overtly laid out in the opening bars of Mass with a secular pressure to rationalize and categorize faith out of public discourse. As a statement on the post-secular, it shows the fatal flaws of both secular and religious worldviews and delights in imagining the effects of their union, if only musically. In its context as a memorial to John F. Kennedy, Mass creates a very different sense of idealism and sentiment than what Jackie Kennedy intended in associating her husband with Camelot. But Mass doesn’t seem to have been written for the slain president. Instead, it seems aimed at those left in the wake of his death: “Let the dead bury the dead,” Jesus said, “but go thou and preach the kingdom of God” (Luke 9:60). Like The Book of Mormon, Mass is at times irreverent and cacophonous, and can thus be difficult to sit through. Both musicals deal overtly with religion, and in important ways both shows problematize religion in America. They are worlds apart in style, in smarts, in time, and in substance, but they both get at the heart of post-secular ideals. In the vein of musicals before them, they defy truth and relish obscuring it. While I type these sentences, our political world reels from uncertainty, and flinches already from the pain that surely will afflict many people. Most uncertainty lies in the gulf that seems to divide those who see truth as substance and those who see it as emotion. As Sarah Ahmed has argued, emotions don’t inhabit us so much as they are performed behaviors, prone to easily “slide” from one form and one person to another and another.18 The same may be true for truth. If “post-truth” seems an impossible obstacle to overcome, a stubborn and persistent ghost haunting our heated conversations and failed dialogues, then perhaps some solace can be found in its tenuousness, its shape-shifting nature that slides from one form to another. Many musicals imply that it is possible for a world where truths and facts don’t always count to also be a world where an invitation to sing is met with a chorus of belonging. If nothing else, the characters in Bernstein’s Mass and in Parker and Stone’s The Book of Mormon exemplify how to wed belief and knowledge for positive results. The ends justify the means these musicals seem to echo. We can show you how to get to the other side for just a song and a dance.

Notes 1 There are numerous accounts of how Jackie Kennedy mythologized her late husband in reference to Camelot. One instructive place to begin is with James Piereson. “How Jackie Kennedy Invented the Camelot Legend after JFK’s Death.” The Daily Beast. 12 Nov. 2013. Web. 24 Feb. 2017. . 2 Carter delivered this as part of a televised address on July 15, 1979. Carter, a long-time Sunday school teacher, framed his plea in familiar Christian rhetoric, where showing faith is a sign of strength: “We

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Jake Johnson simply must have faith in each other, faith in our ability to govern ourselves, and faith in the future of this nation. Restoring that faith and that confidence to America is now the most important task we face. It is a true challenge of this generation of Americans.” 3 Alexander Saxton. “Blackface Minstrelsy and Jacksonian Ideology.” American Quarterly 27.1 (1975): 3–28. 4 See Ian Bradley. You’ve Got to Have a Dream: The Message of the Musical. London: SCM Press, 2004, and Andrea Most. Making Americans: Jews and the Broadway Musical. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2004. 5 Quoted in Bradley, 72. 6 The trope is common enough that parodies of it now exist, including Michael Kooman and Christopher Dimond’s song “Random Black Girl.” For a more critical view of this trope, see Daniel Dinero. “A Big Black Lady Stops the Show: Black Women, Performances of Excess, and the Power of Saying No.” Studies in Musical Theatre 6.1 (2012): 29–41. 7 Consider, for example, popular productions by Sight & Sound Theaters in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and Branson, Missouri, including Moses, Jesus, and Jonah, and the FLDS polygamous community in Utah who re-wrote The Sound of Music to be a polygamist propaganda piece. It is undoubtedly the fluidity of musicals to mean what we need or want them to mean that allows them such variability among disparate religious groups. 8 John Bush Jones. Our Musicals, Ourselves: A Social History of the American Musical Theater. Boston: Brandeis UP, 2003. 273. 9 Throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Mormons were depicted in operetta and musical theater as ethnic minorities, largely because the practice of polygamy placed them in close proximity to “problematic” groups like Islam. When the Mormon Church suspended polygamy officially in the late nineteenth century, they used musicals to change the narrative and garner broader acceptance by white Americans. Consider, for example, the 1944 Mormon musical Promised Valley, modeled after Oklahoma!, in which Mormon values of hard work, religious vision, and commitment to normative family values are used to demonstrate their story as quintessentially American. Anti-Mormon sentiment begins to wane by 1950, after which Mormons enjoy several decades of acceptance not only as part of the white American community, but exemplars of it. 10 Matt Stone and Trey Parker interview on “Fresh Air” with Terry Gross. “‘Book of Mormon’ Creators on Their Broadway Smash.” 9 May 2011. Web. 24 Feb. 2017. . 11 Carl Swanson. “Trey Parker and Matt Stone Talk About Why The Book of Mormon Isn’t Actually ­O ffensive, and the Future of South Park.” The Vulture. 11 Mar. 2011. Web. 24 Feb. 2017. . 12 John Updike. The Coup: A Novel. New York: Random House Publishing Group, 2012. 143. 13 John A. McClure. Partial Faiths: Postsecular Fiction in the Age of Pynchon and Morrison. Athens: The U of Georgia P, 2007. 4. 14 Trey Parker, Robert Lopez, and Matt Stone. The Book of Mormon Piano/Vocal Score. Van Nuys: Alfred Music Publishing Co., 2011. 146. 15 Daron Hagen. “Bernstein’s Seemingly Simple Song.” The Huffington Post. 17 Mar. 2015. Web. 24 Feb. 2017. . 16 Anne Sexton. “Small Wire.” The Awful Rowing Toward God. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1975. 78. 17 Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Schwartz. Mass: A Theater Piece for Singers, Players and Dancers Vocal Score. New York: G. Schirmer, 1971. 112. The score notes that “this quatrain was a Christmas present from Paul Simon.” 18 Sarah Ahmed. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. New York: Routledge, 2004.

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27 LET’S DO THE TIME WARP AGAIN Performing Time, Genre, and Spectatorship Sarah Taylor Ellis

When their car breaks down in the woods one stormy night, newly engaged Brad Majors and Janet Weiss experience a moment of hope when they spot a nearby castle with some of its lights on. They approach the Frankenstein place hoping to call a mechanic and resume their steady narrative drive toward marriage. Yet upon entering the castle, Brad and Janet encounter an odd assortment of characters performing a strangely seductive number titled “The Time Warp.” In The Rocky Horror Picture Show, this participatory song and dance spins a once-linear plot into an episodic musical adventure, dominated by the powerhouse performance of sweet transvestite Dr. ­Frank-N-Furter (Tim Curry). In a glittering corset and fishnets, the Transylvanians’ cool and confident leader brings to life a new creation: a muscular man with blonde hair and a tan named Rocky. He bludgeons a wayward rocker Eddie (Meat Loaf ) and serves him for dinner. Most importantly, he strips the baffled Brad and Janet down to their underwear and seduces them into increasingly outrageous fantasies, culminating in an orgy of fluid gender and sexual identities. Frank manipulates his guests not only with his natural charm and charisma but also with a sonic transducer, which—crucially—grants him the ability to stop time. “The Time Warp” represents an extreme example of how song and dance can bend and even break normative narratives in musical theater. Musical numbers often warp time by speeding it up or slowing it down, emphasizing repetition and circularity, dipping into memory, and projecting the future. In warping time, musical numbers can complicate a linear narrative: song and dance introduce a radical temporal and aesthetic difference into an otherwise straightforward script, and in extreme cases such as “The Time Warp,” that difference can even reroute the story. Most musical numbers, after all, do not seamlessly progress the plot; instead, they step outside a linear conception of time to elaborate on and indulge in a given present moment. For example, “If I Loved You” does not immediately progress Julie Jordan and Billy Bigelow’s budding relationship in Carousel; rather, the song stops the plot to fantasize about a hypothetical romance, which is only realized once the scene resumes. Likewise in A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, “Everybody Ought to Have a Maid” actively encourages both the characters’ and the audience’s distraction from the plot through an imagined scenario of a maid puttering about the house. It is possible to locate queer modes of relationality in the genre’s musical numbers, which stop time to dream about the open possibilities of the present.1 In speculative fiction—which encompasses sci-fi, fantasy, and other supernatural and futuristic genres—a “time warp” enables rapid and radical time travel: it creates discontinuities in a linear narrative by jump-cutting across time and space. A time warp is not a narrative destination unto 273

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itself, but a liminal space of projection into an alternative. A wormhole of open-ended possibilities in speculative fiction is thus much like a number in a musical. Stepping outside a linear notion of time, whether in a wormhole or a song, allows for the examination of alternatives to the present and future. Nonrealist genres like sci-fi/fantasy and musical theater can disintegrate the notion of a homogeneously unified present and physicalize alternatives to a normative life trajectory—­ especially when one can sing and dance along.2 Despite postmodern trends that involve the blending and blurring of modes of discourse, genre is a persistent reality that structures bookstores, Netflix queues, and college courses. The construct of genre does not objectively classify cultural texts, but instead establishes hierarchies of value. Horror, mystery, romance, science fiction and fantasy, thrillers, Westerns, and musicals are often considered to be formulaic products targeted to niche audiences. Many such genres inhabit paradoxical positions of mass popularity on the one hand and critical dismissal on the other hand: fans love them, but critics have a long history of dismissing them as disposable entertainment that audiences mindlessly consume.3 Yet fans of genre entertainment are far from passive consumers; they can be incredibly active participants who make a world of meanings from these texts.4 This chapter examines the oft-maligned, time-warping genres of musical theater and sci-fi/ fantasy and locates an affective link across their dedicated and overlapping fan cultures through an analysis of The Rocky Horror Picture Show and Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog. I am particularly interested in the ways these films’ exaggerated aesthetics exude a cult and camp sensibility that works to appeal to a queer audience, broadly defined. In different ways, each film digs through the sci-fi detritus of the past to create new narrative mash-ups of outrageously alien situations; the plots’ artificiality is further heightened through song and dance. Characters are intentionally broad to the point of caricature: drag queens with luscious red lips; supervillians in oversized lab coats and goggles. Behind these comical costumes, actors wink at the camera and welcome audiences into stylized universes that continually draw attention to their own fabulous, low-tech construction. In such blatant theatricality and intentional gaps between character and actor, both The Rocky Horror Picture Show and Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog point to sites of negotiation between a scripted part and its embodiment, or between performativity and performance.5 These musicals illustrate the possibilities of reiterating cultural norms with a difference; they locate agency in reconfiguring a role from within.6 Fans of these Frankensteinian texts can play on the tenuous borders between reality and fantasy, embracing the wormholes of imaginative alternatives to a normative identity and life trajectory.

Creatures of the Night: The Rocky Horror Picture Show Richard O’Brien’s stage musical The Rocky Horror Show met with critical and popular acclaim when it premiered at the in-yer-face Royal Court Upstairs in London in 1973. As Guardian critic Michael Billington recalls, audience members “had nowhere to hide from the sex and violence that inevitably loomed large” in this intimate space, and the crowd’s visceral involvement in the show contributed to Rocky Horror’s early success.7 In March 1974, Rocky Horror also began a successful nine-month run at Los Angeles’ Roxy Theater, a concert venue and former strip club on the Sunset Strip. Such grungy, alternative venues suited this campy musical experience. Yet in March 1975, The Rocky Horror Show flopped at the symbolic pinnacle of mainstream musical theater culture: Broadway, where it played only four previews and 45 performances. ­A lthough Hair had brought sex, drugs, and rock and roll to the Great White Way in 1968, The Rocky Horror Show’s sexual confusion and sci-fi fusion felt incongruous in such an ornate, mainstream venue.8 Like the Broadway production, the film adaptation, retitled The Rocky Horror Picture Show, flopped in mainstream movie houses in its first general release on September 29, 1975.9

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Chicago Tribune critic Lynn van Matre gave the film a mediocre 2.5-star rating: “It’s not exactly a great movie, but more often than not it’s great fun, provided your heart belongs to drag parodies with overtones of dementia.”10 The mythology of Rocky Horror, then, is intimately bound up with what Halberstam calls the queer art of failure, and Rocky Horror fan culture constitutes itself as reclaiming (what was once) an abject commodity.11 Richard O’Brien’s musical is itself an anachronistic reclamation of earlier lowbrow commodities: a patchwork homage to low-budget science fiction, horror, and other “B” films of the early twentieth century. Motion picture studios’ focus on big-budget features meant that B films were both less marketed and critically disdained as formulaic fodder. Yet paradoxically, the studios’ focus on features meant B films could experiment in style and content, pushing moral boundaries with less censorship. The opening number of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, “Science Fiction / Double Feature,” pays tribute to these genre films. Although The Rocky Horror Picture Show and many of its constituent B films were initially introduced to the mainstream, their ongoing subcultural attachments are intertwined with histories of their initial rejection, as well as their stylistic and ideological excess. Creators, producers, and fans had to locate alternative commercial structures in which these texts could thrive. In the early 1960s, Jonas Mekas’ New American Cinema Group offered a pioneering structure for avant-garde filmmakers to find an audience and introduced some of the first midnight movie screenings.12 This subcultural practice became more firmly established in the 1970s with ­A lejandro Jodorowsky’s El Topo, a brutally bloody Spanish-language Western that premiered as a midnight film at New York City’s Elgin Theater. Theater owners soon “saw that [they] could create a world around the concept of midnight, that at 12 o’clock, a different world of movie-going took place”—and often attracted a cult following of repeat theatergoers.13 Midnight screenings became an alternative business model that both embraced and commercially exploited teen and young adult audiences. With its midnight premiere at New York City’s Waverly Theater on April 2, 1976, Rocky Horror became a popular midnight happening—especially as repeat theatergoers began openly interacting with the movie. Although it is impossible to pinpoint precisely how performative interaction with The Rocky Horror Picture Show began, “The Time Warp” is a very good place to start. This song and dance number explicitly invokes audience participation, and instruction is built into the lyrics: “It’s just a jump to the left and then a step to the right.”14 Perhaps more important is the song’s advocacy for repetition after these simple steps have been taught: “Let’s do the time warp again!” The chorus maintains a “tight, quasi-hysterical circle of control” in the melody, underpinned by a strangely jolting chord progression: almost an all-major-key circle of 5ths progression in reverse.15 This “again”-ness of the “Time Warp” is inherent to the number’s musical and choreographic structure, as well as to the audience itself: fans who return week after week to the same theater’s time-warping midnight showings. In West Los Angeles, performance troupe Sins o’ the Flesh has time warped at the Nuart ­Theater since the late 1980s.16 Each Saturday night, a cast of rotating performers dances to pumping pop music as crowds pour into theater. Vendors sell t-shirts and buttons created by local artists. Following an elaborate preshow ritual of sacrificing Rocky Horror virgins (spectators who have never seen the film before), the cast of amateur actors syncs with the screen in a live shadowcast performance; the film is performed at the same time it is screened, and the entire movie theater becomes a playing space. When troupe members are not performing with the shadowcast, they often attend anyway to participate from the audience and support their friends. Shadowcast members invest both time and money in elaborate costumes, wigs, makeup, and props to performatively subsume themselves in the filmic landscape of The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Though Fox began producing flimsy Rocky Horror Halloween costumes in 2001, many fans

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pride themselves on obsessive detail, often rummaging thrift shops or ordering custom-­sequined material to make, for example, Columbia’s bustier. Costume construction can even be a semiprofitable hobby for particularly skilled fans. A member of Sins o’ the Flesh since 1995, E ­ lizabeth Stockton is equally known for her wig designs; her wigs range from $60 (Rocky H ­ orror’s simple blonde shag) to $99 (Magenta’s lightning bolt beehive space wig).17 Functionality is as essential as accuracy; Sacramento-based costumer Shawn Anthony sews a hidden side zipper into every corset to enable quick costume changes, particularly the pesky transition into the floor show.18 Actors are not typecast by gender, sexuality, race, or other physical attributes in Sins o’ the Flesh, and an actor may specialize in several roles. In addition to wig-making, Stockton has worked her way up from a Transylvanian to Frank-N-Furter in over two decades with the shadowcast, and she appears in an all-star shadowcast filmed at the Wiltern for the 35th anniversary blu-ray. The frequent casting of women in men’s roles both conceals and reveals the gender binary at work in Rocky Horror fan culture. Women such as Stockton often assume the roles of ­Frank-N-Furter, Brad, Riff Raff, and the Criminologist from necessity as much as desire; while Rocky Horror has historically been popular in gay male culture, Rocky Horror’s playful affront to traditional masculinity attracts fewer men to the Sins o’ the Flesh cast. The lack of many men in this particular cast—and the even more notable absence of racial diversity—points to potential limits of Rocky Horror’s carnivalesque fan landscape. As the film is mapped into the 300-seat Nuart Theater, the shadowcast performance draws attention to the disjunctive time and space of film as a medium. Film editing enables quick cuts across time and space, not to mention camera angles and special effects that cannot be replicated on stage. Sins o’ the Flesh must creatively navigate character entrances and exits, often using the theater’s double aisles for a more encompassing interactive experience; performers must fill in the cuts of each scene with appropriate (and sometimes impishly inappropriate) action for their characters. Participatory audiences at The Rocky Horror Picture Show also regularly syncopate time with the film by speaking back to the movie in cacophonous counterpoint to the original text. Legend has it that the kindergarten teacher and avid Rocky Horror fan Louis Farese first began talking back to the screen on Labor Day weekend of 1976. After the narrating Criminologist opened the story—“I would like, ah, if I may, to take you on a strange journey”—Farese spontaneously responded, “How strange was it?”19 Counterpoint dialogue, which has emerged over years of collective midnight movie improvisation, syncopates with and against textual authority. Each local audience script defers a singular meaning, alternatively underpinning and undermining Richard O’Brien’s original script. The film seems ready-made for participatory interjections since the pacing of the acting often drags, filled with expansive rests at the end of lines and musical phrases (Table 27.1). Take, for instance, the chorus of the opening number, “Science Fiction / Double Feature.” The underlined portions represent rests, available for interjections. Although the script of counterpoint dialogue shifts from location to location, audiences often fill the temporal gap after “Doctor X” with the rhyming chant “Sex sex sex sex.” “See androids fighting” is frequently followed by “and fucking and sucking on” “Brad and Janet.” Both the authorially intended line (“See androids fighting Brad and Janet”) and the modified meaning (“See androids fighting and fucking and sucking on Brad and Janet”) can be simultaneously upheld. Why settle for a single meaning when one can read double at the late night “anal friction” double feature “Rocky Horror” picture show? When the host theater allows, fans also physically participate in the film: they fling rice during the wedding scene, literalize the lyric “You’re a hot dog” by throwing wieners, and toss “cards for sorrow” and “cards for pain” during Dr. Frank-N-Furter’s heartwarming “Going Home.” This counterpoint dialogue and prop usage complicate the relationship between text and frame; the boundaries between what lies inside and outside the text become porous, and an audience’s immersive participation in Rocky Horror is both a counterpoint to and commentary on it. 276

Let’s Do the Time Warp Again Table 27.1  Space for Participatory Interjections in “Science Fiction/Double Feature” 1

2

3

4

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fight- ing net stars

in Pla- net.

Oh

Ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh. Night

4

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For bid- den Oh

3

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2

oh

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4

1

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Show 1

2

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3

4

The Rocky Horror Picture Show may have had its midnight premiere on April Fool’s Day of 1976, but in some parts of the world more recently, the movie has become closely associated with the carnivalesque, costumed culture of Halloween. West Hollywood’s Annual Halloween Carnaval in 2010 was Rocky Horror themed; during the festivities, 8,239 people danced “The Time Warp,” breaking the Guinness World Record in honor of the film’s 35th anniversary. Decades after the film’s premiere, as thousands of fans do “The Time Warp” in midnight showings, school dances, gay friendly neighborhoods, or at home in front of streamed viewings of the film, critics may question the ongoing identificatory charge of The Rocky Horror Picture Show. This once-maligned subcultural object has entered into—and wildly succeeded within—the mainstream. Rocky Horror was released on VHS for the first time in 1990 and had its television premiere on FOX in 1993, complete with an edited audience participation track.20 In 2010, an episode of the hit television series Glee staged Rocky Horror at fictional William McKinley High School, and in 2016, the film was remade for television with popular transgender actress Laverne Cox as Dr. Frank-n-Furter.21 Yet no matter how many times a fan has seen the film or a remake on TV, attending a midnight movie “in the flesh” is an important rite of passage. The Rocky Horror Picture Show seems to maintain its identificatory power for an alternative fan base because it persists in such a contradictory, frayed, and fragile present. The acceptability of queer lives remains wildly uneven across times and space; hate crimes can and do happen, after all, as randomly in West Hollywood or Greenwich Village as they can in the rural Midwest or in a Bible Belt suburb. Rocky Horror insists on the cacophonous coexistence of times and spaces. Within the film itself, Frank-N-Furter’s sexually liberated reign is only a flashing, fleeting moment. Deeming Frank’s lifestyle too extreme, the mad scientist’s own followers, Riff-Raff and Magenta, kill him and rocket back to Transylvania, leaving cracked and confused remnants of human culture in their wake. Yet Dr. Frank-N-Furter is resuscitated as his fans do “The Time Warp” week after week, co-creating another utopian moment of cultural acceptance. 277

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We’ll Make Time Stand Still: Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog Just as warping time is the ultimate power for Dr. Frank-N-Furter of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, it serves Dr. Horrible of the viral web series Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog. While Frank uses a sonic transducer to stop time and manipulate his guests into performing a kinky floor show, Dr. Horrible invents a Freeze Ray to stop time, get the girl, and rule the world: an undoubtedly ambitious mission. Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog was born of similarly ambitious aims during the Writers Guild of America (WGA) Strike against the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP), which lasted from November 5, 2007 to February 12, 2008. Wielding their Freeze Rays on film and television studios, many writers explored alternative methods of artistic production and distribution during this work stoppage. In a blog post addressed to his fans in spring 2008, Joss Whedon cast himself as the protagonist in a horribly familiar fantasy: Once upon a time, all the writers in the forest got very mad with the Forest Kings and declared a work-stoppage. The forest creatures were all sad; the mushrooms did not dance, the elderberries gave no juice for the festival wines, and the Teamsters were kinda pissed. (They were very polite about it, though.) During this work-stoppage, many writers tried to form partnerships for outside funding to create new work that circumvented the Forest King system. Frustrated with the lack of movement on that front, I finally decided to do something very ambitious, very exciting, very mid-life-crisisy.22 While time stood still for the studios, Whedon gathered writers Zack Whedon and Maurissa ­Tancharoen, composer Jed Whedon, and a stellar cast and crew to self-produce a three-act web series: Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog. When Act I debuted on July 15, 2008, free and without ads, traffic to drhorrible.com crashed the servers. Dr. Horrible was subsequently released as an iTunes download, as well as a DVD loaded with extras created for—and sometimes by—the web series’ devoted fans. As a “Sing-Along,” Dr. Horrible explicitly invites fans to be supervillainous co-­ conspirators, collectively navigating new methods of artistic creation that circumvent the corporate studio system. Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog emerges from a field of parallel fiction that explores familiar texts from alternative perspectives, like the novel and musical Wicked, which paints The Wizard of Oz’s Wicked Witch of the West as a misunderstood outcast and political activist.23 Dr. Horrible similarly upends the superhero genre by centering on a sympathetic supervillain. A typically straightforward story of good against evil is thus reconfigured to reveal a more complicated range of ­perspectives, deferring moral certainty and closure. In Dr. Horrible, the hypermasculine “hero,” Captain Hammer, is actually a cheesy corporate tool. Hammer’s underlying motive is to boost his own ego and bash his competition whenever possible. More human and sympathetic is the awkward anarchist Dr. Horrible.24 Like Clark Kent and Superman, or Bruce Wayne and Batman, Neil Patrick Harris’ character uncomfortably straddles two identities: boy-next-door Billy and supervillain Dr. Horrible. Both Billy and Dr. ­Horrible are nerdy misfits marked by failure. Billy longs for recognition by Penny, the soft-­spoken girl from the laundromat, but he stumbles over words and struggles to make a “real, audible connection” with her.25 Meanwhile, Dr. Horrible plots how to gain acceptance to the elite Evil League of Evil (ELE). He may not be as lame a supervillain as Moist, a secondary character who wields the questionable power of making objects damp, but Dr. Horrible still finds his career continually thwarted. Dr. Horrible becomes a particularly charismatic and queer countercultural hero due to a third identity that is layered onto the character by Neil Patrick Harris himself: a beloved theater, 278

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film, and television actor whose public persona as an out and proud song-and-dance man makes Dr. Horrible all the more lovable for many of his fans. While mainstream media covers all of Hammer’s exploits, “low-rent super villain” Dr. Horrible projects himself into the world via alternative media: he updates viewers on his latest heists and answers fan email from a webcam set up in his home laboratory.26 Thwarting expectations for a big opening musical number, Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog abruptly leaps into one of the supervillain’s amateur webcam posts. From his lair, Dr. Horrible announces a new weapon designed to solve all his problems: “The Freeze Ray is almost up. This is the one. Stops time.”27 Dr. Horrible then reaches out to his viewers, implicating them in his villainous Master Plan: “Freeze Ray. Tell your friends.” “My Freeze Ray” was the first song written for Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog, and encapsulates the time-warping spirit of the entire artistic endeavor. In this musical number, we realize that Dr. Horrible’s Freeze Ray is not a weapon of mass destruction, but an enabler of alternatives to the present; Dr. Horrible is intent less on “destroying the status quo” than on bending it to discover its multiple potentialities.28 What’s more, Dr. Horrible’s ideal world relies on collaboration with an imagined partner-in-crime: Penny. “[Penny] is fighting ‘the man’” in her own quiet way, says Zack Whedon; her method of putting power in different hands involves volunteering and collecting signatures to support a new homeless shelter, rather than enacting supervillainous plots to wrest control.29 While Captain Hammer’s triumphs are broadcast widely and Dr. Horrible wields the power of the web, Penny’s labors go unrecorded and unrecognized. In fact, as the web series continues, her selfless work is crushed between two increasingly competitive male egos. In this battle between selfish male “supers,” everyone loses. Dr. Horrible grows dark and destructive when his nemesis gets the girl; he ultimately uses his Freeze Ray in tandem with a Death Ray, which backfires and kills the innocent Penny in the hotly debated Act III.30 Yet, during the utopian moment of “My Freeze Ray,” Dr. Horrible and Penny peacefully warp the world together. “My Freeze Ray” physicalizes the possibility of a partnership between this sympathetic supervillain and dedicated local activist, dancing their way toward subversion of the status quo. Joss Whedon explicitly connects Dr. Horrible’s subversion with his own exploration of alternatives to the studio system in a DVD special feature, Commentary! The Musical. Like the counterpoint dialogue that creates a layered range of meanings for The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Commentary! reframes the popular web series with an array of behind the scenes stories. This additional audio track bends the genre of filmmakers’ commentary into a heightened, campy, and memorable musical form. After a densely self-referential opening number (“Commentary!”), Joss Whedon contextualizes the creation of Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog with a workers’ anthem: “Strike / For all the writers / Strike / For a living wage / Until these wrongs are righted / We won’t write another page.”31 The juxtaposition of visuals from “My Freeze Ray” with the unified patter and percussive drive of this new audio track—“Strike!”—encourages audiences to read the writers’ strike as a utopian moment of creative solidarity, akin to Dr. Horrible’s own dream collaboration with Penny. While freezing work on mainstream projects during the strike, writers sent the studios scrambling to fill the gaps in the television schedule, and redirected their imaginative energies to blogs and viral videos. Maurissa Tancharoen, Jed Whedon, and Zack Whedon primed themselves for Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog by creating clever web shorts throughout the strike. Their YouTube hit “WGA vs. AMPTP” even foreshadowed the battle between Dr. Horrible and Captain ­Hammer by exaggerating the binary between poor, well-meaning writers and wealthy, heartless studio heads. Executives at CBS, FOX, and NBC worried that the WGA would win the public relations battle through their compelling storytelling and Dr. Horrible-like command of alternative media.32 The viral videos like “WGA vs. AMPTP” seem to have swayed public opinion; in a 279

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survey for the April 2008 Nielsen Report on the strike’s impact, 100% of respondents knew about the strike, and 77% supported the writers either strongly (55%) or somewhat (22%).33 The writers ultimately won residuals for digital media, and Whedon’s crossover from film and television to the web began to complicate the distinction between “amateur” and “professional” media. Felicia Day credits Dr. Horrible for “legitimizing” web video; Whedon’s prior work within the studio system on cult shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Firefly brought credibility to his own web series and to others’ online productions, including Day’s web series The Guild.34 When Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog won a 2009 Emmy Award in a new category (Outstanding Special Class—Short-Format Live-Action Entertainment Programs), Dr. Horrible hijacked the awards ceremony to proclaim, “The future of home entertainment is the Internet!”35 How prescient this statement would turn out to be; this “alternative” medium is now decidedly mainstream. Had the web series been created only a few years later, Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog could have been streamed directly on audiences’ web-connected televisions. Flexible cross-media content proliferates across computers, smartphones, tablets, and televisions today, and corporate presence is increasingly palpable across them all. In the end, Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog set out not to overturn the film and television studios, but to question their authority and dominance; Whedon continues to work within the studio system, achieving unprecedented success writing and directing Marvel Studios’ The Avengers in 2012. But Whedon fans, often established in and through his studio work, are essential to his mission of shifting the system to break down artificial hierarchies of artistic production. Whedon is no egomaniacal supervillain. Rather, he embodies the collaborative, utopian moment of “My Freeze Ray” by constantly crediting his co-conspirators and encouraging these “writers, fans and friends of mine” to sing along with the musical series and its meta-musical commentary.36 The “real triumph” of Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog, according to the writers, was not the “finished product,” but the physicalization of its ever-expanding potentialities through the fans who now perform as Dr. Horrible, Captain Hammer, the Bad Horse cowboy chorus, and their own supervillainous creations at fan conventions such as Comic-Con.37 Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog epitomizes a type of creative consumerism that does not deny its overlap with capitalism, but refuses to reduce its product to mere exchange value. Warping time and genre, Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog not only acknowledges but encourages fans’ deep involvement in and commentary on its ever-expanding world. The ELE began accepting online applications for membership in fall 2008, for example, and ten members were awarded with inclusion in the DVD’s special features. Over a thousand supervillainous fans produced short YouTube and Vimeo video applications to be considered by the League and its designated agents. One ELE winner embraces the “Sing-Along” spirit of Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog unlike any other. “Miss Broadway Dork”—the supervillainous YouTube persona of Alex Heinen—is an overly exuberant fangirl whose weapon of choice is a performative act rather than a physical object: she sings showtunes. With a girlish giggle, the high-spirited Miss Broadway Dork admits that showtunes may seem to inspire jazz hands more than fear and terror. But the strange otherness of song and dance can stop time, much like Dr. Horrible’s Freeze Ray: “Have you ever gone out in the middle of a crowded street and just started singing at the top of your lungs? People stop. People stare. People look at you like you are horrible and have done the worst thing in the world,” she explains. Miss Broadway Dork views this stoppage of time as a potential enabler of chaos; showtunes can snap out of the time of capital, as well as out of a heteronormative genealogy, by distracting people from looking after their cash registers, their children, and their elderly. Miss Broadway Dork concludes her ELE application with a sinister smile: “Showtunes. They’re not all happy and cheery. And even when they are, they can be used … for evil.”38 Once more, with feeling, musical theater creates a tuneful structure for warping time and subverting the status quo.

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Notes 1 Like Stacy Wolf, I follow Alexander Doty’s definition of queer, which “privileges any nonstraight reading or interpretation” and marks “a flexible space for the expression of all aspects of non (anti-, contra-) straight cultural production and reception.” See Stacy Ellen Wolf. A Problem Like Maria: Gender and Sexuality in the American Musical. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2002. 23. 2 Bliss Cua Lim. Translating Time: Cinema, the Fantastic, and Temporal Critique. Durham: Duke UP, 2009. 28. 3 Richard Dyer. Only Entertainment. London: Routledge, 1992. 6. 4 Rick Altman. The American Film Musical. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1987. 2. 5 See Judith Butler. “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory.” Theatre Journal 40.4 (Dec. 1988), Web. 29 Oct. 2012. . 6 Raymond Knapp. The American Musical and the Performance of Personal Identity. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2006. 242. 7 Michael Billington and Maddy Costa. “The Royal Court Upstairs Marks 40 Years of Scaling New Heights.” The Guardian. 21 July 2009. Web. 29 Oct. 2012. . 8 See Elizabeth L. Wollman. Hard Times: The Adult Musical in 1970s New York City. New York: Oxford UP, 2013, for a discussion of Off- and Off-Off-Broadway adult musicals, which ruffled moral feathers, but ultimately made their way into the mainstream. While partaking in the same vision of sexual liberation, The Rocky Horror Show romped through campy genre films, which aesthetically set this musical apart. 9 Raymond Knapp notes that this cinematic flop was the result of marketing, or the lack of it, as much as it was the result of the film’s form and content. 10 Lynn Van Matre. “‘Rocky Show’ Bumps to a Different Beat.” Chicago Tribune. 18 Aug. 1976. 11 Judith Halberstam. The Queer Art of Failure. Durham: Duke UP, 2011. 12 Jonas Mekas. “History.” The Film Makers Cooperative. Web. 29 Oct. 2012. . 13 Midnight Movies: From the Margin to the Mainstream, dir. Stuart Samuels. Stuart Samuels Productions, 2005, DVD. 14 All lyrics from The Rocky Horror Picture Show (c) Richard O’Brien and Rocky Horror Company Limited. 15 Knapp, Personal Identity, 250. 16 “Sins O’ the Flesh: Los Angeles, CA.” TRHPS Official Fan Site. Web. 14 Oct. 2012. . 17 Elizabeth Stockton. “My Favorite Obsession.” –Liz’s Rocky Horror Wigs. Web. 18 July 2018. . A post on her Facebook page indicates that Liz has semi-retired from wig-making as of November 12, 2017, but she will still accept orders on a case-by-case basis. 18 Shawn Anthony. Shawn Anthony’s Custom Garments. Web. 31 Oct. 2012. . Similar to Stockton, Shawn has since left the RHPS costuming business; he posted in October 2011 that he would be on hiatus due to his father’s health. “I am but one person that does this for a hobby. The stress & anxiety is majorly getting to me,” he wrote, thanking clients for their patience. 19 Sal Piro. “It Was Great When It All Began.” Creatures of the Night: The Rocky Horror Experience. Redford: Stabur Press, 1990. Web. 14 Oct. 2012. . 20 “History: Rocky Horror Timeline.” TRHPS Official Fan Site. Web. 14 Oct. 2012. . 21 In a student-directed production at The Nightingale-Bamford School, a girls’ school where I now teach, over half of the student cast members admitted to first encountering RHPS on Glee; for other students, the book and film adaptation of Perks of Being a Wallflower introduced them to the film. 22 Joss Whedon. Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog. Web. 14 Oct. 2012. . 23 Stacy Ellen Wolf. Changed for Good: A Feminist History of the Broadway Musical. New York: Oxford UP, 2010. See in particular Chapters 6 and 7 (“‘Changed for the Better’: Queer Conventions in Wicked (2003)” and “‘It’s All About Popular’”: Wicked Divas and Internet,” respectively) for a discussion of the green-skinned outsider Elphaba and Wicked’s fangirl culture. 24 Anouk Lang. “‘The Status Is Not Quo!’: Pursuing Resolution in Web-Disseminated Serial Narrative.” Narrative 18.3 (2010): 367–381. 25 Joss Whedon and Jane Watkins. Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog: The Book. London: Titan Books, 2011. 20. 26 Whedon and Watkins, Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog, 9.

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Ibid., 16. Ibid., 16. Ibid., 13. Lang, “The Status Is Not Quo!,” 370. Many avid Whedon fans were disappointed and angry because Whedon’s oeuvre—such as Serenity, Angel, and Buffy—so frequently resorts to these unhappy endings. Whedon and Watkins, Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog, 83. Brian Stelter. “Strike News: Writers Gain P.R. Advantage.” NYTimes: Media Decoder Blog. 19 Nov. 2007. Web. 14 Oct. 2012. . The Nielsen Company. Television in Transition: The Initial Impact of the Writers’ Strike, report (Apr. 2008): 11–12, Web. 14 Oct. 2012, . Rick Marshall. “What Does Felicia Day Want To See In The ‘Dr. Horrible’ Sequel?” MTV Splash Page. 31 Mar. 2010. Web. 14 Oct. 2012. . Whedon and Watkins, Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog, 80. Ibid., 83. Ibid., 76. Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog, dir. Joss Whedon (2008), DVD.

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28 THE EYE OF THE STORM Reading Next to Normal with Psychoanalysis Aleksei Grinenko

Seeing, thus, is always in some manner sleeping, that is, looking with the very eyes of the unconscious— through the fabric of a dream, reading not literally but rhetorically. Shoshana Felman, Writing and Madness

There is a momentary lull in act two of the 2009 Broadway production of Next to Normal (book and lyrics by Brian Yorkey, music by Tom Kitt, directed by Michael Greif ). During a number called “Better Than Before” the musical seems to peek out timidly from under the debris wrought by the surge of unrelenting emotional pain in act one. At this point in the narrative, Diana G ­ oodman, the bipolar protagonist of Next to Normal, has returned home after a course of electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) to a life she does not remember living. As her husband Dan and daughter Natalie sit with her at the kitchen table and sift through family photos in an effort to bring back some of the memories she lost as a result of ECT, they begin to sing of going back to normal, a possibility that somehow, for the first time in a long while, does not seem far out of reach. Perhaps the clearest sign of improvement is that Diana is no longer delusional. Gone are her phantasies that her son Gabe, who died when he was eight months old, is still around and almost 18.1 Throughout the action leading up to ECT, Gabe—or rather Diana’s idea of Gabe—is played by a live actor. We can see him on stage fully integrated into the family’s daily routine the way Diana imagines he would have been, had he lived. Yet in the days following ECT, Diana does not even remember having a son. In terms of representational style, the production here abandons the abstract device of using the stage figure of Gabe to dramatize the dynamics of Diana’s inner life and shifts toward a more “realist” optics. The readjusted stage picture in front of us, just like the carefully pruned photos in front of the characters, is wiped clean of his presence. As we watch ­Diana, Dan, and Natalie peer at the photos, their ocular experiences correspond with ours. Just like us, they are all seeing a family of three, not four. “Better Than Before,” then, models and endorses as wholesome a “realist” kind of seeing—that is, seeing only what is exterior and anterior to the mind, a world of matter rid of the fabrications of the unconscious. The sight of three bodies in this scene reinforces with phenomenological eloquence the Goodman family’s progress toward a semblance of normality, and parallels their emerging, if fragile, optimism about Diana’s chances of recovery, as she learns a new script for her subjectivity, one that precludes phantasized interactions with the now-forgotten Gabe.

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Yet the storm, it turns out, is far from over. In the following number, “Aftershocks,” Gabe is back on the set, as the production reverts to its former abstract tactic for staging Diana’s subjectivity. His reappearance undermines the cures teased in “Better Than Before” and signals Diana’s imminent relapse. The switch between two representational modes, “realist” and abstract, in the organization of her interiority on stage in these two numbers parallels a shift between signs of recovery and madness. This dynamic suggests an underlying relationship between medical and aesthetic dimensions of the production text, a relationship I propose to examine or “read” in dialogue with psychoanalysis. In conceptualizing Diana’s madness, the authors of Next to Normal tend to pose questions but withhold definitive answers; their method is interrogation without verdict. Likewise, in reading this musical with psychoanalysis, I do not intend to explain Diana’s madness. In common with Shoshana Felman’s methodology in Writing and Madness, my purpose is not to produce “an application of psychoanalysis” to theater, but to highlight “their mutual implication in each other.”2 Following her model, I am interested not in what the musical’s representation of mental distress means, but in how it means. Next to Normal’s articulation of madness is structurally dependent on tensions between the seen and the unseen, the inner and the outer, the subjective and the objective. What is the historical role of psychoanalysis in highlighting these tensions in musical theater? What does a twenty-first-century musical like Next to Normal gain from its encounter with psychoanalytic thinking?

Modernist Visions of the Interior and the “Golden Age” According to the medical opinion expressed by the doctors in the musical, Gabe is a delusion, a symptom of Diana’s mental illness.3 Yet dramaturgically, he is an extension of her character, a critical introspective space in which she can reflect on her life. In watching her interactions with Gabe, we get access to the conflicted ideas running through her mind, phantasies that sustain her on a daily basis.4 This way of representing a character’s inner life in the US stage musical goes back to the fantasy sequences and dream ballets of the first half of the twentieth century. The musico-dramatic conceit that placed the action overtly within a character’s mind in a number of Broadway shows like Peggy-Ann (1926), Strike Up the Band (1930), The Bandwagon (1931), The Cat and the Fiddle (1931), and Babes in Arms (1937) paralleled the increasingly psychodynamic or depth-psychological orientation of US psychiatry. Before the arrival of psychodynamic theories of the mind, psychiatry had been dominated by biological paradigms, which conceptualized madness as a bodily or somatic disorder. The dynamicists, however, proposed “models of human mental functioning with multiple strata of consciousness and an interplay of energies and activities between the different levels.”5 Madness, in such paradigms, stemmed from the workings of the unconscious. Contemporaneous with the steady rise of psychodynamic thinking to dominance in US clinical settings, the fantasy sequences and dream ballets aestheticized the conscious/unconscious duality, imagining what happens in the deeper recesses of the human mind and contrasting these inner processes and events with life outside. Such artistic trends, as well as dynamic theories of the mind, were products of modernism, a powerful cultural movement that emerged during the last two decades of the nineteenth century. A radical interest in the subjective experience and a revolt against traditional, positivist structures of thought inherited from the Enlightenment were defining features of modernist intellectuals in both the arts and the sciences. During this period much creative energy in the fields of literature, visual arts, and theater was directed against the aesthetic principles of naturalism, which valorized close observation and reproduction of external reality. Mark Micale writes that at the time of the modernist revolution the scientific arena itself was being critiqued as “excessively realist.” These critiques came not only from artistic intellectuals but also from within the sciences, as “physicians and philosophers… began to emphasize the degree to which science provided less a literal and 284

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direct account of the external world than a collection of models and representations of that world mediated by human perception, cognition, and language.”6 Fin-de-siècle reflections on the relativity and fallibility of “externalism” opened up a wide cultural space for epistemological modalities and representational practices that amplified the role of the interior. The modernist drive to inwardness in turn-of-the-century European and US theater often took the form of what David Savran calls “a kind of psychic mimesis that allowed for the projection of psychological forces upon both the environment and the entire dramatis personae.” 7 In Europe, this approach to the theatricalization of the inner space was manifest in various cross-­ currents of the historical avant-gardes, informing dramatic experiments by Gerhart Hauptmann (The Assumption of Hannele, 1893), August Strindberg (A Dream Play, 1901), Nikolai Evreinov (In the Stage-Wings of the Soul, 1911), and Reinhard Sorge (The Beggar, 1911), to name just a few. In US drama, similar tactics informed a number of plays that dramatized mental life and dreams (Eleanor Gates’s The Poor Little Rich Girl and Alice Gerstenberg’s Overtones, both 1913; Owen and Robert H. Davis’s Any House, 1915), and became particularly prominent during the 1920s in works by playwrights whose aesthetic solutions are usually grouped under US expressionism in critical literature. Best exemplified by the experiments of Eugene O’Neill (Emperor Jones, 1920; The Hairy Ape, 1922), S­ usan Glaspell (The Verge, 1921), John Howard Lawson (Roger Bloomer, 1923), ­Elmer Rice (The Adding Machine, 1923), and George S. Kaufman (Beggar on Horseback, co-authored with Marc Connelly, 1924), US expressionism comprised heterogeneous dramatic experiments that had a shared investment in the “[o]bjectification of the subjective and externalization of the internal… accomplished through scenery, performance, use of space, and interpretation of events.”8 Such dramaturgical and scenic innovations turned the stages, in whole or in part, into t­ hree-­d imensional visions of the protagonists’ inner experiences and often reflected and stimulated cultural engagement with mental distress. In the penultimate scene of O’Neill’s Where the Cross Was Made (1918), for instance, the stage filled up with moving bodies and rhythmically shifting shades of light representing the inner perspective of the play’s hero, Nat. While these visions were real to him, his sister Sue, also present on stage, could not see or hear them. This distinction fulfilled an important function for O’Neill: it marked Nat as the mad sibling. But the technique also served as a way of enabling the audience to peer inside the hero’s mind and share in his subjective experience. Reflecting on this staging device, which would appear with some modifications in his more famous 1920s plays, The Emperor Jones and The Hairy Ape, the playwright said, “I want to see whether it’s possible to make an audience go mad too.”9 The rise of modern dynamic psychiatry was a central force in the shaping of modernist epistemologies and languages of interiority, Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic enterprise playing a key role in this process.10 On the level of textuality, Freud’s inquiry into the mind combined traditional dramatic structures (most famously in his interpretation of Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex) with modernist innovations such as narrative fragmentation and unreliability. While Freud did not create the idea of the unconscious, his writing about it helped promulgate general aesthetic principles for representations of subjectivity in a variety of cultural artifacts associated with early ­t wentieth-century modernisms. Closely allied with the representational practices of inward-­ looking literary and theatrical avant-gardes were Freud’s topographic descriptions of the unconscious. As Françoise Meltzer observes, Freud’s theory maps the psyche thorough rhetorical devices concerned with space, “as if there were a geography of the mind, with the unconscious lying as an area within it.”11 This area is populated by “mental impulses” that “jostle one another like separate individuals,” acting out collectively the stuff of dreams, memories, and fears.12 The topography of interiority in Freud’s model thus mirrored the conditions of “psychic mimesis” developed contemporaneously by modernist avant-garde playwrights, directors, and scenic designers. In the psychoanalytic imagination, the human mind appeared as a kind of theatrical stage; in the theater, the stage resembled depth-psychological models of the mind. 285

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Clinical and artistic hypotheses of the unconscious posited dreams as one of its central forms of discourse. Extending and revising the romantic tradition of dream-writing, psychological and aesthetic modernisms incorporated dream images and techniques into their models of interiority. In Freud’s epistemology dreams were “the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious activities of the mind.”13 The new emphasis on dream interpretation had methodological and stylistic consequences for the articulation of subjectivity in the clinical situation and in the writing of case histories. By identifying the distortions of the dream-work in manifest dream content, the ­Freudian analyst attempted to unveil the latent content, extracting an underlying stratum of repressed wishes from the depths of the patient’s psyche. The use of free associative techniques allowed for the mapping of temporal and spatial fragmentation and rupture, experienced in dreams, onto the mental landscape of the person undergoing analysis—the “protagonist” of the medical case history. Similar techniques, such as the “stream-of-consciousness” method, were characteristic of literary representations of the day-dreaming mind in modernist texts by James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Marcel Proust, and many others.14 These shared stylistic features of psychoanalysis and modernist fiction had theatrical counterparts among the avant-garde movements, particularly in symbolist, expressionist, and surrealist performance texts, where the protagonist’s subjectivity, like that of the patient in analysis, often took the form of a dreamscape. In this kind of theatrical dream-writing, as August Strindberg expounds, “times and space do not exist; on an insignificant basis of reality the imagination spins and weaves new patterns: a blending of memories, experiences, free inventions, absurdities, and improvisations. The characters split, double, redouble, evaporate, condense, scatter, and converge. But one consciousness remains above all of them: the dreamer’s.”15 Exploring continuities between waking and dreaming at the heart of psychodynamic interiority, this kind of theater prioritized depictions of “psychological” realities over “external” ones. What the audiences saw on stage was not a copy of the observable “objective” world, with its “natural” laws, but a representation of how this world might be perceived by characters in conflict or distress. The stage musical’s engagement with psychodynamic models of the mind became more overt in the 1940s, when the popularity and prestige of psychoanalysis, the most influential carrier of depth-psychological thinking, were rising to unprecedented heights in the United States. The “golden age” of the psychoanalytic enterprise in the United States spanned the mid-1940s and the mid-1960s, roughly coinciding with the “golden age” of the Broadway musical. As the specialty dominated mainstream psychiatry and Freud was being celebrated as a preeminent modernist thinker by the intelligentsia during this period, popular culture—from movies and plays to journalistic accounts in mass magazines—seized on the subject of psychoanalysis, in its Americanized forms.16 The Broadway musical likewise participated in this conversation. In the 1940s, the medium reorganized its presentation of interiority in fantasy sequences and dream ballets around an increasingly explicit focus on psychoanalytic formulations of subjectivity. This shift manifested itself most vividly in shows like Very Warm for May (1939), Lady in the Dark (1941), Oklahoma! (1943), The Day Before Spring (1945), Allegro (1947), and Ballet Ballads (1948). At certain points in the narrative, the stage environment in these musicals would become filled with people, objects, and scenic elements that collectively represented the mental landscape of an introspecting or day-dreaming protagonist in crisis. Not all of these musicals attempted to reproduce the clinical situation literally, but prominent in their organization of dreams, memories, and other inner experiences and states were the discursive features of the unconscious, such as displacements, juxtapositions, and allusions, strained through the interpretive methodologies of psychoanalysis. As a rule, such scenes of the interior, particularly in Lady in the Dark, Oklahoma!, and Ballet Ballads, followed a tightly controlled plot, utilizing a meticulously selected set of abstractions and symbols to spell out a predetermined interpretation of the protagonist’s problem. Yet incorporated into the interior narrative were distortions and exaggerations designed to cloud its transparency, bearing 286

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a calculated resemblance to unstructured, disorganized material that might emerge from a free-­ associating psychoanalytic patient. Staging the dynamic unconscious through the shared vocabulary of psychological and aesthetic modernisms, the mid-century Broadway musical responded to and promoted the ascendance of psychodynamic/psychoanalytic notions of the self in US culture. The trend of endowing the protagonist with an unconscious contributed to what many historians of the genre see as the emergence of “characters with more psychological depth.” As Andrea Most argues, musical numbers now “served … to reveal motivations, beliefs, and personal history.”17 In dwelling on the challenges and inability to make up one’s mind, scenes of the interior in the abovementioned musicals reformulated and updated the age-old dramatic trope of indecision as inner conflict, offering a sort of mid-century psychoanalytic riff on Hamlet’s question “to be or not to be.” The expanding hegemony of psychoanalysis within psychiatry and its impressive symbolic capital during the “golden age” lent an aura of authenticity to these modernist spectacles of inner depth, buttressing their aspirations to “serious” art theater. Laurey in Oklahoma! is one example of this phenomenon. At the start of the show, she has all the makings of a predictably “flat” ingénue type, a cliché of musical comedy and operetta, but the mounting of her dream life at the end of act one, as she struggles to decide which of two suitors she will date, endows her with inner properties that signify complexity and dimension. After taking a whiff of smelling salts, she closes her eyes, assumes a restful attitude, and begins to sing, gradually inducing in herself a trance-like state approaching sleep. These preliminaries set up conditions equivalent to those required by Freud for free association. What follows is a ballet that gives visual and sonic form to a train of seemingly unfiltered thoughts and dream structures unspooling from her unconscious as if she were a patient on the analytic couch. As the musical takes this inward turn, the stage fills with dancing figures who enact a harrowing drama unfolding in the hidden strata of Laurey’s mind. While most of these figures are recognizable as actual live characters from the preceding scenes, set in the external world, here they are not autonomous individuals but only facets of the heroine’s inner torment. Replete with images and sounds telegraphing her unspoken desires and fears, this dark, brooding dream ballet reveals a kind of “tragic” depth in Laurey. The effect is achieved by adopting an experimental, modernist stage vocabulary, which parallels what Michael Levenson describes as a “new metaphysics of character” manifest in psychoanalysis: “Character is the precipitate of fantasies, desires, and dreads; it is an overlay of past and present; it possesses an inexhaustible convergence of meanings.”18 The psychoanalytic vernacular of subjectivity, with its abstract properties heightened through the media of music and dance, produces a striking spectacle of interiority ­generating itself before the audience’s eyes, promoting and sustaining the illusion of individual depth on stage. While not the only means of “deepening” character in the “golden age” musical, such conventions were particularly well-suited to the project of psychologizing the art form, not least because they literalized psychoanalytic depth as material, phenomenologically “real” space. This period of modernist experimentation laid the groundwork for subsequent depictions of interiority and mental distress in the stage musical.

Seeing Inside in Next to Normal As Savran observes, a great number of canonized US playwrights have adhered to a formula that combines an admixture of avant-gardist and realist aesthetics with a “teasing use of enigmatic situations, characters and themes … from Rice and O’Neill to Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, Edward Albee, August Wilson, Tony Kushner, and many, many others.”19 Next to Normal is part of this tradition. This musical inherits the “golden age” modernist conventions described earlier and injects them into the basic dramatic structure of the modern “psychological” play, probing the mystery of the heroine’s inner life. Like much of the US dramatic canon of the twentieth century, 287

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Next to Normal follows a traditional, well-made plot formula influenced by the domestic dramas of Henrik Ibsen. The dramatic trajectory of the musical’s book is rooted in the precepts of Ibsen’s “psychological” teleology, where a tense dialectic between concealing and revealing something about a character’s past propels the action forward until the mystery is brought out into the open, resolving the play.20 Next to Normal’s structural indebtedness to this turn-of-the-century model of “psychological” drama lies in the archeological preoccupation with the character’s past as a clue to their present, an interest which was cultivated contemporaneously by modernist playwrights (like Ibsen) and psychoanalysts.21 Lodged snugly within this popular dramatic formula, the Broadway production of Next to Normal infuses its realist base with abstract theatrical styles. Drawing on the psychologized conventions of “golden age” fantasy sequences, it exploits a combination of visual devices to externalize the heroine’s subjective experience. A pair of disembodied eyes displayed on the marquee of the Booth Theatre signals the musical’s conditions of amplified inwardness. In the fuller version of the logo, these proverbial windows to the soul hover over a disproportionately tiny house, announcing the production’s priority of scale with regard to the subjective, inner dimension (Figure 28.1). The eyes also appear on a pair of shutters within the stage set (designed by Mark Wendland) to intensify the action’s introspective register during Diana’s sessions with her therapist, Dr. Madden. The set itself, an abstract three-tiered structure representing the Goodmans’ house, doubles as a physicalization of Diana’s mental processes.22 The production is moored visually in an architectural metaphor that splices modern US notions of the interior of both the mind and the home. The mid-century musical tended to signpost transitions between internal and external orders of reality on stage, leaving little room for ambiguity at any given moment as to whether the action is taking place within someone’s mind or in the outside world. Next to Normal, for the most part, eschews clean-cut separations between its interior and exterior narratives—between that which happens only in Diana’s phantasy and that which happens on the level of “objective” reality shared by the other characters. Instead, the musical merges both experiential dimensions visually, presenting them simultaneously. After establishing the dual nature of the events for the audience in “He’s Not Here,” the musical invites a spectating mode attentive to the tug-of-war between its interior and exterior narratives. If we accept this invitation, we spend the next couple of hours watching the two levels of action collide, overlap, and cross into each other, making competing claims for

Figure 28.1  O  utside the Booth Theatre during the Broadway run of Next to Normal. The oversized eyes in the artwork signal the primacy of the heroine’s enigmatic interior in the musical.

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authority and credibility. At some moments, the inside takes precedence, invading and shrinking the outside, running over, under, and through it. Thus, in the number “I Am the One,” Gabe, who carries the interior narrative, shows up on stage, when Diana and Dan are arguing. Now circling around his parents, now coming between them, he embodies the pull of Diana’s phantasy as she struggles to make sense of two realities, her own and the one Dan insists on. The physical presence of the actor playing Gabe on stage functions as a powerful counterargument to Dan’s denials of his existence. In this number, the internal comes to dominate the external, as the visible, live action on stage mimics Diana’s perspective. At other moments, however, the dynamic is completely reversed, as the outside expands and causes the inside to contract or disappear from view. Such is the case with the staging of “Better Than Before,” which trains our gaze on three bodies on stage, offering a tutorial in trusting only empirically verifiable facts of external reality. Overall, these tensions between the inside and the outside in the musical’s action result in a blurring of boundaries between the conscious and the unconscious, making these realms appear continuous and discontinuous at the same time as they do in psychoanalytic texts and much modernist fiction. In arranging and working through these tensions, the musical foregrounds yet another split, one that forms one of the central questions of the evening. As Yorkey explains, the question has to do with “what lies in the brain, what’s in the chemistry, what’s in the circuitry, and what’s in our soul.”23 The librettist’s statement maps Next to Normal’s interest in the etiology of mental distress, with a host of related concerns, onto the historical split between biological and dynamic thinking in US psychiatry. From the rise of modern psychiatry in the nineteenth century to the present, these two competing conceptual paradigms have traced the origin of mental distress, respectively, to the brain and to the mind.24 According to the biological view, madness is primarily a somatic disorder, rooted in the organic structures of the brain. This side of the debate includes the currently dominant field of neuropsychiatry, which dominates the diagnostic and therapeutic environment that Diana navigates daily as a bipolar patient. Her condition, as Dr. Madden’s opines, is “a chronic illness… [l]ike diabetes, or hypertension,” requiring somatic treatments such as psychopharmacological medication and, in certain instances, ECT.25 According to the dynamicists, however, madness is primarily a disorder of the mind, rooted in the interaction of conscious and unconscious mental forces in relation to the patient’s life experiences. In the psychodynamic paradigm the primary clinical focus is not on the bodily symptoms but on the ways in which the patient responds to “problems in living.”26 The main field of investigation here, as well as the central location of madness, is the more nebulous entity we refer to as one’s “personality” or “character.” Diana comes to embrace this kind of thinking about mental distress in the scene “Break,” a climactic moment that explicitly articulates Next to Normal’s interrogation of the brain/mind dichotomy. In expressing her frustration with the seemingly haphazard, sometimes brutal, and largely ineffective “cures” doctors have tried on her over years, she concludes that perhaps all this time they have been treating the wrong “bone”: that her suffering might stem not from her failing biology—her “circuitry,” her “chemistry,” or her “blood”—but from her “soul,” an entity made synonymous with the mind in psychoanalysis. Next to Normal sets up conditions for this epiphany by drawing on the enduring legacy of Freud’s “talk therapy,” a clinical method he invented in his work with trauma at the end of the nineteenth century. During that period, he linked the mental and emotional suffering of some patients to an unremembered traumatic experience that, unbeknownst to themselves, continued to be present in their unconscious as a suppressed memory, throbbing with pain as a kind of neglected wound in their soul. Freud’s working method was to let such patients speak about their past for long periods of time in the hope that the repressed memory might eventually surface in some form in their conscious or semi-conscious awareness. Commonly referred to in contemporary popular culture as the “talking cure,” this form of dynamic treatment, pioneered by Freud, sought the alleviation of mental and emotional pain by tracing its source in the mind. 289

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This clinical method, in a much-modified contemporary format, sets in motion Diana’s breakthroughs, underwriting the psychodynamic current in Next to Normal. It is in the course of her talk therapy sessions with Dr. Madden during act one that she begins to acknowledge the fact of Gabe’s death, rediscovering and working through the trauma she experienced as a result of that loss. Having taken her off medication, Dr. Madden gets Diana to open up and speak about herself, gently steering her introspective trajectory into the past toward the painful events. Gradually, memories of what actually happened take precedence over the alternative history constructed by her mind, a history in which Gabe never died. In act two, after her memories of loss have been locked away in the unconscious again—not through the mechanisms of repression formulated by Freud but through the destructive side-effects of ECT—she retraces her steps to the trauma on her own, without Dr. Madden’s assistance. Prompted by the sounds of Gabe’s music box, she mobilizes the psychodynamic mechanism of self-discovery in the number “How Could I Ever Forget?,” singing herself back into conscious memories of her son’s death. As Yorkey insists, Next to Normal is “about what’s really more common, which is, a doctor who is very competent and very well-meaning runs up against a disease he or she still can’t cure.”27 Yet while the show is decidedly not an indictment of psychiatry like One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (which Diana references in the number “Didn’t I See This Movie?”), its critical focus on psychopharmacology and ECT holds up to scrutiny somatic interventions predicated on the concept of mental illness as an organic condition. This critique was imbedded in the authors’ conceit from the beginning, when they set out to write a musical (then named Feeling Electric) about a woman undergoing ECT. The musical’s form and themes changed significantly in the course of its long developmental process, from its first iteration as a ten-minute writing exercise in the BMI workshop to the Broadway version. Yet in its final shape, the musical still expresses unease about the contemporary emphasis on “objective,” measurable facts in psychiatric determinations of madness. The “scientism” of biological psychiatry comes under direct attack early in the show, in a humorous if sobering number called “My Psychopharmacologist and I,” which caricatures the somatic orientation through the figure of Dr. Fine, who turns Diana into a mathematical problem. Scenes with Dr. Madden—who embodies the creative team’s idea of the “competent and very well-meaning,” human side of psychiatry—continue to develop this critique in a more balanced mode, exposing the fault lines of the integration of biological and psychodynamic thinking in an early twenty-first-century context. Reading Dr. Madden’s character as an accurate representation of a real-life mental health professional working in the early 2000s does not get us very far. From seeing private patients in his office for regular talk therapy sessions incorporating a somewhat unlikely admixture of psychotherapeutic modalities to prescribing and administering ECT in the hospital, the scope of his clinical practice and institutional responsibilities beggar belief. But if we regard him as a dramatic abstraction of sorts, a kind of composite figure that stands for the field of contemporary psychiatry in general, he makes much better sense. As an amalgam of different trends and specialties circulating across the mental health care system, the character of Dr. Madden usefully highlights the impact of the brain/mind divide that the musical explores. Dr. Madden’s multiple attempts to bridge this divide, on the one hand, and his ultimate emphasis on somatic solutions, on the other hand—even as Diana urges him to look at her soul—comment on the precarious status of talk therapy in the age of neurobiological psychiatry. Even though best practices for most mood disorders suggest some combination of psychotherapy and pharmacological intervention, strong structural forces in American society—like the financial priorities and influence of insurance and drug companies—have eroded the emphasis on and availability of longer-term psychodynamic modes of treatment. The current vogue for medication only or cognitive-behavioral and other short-term therapies has more to do with the politics and economics of the current mental health care climate than with what patients like Diana need to feel better. 290

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By blurring and destabilizing boundaries between internal and external orders of reality on stage, Next to Normal problematizes the privileged status of the visible and the physical in contemporary symptomatology of mental illness. The psychoanalytic concept of the unconscious is essentially a category of invisibility and must therefore give precedence, in Diana’s clinical situation, to verifiable empirical evidence supplied by bodily facts. For instance, what qualifies as “grief,” a largely inner process, is only considered legitimate for a limited period of time. As Diana learns from her first psychiatrist, after four months, “according to the manual,” grief is no longer diagnostically viable and its symptoms should be medicated (“Make Up Your Mind/Catch Me I’m Falling Reprise”).28 The clinical reformulation of grief as a short-term disorder thus devalues Diana’s relationship to loss as abnormal, disproportionate, and, above all, demonstrably dangerous for her body. The attendant somatic therapies, such as medication and ECT, paralyze her ability to grieve, depriving her of means to deal with the trauma, which, the musical suggests, could be the primary root cause of her illness. To throw into relief the urgency and complexity of “invisible” inner processes downplayed and neglected in the wake of the newly re-medicalized, non-dynamic psychiatry, Next to Normal makes Diana’s mental distress vividly accessible to observation. The formerly avant-gardist stage language of innerness that serves the musical’s psychodynamic project of “bringing the audience inside her experience” relies on the conceptual gambit of psychoanalysis, which historically substituted questions of the mind for matters of the soul.29 The musical’s dependence on the epistemologies of psychological modernisms has consequences for the tone of the finale. Echoing the psychoanalytic take on inner conflict at mid-century, the injunction to explore yourself and make up your mind reverberating through the clinical spaces of Next to Normal seems laden with curative rewards. Yet as in classic psychoanalysis, the musical’s actual prognosis is murky. Next to Normal’s hopes, in fact, extend no further than Freud’s: the range of foreseeable improvement intimated in the finale is transformation from extreme “misery” to “common unhappiness.”30 In the final, anthemic number, the characters, one by one, find this bleak prospect to be enough. According to the Goodmans’ verbal recollections dispersed throughout the show, the edges of their days are chronically submerged in gray and rainy weather, from wedding and vacation to Gabe’s death and Natalie’s birth. In the finale, the family accepts these storms as an inevitable, integral part of the vicissitudes of an authentic life. Coming out into the light as emotionally and mentally wounded, the characters shed their shame about depression and invite the audience to open up and embrace the full spectrum of their feelings in the fight against the pathologization of unhappiness in the United States. The rhetorical and structural inseparability of the unconscious from the musical’s action—its discursive hypervigilance in the production text—is a manifestation of the broader implication of psychoanalysis in the art form’s conceptions of subjectivity. Even though the commanding power of psychoanalysis within US psychiatry started to wane in the late 1960s, ultimately giving way to a newly reinvigorated biological determinism in the last quarter-century, the modernist principles of “psychic mimesis” have remained integral to the stage musical’s theatricalization of interiority. The vivid language of psychological and aesthetic modernisms continues to define the medium’s imagination about inner depth, spectacularizing the protagonists’ minds in moments of intense introspection and states resembling reverie, dreaming, or hallucinations in a multitude of post-”golden age” musicals such as On a Clear Day You Can See Forever (1965), Company (1970), Follies (1971), March of the Falsettos (1981), Nine (1982), Kiss of the Spider Woman (1992), A New Brain (1998), American Psycho (2013), First Daughter Suite (2015), Dear Evan Hansen (2015), and countless others. The sensibilities of contemporary stage musicals may echo current clinical-conceptual frameworks that are vastly different from and at times expressly biased against the psychoanalytic paradigms of the mid-century. Yet the basic structural principles of human subjectivity that inform such musicals, including Next to Normal, are continuous with the psychodynamic stage character model that was consolidated during the concurrent “golden age” of psychoanalysis and 291

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the Broadway musical in US culture. As the art form carries on its project of aestheticizing the emotional and mental life of the nation, it continues to recycle and reinvent musico-dramatic structures that came into their own during a century marked by the cultural explosion of the dynamic unconscious, thriving on the prolific rhetorical power and clinical authority of the psychoanalytic imagination. It is as if having once penetrated and pictured the dark storms within people’s souls through the eyes of psychoanalysis, the art form, like much of our culture, cannot think itself out of that vision.

Notes 1 Throughout the essay, I use “phantasy” and “phantasize” (spelled with “ph”) referring to psychoanalytic concepts of mental phenomena, broadly construed. I reserve the more traditional spelling, “fantasy,” for discussing theatrical devices that stage a character’s inner life, or flights of imagination. 2 Shoshana Felman. Writing and Madness. Palo Alto: Stanford UP, 2003. 261. 3 See, for instance, Tom Kitt and Brian Yorkey. Next to Normal. New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2010. 89, 91. 4 For reasons of space, I discuss Gabe only as a device for staging Diana’s interior. I want to note, however, that the musical puts Gabe to other uses such as dramatizing Dan’s grief (especially in “I’m the One (­Reprise)”) and, more obliquely, Natalie’s inner experiences (“Superboy and the Invisible Girl”; the scene in the bathroom during “I’m Alive”). Kitt and Yorkey. Next to Normal. 99–100, 37–38, 43. 5 Mark S. Micale, ed. The Mind of Modernism: Medicine, Psychology, and the Cultural Arts in Europe and ­America, 1880–1940. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2004. 369. 6 Mark S. Micale. “Two Cultures Revisited: The Case of the Fin de Siècle.” Medicine, Madness and Social History: Essays in Honour of Roy Porter. Ed. Roberta Bivins and John V. Pickstone. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. 221–222. 7 David Savran. Communists, Cowboys, and Queers: The Politics of Masculinity in the Work of Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1992. 30. 8 Ronald H. Wainscott. The Emergence of the Modern American Theater, 1914–1929. New Haven: Yale UP, 1997. 91–92. 9 Edna Kenton. The Provincetown Players and the Playwrights’ Theatre, 1915–1922. Ed. Travis Bogard and Jackson R. Bryer. Jefferson: McFarland, 2004. 82. 10 That is not to insist that Freud generated ideas that were then picked up by the artists of his time. As the work of historians like Micale shows, the ideas circulating within psychological and artistic modernisms developed through cross-pollination, with multi-directional flows of influence running between clinical and cultural spaces and informing both realms. For more see Mark S. Micale. “The Modernist Mind: A Map.” The Mind of Modernism: Medicine, Psychology, and the Cultural Arts in Europe and America, 1880–1940. Ed. Mark S. Micale. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2004. 1–68. 11 Françoise Meltzer. “Unconscious.” Critical Terms for Literary Study. Ed. Lentricchia Frank, and Thomas McLaughlin. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1995. 50. Meltzer also describes other models of the psyche, such as dynamic and systematic, in Freud’s theory. 12 Sigmund Freud. “Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis (1916–1917).” The Standard Edition of the ­ ogarth Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. XVI. Trans. and Ed. James Strachey. London: H Press, 1963. 295. 13 Sigmund Freud. “The Interpretation of Dreams (1900).” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. V. Trans. and Ed. James Strachey. London: Hogarth Press, 1953. 608. 14 There was a great deal of interaction between the modernist artistic scene and non-Freudian or pre-Freudian psychological theories. The American psychologist William James’s writing on “stream of thought,” for instance, predated Freud’s implementation of free association techniques and directly influenced Gertrude Stein and other American modernist writers. However, I confine my discussion to Freudian psychoanalysis because of its ultimate cultural and clinical dominance in mid-century ­A merica. “Freudian” in this essay means “derived from Freud” rather than representing his theory at its purest. Williams James. The Principles of Psychology, Vol. 1. New York: Henry Holt & Company, 1890. Chapter 9. 15 August Strindberg. A Dream Play and Four Chamber Plays. Trans. Walter Johnson. Seattle: U of ­Washington P, 1973. 19.

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The Eye of the Storm 16 On the “golden age” of psychoanalysis, see Nathan J. Hale. The Rise and Crisis of Psychoanalysis in the United States: Freud and the Americans, 1917–1985. New York: Oxford UP, 1995. Chapter 16; on Freudianism and in the canonization of modernism, see Dorothy Ross. “Freud and the Vicissitudes of ­Modernism in the United States, 1940–1980.” After Freud Left: A Century of Psychoanalysis in America. Ed. John Burnham. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2012. 17 Andrea Most. Making Americans: Jews and the Broadway Musical. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2004. 30. 18 Michael Levenson. Modernism. New Haven: Yale UP, 2011. 83. 19 David Savran. Highbrow/Lowdown: Theater, Jazz, and the Making of the New Middle Class. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2009. 165. 20 The similarities between Ibsen’s A Doll’s House and Next to Normal are striking in this context. The pivotal moment of revelation toward which the musical’s action builds is the number “How Could I Ever Forget?/What Was His Name?,” which constitutes the ultimate confrontation between Diana and Dan in act two. Echoing Nora in A Doll’s House, Diana forces her husband to have a conversation about a subject they have avoided for many years. His characteristic unwillingness to let her talk and his continued attempts to silence her at the end of the scene precipitate her decision to leave him. 21 For more on the historical interrelation of Ibsenite drama and psychoanalysis, see Elin Diamond. Unmaking Mimesis: Essays on Feminism and Theatre. London: Routledge, 1997. Chapter 1, and Christina Wald. Hysteria, Trauma, and Melancholia: Performative Maladies in Contemporary Anglophone Drama. New York: Palgrave, 2007. Chapter 1. 22 Parts of the set are also made to stand for other locations in the characters’ daily social geography (e.g. school; doctor’s office). 23 “The Agenda with Steve Paikin.” published on YouTube on June 29, 2011. . 24 For a brief account of the shifting relationship between biological and dynamic impulses in US psychiatry, see Elizabeth Lunbeck. “Psychiatry.” The Cambridge History of Science, Vol. 7. Ed. Theodore M. Porter and Dorothy Ross. Cambridge UP, 2003. 663–677. 25 Kitt and Yorkey, Next to Normal, 91. 26 Leon Eisenberg. “Mindlessness and Brainlessness in Psychiatry.” British Journal of Psychiatry 148 (1986): 497–509, at 500. 27 Agenda with Steve Paikin. 28 Kitt and Yorkey, Next to Normal, 92. 29 Agenda with Steve Paikin. 30 Joseph Breuer and Sigmund Freud. “Studies on Hysteria (1893–1895).” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. II. Trans. and Ed. James Strachey. London: Hogarth Press, 1955. 305.

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29 PARENT/CHILD RELATIONSHIPS IN THE MUSICALS OF STEPHEN SCHWARTZ Paul R. Laird

When working with composer and lyricist Stephen Schwartz as book writer for Children of Eden, John Caird noted how important the relationship between parents and children is to Schwartz: “He works on them [musicals] when he loves them and Children of Eden he’s had an incredible soft spot for…. It’s the stuff about fathers and children that’s so central to his deepest preoccupations.”1 Indeed, the theme of children seeking validation from their parents, struggles between the generations, or aspects of the simple realities in the lives of children appear in almost every show with which Schwartz has been associated. This chapter considers several shows in which the overall theme is most significant. Schwartz’s attachment to such themes may be seen in the following brief survey of his projects. Among the major shows, Godspell (1971), while not involving children, includes a group of lost souls who surround Jesus and look to him as a parental figure. Schwartz wrote the English lyrics for Leonard Bernstein’s Mass (1971), a piece that opens with the Celebrant surrounded by a community that again regards the central figure with admiration and respect, only to move away as the world becomes more complicated. The dramatic resolution is initiated by a child singing of simple faith. Pippin (1972) includes two references to the theme: the difficult relationship between the title character and his father, Charlemagne, and a similarly contentious one with Theo, C ­ atherine’s son, who plays an important role in the second act. In Working (1978), two of Schwartz’s songs address the theme: “Neat to Be A Newsboy” and “Fathers and Sons.” Rags (1983), for which Schwartz wrote the lyrics to Charles Strouse’s music, includes two young characters that play major roles in the plot. Children of Eden (finished 1997) examines deep feelings and conflicts within three familial units. In Wicked (2003), Elphaba deals with Frex, the man she believes to be her father, and the Wizard of Oz, her biological parent and a powerful man who admits defeat when he believes that he had his child killed. Schwartz’s opera Séance on a Wet Afternoon (2009) includes two children at the center of the plot and musical segments that explore their relationships with adults. Outside of Schwartz’s major corpus of stage musicals are five other projects that relate to this theme. Two stage musicals are for children: Captain Louie (1983, revised 2004) and My Son ­Pinocchio: Geppetto’s Musical Tale, which began as the Disney television musical Geppetto (2000). Captain Louie is Schwartz’s only show that takes place entirely in a child’s world. The later show concerns mostly the difficult relationship between the toymaker and his son. Each of Schwartz’s animated films—Pocahontas (1995), The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1996), and The Prince of Egypt (1998)—deals to an extent with parent/child relationships.2

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For the purposes of this chapter we will focus on five shows in chronological order where the creators dealt with children or parents with some depth or amplitude: Pippin, Working, Rags, ­Children of Eden, and My Son Pinocchio: Geppetto’s Musical Tale. The three principal categories within the larger theme in these shows include competition between a parent and child, addressed most directly in Pippin and Children of Eden; the difficulties that can exist in establishing or maintaining a bond between parent and child, a major plot conflict in Pippin, Working, Rags, Children of Eden, and My Son Pinocchio; and the dramatic evocation of a child’s world, with or without adults involved, in Working and Rags.

Pippin Schwartz’s principal collaborators on Pippin were book writer Roger O. Hirson and director/choreographer Bob Fosse, the latter of whom made numerous changes in the show.3 Set in the Middle Ages but reflective of the lives of contemporary young people, Pippin involves the immature title character’s search for self-identity. He tries out the military, pleasures of the flesh, political activism, and domesticity, but tires of each because he believes himself to be “extraordinary.” Once the Leading Player and his troupe offer Pippin the opportunity to die memorably by setting himself ablaze, only then does Pippin begin to act like an adult. Pippin’s relationship with his father, Charlemagne, is one of constant struggle between a moody adolescent and an inattentive father. After Charlemagne reluctantly accepts Pippin into the army, he interrupts his father’s strategy session in the song “War is a Science” with naïve calls to glory.4 Whereas Charlemagne announces his plans in a matter-of-fact patter song, Pippin offers a march with ironic wind flourishes, proving his uninformed assumptions about battle. Later, Pippin discovers how his father treats peasants and becomes a revolutionary. He dramatically kills Charlemagne, but discovers that he has no talent to rule, so we enter the theater of the absurd as Pippin pulls the knife out of Charlemagne’s back and the resurrected king returns to the throne. This ends the competition between father and son, and Pippin resumes his search for self-actualization. Pippin ends up at the home of the widow Catherine and her son, Theo. At this point, he cannot settle for domesticity, as he makes clear in his rant “Extraordinary.” The song opens in a simple pop style with a conjunct, syncopated melody that moves into angry rock, defining the character’s immaturity. Pippin knows nothing about being a father, given his pathetic efforts with Theo, whose scenes with Pippin reflect hints of parent/child competition like Pippin had with his father. Although Pippin falls in love with Catherine, he leaves her because he still wants more, but after being offered the chance of self-immolation, he defies the Leading Player, grows up a bit, and chooses to return to Catherine and Theo. The history of show’s end demonstrates how altering Theo’s age can change one’s perception of the plot. During the musical’s creation, it proved difficult to decide how to conclude Pippin. In the Broadway run, Theo was played by a young boy who at the end stood with Catherine and Pippin as a member of their newly formed family. The composer, however, discovered another possibility in a fringe production at London’s Bridewell Theatre in the 1990s. Director Mitch Sebastian asked permission to make this change because British child labor laws required there be three young boys to play Theo. They made him a teenager, requiring fewer actors, and at the end they had him start to sing “Corner of the Sky,” meaning Theo was starting his search for a meaningful life, like Pippin at the show’s opening.5 It is hard to know if Theo would enter the world as badly prepared as Pippin was, but perhaps the young man learned something from watching Pippin decide that self-immolation would have been an outrageous way to prove that he was “extraordinary.” Such generational cycles also appear in shows considered below.

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Working One does not immediately think of the theme of children and parents as part of this adaptation of Studs Terkel’s gritty book of the same name based on interviews with people that labored in many professions, mostly blue collar and many that disliked their work. Schwartz and his co-adaptor Nina Faso embraced the unhappiness, populating the show with such figures as an older teacher who no longer understands children or the demands of her position, and a millworker who suffers from her dangerous job.6 Schwartz wrote the score along with other songwriters; two of his own songs address themes related to this study. One depiction in the original version of Working was of an 11-year-old newsboy based upon three interviews in Terkel’s book. Schwartz’s song “Neat to Be a Newsboy” mostly has to do with how much the child loves the movement of the bushes after he throws a newspaper into them.7 Schwartz called the number “kid/pop; it was just supposed to sound like a little kid.”8 He compared the accompaniment to Beatles songs, with repeated chords in the right hand over a reiterative bass line, and a simple melody. The verse presents the boy’s overall satisfaction with his job, setting up the playful refrain about the springy bushes with sound effects in orchestra and voice. Working also includes one of Schwartz’s most personal explorations of parents and children, the song “Fathers and Sons.” The singer is a father, performing in a conversational style over n ­ oodling accompaniment, a bit like a country song.9 The form includes three verses separated by two refrains. The verses present a progression of sentiment: the father remembers his own son at age three-and-a-half in the first verse, considers his own father in the second, and finally muses on the speed of life and how he works for a better life for his son in the last. The song implies difficulties between the singer and his father, and then similar ones with his son when the next generation reaches a certain age. As was the case in the new conclusion for Pippin, Schwartz addresses generational cycles in this song, a theme that he explored even more in Children of Eden, as will be seen. Working failed on Broadway, playing only 24 performances in May/June 1978. With the help of director Paul Lazarus, Schwartz and Faso revised Working quickly, with “Fathers and Sons” playing a role in the solution. Schwartz recalls Lazarus’s suggestion: “It was his idea—the thing that I most remember because it worked immediately, and I learned a lesson from it—it was his idea to flip the order of ‘Cleaning Women’ and ‘Fathers and Sons.’ They were originally in the opposite order and neither of the songs particularly worked…”10 The original order was “Fathers and Sons” followed by monologues for a newspaper copyboy and tie salesman, setting up “Cleaning Woman,” which Schwartz described “as the 11:00 ­number … this big rock ‘em, sock ‘em number right before the end.” But Schwartz notes that “Fathers and Sons” “sort of leads you home. It … starts to tie up the show emotionally, and by having ‘­Fathers and Sons’ … lead almost immediately into ‘See That Building’ [the finale] it just was very powerful all of a sudden.”11 Schwartz and Lazarus gave the song to Mike the steelworker, a character with whom the audience tends to identify but who had not sung it in the original version. Schwartz had considered cutting “Fathers and Sons” because it did not directly address the show’s major theme, but Nina Faso insisted that it belonged because “that was what the whole play was about: posterity.”12 By showcasing the song “Fathers and Sons,” Schwartz and Faso helped make posterity and the cycle of generations a positive theme in what is overall a bleak show.

Rags A disappointing flop, Rags had a run of only four performances in August 1986, but book writer Joseph Stein, composer Charles Strouse, and lyricist Stephen Schwartz continued to work on it for the next few decades.13 The show concerns Russian Jewish immigrants in New York City, in further consideration of the types of characters Stein explored in writing the book for the far 296

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more successful Fiddler on the Roof (1964). Rags’s plot follows two interconnected families. Rebecca ­Hershkowitz and her young son, David, immigrate to New York City after fleeing a pogrom. They have not seen the boy’s father, Nathan, since he left for New York six years earlier to look for a job and then send for them. While looking for Nathan, Rebecca takes work as a seamstress and becomes involved with Saul, a union organizer. When the Hershkowitz family reunites, Rebecca and Nathan find themselves at odds because he is an anti-union Tammany Hall politician and has become assimilated in the years that he has been in America. The other family includes Avram, a middle-aged Jewish scholar and widower, and his daughter Bella, who is in her late teens. Bella has fallen in love with Ben, a young man she met on the ship to New York. Avram does not approve of Ben, who has rejected his Jewish identity. Bella defies her father and seeks work at a clothing factory. The plot references the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire of 1911, in which Bella dies. David plays a major role in the story. He is a natural salesman, helping Avram at a sales cart while Rebecca works. David’s character and the nature of his relationship with his parents emerge in songs.14 “Brand New World” opens with Rebecca singing a lullaby with Eastern European inflections for David. She quickly becomes interested in sights outside the window and awakens him; both grow fascinated by what they see, and Rebecca’s song switches to ragtime. Rebecca urges her inquisitive son to watch and learn as the music becomes more inspirational, with brass chords and bell sounds. In his music for Rags, Strouse usually used Eastern European or Jewish inflections, such as minor mode, melodic augmented seconds, and klezmer references with clarinet to describe the older generation, while the sounds of ragtime and early jazz were related to younger characters and American situations. “Penny a Tune” is an ensemble number that opens with klezmer-style music but later moves closer to early jazz. The number establishes the New York scene with immigrants trying to succeed in various professions. Rebecca enters and sings about what it is like to work as a seamstress, and David performs briefly right after the jazz style starts, evoking the younger generation as he sells from his cart. “Easy for You,” a number that also careens between Jewish tropes and early jazz, pits Rebecca against Saul over unionization. David enters with a verse, describing the socialist meetings they attend with Saul where people argue, as well as his mother’s animated discussions with their friend. Immediately following is a trio where David repeats Saul’s socialist rhetoric, concluding with a solo for Rebecca, who is proud to see her son learning and growing. David speaks at the opening of the next number, “Hard to Be a Prince,” introducing the Yiddish version of Hamlet that Saul takes them to, again showing the boy’s excitement at new things. At the conclusion of Act 1, thugs beat David for refusing to pay “protection” money at the sales cart. In “Nothing Will Hurt Us Again,” he briefly tells his mother that he had stood up for himself, just as Saul had taught him. Nathan finds them, and Rebecca ends the act singing the title of the song to her son. David’s continuing personal growth is evident in his songs in the second act. Nathan shows how he intends to follow the American Dream in “Yankee Boy,” a number redolent of Sousa marches. David echoes him in counterpoint in the second verse, invoking typical American images. Nathan has been fighting to find a life for six years, but David, who is younger and more adaptable, readily embraces his experiences in the United States and proudly joins his father’s song. In “The Sound of Love,” which includes Jewish tropes among other inspirations, David helps Bella’s boyfriend Ben sell a gramophone. David opens “Finale Rags,” recalling ragtime material from “Brand New World,” but here he asks his mother if she remembers the ragtime they heard that first night. She again urges him to observe and learn, and David answers that now “it belongs to me.” The character follows an engrossing and far-reaching journey during the show, heard in the impressive number of songs in which he participates. Meanwhile the adolescent Bella is vying with her father Avram. He insists that she stay home and work as a seamstress, but she wants to go out and experience their new home and find Ben. 297

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In “Penny a Tune,” she sings a verse about how Ben will become rich and find her. Later, during an argument between Avram and his brother-in-law, Bella flees. Avram catches her and tries to inspire her about their new surroundings with the same music Rebecca sang in “Brave New World,” but Bella rejects him, singing “Rags” and venting her frustration about her restrictive life. In the ensuing musical debate with her father, the music veers between ragtime and Jewish tropes, a melodic exploration of generational conflict. This wrestling between generations, and David’s journey as a child new to the United States, places Rags in the center of Schwartz’s output in terms of its overall themes.

Children of Eden Children of Eden includes the bible stories about Adam and Eve and Noah and the Flood to depict conflict between parents and children in three separate generations: God (“Father”) versus Adam and Eve, the first couple versus Cain, and Noah versus Japheth. Children of Eden began in 1985 as a youth pageant for the Roman Catholic shrine Our Lady of the Snows in Belleville, Illinois.15 The commission coincided with an overture to Schwartz from set designer Charles Lisanby to collaborate on an adaptation of stories from the Book of Genesis. The initial result was Family Tree, with a book by Lisanby; the team subsequently began making revisions for further development. John Caird, associate director at the Royal Shakespeare Company, who had worked with Trevor Nunn on Nicholas Nickleby and Les Misérables, joined the collaboration. When Lisanby could not produce an acceptable script, Schwartz and Caird obtained control of the project through arbitration; Lisanby retained conception credit and a share of royalties. Under the name Children of Eden, the musical opened in the West End in January 1991. Critics were lukewarm, and the show closed in April. Schwartz and Caird, however, persevered. Caird, son of a Congregationalist minister and ­Oxford theology professor, was “… fascinated by the inconsistencies in the different creation myths” and parent/child relationships, especially expectations of family loyalty that “children cannot sustain.”16 A revised production, directed by Ernie Zulia, ran in Roanoke, Virginia in late 1991; at least eight more regional productions with subsequent rewrites were staged before the show was declared finished with a 1997 staging at the Paper Mill Playhouse in Millburn, New Jersey. Parent/child relationship is Children of Eden’s central theme. Father interacts with Adam, Eve, Cain, Abel, and Noah, but his most dramatic conflict is with the first couple. Their scene together is paralleled by confrontations between Adam and Cain, and in Act 2 between Noah and Japheth. The biblical narratives are augmented by some of Schwartz and Caird’s own plot inventions. For example, Caird could not accept the “ghastly paternalism” of the Fall of Man story, suggesting that “If the Tree of Knowledge is forbidden, let’s start by assuming that it’s a bad thing that it was forbidden. … if parents shouldn’t do that to their children, then why should the children be punished?”17 As the musical begins, Father has created the world and the chorus of Storytellers has declared that everything is “Perfect.”18 Eve asks about the glistening Tree of Knowledge, causing Father to lose his temper. Father distracts Eve and Adam by suggesting that they name the animals; “The Naming” is an African-inspired number with repeated melodic ostinati and prominent accompaniment realized on Orff instruments, small marimbas often used in elementary school classrooms. Father then tells them it is time to sleep.19 Adam and Eve sing their prayer, “Grateful Children,” a short number with a simple melody and accompaniment mostly in the treble range. Father gazes at his sleeping charges and performs “Father’s Day,” a sweet tune with an active, repetitious accompaniment. He demonstrates his naiveté about children by singing that they will never change. Eve’s curiosity takes her to the Tree of Knowledge. She excitedly returns to Adam to report that when one approaches it, the tree glows. Eve sings the R&B-inspired “The Spark of Creation,” 298

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which shows that she has matured and believes her curiosity to be a remnant of Father’s creative power. She returns to the Tree of Knowledge and encounters a snake that tempts her to eat the apple. Eve is ambivalent about serving Adam apple dishes for dinner, and he realizes what has happened just before Father enters and gives him a choice of a new mate or never seeing Him again. Adam grows up in the song “A World Without You,” a tune sung in a wide range, numerous large leaps, and a varied accompaniment. He chooses Eve, bites the apple, and Father drives them from the garden. The next sequence sets up a parallel confrontation between Adam and Cain, which includes several of the same musical motives from the first sequence, as well as a similar progression in musical style. Cain and Abel are ten and eight, assisting Adam in offering a sacrifice to Father, reprising “Grateful Children.” Adam makes them promise to stay close to home, but Cain is curious. Eve reprises “The Spark of Creation,” realizing that Cain inherited her restlessness. Seven years pass; Cain and Abel are alone on stage. Abel offers Father another sacrifice in a reprise of “Grateful Children,” but Cain interrupts, singing “Lost in the Wilderness,” a driving guitar song with a wide range and pop sensibility in the vocal line, showing that he has reached the place his father did in “A World Without You.” Abel agrees to leave with him, but Father appears. He stops Abel from calling his parents, telling him that he is now Father’s hope. A defiant Cain sings a bit of “The Spark of Creation” and leaves. Adam and Eve enter, furious that Cain has fled. They remember a simpler time, singing “Close to Home” with younger versions of Cain and Abel as the parents try to return to the past. Cain returns, excited, singing material that Eve earlier performed when she told Adam about the Tree of Knowledge. Cain takes them to the Ring of Stones, evidence of other humans. Eve, Cain, and Abel are excited, reprising material from “The Spark of Creation” and other numbers. Adam interrupts in song, tearing into his son for ignoring dangers. Adam has visited here before and seen people dancing among bones. Cain wants to leave with Abel. Like Father in the previous confrontation, Adam tells Abel if he leaves he will never see his father again. Abel reprises “A World Without You,” reflecting his maturation. Tempers flare after Cain taunts Adam with news of Father’s visit and the older son picks up a rock to murder Adam, but Abel intervenes and suffers the fatal blow. The climactic moment of Act 2 occurs between Noah and Japheth, his youngest son, again including resonances of earlier confrontations and gaining further power from the fact that the same actors play Adam/Noah and Cain/Japheth. Japheth has hidden the woman he loves, Yonah, on the ark; she is not supposed to be there because she bears the Mark of Cain. Forty days of rain have passed with no end in sight and Noah no longer hears from Father. Yonah wonders if her presence is the problem and allows herself to be discovered. Noah’s other sons Shem and Ham threaten to throw Yonah overboard; Japheth defends her. Noah strikes Japheth, who picks up Adam’s staff (that his father carries) and menaces Ham, but Yonah runs between them. Japheth returns the staff and agrees to share whatever Noah declares to be Yonah’s fate. Mama Noah orders everyone below and sings some of “The Spark of Creation,” insisting that her husband find a resolution. She leaves and Noah briefly reprises “A World Without You,” introducing a new song that bears the show’s message: “The Hardest Part of Love.” It is a father’s recognition that the most difficult thing to do is let children grow up and make their own decisions. It is a sincere ballad with a conjunct melody, deliberate but with forward motion, the melody derived from what Father sang in “The Expulsion” after his confrontation with Adam and Eve and with references in the orchestra to “Father’s Day.” These motivic associations become more powerful when Father joins Noah in the song—heard only by the audience—resolving his conflict with his human children. Noah marries Japheth and Yonah, the ark lands, and the family splits off in various directions to repopulate the earth. Schwartz and Caird brought welcome resolution to the generational conflict that defines Children of Eden. In this exploration of cyclical conflict between generations, two fathers finally have allowed their children to make their own choices and leave the nest, recognition of what must take place as the next generation rises. 299

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My Son Pinocchio: Geppetto’s Musical Tale Geppetto (2000) is Stephen Schwartz’s only television musical.20 He later collaborated with David I. Stern to turn Geppetto into My Son Pinocchio: Geppetto’s Musical Tale, a children’s show conceived for community and regional theaters. The show emanated from Stern’s personal experiences. His father died in 1996, and the process of dealing with his legacy led Stern to fresh realizations. When Stern read Pinocchio, he found himself pondering, “How did Geppetto end up inside the whale?”21 Stern noted that Geppetto had prepared Pinocchio poorly for meeting the world, but by the end Geppetto has gained better parenting skills that Stern assumes developed during his “separate journey.”22 By the end of the show Geppetto and Pinocchio have a workable relationship, not unlike what Father has managed to do with the human race by the conclusion of Children of Eden. Stern shared this idea with Schwartz and the two pitched the idea to Disney in 1997; as Schwartz remembers, “they bought it immediately,” as an episode of The Wonderful World of Disney.23 The cast included actors Drew Carey as Geppetto, Julia Louis-Dreyfus as the Blue Fairy, Brent Spiner as ­Stromboli, Rene Auberjonois as Prof. Buonragazzo, and Usher as the Ring Leader. Schwartz stated, “We keep the camera on Geppetto instead of moving with Pinocchio.”24 Geppetto follows the puppet, catching up with him at Pleasure Island before they are swallowed by the whale. In the process, G ­ eppetto learns how to be a father and has a family when the Blue Fairy turns Pinocchio into a real boy. Before writing songs for Geppetto, Schwartz had his lawyer secure permission to use two of the famous songs from Disney’s 1940 animated feature: “When You Wish Upon A Star” and “I’ve Got No Strings” by composer Leigh Harline and lyricist Ned Washington. Schwartz added eight new songs, many of which concern the developing relationship between Geppetto and Pinocchio. “Toys,” a production number that introduces Geppetto’s popularity with children, is a march. “Empty Heart,” sung by Geppetto to the inanimate Pinocchio about his longing for a son before the Blue Fairy appears, is a lovely ballad. “And Son,” a waltz/duet for Geppetto and the newly animated puppet, shows Geppetto’s pride and desire to pass his business onto Pinocchio. “Satisfaction Guaranteed,” sung by Prof. Buonragazzo, concerns the character’s machine that produces artificial “perfect children,” allowing Geppetto to see that one cannot expect a son to be without fault. The moving ballad “Since I Gave My Heart Away” shows Geppetto’s growth as a father. He sings it to Stromboli to dissuade him from executing a contract that allows him to possess Pinocchio, and then to the Blue Fairy, imploring her to stop Stromboli. She turns the puppet into a boy, causing the puppeteer to lose interest. In about 2004, Schwartz was at a meeting with Music Theatre International (MTI). In response to a question about finding more family shows with casts combining adults and an unspecified number of children, Schwartz suggested Geppetto and MTI secured Disney’s permission to adapt the television show for the stage. Schwartz and Stern focused on the conflict between Geppetto and the Blue Fairy. It is the toymaker’s contention that he wished for his heart to be filled, but the fairy produced a “defective” living puppet. The framing device is a “time machine” that moves the audience between flashbacks. Schwartz replaced “And Son” with “Geppetto and Son,” another waltz.25 To clarify the show’s derivation, it became known as My Son Pinocchio: Geppetto’s Musical Tale. Its charm emanates from the developing relationship between father and his wooden creation, while a sense of postmodern snark appears in arguments between the smug Blue Fairy and Geppetto.

Conclusion When considering relationships in the musical theater we tend to think of heterosexual love first, but the powerful union of story, dialog, and music that marks the genre is also used to explore other emotions. The relationship between parent and child is arguably more universal in that just about everyone has known a parent. Schwartz and his collaborators have explored aspects of

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parent/child relationships in shows considered here: a child’s simple delight and a father’s musings on the speed with which a child grows up and his role in the passage in Working; a child encountering a new world and new relationships in Rags; conflict between parents and children in Pippin, Rags, and Children of Eden; and a father learning his role in My Son Pinocchio: Geppetto’s Musical Tale. The majority of the songs referenced in this study are sung by fathers, but Schwartz also participated in voicing a mother’s concerns in music for Eve in Children of Eden, and as lyricist with composer Charles Strouse for Rebecca in Rags. The emotional honesty that Schwartz and his collaborators brought to these situations and shows is notable, contributing to their universality and artistic significance.

Notes 1 Telephone interview with John Caird, 4 Jan. 2008. 2 For additional information on each of Schwartz’s projects, see: Paul R. Laird. The Musical Theater of Stephen Schwartz from Godspell to Wicked and Beyond. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2014, and Carol de Giere. Defying Gravity: The Creative Career of Stephen Schwartz from Godspell to Wicked. New York: Applause Theatre & Cinema Books, 2008. 3 For material on the show’s creation, see Laird, 55–63, and de Giere, 81–105. The source consulted here is a script dating from January 3, 2005, book by Roger O. Hirson, music and lyrics by Stephen Schwartz. 4 Songs from Pippin are available on: Pippin, Original Cast Album (Motown 3746352432, 1972). 5 For more information on changes in the show’s ending, see: Laird, 60. 6 For material on the show’s creation, see: Laird, 151–170, and de Giere, 145–173. 7 Songs from Working are available on: Working, Original Cast Album (Sony Special Products 3020621142, 1978, 2001). 8 Personal interview with Stephen Schwartz in New York City, 8 Apr. 2008. 9 Score: Working, from the book by Studs Terkel, adapted by Stephen Schwartz and Nina Faso (Heelstone Parc Productions, 1978), 156–171. “Neat to Be a Newsboy” appears on 32–37. 10 Personal interview with Stephen Schwartz in New York City, 8 Apr. 2008. 11 Ibid. 12 Telephone interview with Nina Faso, 3 June 2013. 13 For material on the show’s creation, see: Laird, 133–140, and de Giere, 187–201. 14 Rags: The New American Musical, with Members of the Original Broadway Cast (Sony Masterworks SK 42657, 1991). In a show with a complicated history, this description will be based upon the 1987 commercial recording. 15 For material on the show’s creation, see: Laird, 173–205, and de Giere, 205–226. 16 Telephone interview with John Caird, 4 Jan. 2008. 17 Ibid. 18 This description of Children of Eden is based on a script dated September 1996. 19 Songs from Children of Eden are available on: Children of Eden, American Premiere Recording (RCA Victor 09026-63165-2, 1998). 20 For material on the show’s creation, see: Laird, 257–268, and de Giere, 485–486. 21 Electronic communication from David I. Stern to author, 13 July 2006. 22 Ibid. 23 Personal interview with Stephen Schwartz in Kansas City, MO, 13 July 2006. 24 Ibid. 25 I heard this song performed at a workshop performance of the show in March 2006.

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30 JOHN KANDER The First Ninety-Two Years James Leve

John Kander turned 91 in March 2018. A few weeks after his birthday, he began rehearsing The Beast in the Jungle, which premiered at the Vineyard Theatre in May and is just one of several musicals that he has completed in recent years. Kander’s continued presence on and off Broadway distinguishes him from other major musical theater writers of his generation, nearly all of whom have had to content themselves with revivals of their hits and the occasional career tribute. Over the last 14 years, Kander has shepherded to Broadway Curtains, The Scottsboro Boys, and The Visit, three of four works that he and Fred Ebb were working on before Ebb’s death in 2004. Kander has also completed four new musicals—three with a new partner, Greg Pierce—as well as The Beast in the Jungle; Kander and Pierce are currently working on their fourth musical together. Kander has joked about not being able to retire, but he continues to derive pleasure from composing and collaborating with people to whom he feels close. In fact, the collaborative process means more to him than critical approbation. Kander has a strong sense of loyalty, which explains why he never stopped working with Ebb, even during rocky patches in their 40-plus-year partnership. This essay examines Kander’s career since 2004. The concept of a late-period style, common for classical composers, rarely figures in discussions of musical theater composers. But Kander’s career has gone through three distinct phases: his early years in New York, his collaboration with Fred Ebb, and his current work. Late-period Kander is not just a stylistic phase but also an expression of how he views musical theater, his life, and the world. His recent musicals comprise some of his most personal works. Although not autobiographical, they express his views on art and family. They also reflect the strong emotional ties that Kander has maintained with the Midwest, especially Kansas City, Missouri, where he was born and raised. Kid Victory, his second work with Pierce, is set in Kansas. The only other time Kander has written explicitly about the Midwest was for his Broadway debut, A Family Affair (1962), a comedy about a Jewish wedding in Chicago, on which he worked with childhood friends James and William Goldman. Kander and Pierce’s ­musicals, however, have more serious themes. Kander’s music for these works has a more mercurial quality and encompasses a broader eclectic stylistic range than the music he composed with a Ebb. I will discuss the three prominent aspects of late-period Kander, beginning with Kander and Ebb’s final Broadway musicals, moving on to his collaborations with Pierce, and concluding with a discussion of an experimental “dance play” he created with Susan Stroman and David ­Thompson. Kander and Ebb’s late work is in the same vein of their earlier adventurous, socially aware musicals, as epitomized by Cabaret and Chicago. They employ meta-theatrical devices to shine a harsh light on complex contemporary issues.1 302

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Kander and Ebb’s Final Two Broadway Musicals2 The Scottsboro Boys (2010) The Broadway production of The Scottsboro Boys was divisive not because of the infamous historical events on which it is based but because of the way the story was presented. The plot centers on nine African-American youths who in 1931 were falsely accused of raping two white women on a train in Alabama. The legal proceedings dragged on for decades, and the so-called Scottsboro Boys were not exonerated until 2013. David Thompson, who wrote the book for the musical, telescoped the protracted story into two acts. The Scottsboro Boys explores a serious theme using a show-within-a-show format, a hallmark of Kander and Ebb’s most popular musicals. However, whereas previous shows employed benign genres of popular entertainment (e.g. vaudeville in Chicago), Scottsboro tells its story in the form of a minstrel show—the most racist of popular entertainments in American history. Kander and Ebb’s score is a catalogue of minstrel show conventions: coon songs, plantation ballads, ­cakewalks, and pseudo-operatic arias. The final scene of the musical takes place on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama. A black woman (an unidentified Rosa Parks) who has silently witnessed the show boards a bus and is ordered to move to the rear; she refuses, and the show ends. The late appearance of Rosa Parks has a sound historical basis: Parks had raised money for the defense of the Scottsboro Boys, and her efforts mark the beginning of her political activism. The minstrel show frame in The Scottsboro Boys was intended as both a disarming narrative device and a metaphor for the racist criminal justice system. The actors enact a minstrel show so that they can tear it down. However, several detractors felt that coupling the real-life story with such a demeaning entertainment tradition was offensive and untenable. Theater critic Linda Armstrong (apparently unaware of other dramatic works based on the case) suggested that the only acceptable way to dramatize the story would have been to adopt the same courtroom-drama convention used for the 1961 film Judgment at Nuremburg. She makes no mention of the musicals involving Nazism. Other critics expressed the spurious view, long disproven, that the musical is too frivolous a genre for serious and divisive topics. Yet the heightened theatricality of Kander and Ebb’s musicals—the very thing that renders them both entertaining and intellectually engaging—is part of a strategy to disarm audiences. Critics of Scottsboro inveighed against the racist nature of the minstrel show without considering its dramatic function in the musical. On several evenings during the Broadway run, a group of protestors gathered outside the ­Lyceum Theater.3 A banner carried by one of them asked, “Where is the Song and Dance ­Musical about Gas Chambers, World Trade Center or Japanese Internment Camps?” Susan Stroman, director of The Scottsboro Boys, defended the show’s concept: “The trials [of the defendants] were treated as if the [Scottsboro] boys were in a minstrel show … The actors [in our musical] actually deconstruct the device.” Kander explained that the emotional power of music gives musical theater a “capacity to understand and portray human suffering … [I]f we’ve done our job right, people will feel strange … [S]ociety does not just cure itself[;] it happens with agitation and power in the right places.”4 Other writers had dramatized the Scottsboro Boys case but with entirely different results. John Wexley’s 1934 play They Shall Not Die, a courtroom drama that opened shortly after the first trial, tried to sway public opinion in favor of the accused. At a symposium held in conjunction with this production, playwright Elmer Rice exclaimed, “We have tended to be pretty critical of the Hitler régime, of Mussolini, even of Russia, but right at our doorstep lies something which overshadows anything being done in Europe.”5 Mark Stein’s 1980 play Direct from Death Row the Scottsboro Boys was inspired by the fact that the first four Scottsboro Boys released from prison were actually hired to reenact their trial in vaudeville.6 Stein, accordingly, presents the story

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in the form of a vaudeville show, which, despite its ability to create ironic distance, does not achieve the same c­ onfrontational effect of the minstrel show concept of Kander and Ebb’s version.7 Stein, ­moreover, focuses on backstage tension between the Communist Party and the NAACP ­( National A ­ ssociation for the Advancement of Colored People). As a historical drama, Kander and Ebb’s musical seeks to elicit historical and theatrical empathy.8 The Scottsboro Boys asks the audience to process the facts of the complex legal case and identify with the characters. Historical empathy, a pedagogical tool for teaching history, requires intellectual and emotional engagement. Theater historian Megan Stahl suggests that the mannered minstrel show presentation of the facts dulls one’s ability to feel something for the characters: how can one fully empathize with a protagonist who performs a self-deprecating coon song? Stahl identifies a major hurdle for the show but fails to acknowledge the ability of Kander and Ebb’s concept musicals, including The Scottsboro Boys, to shift back and forth between different performative modes (i.e. between diegetic time and non-diegetic time). David Thompson feels that attacking the minstrel show concept was “a way for people to protest something that the play really had nothing to do with.” The negative reaction, however, was mainly limited to New York. “When it played in Philadelphia,” Thompson recalls, when “protesters came down to see the show … they apologized to the cast.” The positive response outside New York extended to England. The 2013 West End production was so successful that it spurred interest in a movie version, for which Thompson has written a screenplay. This version begins in 1939, as a traveling minstrel show pulls into Scottsboro to perform the story of the Scottsboro Boys. The townsfolk follow the parade of minstrels into a decaying opera house, where black patrons head for the balcony and whites for the main floor. Deviating from the live stage version of the musical, the Jewish lawyer Samuel Leibowitz is written to be played by a white actor and is more avaricious. A “consummate showman,” he compares himself to Moses, declaring, “It is not the cause of the Negro alone. It is the cause of my own people.” At the time of this writing, the film project is still on track. Kander and Ebb never stopped looking for effective variations of what is essential the backstage musical. The show-within-a-show concept of The Scottsboro Boys called for songs written in a minstrel show vein and thus played into their ability to invoke old popular song conventions in the service of biting satire. The marriage of form and content of Kander and Ebb’s most socially relevant work is also the basis for their unique blend of irony and show-biz panache.

The Visit (2015) Even without the premiere of Hamilton in 2015, The Visit would likely not have been a commercial hit. After all, it has a European sensibility, one of the bleakest plots in the repertory, and a more operatic score than most contemporary Broadway theatergoers expect to hear. The plot centers on Claire Zachanassian, the wealthiest woman in the world, who returns to her childhood home of Güllen, now on the brink of ruin, to seek revenge on her former lover, Anton, who betrayed her. She offers the town a fortune on the condition that the citizens give her justice by executing Anton. Despite its short run, the production of The Visit gave Kander a sense of satisfaction, in part because it was his and Ebb’s final Broadway musical. For Kander and book writer Terrence McNally, Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s play The Visit (1956) is a love story. The music that Kander composed to express the protagonists’ nostalgia for the passion they once shared softens the play’s dystopian theme. Kander believes that Dürrenmatt intentionally based his play on Franz Lehár’s bubbly 1904 operetta The Merry Widow, which explains the operatic character of Kander’s music and the prominence of the waltz “You, You, You.” The music tempers, and even helps explain, Claire’s desire for vengeance. Anton’s death is treated as a type of liebestod (love-death). Claire will accompany Anton’s corpse to Capri, and their souls will spend eternity together. 304

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Unlike Dürrenmatt’s play, the musical shifts between the romanticized past and the cold reality of the present, which is haunted by young doppelgängers for Claire and Anton (Alfred in ­Dürrenmatt’s play). Several critics felt that the emphasis on the love once shared by Claire and Anton did not fit well with the nihilistic world of Dürrenmatt’s play, in which “blood and flesh, love and fidelity, dignity and intrinsic human value have only cash value.”9 Claire’s enormous wealth grants her formidable power, but it also dehumanizes her. Dürrenmatt scholar Melvin Askew sees in the play the skeletal framework of Oedipus Rex. Claire is a sphinxlike figure, a castrating god with an enigmatic riddle. ­Dürrenmatt unmasks the hypocrisy of institutions that maintain the illusion of civilized society. Anton is Everyman, no guiltier than anyone else.10 As the play unfolds, religion is replaced by money, and God by Claire. Claire remakes the laws of nature, prostituting the town and doing to Anton what he, with the town’s complacency, did to her. In such a barren landscape, how can a love story take hold? The unresolved tension between the love story and revenge plot has haunted The Visit since its world premiere (directed by Frank Galati) in 2001 at the Goodman Theater in Chicago. The Visit reached Broadway 14 years later. John Doyle, as director, adopted his signature minimalist approach, shortening the action to one act and reducing the cast size. Claire travels with a diminished entourage, which detracts from the sense of her opulence in the earlier production.11 Broadway critics felt the show was in conflict with itself. The Visit featured 80-year-old Chita Rivera, who stepped into the role after Angela Lansbury withdrew from the project before the Chicago premiere. Rivera’s Claire had a prosthetic leg and moved stiffly with the aid of a cane. She brought a stillness to the role and noted, “playing Claire is an exercise in repression.” With Rivera as the lead, the choreography, by Graciela Daniele, took on greater dramatic importance. In the most poignant moment in the production, Rivera joined her younger counterpart in a pas de deux immediately after singing “Love and Love Alone,” the most Weillian song in the score. If for the 1958 American premiere of Dürrenmatt’s play the actress Lynn Fontanne brought to the part “her familiar combination of irony and grandeur,” then Rivera brought a palpable bitterness.12 Hers was, both vocally and emotionally, a very dark performance.

Kander and Pierce Shortly after Fred Ebb died, Kander’s creative juices began to surge. He recalled, “I hadn’t thought much about what projects were next after Fred died until one day, when I … thought I’d like to [write] something … you could almost [perform] in your living room.” Kander had enjoyed reading short stories by the writer Greg Pierce and felt that he could work with him. Nothing in Pierce’s background suggested that he could fill Ebb’s shoes, but Kander had a different type of collaboration in mind. “A great story is clearly what turns Greg on,” Kander explains. “Fred was a character person … Greg thinks about the layers and details and economy of story.”13 Pierce was barely 30 when Kander approached him. Like Kander, he attended Oberlin College. They met when Kander came to campus to coach some students. Pierce majored in English and, after graduating, moved to New York and performed sketch comedy. In addition to short stories and musicals, Pierce has written screenplays, plays, and opera librettos. He is primarily interested in issues faced by teens and young adults. In his play Slow Girl, a teenage girl visits her reclusive uncle in Costa Rica to escape problems back home. Her Requiem is about a teenage girl who composes a requiem Mass and the impact of her endeavor on her family. As collaborators, Kander and Pierce never predetermined what they were going to do or how they were going to do it. Kander assumed he would write the lyrics, “but it turned out that Greg is a terrific lyricist.”14 Pierce does not revel in wordplay in the tradition of musical comedy, and his humor is more writerly than performative. 305

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Kander and Pierce’s first two musicals feature original stories involving children or young adults, themes about belonging, intimate scenes involving intense interactions, endings without closure, short vocal phrases woven into the dialogue, direct melodic writing, and a selective use of chromaticism. While some people might prefer the term “post-Ebb” to describe these musicals, that term draws attention away from Pierce’s impact on Kander’s music.

The Landing (2013) Kander and Pierce began their collaboration by playing a game of “what if,” a technique that Kander and Ebb employed to stimulate ideas whenever they started a new musical. They propose a situation, follow it through to its conclusion, and see if it leads to a song or story. Kander and Pierce eventually came up with a one-act musical about a lonely boy. When William Goldman suggested that they expand the work, they added two more self-contained one acts and titled the musical The Landing. Each act features a precocious boy and a narrator. The first, “Andra,” is set in New England. Noah, an 11-year-old misfit with a father who is too busy to notice him, finds companionship in Ben, a carpenter his mother has hired to build some cabinets. Ben gives Noah a telescope. One evening when using his new gift, Noah spots Ben and his mother in her bedroom. In the second act, “The Brick,” Darius is spending summer vacation with his Aunt Charl and Uncle Cliff, who live in a Connecticut suburb with a “picture-perfect 1950s feel.” Darius and his aunt enjoy watching noir films on television. In response to an infomercial, Charl purchases a brick supposedly from the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. The Brick, personified as a gangster—and originated by Pierce’s uncle, David Hyde Pierce—turns Charl and Cliff’s life upside down. The eponymous final act, “The Landing,” is about two gay men, Jake and Denny, who are foster dads to a boy named Collin. Collin asks Jake to accompany him to “an old ships’ landing,” where he reveals that he has come into their lives to help Jake cope with the imminent loss of Denny, who later dies from a heart attack. The Landing disabused anyone expecting to hear something reminiscent of Kander and Ebb. Pierce’s lyrics avoid the cynicism and hard-edged humor in which Ebb reveled. The music for this and Kander and Pierce’s subsequent musicals is less flashy and conventional, and more elegiac than Kander’s earlier music. Kander often reached back to the music of his youth: ragtime, vaudeville, Broadway, and opera. His nostalgia for the eclectic soundscape of his childhood, however, has always been in dialogue with his formal musical training. Starting with The Landing, his music began to evoke the neoclassical tendencies of his student compositions, characterized by a sense of play and surprise. Moreover, the score exhibits indifference to preconceived notions of what a musical should sound like. Music drifts in and out, sometimes as underscoring or incidental music, sometimes as a single vocal phrase. Pierce’s stories encouraged Kander to explore new ways to use music and avoid the hyper-­ theatricality of his collaborations with Ebb. The music in “Andra” is ubiquitous, mercurial, and quixotic. Syncopated jazz rhythms and blue notes are limited to the gangster pastiche of “The Brick,” although this segment ends unexpectedly with a playful allusion to the famous act three quartet in Rigoletto (“Bella figlia dell’amore”). Kander’s lyrical impulses are strongest in Jake’s farewell song, “Thanks for That” from “The Landing.” The Landing premiered at the Vineyard and received mixed reviews. Critics avoided comparisons of Pierce with Ebb; with the sole exception of Jesse Green, they also ignored the impact of Pierce’s writing on Kander’s music. However, Green was unable to identify a new Kander style, although he described a “lieder-like tune” in the first act, a “Brittenesque air” in the third, and the absence of the type of song that Kander calls “screamers” and that Ebb favored.15 The Landing marks the beginning of a new stage in Kander’s career and a change in the character of his music. However, this, Kander’s first major collaboration without Ebb in over four decades, overlapped with the Broadway productions of Curtains, The Scottsboro Boys, and The Visit. 306

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Kid Victory (2015) Kander and Pierce’s second musical, Kid Victory, is about a 17-year-old boy named Luke, who attempts to rejoin his community after being abducted and held hostage for a year. Pierce explains, “We knew that we wanted to start the show right when this kid came back after everything happened to him that he doesn’t want to talk [about].”16 Because his parents are incapable of relating to him, Luke feels as though he has emerged from one prison into another. His mother, a zealous Baptist, relies on religion to help him. Luke’s father, while more sympathetic, is incapable of standing up to his wife or helping Luke. The past impinges on the present as Luke relives his captivity. Luke’s abductor, a gay man in his forties, eventually releases Luke and kills himself. Back home, Luke connects with Emily, a “crunchy” and “devout atheist” and owner of a lawn and garden store that sells merchandise such as “Jesus birdfeeders.” Luke’s ex-girlfriend Suze hopes to rekindle their relationship, but Luke, who is still exploring his sexual identity, gives her little hope. He ultimately leaves home to begin the next journey of his life. The specter of religion hangs over the story, in part because Kander wanted to connect the work to his Kansas City upbringing. Pierce observes that in the Midwest, “You see nativity scenes and lots of churches everywhere … When you think about America … it’s a religious place … [T]he country is changing pretty quickly in terms of younger people and their feelings toward gay marriage and all kinds of issues, but still at heart we’re in a Christian country.” Luke joins a small but notable group of non-singing major musical theater characters. Critics suggested various reasons why Luke never sings. One described him prosaically as a “caged bird for whom the entire show sings,” and another suggests that he “has been stripped of his identity and hence his own song.”17 An outsider in his own home, Luke is searching for his voice. In part because he is never given the space to do so, Luke cannot open himself up to those around him. For Kander, Kid Victory is “about people who don’t fit trying to find out where they do.”18 The Landing and Kid Victory bear the hallmark features of Pierce’s other works. The writer explores fractured family structures and how children fit into them. The small-town and suburban settings, introspective characters, and disquieting situations of Pierce and Kander’s musicals are a far cry from Ebb’s hardboiled, urbane brand of musical theater. Kander and Ebb had dealt with gay characters, but Kander and Pierce explore gay interiority more deeply. Their next project diverges from the thematic focus and musical style of their first two musicals. This work, an adaptation of a preexisting source, was entirely Kander’s idea. The story is not set in America or in the present.

The Enchanted Kander and Pierce’s third musical, which has not yet been produced, is based on Jean Giraudoux’s Intermezzo, known in English as The Enchanted.19 This project began in the fifties, when Kander and James and William Goldman worked on a musical adaptation of the play. They completed six songs, which they auditioned for literary agent Audry Woods in hopes of securing the musical rights to the play.20 They failed to obtain the rights, but Kander never lost interest in the musical, and even tried to interest Ebb in the project. Giraudoux’s play is set in a provincial French town (Aubergine in the musical). An officious ­Inspector arrives to investigate strange happenings. These are apparently caused by Isabel, a schoolteacher who has been communing with a ghost that she believes understands the world better than the living do.21 The Inspector, who fears that Isabel’s behavior could “undermine the basis of established government,” orders the Superintendent of Weights and Measures to relieve her of her post. The Superintendent instead falls in love with Isabel. She is reluctant to give up her Ghost, but the Superintendent perseveres, and order is restored. 307

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The Enchanted is about the poetry found in routine existence.22 The Supervisor of Weights and Measures represents “the compromises necessary to attain happiness” in a world ruled by bureaucrats. What he offers Isabel is life, the only proper way to death. They embrace the perpetual anticipation of not knowing the city to which the superintendent’s job will take him every three years. This routine but dependable fact of life is enough for Isabel to rejoin the human race. The Enchanted espouses Kander’s philosophy about life and art. He cites William Saroyan’s famous line, “Go ahead. Fire your feeble guns. You won’t kill anything. There will always be poets in the world.” This theme helps to explain why Kander has never given up on The Enchanted, and why Ebb never warmed to it. Given the European setting of the play, Kander is in familiar territory. Waltzes and marches abound, and there are hints of the can-can. The score has a strong sense of unity; in several songs, for example, the B section begins directly on V7/IV and emphasizes the subdominant. Kander borrowed from his earlier version of The Enchanted on only one occasion, the lovely “When Twilight Falls.”23 The final segment of Giraudoux’s play has always fascinated Kander. In it, Isabel faints when she chooses the superintendent over the Ghost. To rouse her, the Doctor orchestrates a “symphony of sound,” instructing everyone to use the sounds of ordinary life.24 The version of this scene that Kander wrote with the Goldmans is charming, but he decided not to use it, perhaps in deference to his new collaborator. He has attempted to compose a new version of this climatic scene several times: “I keep writing it and fucking it up because it’s in my head.” The Enchanted was put on hold while Kander tended to his next project.

A “Dance Play” by Kander, Stroman, and Thompson The Beast in the Jungle is the work of a legendary Broadway composer unburdened by the emotional demands of a sometimes stressful collaboration and the commercial pressures of Broadway, still enthralled by the idea of “putting on a show” with friends, and still full of the energy to pull it off. This project reunited Kander with longtime collaborators Susan Stroman and David Thompson, and with the Vineyard Theatre, which produced four of the works discussed earlier. Kander calls the Vineyard “home” and enjoys the risk-free atmosphere in which the organization allows him to experiment. Indeed, The Beast in the Jungle tests the very notion of what a musical is. Kander, Stroman, and Thompson decided to write something without singing—a “dance play.” Stroman suggested a story about a man looking back ruefully on his life.25 They saw potential in Henry James’s The Beast in the Jungle, a novella about a man, John Marcher, who avoids making a strong emotional connection to anyone because he fears a nebulous destructive force in his life. As a young man, Marcher encounters May Bertram in Italy. A decade later, they run into each other in London. They visit galleries and attend concerts, all the while waiting for the beast to appear and destroy Marcher. Their friendship becomes “a daily habit” but never a romance. Marcher’s obsession with destruction ultimately destroys May’s life. She dies, leaving Marcher alone and filled with regret. Stroman wanted to expand the use of both classical and contemporary dance in musical theater. Thompson explains, “[w]e’re looking at flipping the form of the typical musical, where your dance doesn’t get into the realm of heightened, incredibly technical ballet.” For Kander, according to Thompson discussing such abstract ideas “is the most pretentious thing you can ever talk about.” But Thompson insists that they are “doing something we’ve never done before. So that’s very Kander.” Stroman’s initial concept for the show was the idea of “waltzing thorough life,” so it seemed logical to base the entire score on waltzes. Kander started to compose waltzes every day. Thompson recalls, “You’d wake up in the morning and on your phone would be another Kander waltz … And they would be about anything … returning to the country, coming to New York, looking forward to Friday … He is writing actually some of his most profoundly mature music, very haunting.” 308

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Thompson updated James’s story and gave it a solid dramatic structure. The musical begins in the present as Marcher’s nephew, a new character, arrives at his uncle’s home distraught following an argument with his fiancée. Marcher recounts his relationship with May, whose funeral he has just attended. Thompson’s version is comprised of three episodes set in, respectively, Naples (1968), London (1988), and New York City (the present). Fifteen waltz segments weave in and out of the dialogue. Thompson fashioned a world nearly as rarified as the James’s. Marcher is an international art dealer, May a successful photographer who marries a wealthy Englishman. In the second segment, the three attend the ballet and opera together. They drink wine and gin, not beer and whiskey; Marcher reads Proust. Thompson has given Marcher more backstory in an effort to explain his fears, and his version of May does not sacrifice everything for her emotionally paralyzed friend. She marries well and has a career, though she remains in love with Marcher. May’s husband, also a newly invented character, is essentially a dramatic device to bring Marcher and May back into contact in the 1988 segment. During their initial encounter, Marcher and May view a study for Henri Matisse’s The Dance, which Stroman brings to life several times. Twenty years later, May’s husband purchases the study for her, engaging Marcher as his agent. Marcher visits them in England, and while May’s husband is out hunting, she and Marcher have sex. At the end of the musical, Marcher’s nephew decides not to repeat his uncle’s mistakes. As the nephew dances with his fiancée, Marcher waits for the beast to arrive. The critics admired Kander’s waltzes and Stroman’s choreography, but they struggled with Thompson’s attempt to explain Marcher’s fears. By contrast, James’s beast simply exists. Sara ­Holdren notes that James’s beast “can’t be psychoanalyzed away, ascribed to some single inciting emotional wound.” She also suggests that a privileged, white man-child unable to embrace happiness is perhaps no longer worthy of our sympathies. The challenge of blending dance and dialogue was the artistic impetus for the project. H ­ owever, the story’s universal message resonated with Kander. He likened the story to his professional philosophy: “Why do it if you’re not going to have a happy, creative experience?” On the other hand, Kander relates personally to the story’s message: “Even when I was much younger, the idea of reaching the end of your life and looking back at it and thinking ‘I missed it’ is one of the saddest things I can conceive of. And that’s the story we’re telling.”

A Nice Midwestern Boy John Kander is the only major Broadway composer of his generation not raised in or near New York. This biographical detail would seem inconsequential except for the fact that Kander himself feels that his Kansas City upbringing defines who he is. Kander’s friends agree that his Midwestern sensibility has shaped his character. Whatever they consider “Midwestern” to be, they believe that Kander epitomizes it. At ninety-two, Kander remains close to his brother Eddie and returns to Kansas every year during the holidays for a family gathering. As part of this long-standing tradition, one evening Kander sits at the piano surrounded by his brother, nieces and nephews, grandnieces and grandnephews, and Albert Stephenson, his husband since 2008, and performs his latest work. For Kander, Kansas City evokes memories of “a wonderful childhood.” His was a happy home, where he and his brother were “allowed”—to borrow their own term to describe the open, nurturing environment their parents fostered—to explore whatever interested them, similar to the Vineyard today. Kander always emphasizes the positive, stress-free environment of his youth, a striking contrast to how contemporaries Stephen Sondheim, Charles Strouse, and Fred Ebb ­describe their childhoods. Kander has remarked that he does not identify with the neurotic traits—clichés notwithstanding—that Fred Ebb and several other New York Jews in show business have often worn as a badge of honor or exploited to comic effect. 309

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Ebb’s death in 2004 did not suddenly free Kander to pursue new projects; he had always composed music outside their collaboration. By contrast, as Kander remembers, Ebb insisted that “If we’re not in the same room, I’m not working.” Ebb’s dependence on Kander put considerable pressure on the composer. That he limited his writing always puzzled Kander: “He was so brilliant and so talented, how could he not write?… I can’t stop writing; it doesn’t matter what it is. And Greg [Pierce] is always working on something.” Other things strained Kander and Ebb’s relationship. Ebb never went out of his way to support Kander’s work that did not involve him. He “managed not to appear,” even when reminded by an event organizer. Kander learned to accept this behavior “for being the complicated thing it must have been for him.” It did not help matters that Ebb never had a sustained romantic relationship in all the years Kander knew him, and that as he aged, he suffered health problems. Kander eventually learned to protect himself emotionally. When Ebb died, Kander felt a greater sense of purpose than he did a sense of grief. Kander counts himself lucky to have been part of the last generation of writers that was allowed to fail on Broadway. He recognizes how Broadway has changed, how much more corporate—and risk averse—it has become. As far as he is concerned, his musicals could be performed in his own living room—and they have been. Kander has publically credited Pierce for inspiring him to continue writing after Ebb’s death: “He really, really extended my life.”26 Pierce acknowledges, without any sense of sadness, that when Kander dies, he will likely be sitting on an unfinished musical. When he thinks about his career, Kander gets a youthful twinkle in his eye and exclaims, “I’m having a good time writing.”27

Notes 1 James Leve. Kander and Ebb. New Haven: Yale UP, 2009. 82. 2 For a discussion of Curtains, see Leve, 260–271. 3 Patricia Cohen. “Protest of ‘Scottsboro Boys’ at the Lyceum.” New York Times. 8 Nov. 2010. 4 Felicia R. Lee. “New Musicals that Strike a Somber Chord.” New York Times. 2 Mar. 2010. 5 “Scottsboro Play Symposium Issue.” New York Times. 5 Mar. 1934. 6 James Lardner. “Live from Death Row.” Washington Post. 21 Oct. 1980. 7 Mark Stein and Harley White, Jr., Direct from Death Row the Scottsboro Boys (An Evening of ­Vaudeville and Sorrow). New York: Dramatist Play Service, 2005. 8 Megan Stahl. “Too Big for Broadway? The Limits of Historical and Theatrical Empathy in ‘Parade’ and ‘The Scottsboro Boys’.” Musical Theatre Studies 10.1 (2016): 69–79. 9 Melvin W. Askew. “Duerrenmatt’s ‘The Visit of the Old Lady’.” The Tulane Drama Review 5.4 (1961): 92. 10 Askew, 94. 11 Christopher Wallenberg. “A Tenacious Show Finds a New Stage.” New York Times. 17 July 2014. 12 Brooks Atkinson. “Lunts in ‘The Visit’.” New York Times. 18 May 1958. 13 Patrick Healy. “Kander and … Pierce? A New Collaborator for the Composer of ‘Chicago’ and ‘Cabaret.” New York Times. 24 Mar. 2011. . 14 Healy, “Kander and … Pierce?” 15 Jesse Green. “The Landing Gives Us Kander after Ebb.” Vulture. 23 Oct. 2013. 16 Interview with Greg Pierce, March 2016. 17 John Stoltenberg. “‘Kid Victory’ at Signature Theater.” DC Metro Theater Arts. 1 Mar. 2015. ; Ben Brantley. “In ‘Kid Victory,’ Recused but Not Free.” New York Times. 22 Feb. 2017. 18 Behind-the-Scenes with Kid Victory, 11 Feb. 2015. . 19 Jean Giraudoux’s The Enchanted, in volume 1 of Four Plays, Adapted, and with an Introduction by Maurice Valency. New York: Hill and Wang, 1948. 103–173. 20 Leve, 133–135. 21 Donald Inskip. Jean Giraudoux: The Making of a Dramatist. London: Oxford UP, 1958. 71. 22 John H. Reilly. “Giraudoux’s Intermezzo: Its Elaboration.” American Association of Teachers of French 39.3 (1965): 411.

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John Kander: The First Ninety-One Years 23 Leve, 134. 24 John H. Reilly. Jean Giraudoux. Boston: Twayne, 1978. 84. 25 Interview with David Thompson, March 2017. All subsequent Thompson quotes are taken from this interview. 26 Theater Talk, 11 Mar. 2017. . 27 Interview with John Kander, March 2016.

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31 UNLIKELY SUBJECTS The Critical Reception of History Musicals Elissa Harbert

In 2015 Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton sparked rave reviews, made front-page news for its enormous popularity, and prompted the biggest spike in interest in the American Revolutionary War since the Bicentennial. Only superlatives seemed adequate to describe it. The New York Times theater critic Ben Brantley joked that it would be worth mortgaging your house and leasing your children to buy tickets.1 First Lady Michelle Obama called it “the best piece of art in any form that I have ever seen in my life.”2 The Internet exploded with Hamilton-related hashtags, social media tributes, and parodies. For over a year, Hamilton was everywhere, a reception seemingly unprecedented among Broadway musicals in its reach and fervor. Yet as reviews poured in and the show settled in for its open-ended run, certain patterns in its reception emerged: a familiar assumption here, a tired phrase there. In addition to all the fanfare, critics wrote about Hamilton in ways that retraced the same grooves worn by other history musicals, which dramatize real people and events with some degree of historical accuracy. This chapter examines history musicals’ reception discourse spanning half a century (1969–2017), first exploring the underlying skepticism about historical subjects on Broadway, and then surveying how some of these musicals earned critics’ approval and which flaws critics found particularly ruinous. Many intertwined factors contribute to the success or failure of a Broadway musical. In a perfect world, the quality of the book, music, lyrics, performances, and the production as a whole would be the determining features; but in reality, critical reception, promotion strategies, competition, star performers, venue, economic and cultural climate, and, in recent years, online buzz can each play a major role. In the case of history musicals, the way they represent the past also influences how they fare with critics.3 Reviews of history musicals tend to fall into a distinct pattern: first, critics express surprise at the “unlikely” subject for a musical. In predominantly positive reviews, they often seem astonished that they like the show despite its historical subject. They may exclaim that it is not a dry history lesson, while perhaps acknowledging that they nevertheless learned more than they did in high school. The highest praise critics offer is the affirmation that they feel a greater sense of personal connection to history. With negative reviews, the trajectory differs: after bemoaning the subject, critics tend to focus on the flaws in the show’s relationship with history. They often describe it as boring or heavy-handed. The most fatal flaw seems to be that the production fails to bring history to life, the characters remaining cardboard cutouts that do not emotionally engage the critic. 312

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As cultural gatekeepers, many critics in influential positions have resisted unconventional subjects for musicals. In both positive and negative reviews, the way critics react to history musicals suggests a prevailing skepticism about the value of history as entertainment and the suitability of Broadway musicals for enacting serious issues.

Surprising Subjects The most prominent feature of history musicals’ reception discourse is how often critics express incredulity at the very idea of a musical about historical figures and events. This initial surprise and even aversion to the concept is likely because history musicals require the suspension of disbelief when historical figures who were not entertainers implausibly burst into song, a defining feature of musicals that delights some and repels others. However, critics’ surprise also reveals deeply held cultural attitudes about whether history is entertaining or even appropriate for the genre. In other words, it implies that the way people think about history conflicts with what they expect of Broadway musicals. Critics predict that audiences will experience cognitive dissonance when reconciling the “serious” facts and figures of history they learned in school with the singing and dancing world of Broadway. Of course, this cognitive dissonance goes beyond musicals with historical plots. Because it is unrealistic when nearly any group of nonperformers suddenly bursts into song, be they politicians, street gangs, or cats, surprise is a common theme in reviews of all but the most conventional musical theater subjects. As Warren Hoffman writes, “While a number of serious musicals do exist, the stereotype of the genre as a whole is that musicals are fanciful, silly, throwaway entertainments that have nothing profound to offer.”4 Hoffman argues that people habitually misread musicals because “the happy-go-lucky, toe-tapping, belt-to-the-rafters Broadway musical has blinded us with its songs and dances, making us think that it is the most innocent of art forms when, in fact, it is one of America’s most powerful, influential, and even at times polemical arts precisely because it often seems to be about nothing at all.”5 The form’s stereotypes, combined with the typically serious plot and social commentary found in history musicals, create a mismatch between genre expectations and subject matter that frequently surprises skeptical critics on first impression.6 The quintessential example of this phenomenon is 1776, the 1969 hit with music and lyrics by Sherman Edwards and book by Peter Stone. Nearly every reviewer noted how surprising its subject was.7 1776 dramatizes the proceedings of the Second Continental Congress in Philadelphia as John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, and the other delegates draft and debate the Declaration of Independence. When Edwards, a former history teacher obsessed with writing a musical about the Revolutionary War, brought his concept and drafts to potential producers, several turned him away sight-unseen because they “hated the period and thought it unsuitable for the theater.”8 Edwards persisted, and eventually the show made it to Broadway. From 1776’s Broadway debut through its 1217-show run and 1972 film adaptation, critics continued to express surprise. New York Times theater and dance critic Clive Barnes opened his glowing review, “On the face of it, few historic incidents seem more unlikely to spawn a Broadway musical than that solemn moment in the history of mankind, the signing of the Declaration of Independence.”9 Numerous critics followed his lead, calling it an unlikely idea for a musical.10 The Times’ Walter Kerr emphasized just how strange the title and subject were for Broadway, assuming the reader would be incredulous: “Look at what it’s up to. It won’t budge on that title, which cannot be said to have a box-office ring to it. It really is about the American Revolution, seriously, playfully, plainly, preposterously. Wigs and all…And it’s just dandy.”11 Even decades later, critics seemed to remain astounded by 1776. Brantley summed up its reception in his review for the 1997 Broadway revival, calling it “the show that nobody expected to like when it opened in 1969.”12 He then perpetuated the same pattern: 313

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But darn it if 1776, the 26-year-old musical about (oh, please) the Declaration of Independence, doesn’t prove itself to be a surprisingly (if oddly) skilled seducer. It’s like some facetious history nerd of a blind date you couldn’t imagine, at the evening’s beginning, enjoying yourself with. Yet by the end of three hours in its company at the Roundabout Theater, you’re amazed at how quickly, and even pleasurably, the time has gone.13 Here, Brantley crowds in no fewer than five remarks on how surprising it is that he liked this history musical, and that history on Broadway can sometimes be entertaining. In reviews of many other history musicals, critics’ first reactions are skepticism and surprise. Brantley wrote of Titanic’s (1997) premise, “the mere fact of a $10 million musical called ­Titanic, a singing-and-dancing rendition of the century’s most famous maritime disaster: yes, it all seemed to portend a memorably bloody chapter in the history of flops on Broadway…. Theater disaster cultists will have to wait, however, as will headline writers armed with scalpels and the obvious puns.”14 Michael Riedel summarized the prevailing incredulity Titanic encountered: “When word leaked out last year that composer Maury Yeston and playwright Peter Stone had written a musical about the sinking of the Titanic, Broadway snickered. A musical called ‘Titanic’? Shades of ‘Springtime for Hitler,’ people joked.”15 Clearly, the belief that a musical is the wrong medium for a tragic, true story endures. Despite a wave of negative reviews, audiences loved Titanic. Riedel explained, “The salvaging of Titanic will surely go down in theater history as one of the great turnarounds of all time. It was the result, its creators say, of tenacity, savvy marketing… and the unwavering belief critics be damned that audiences were moved by the show.” Peter Stone’s heartrending book, Maury Yeston’s nostalgic music and lyrics, and the charming ensemble cast propelled Titanic to win all five Tony Awards for which it was nominated, including Best Musical of 1997. Jason Robert Brown’s debut musical Parade (1998) also faced doubts about its historical subject. Parade, with music and lyrics by Brown and book by Alfred Uhry, recounts a young girl’s murder in 1913 Georgia, and the trial and conviction of an innocent Jewish factory manager, Leo Frank. Brantley wrote that in his circles, “Parade prompted raised eyebrows and arch jokes (have you heard the one about the dancing lynch mob?) long before it went into previews.”16 Again, he blamed this skepticism on the show’s premise: “the death of Leo Frank may be an unlikely subject for a musical.” Others objected for more aesthetic reasons. Charles Isherwood doubted the suitability of a grim scenario like Parade for a musical both because of the stereotypes of the genre’s cheeriness and more fundamentally because of the perceived mismatch between the ugliness of the story and the beauty of the music: “Why set to music a story whose hard and distasteful facts can accommodate little of the nuance and color and joy — to say nothing of beauty — that music could bring?”17 Not all critics had an incredulous reaction; Vincent Canby thought Parade to be a “promising” subject for a musical.18 Still, this type of response is a rare exception for most history musicals. Another exception to this pattern was the initial response for Stephen Sondheim and John Weidman’s Assassins in its original 1990 incarnation (by the 2004 Broadway version, the show’s subject was already a known quantity, at least to critics.) Assassins bands together nine infamous figures from US history—four presidential assassins and five who attempted the deed and failed— into a carnival shooting gallery beyond the bounds of time and space. The villains from different eras and backgrounds rationalize their actions and encourage each other to justify their own, in the process displaying their delusions and revealing a dark underbelly of American society. Because Sondheim is renowned for approaching his subjects, whether daring or not, from unconventional and often challenging angles, when he chose a subject as truly shocking as the history of presidential assassins, critics did not doubt he could turn it into an entertaining, innovative musical, even though many were disappointed by the first version in 1990. In marked contrast to 314

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the genre as a whole, Sondheim’s musicals manage to avoid a reputation for frivolity. In Assassins, he exploits this by using a “deceptively peppy musical-comedy tone,”19 flaunting the apparent misalliance of subject, genre, and his reputation. Reviewing its Off-Broadway premiere, rather than calling the idea of Assassins an unlikely subject for a Broadway musical, critics like Frank Rich and David Richards called it audacious. Their language shifted because, as Richards wrote, “Mr. Sondheim has long since accustomed audiences to expect the unexpected.”20 As Rich put it, Assassins is “a daring work even by his lights.”21 Only the Times’ Melvyn Rothstein remarked that the subject was unusual, writing, “The credo of an American presidential assassin is hardly your usual musical-theater fare. But then again, this musical is not about an American presidential assassin. It is about nine of them.”22 Sondheim himself made the disclaimer, “There are always people who think that certain subjects are not right for musicals… We’re not going to apologize for dealing with such a volatile subject… Nowadays, virtually everything goes.”23 In Hamilton, the “unlikeliness” of the subject is multiplied: it is a Broadway musical about the American Revolutionary era told through hip-hop and R&B styles. Any two of those three do not initially seem to go together. Lin-Manuel Miranda anticipated this assumed mismatch when he began his project in 2009, reveling in its unexpectedness when he presented the first excerpt at Barack and Michelle Obama’s White House Evening of Poetry, Music, and the ­Spoken Word. Scanning the audience for their reactions, Miranda earnestly announced what he would be presenting: “I’m actually working on a hip-hop album, it’s a concept album about the life of someone I think embodies hip hop: Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton. [Pauses for laughter.] You laugh, but it’s true!” 24 His performance provoked more delighted laughter from the Obamas and their guests, seeming to confirm the unlikeliness of combining hip-hop with history. Many commentators have lingered on this presumed disjunction. Peggy Noonan called ­Hamilton “surprising,” while Jody Rosen described it as an “odd creation: a rigorously factual period drama about the political intrigues of the early Republic, starring a cast of mostly black and Latino actors, with a score steeped in hip-hop.”25 Brantley expressed uncertainty about the subject matter, but raved, “even theater reactionaries seem destined to be swept up in its doubt-defying ardor,” guaranteeing that it “persuasively transfers a thoroughly archived past into an unconditional present tense.”26 Even a year after Hamilton’s immense popular and critical success was beyond doubt, writers like Syreeta McFadden continued to call it “an unlikely Broadway hit.”27 It is “unlikely” in large part because of the combination of its historical subject, the ways that subject is conveyed, and by whom. One might wonder if, following Hamilton’s success, critics would persist in doubting the subjects of history musicals. Indeed they have. Come from Away (2017), by Irene Sankoff and David Hein, explores the events following the September 11, 2001 attacks when 38 planes flying internationally were diverted to the tiny town of Gander, Newfoundland. Jesse Green for New York Magazine called it “the unlikely and aggressively nice new musical.”28 He went on to explain his doubts, “That a story is basically true does not make it more believable onstage, which is why there are so few great nonfiction musicals.” By now, the rhetorical device of surprise has become a convention in itself. It shows critics’ perhaps subconscious desire for Broadway musicals to adhere to the long-standing stereotypes and conventions of the genre rather than venturing into serious historical topics. Reviews of Come from Away often address New Yorkers’ dread of media that trivializes or exploits the attacks. Brantley wrote, Come from Away sounds like a show that most New Yorkers would run a city mile to avoid. I mean, come on guys, a feel-good 9/11 musical created by a husband-and-wife team whose most notable previous credit was something called My Mother’s Lesbian Jewish Wiccan Wedding? 315

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That’s a self-spoofing concept that might have come up in a Saturday Night Live brainstorming session, and been rejected on the grounds of bad taste.29 He praised the show, however, remarking that it is “smarter than it first appears,” again implying that the subject does not seem at first blush like it would work for a Broadway musical. Reviews modeling suspicion in this way may have been necessary to reassure New Yorkers that Come from Away was not just capitalizing on the still-recent tragedy. The motive underlying the doubt may be distinct from the surprise evoked by other history musicals, showing that skepticism for unconventional subjects based on real events may occur for different reasons, but is rooted in the belief that nonfictional stories may be inappropriate for the musical genre.

History Lessons Once reviewers have modeled their surprise as an opening gambit, they go on to critique the historical substance of the musical. In many positive reviews, critics assure the public that a show will not feel like a high school history class, and that any learning that happens from curtain to curtain will be fun and effortless. For example, Walter Kerr wrote of 1776, “How, pray, do you get a musical, rather than a Channel 13 television show, out of that?… You find yourself grasping without effort the relative position of all 13 colonies, a triumph you probably weren’t able to manage when you took American History in high school. The show makes you feel smarter than you used to be… and smarter without having had to slave for it.”30 Michelle Obama, who invited the cast of Hamilton to do a workshop with students at the White House, said, “I was so excited to share the magic of Hamilton with young people, because I believe that this is how history should be taught. And I wanted to get them excited about learning about our nation’s past.”31 Stacy Wolf noted that Hamilton turns “what might be imagined as a staid history lesson” into something “unbelievably satisfying,” implying that these are mutually exclusive.32 On the blog of the American Historical Society, historian Sadie Bergen poked fun at her colleagues and the lengths to which some go to make history entertaining. “The premise of Hamilton,” she writes, “sounds a bit like a desperate high school history teacher’s last-ditch effort to engage apathetic teens: a hip-hop musical telling the story of Alexander Hamilton.”33 The opposite of a staid history lesson in this context is a relevant one. In order to succeed, history musicals must coax audiences to reflect on issues in their own time. When a history musical is relevant, critics and audiences feel they’ve become more personally connected to that history. For example, Michael Friedman and Alex Timbers’ Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson (2010) brings the seventh president and the people surrounding him into a space that hybridizes the past and present, using emo rock and contemporary language to sketch parallels and issue political warnings for contemporary audiences. Reviewing the Public Theater premiere of Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson, Brantley emphasized its focus on a “chapter in American history that feels anything but distant”; in his review of the Broadway production he declared the musical a “true reflection” of politics in 2010.34 A new relevance was part of the reason for Assassins’ success in 2004: the show’s themes seemed more immediate than they had in 1990. Assassins had trouble making it to Broadway. Although its short Off-Broadway run at Playwrights Horizons was sold out, it received mixed reactions. Hopes of a move to Broadway were dashed due to bad timing: the outbreak of the Gulf War, and the wave of jingoism that ensued, made the dark comedy seem too unpatriotic.35 After successful productions in London’s West End and elsewhere, a Roundabout Theatre Company production was set to open on Broadway in Fall 2001. It had to be postponed again after the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, which rendered it inappropriate for the cultural climate.36 When it finally ran on Broadway in 2004, its reviews were far more enthusiastic and it won six Tony Awards including 316

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Best Revival of a Musical. The production had been revised, but, as Frank Rich wrote, “it’s not the show that has changed so much as the world.”37 After 9/11, and with the transformation of American culture between 1990 and 2004, the themes of Assassins resonated more than ever. Joe Mantello, who saw the 1990 version and directed the 2004 production, said the musical was finally the right fit for the time because “history and violence have become much more concrete for many New Yorkers.”38 Both Rich and Mantello noted in particular that the audience’s reaction to the character Samuel Byck, who tries to crash a 747 into the White House to assassinate President Nixon, had changed. Mantello said, “In 1991 I think that was darkly comic and unfathomable… but there’s definitely a hush that comes over the audience now.”39 Similarly, although Come from Away presents relatively recent historical events, reviewers emphasized connections between 2001 and the show’s premiere in 2017. With its portrayal of ­Canadian hospitality and the importance of making refugees welcome, the musical resonated as a counterpoint to anti-refugee policies in the United States. Michael Paulson wrote, “the show has turned unexpectedly into a form of Canadian soft power: an expression of Canadian ideals, seemingly at odds with those of the new American administration.”40 Again and again, critics feel the need to assure audiences that these history musicals make important connections with their own time, emphasizing that these shows will engage the audience emotionally and prove relevant to the present day.

Negative Reviews When reviewers dislike history musicals, they tend to critique them along similar lines: they often begin by remarking on the surprising subject, as discussed earlier. Sometimes they point out flaws in the show’s depiction of history, although departures from historical record are usually forgiven in positively received musicals in all but the most pedantic reviews.41 Still, historical inaccuracy can be an easy target when looking for a musical’s flaws. Often, critics scold shows for being heavy-handed in pushing political views or ethical lessons. Perhaps the most damning thing a critic can say is that a show fails to bring history to life, letting its subject remain an emotionless series of statistics and abstractions. To be successful a history musical must make the audience feel emotionally invested in the characters. The impression of a dispassionate narration of historical events colored several negative reviews of history musicals, including 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Evita, The Civil War, Parade, and Titanic. Leonard Bernstein and Alan Jay Lerner’s 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue (1976) features historical vignettes about a century of presidential administrations in the White House and the African American servant family that keeps the house running. The highly anticipated musical, which was planned for the American Revolution Bicentennial and sponsored by the Coca-Cola Corporation as its birthday gift to the United States, closed on Broadway after only eight performances.42 Nearly all of 1600’s reviews were negative; critics thought the plot lacked cohesion, and they were bothered that the authors’ political disillusionment after the Watergate scandal and the Vietnam War overpowered the musical’s expected patriotic tone.43 Reviewers complained of “tedium” and the show’s “patronizing” approach to history.44 One of the most scathing reviews was from ­Philadelphia Inquirer critic William Collins, whose report on the first preview exemplifies the pattern described earlier: “Leonard Bernstein and Alan Jay Lerner are in a terrible funk about ­A merican history. They look back and see nothing but hypocrisy, chicanery, corruption… They are so depressed that they have written a big, long musical that makes the rest of us feel as bad as they do… This is a heavy, bloated, gloom cloud of a show.”45 He continued, “Instead of personalizing history, Lerner has made people into historical abstractions.” Similarly, in Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice’s Evita (1978), Walter Kerr complained that most of the historical events in Eva Perón’s life are not dramatically rendered but instead delivered 317

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as narration by Che, a Greek chorus figure loosely based on both Argentine revolutionary Che Guevara and the “common man” archetype.46 As a result, Kerr felt that the musical’s history was distant and emotionally deadened: “It is rather like reading endless footnotes from which the text has disappeared, and it puts us into the kind of emotional limbo we inhabit when we’re just back from the dentist but the Novocain hasn’t worn off yet.”47 Kerr also pointed out a flawed relationship with history, complaining that the omnipresent narrator, whom he took to be Che Guevara, “factually… wasn’t there at the time, [and] had nothing whatever to do with the Peróns.”48 ­Despite mixed reviews, Evita was a hit with audiences and won seven Tony Awards. Lloyd Webber’s memorable music, the deft staging by Harold Prince, and the charismatic performances arguably outweighed the deficiencies of its libretto. Frank Wildhorn’s The Civil War (1998), more a song cycle than a cohesive narrative, received unanimously negative reviews and closed after 61 performances. Critics found it “generic” and “bland,” and above all said it failed to involve the audience emotionally.49 Charles Isherwood’s Variety review of The Civil War emphasized how little emotional connection one makes with the characters, calling it “a numbing musical that always substitutes self-importance and superficiality for an original or authentically felt examination of a traumatic period in American history. It’s history shrink-wrapped as homily and sentiment, not flesh and blood and feeling.”50 He explained that it has a problem conveying history in a meaningful way: “In just over two hours, Wildhorn and his collaborators manage to thoroughly trivialize a sizable chunk of American history, turning a complex conflict that claimed some 620,000 lives into a live-action version of an easy-listening concept album.” For Ben Brantley, any musical, historical or otherwise, that lacks strong emotional impact is fatally flawed, and he emphasizes this benchmark in nearly all of his reviews of history musicals. His review of The Civil War weaves together several familiar tropes: There’s not one moment of insight or originality… The show arranges its archetypal elements into confoundingly static patterns, laying out all its cards in its opening minutes and then failing to combine them in ways that would build to revelation or strong emotional response. Though the musical covers the full span of the war, with the names, dates, and casualty counts of major battles projected in supertitles, you eventually come to feel that you have been watching the same rotating diorama.51 At the most fundamental level, he continued, “Without humanizing detail, none of the people onstage grab our hearts.” Parade also failed to bring history to life for Brantley and other critics. He wrote, “there’s no getting beyond the impression that [Leo Frank] is as flat and iconic as a bleeding saint in a religious mural.”52 Of the other characters, he complained, “it is sometimes hard to distinguish them from the two-dimensional cutout figures” of the set. He concluded that Parade does not pack the necessary emotional punch: “For those tears to flow, we have to get to know Leo Frank as a man, not a symbol. The civics lesson that is Parade forbids our ever approaching such knowledge.” Here, he evokes a relative of the dreaded history lesson, a civics lesson, implying with similar disdain that it is fundamentally not entertaining nor desirable for a musical. Vincent Canby, who unlike most critics thought the idea for Parade was promising, argued that the work failed to live up to that promise: “Parade is without life. It plays as if it were still a collection of notes for a show that has yet to be discovered.”53 He complained about how perfunctorily the show dealt with the historical facts: “The story of Frank’s arrest, conviction and murder is clearly a very big subject, with all sorts of social and political associations, but Parade goes through them as if checking off the information for items listed in a curriculum vitae.” A curriculum vita seems worse, even, than a civics lesson. He also found the characters too generic, writing, “Except for Leo and Lucille [Frank], Parade is 318

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populated by characters who could have been ordered from a catalogue.” Isherwood also found many of the characters one-dimensional, including Leo Frank, whom he found to be “probably factually impeccable but unsympathetic,” implying that it might have been preferable to deviate from the historical record to make a more relatable character.54 Brantley found similar faults in Titanic, calling it too abstract and lacking in emotionally compelling characters. He dubbed it a “perversely cool work, cerebral without being particularly imaginative or insightful. Most often, it feels like a singing blueprint, still waiting to achieve the third dimension.”55 He warned there is an “unwieldy amount” of factual data, which dominates “at the expense of emotional engagement, as if one were looking at this assortment of doomed souls through a telescope and at considerable distance.” He concluded, “It doesn’t stir up much vicarious anxiety or sympathy. Unless you’re allowed to know the victims of any catastrophe, they will remain statistics. With this Titanic your heart doesn’t, as it has to, go down with ship.” Variety’s Greg Evans agreed, calling the characters “snapshots… few boast more than a single identifiable trait,” and saying the show had “no convincing character drama.”56 In Titanic, however, many of the characters are archetypal figures rather than the specific historical individuals whose names librettist Peter Stone found in the ship’s records,57 and their generic personalities serve as examples of the many ordinary people swept up in an event far larger than themselves. Their vagueness is more an invitation to the audience to project themselves into the situation; here, perhaps, these critiques miss the point. What these negative reviews have in common is that they all doubt the potential for historical detail to be entertaining on the Broadway stage. A Broadway musical, they insist, must be emotionally enthralling, not dry and rigidly factual. Thus, history musicals must find a way to make history emotionally present for audiences, which usually means creating rich and sympathetic characters for us to identify with, not dreaded cardboard cutouts. History musicals face a difficult path to success on Broadway. Their reviews reveal attitudes toward the role of the past in the present day, as well as persistent stereotypes about what is and is not appropriate for a Broadway musical. Critics often seem biased against the very concepts these musicals take up, doubting whether audiences will abide a history lesson when they go looking for entertainment. Whether or not an individual critic likes a particular musical, the resistance of the group as a whole toward musicals with nonfictional subjects over the last 50 years implies a gatekeeping instinct to keep the genre limited in the subjects it explores. The history musicals that do win critics over bring history to life with sincere emotional impact and clear relevance to the present day. Despite their hurdles, history musicals will continue to arrive on Broadway, and perhaps eventually their subjects will no longer seem so unlikely.

Notes 1 Ben Brantley. “‘Hamilton,’ Young Rebels Changing History and Theater.” The New York Times. 6 Aug. 2015, sec. Theater. . 2 Syreeta McFadden. “Hamilton at the White House: Why This Moment Means So Much.” The Guardian. 15 Mar. 2016, sec. Culture. . 3 This chapter only accounts for a selection of history musicals that made it to opening night on Broadway. 4 Warren Hoffman. The Great White Way: Race and the Broadway Musical. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 2014. 3. 5 Hoffman, 2. 6 Another reason for the surprise is the cognitive dissonance of historical figures breaking into song and dance. See Elissa Harbert. “Hamilton and History Musicals.” American Music 36.4 (Winter 2018): 422. 7 On 1776’s reception, see Elissa Harbert. “‘Ever to the Right’?: The Political Life of 1776 in the Nixon Era.” American Music 35.2 (Summer 2017): 237–270. 8 Sam Zolotow. “Birthday of U.S. Inspires a Broadway Musical.” The New York Times. 8 July 1966.

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Elissa Harbert 9 Clive Barnes. “Theater: Spirited ‘1776’.” New York Times. 17 Mar. 1969. ProQuest Historical Newspapers The New York Times (1851–2007) edition. 10 See, for example, Molly Haskell. “Theater Uptown: 13 Stars.” The Village Voice. 3 Apr. 1969; Marion ­Simon. “Putting ‘1776’ On Stage: How Mr. Edwards’ Affection Became a Broadway Smash.” The National Observer. 28 July 1969; John Crosby. “Musical ‘1776’ Is 1970’s Valentine to the Past.” Los Angeles Times. 12 July 1970, sec. Calendar. 11 Walter Kerr. “‘1776’ and All’s Well.” New York Times. 23 Mar. 1969, sec. Arts and Leisure. 12 Ben Brantley. “Singing the Course of Human Events: 1776 The Course of Human Events, Sung.” The New York Times. 15 Aug. 1997. 13 Brantley. 14 Ben Brantley. “‘Titanic,’ The Musical, Is Finally Launched, and the News Is It’s Still Afloat.” The New York Times. 24 Apr. 1997. . 15 Michael Riedel. “Raising the ‘Titanic’: It Was Supposed to Be an Accident Waiting to Happen, But the Broadway Musical Is Looking Unsinkable.” New York Daily News. 22 July 1997. . 16 Ben Brantley. “Martyr’s Requiem Invokes Justice.” The New York Times. 18 Dec. 1998, sec. Theater. . 17 Charles Isherwood. “Parade.” Variety. 17 Dec. 1998, sec. Reviews. . 18 Vincent Canby. “Pedigree versus Play: The Mystery of ‘Parade’.” The New York Times. 27 Dec. 1998, sec. Theater. . 19 Frank Rich. “Review: Sondheim and Those Who Would Kill.” The New York Times. 28 Jan. 1991. 20 David Richards. “They Shoot Presidents, Don’t They?” The New York Times. 3 Feb. 1991. 21 Rich, “Review: Sondheim and Those Who Would Kill.” 22 Mervyn Rothstein. “Theater: Sondheim’s ‘Assassins’: Insane Realities of History.” The New York Times. 27 Jan. 1991. . 23 Rothstein. 24 Lin-Manuel Miranda Performs at the White House Poetry Jam, 2009. . 25 Peggy Noonan. “How to Stage a Revolution.” The Wall Street Journal. 10 Apr. 2015, sec. Opinion. ; Jody Rosen. “The American Revolutionary.” The New York Times T Magazine. 8 July 2015. . 26 Ben Brantley. “In ‘Hamilton,’ Lin-Manuel Miranda Forges Democracy through Rap.” The New York Times. 17 Feb. 2015, sec. Theater. . 27 McFadden, “Hamilton at the White House: Why This Moment Means So Much.” 28 Jesse Green. “Theater Review: Come From Away Makes a Musical out of Canadian Niceness.” New York Magazine Vulture. 12 Mar. 2017. . 29 Ben Brantley. “Review: ‘Come From Away,’ a Canadian Embrace on a Grim Day.” The New York Times. 12 Mar. 2017, sec. Theater. . 30 Kerr, “‘1776’ and All’s Well.” 31 Michelle Obama quoted in Adam Hetrick. “Exclusive: Michelle Obama Talks Arts Legacy and Power of Hamilton.” Playbill. 25 May 2016. . 32 Stacy Wolf. “Hamilton.” The Feminist Spectator (blog). 24 Feb. 2016. . 33 Sadie Bergen. “On Hamilton and Learning to Think Historically.” AHA Today (blog). 26 Oct. 2015. . 34 Ben Brantley. “Old Hickory, Rock Star President.” The New York Times. 7 Apr. 2010, sec. Theater; Ben Brantley. “Ideal President: A Rock Star Just Like Me.” The New York Times. 13 Oct. 2010, sec. Theater Reviews. .

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Unlikely Subjects 35 David Gritten. “‘Assassins’ Murders ’Em in London.” Los Angeles Times. 16 Nov. 1992, sec. Stage. ; Murdoch McBride. “Producers Chase Revival of Sondheim’s Assassins in Roundabout Fashion.” Playbill. 8 June 2000. . 36 Frank Rich. “At Last, 9/11 Has Its Own Musical.” The New York Times. 2 May 2004. 37 Rich. 38 Jesse McKinley. “Ready, Aim, Sing: ‘Assassins’ Hits Broadway.” The New York Times. 22 Apr. 2004. 39 McKinley. 40 Michael Paulson. “A Broadway Musical Brings Out Canadian Soft Power.” The New York Times. 16 Mar. 2017, sec. Theater. . 41 On realism and theatricality in history musicals, see Harbert, “Hamilton and History Musicals,” 421–423. 42 Mel Gussow. “Coke Backs Lerner-Bernstein Show.” The New York Times. 17 Sept. 1975. 43 Elissa Harbert. Remembering the Revolution: Music in Stage and Screen Representations of Early America during the Bicentennial Years. Northwestern University, 2013. Chapter 3. 4 4 Clive Barnes. “‘1600 Pennsylvania Avenue’ Arrives.” The New York Times. 5 May 1976, ProQuest Historical Newspapers The New York Times (1851–2007) edition. 45 William B. Collins. “Giants of the Stage Produce a Puny ‘1600’.” Philadelphia Inquirer. 27 Feb. 1976. 46 Tim Rice admitted that although Che Guevara never met the Peróns, he “thought it would be interesting to put those two characters together” because they were contemporaries. Michael Owen. “A London Hit Arrives – With a Controversial Heroine.” The New York Times. 23 Sept. 1979. 47 Walter Kerr. “Stage: ‘Evita,’ a Musical Perón.” The New York Times. 26 Sept. 1979. 48 Kerr. 49 Ben Brantley. “History Soldiering On.” The New York Times. 23 Apr. 1999, sec. Theater. . 50 Charles Isherwood. “Review: The Civil War.” Variety. 23 Apr. 1999, sec. Reviews. . 51 Brantley, “History Soldiering On.” 52 Brantley, “Martyr’s Requiem Invokes Justice.” 53 Canby, “Pedigree versus Play: The Mystery of  ‘Parade’.” 54 Isherwood, “Parade.” 55 Brantley, “‘Titanic,’ The Musical, Is Finally Launched, and the News Is It’s Still Afloat.” 56 Greg Evans. “Titanic.” Variety. 24 Apr. 1997. . 57 Jackie Demaline. “‘Titanic’ Disaster Inspires Broadway Musical.” The Cincinnati Enquirer. 7 Nov. 1999. .

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PART 8

Beyond Broadway New Media and Fan Studies

For many decades, the New York Times had the power—or at least seemed to have the power—to make or break a show. A positive review by the head theater critic in the Times could help a show run for years; a negative one could close a show in a week or sometimes even a single day. There were exceptions—Cats was famously panned by critics—but that’s what they were: exceptions that only occasionally bucked the power of one man with one newspaper column. While the Times’ review, along with those in other publications, may still carry some weight, there’s no question that the power of the critic has been decentralized. Thanks to social media, word of mouth is increasingly tangible: on fan sites, blogs, chat rooms, and other online communities, fans don’t just identify themselves as such—they act on it. They buy tickets, cast recordings, and merchandise; they campaign for beloved shows to remain open or to tour; they interact ­d irectly with shows’ creators and casts via Twitter and other platforms or at stage doors after performances, becoming part of a production’s ever-evolving persona. Occasionally, fan engagement comes full circle: the set design of Dear Evan Hansen, for example, displays actual tweets and videos from fans on its multimedia screens throughout the show, and fan art is sold in the lobby. Enacting fandom is now part of a performance, integral to how a show is marketed and received. In this way, the musical has become decentralized from Broadway, from New York, and from mainstream critics through the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Although live musicals still run in one of the several dozen official Broadway houses in New York City, others now flourish via the mass media and are supported by other means. Television musicals are having quite a moment in the 2010s, both in the form of narrative TV series and live stagings. This latter is a phenomenon that creates “event television” by encouraging viewers to watch and participate via social media in real time. The internet has become another home to new musicals, perhaps most obviously in the case of the hit Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog. Of course, musicals shared via screen rather than stage can reach exponentially more viewers than Broadway shows; thus they allow fans to become part of huge experience-sharing communities. They also make the most of the medium: TV musicals, for example, can do things live theater can’t, with cameras, staging, sound, and other technical and storytelling devices; internet musicals can do the same, and can also tap into content that would not necessarily be welcome or workable on a live stage. This collection of chapters visits musicals in new media, and explores how they draw upon stage tradition while making the most of newer technologies. The section examines how

Beyond Broadway

audiences—bloggers, fans, hate-watchers, the public at large—impact the creation and reception of these new screen musicals. Jessica Hillman-McCord describes the especially powerful social media presence of ­Lin-­Manuel Miranda, creator and star of Hamilton. He’s not only a composer, lyricist, and actor but also a savvy social media expert who posts multiple times a day and has an enormous following. Hillman-­ McCord argues that his success on Twitter results in a kind of hero-worship, making him a “totem” to millions of followers who have come to rely on him for advice, support, and, in some cases, the will to go on living. Kelly Kessler looks at social media interaction from a different angle, focusing on fan interactions with web musicals and also on the “hate-watching” that often accompanies live TV musicals. Kessler explains how the live TV musical became entwined with real-time posts full of snarky humor, creating a new—and not especially supportive, but certainly passionate—way for fans to interact with musicals. In her exploration of stage-to-screen adaptations, Holley Replogle-Wong uncovers how filmmakers walk a thin line between pleasing longtime knowledgeable fans of a musical and drawing wider film audiences. Fandom, she notes, is not passive; fans are active receivers, and sometimes even shapers, of a film’s content and changes. James Deaville offers us a glimpse into a subculture of fandom: the repeat attender. These ‘superfans’ attend live musicals in person, sometimes hundreds of times. What motivates a person to experience a musical live—not on YouTube or video, not via the cast album—but necessarily in person, in the theater, so often? Deaville offers numerous firsthand experiences of repeat attenders to uncover the thrill, the communal experience, the escape, and the healing boost many of these fans describe. Renée Camus argues that Joss Whedon used his two most high-profile screen musical outings to bridge the divide between musical theater fans and geeks, paying respect to both groups by writing earnest, full-fledged musicals. “Once More With Feeling,” the much-loved musical episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog follow both the rules of musicals and the rules of science fiction/fantasy storytelling, thus satisfying both groups of fans and demonstrating common ground. Aya Hayashi offers several examples of musicals that similarly tap into niche subcultures—video gaming, for example—in her exploration of two teams of musical creators who post original shows on YouTube. She demonstrates how these young creators—who consider themselves fans as much as composers, lyricists, or performers—have made names for themselves by catering to their viewers’ interests. Hayashi speculates that mainstream musical theater, even live Broadway shows, might learn from the success of YouTube creators. Robynn Stilwell turns to the more traditional television series in her explorations of the shows Smash and Nashville. She illuminates a storytelling device—the dual-focus narrative—that works especially effectively on these serial shows, noting that while this strategy had often been used to tell parallel stories from a male and female point of view, these two shows utilize it to tell mainly women’s stories. The music, combined with the innovative use of this narrative device, gives us two musical series with female characters that are thus complicated both in terms of character and in terms of music. While mass media and technology continue to develop and change, the musical will surely never be fully centralized on live stages in a handful of theaters in New York ever again. The following chapters guide us into new media, and new ways of receiving and participating in the musical theater experience today.

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32 WORSHIPPING LIN-MANUEL MIRANDA Fans and Totems in the Digital Age Jessica Hillman-McCord Are you a Lin-Manuel Miranda fan? Go online, and you can find out what he’s doing, practically every hour of every day, in real time. When he was starring in Hamilton: An American Musical, the Broadway phenomenon he wrote, you knew who his friends were in the cast and what celebrities came backstage after the show every night. Since his exit from the production, you can continue to find out personal details about his hopes, fears, triumphs, and passions. You know what he, his sons, his wife, and sometimes his parents, sister, and nephews are up to today. Most importantly, you can tweet him, and if you are particularly witty, heartfelt, interesting, or on-point, he might respond—not privately, but in front of an audience of over a million fans. You have arrived. Lin-Manuel Miranda’s personal, inclusive, extremely active social media presence creates feelings of intimacy, making millions of followers feel as if they personally know him, and as if they are insiders and not merely fans. Partly due to this accessibility, his fans respond to Miranda as a personal guru, even a life-saving power. Utilizing sociologist Emile Durkheim’s model of “effervescence,” this chapter will examine Miranda’s power as a “totem” in the digital world. Durkheim details how a totem (a spiritual object or person) helps create and focus feelings of effervescence (increased positive feelings of strength or confidence) in his followers. This model may help us explain the emotionality and quasi-spiritual connection of fans to their object of fandom. How has the relationship of fans to their totem changed in the digital world? What are the commercial implications of a totemic following? This chapter will address these questions, using Lin-Manuel Miranda as a potent, current test case.

Miranda Fandom and Social Media A current wave of scholarly reclamation seeks to understand the implications of celebrity “worship.” In older celebrity theory, scholars described perceived intimacy with celebrities within media culture as “parasocial interaction,” a term that often held associations with stalking and mental instability. Most often discussed in film theory, this term detailed fans’ false sense that they were somehow interacting with the celebrity, with elements like gossip columns, studio press releases, filmic close-ups, and confessional asides all creating an illusion of accessibility. In reality, the fan only had such distant means as fan letters to satisfy their desire for intimacy with the celebrity. Social media and the digital world have radically shifted this relationship. Now, on microblogging sites, and especially Twitter, fans are allowed reciprocal interactions with celebrities. This has de-pathologized fandom, and placed interactions with celebrities in the same format through 325

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which users communicate with people from their daily lives. Social media has enabled a two-way relationship with celebrities that has created a new world, with new rules. Miranda makes use of this world very effectively. In order to understand his totemic power, we must first detail the way he constructs his online persona, and how fans understand his social media presence. Miranda demonstrates his devotion to fans with especially active engagement online, most specifically on Twitter. He is without a doubt the most recognizable and most followed Broadway celebrity online, with 2.84 million Twitter followers as of this writing. He has tweeted over 60.2 thousand times (and counting) since joining the site in 2009. He says he uses Twitter as a “release valve,”1 and argues that sharing on social media allows fans to be part of his artistic process: “the people who follow me have been in on the process, I’ve been writing about what I struggle with.”2 In a non-scientific estimate, Miranda tweets five to fifteen times a day— sometimes more, sometimes less. His unique online presence is equal parts cheerleader, loving guru, friend, teacher, lecturing adult, inspirational speaker, and goofy buddy. While he embraces the silly, the “geeky,” and the quotidian aspects of his online persona, his inspirational posts most strongly engender the kind of devoted following and adoration we will further explore here. He shares daily morning and evening tweets addressed to his fandom that are generally affirmational or inspirational in nature. Typical examples read, “Good morning stunner. What did we do to deserve you? Can we do it again,”3 or, “Good night now, and rest, Today was a test, You passed it, you’re past it, Now breathe till unstressed, #IThinkYoureTheBest #HashtagBlessed,” which has received 11,312 likes thus far.4 A book collection of these tweets, entitled Gmorning, Gnight!: Little Pep Talks for Me & You, was published by Random House in October 2018, and became a New York Times Bestseller. When it opened in 2015, first Off-Broadway at the Public Theater and then on Broadway at the Richard Rodgers, Hamilton created a social media storm not before seen, at least in the American commercial theater realm. Public awareness of the musical began with Miranda’s first performance of the opening song at the White House in 2009, the YouTube video of which has been viewed over six million times as of this writing. Countless videos, shared via social media, have followed; these include recordings of almost every #Ham4Ham show, a phenomenon started by Miranda as impromptu live performances outside the theater for fans entering the $10 ­lottery for front-row tickets. #Ham4Ham subsequently became a digital phenomenon, with both widely distributed videos of the live shows and digital-only performances. There are now almost 100 #Ham4Ham videos in circulation online. These videos are often encountered through Twitter as a platform. As Christopher Bonanos stated in Vulture, “The advent of Twitter turns out to have created the perfect conduit between Miranda’s happy place and that of a million drama-club kids. The crowd that loved Glee but can’t get to New York can watch the videos from 46th Street almost in real time.”5 Miranda’s social media presence holds impressive marketing power. Fans and celebrities engage with or mention him extensively. In 2015 and 2016 combined, there were 2.3 million mentions of “@Lin_Manuel” or “Lin-Manuel Miranda” on Twitter.6 The resultant buzz and ticket demand for Hamilton, even before it opened Off-Broadway in January 2015, crashed the Public Theater’s phone system. Miranda’s power on Twitter proved to have active, real-world results beyond marketing, such as when he used several tweets to share the news of a flood at the Drama Book Store, and encouraged fans to buy books there. According to the store, sales tripled after his tweets7 ­(After the shop continued to face new challenges, Miranda and three other members of the Hamilton team purchased it themselves in January of 20198). Miranda’s strong social media presence also contributed to the decision to keep Alexander Hamilton on the face of the ten-dollar bill, despite earlier promises by the United States Department of the Treasury to replace him with a prominent woman.9 Miranda has also used his online power (in concert with in-person activism) to bring attention to Puerto Rico’s debt crisis and Hurricane Maria relief, to raise funds for the families of 326

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victims of the June 2016 mass shooting at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, and to lend his voice to the #KeepFamiliesTogether and #NeverAgain movements. Miranda’s social media presence did not begin with Hamilton, nor does he limit his presence to Twitter (though he is most active there). He has used Twitter and other sites, especially for video content, extensively throughout his career. He posted at least 16 videos on YouTube for his first Broadway show, In the Heights (2008). He also has a history of appearing in Broadway-related viral video series.10 Even part of his wedding reception went viral after he performed “To Life” from Fiddler on the Roof with his wedding party. That video has been viewed over 6.4 million times as of this writing. He was also featured in a viral “carpool karaoke” video with James Corden that was replayed on the 2016 Tony Awards broadcast. Clearly, Miranda has created an extensive, powerful online presence, engaged through multiple platforms. How can we understand the impact his resultant accessibility and intimacy have on fans?

Totems and Effervescence In an attempt to explain fans’ emotional connection to celebrities, theorists in the late 1990s and early 2000s likened celebrity worship to more traditional religious worship.11 Later scholars, however, took issue with what they saw as a too-simplistic comparison. As fan studies scholar Mark Duffett argues, likening fandom simply or superficially to religion can be reductive and dismissive of fans’ critical abilities, more or less labeling them as dupes to false gods. He notes further that fans can be critical of and disappointed in their objects of fandom in a manner religious worship discourages. A more nuanced comparison with religion or spirituality, however, can serve as a useful tool to examine fandom, and Duffett’s use of one specific religious metaphor—sociologist Emile Durkheim’s work on effervescence and totems—proves particularly apt. Although Duffett researches popular music, including performers like Elvis Presley, his method of analysis can be easily extended into the musical theater field.12 Durkheim studied Australian clans in a 1912 work called The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. Duffett explains that for “Durkheim, religious clans are focused on central objects or figures called totems that act as a foci of community attention and separate the secular from the sacred.” Thus, Durkheim’s “work on totemic religion offers us a crucial opportunity to understand fandom as an emotional encounter with socially valued people.”13 Totems may be people, in addition to objects. Regardless of the form they take, totems help create community by uniting a group in shared adoration and offering a place for the community’s full emotional range to center. In brief, totems highlight perceptions of excellence and separate the everyday from the special, the “normal” from the exceptional. Significantly, Durkheim’s concept of “effervescence” often occurs during live performance, when “the emotionally-heightened crowd member experiences a life-changing jolt of electricity as they subconsciously recognize a personal connection to the totem. The energy boosts his or her levels of individual strength and confidence.”14 Where does this so-called electricity emerge, and how does it function? Duffett states, “social electricity only exists in so far that individuals feel it … Nothing literally leaps between people, yet those involved feel an intense and undeniable human chemistry.”15 For Durkheim, this electricity has a societal function: it helps create and shape fans’ personal identities by underlining their allegiance both to the totem and fellow worshippers. Various scholars have utilized a Durkheimian analysis to investigate popular music, examining figures like Eric Clapton or Prince as spiritual artifacts.16 By viewing celebrities as totems and their devotees as clans, we may discover useful ways of examining fans’ motivations for attachment to their objects of fandom. Without directly calling fandoms “religions,” a Durkheimian approach still allows us to point out the deep emotional reactions that can sometimes serve as substitutes for more formal spirituality. 327

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Duffett points out that fans’ intimate knowledge “of the private life or social position of iconic ­ resley individuals is often crucial to the totemic pull of their stardom.”17 He notes the efficacy of P as a case study, where information about his private life—like his love for fried peanut butter and banana sandwiches—contributed fan feelings of connection, and therefore semi-worship. Duffett does not fully explore the digital world; however, in the age of social media, a fan may acquire what scholars call “intensive knowledge” by discovering exponentially more detail about the totem’s private life. Digitally connecting to totems—being able to address them directly and even possibly receiving a response—allows the totemic pull to be increasingly strong. The more intimate fans can be in the social media age, the more the connection to, and therefore the power of, the totem increases. The power of the totem extends beyond the live experience. Seeing a totem live may contribute to feelings of connection and personal growth, but the live experience offers only the pinnacle of the experience of connection, which exists as well in the modern world through various mediatized forms. Duffett’s “circuit of energy” between totem and clan and between celebrity and fans would seem confined to the live experience, but online audiences can create digital occasions that have at least some of the power of the live. The digital community allows this “circuit of energy” to flow, albeit in modified ways.

Miranda as Totem Many fans declare a quasi-spiritual connection to Lin-Manuel Miranda, and totemism offers a less dismissive or reductive explanation than the previously mentioned “parasocial interaction,” for these feelings. According to Durkheim, a totem increases people’s strength and confidence, and Hamilton fans claim this experience frequently. Miranda’s persona and resultant totemic power are, ultimately, more wrapped up in his authorial status than in his role as a performer. Many of his fans seem to love him more because he wrote Hamilton and In the Heights than because he created starring roles in them. To his fans, then, Miranda is more than just a performer: he is an auteur, who has successfully and uniquely married hip hop to the musical theater. This double authenticity bears a resultant extra power.18 The kind of extensive adulation Miranda receives online frequently attains the fervor of something beyond daily life experiences.19 One article by a fan on hypable.com is typical of many fan reactions in its emotional intensity: With humor, with rhyme, with harmony, and with heart, you present the essence of the Real… and the world will never be the same. Thank you. Each of these [Tweeted] greetings and farewells are beautiful, inspirational, and make us want to think differently about the world … As I see in your mentions, tens of thousands of people enjoy your unrelenting messages of hope, love, and strength. Most importantly, you encourage us, you value us and you love us … You seem to see the potential in every single person you engage with, you do not underestimate what any human being has to offer, and it isn’t just lip service – you put it into practice constantly.20 Here, as elsewhere on social media, we see the repeated assertion of Miranda’s capacity to change individuals and, through them, the world. We consistently see words like “inspiration,” “hope,” and “beauty.” In addition to the positive (if relatively extreme) kinds of comments Miranda ­provokes—like “God Bless you @Lin_Manuel, you are a gift to humanity”21—we also find protestations of connection and gratitude on a deeper level, like “you make my day every single day all over again. Whether it’s something you posted or said; or just listening to Hamilton to get me through my day. I thank you so much for everything. you’re an amazing person Lin.”22 In response to one of his inspirational morning tweets—“Good morning. You are perfectly cast in your life. 328

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And with so little rehearsal too! It’s a joy to watch. Thank you”23 —one Facebook commenter wrote, “Thank you for these kinds of posts, Lin-Manuel Miranda. Truly, these keep me going on the worst days. Knee-deep in finals and early in my medical gender transition,24 sometimes these posts literally save me. Thank you thank you.”25 Fans often employ spiritual terms in their own comments, for example: “every time you post one of these I just feel so blessed to exist at the same time as you do. I always get really depressed in the morning and the evening but seeing these messages, from you no less, makes everything much better.”26 Many fans frequently credit Miranda with helping them through personal difficulties, and sometimes even with saving their lives. Some fans feel such emotions so strongly that they want their connection to Miranda literally inscribed on their skin. He has mentioned that several fans have asked for samples of his handwriting to use his lyrics for personal tattoos, or “hamiltats.”27 If Miranda functions as a totem, his fans’ experience can be likened to Durkheim’s effervescence. The experience of interacting with a totem gives rise to feelings of increased strength and confidence, but this “social electricity” can also be expressed through other extremes. As Paul Booth points out, “fans are emotional–one might even call it the defining aspect of the fannish experience.”28 Leslie Odom Jr., in an interview with The Today Show, noted that when he was playing Aaron Burr in Hamilton, the lottery winners who sat in the front row would frequently cry through the show.29 Duffett explains that that this kind of emotional engagement helps explain why fans try to boost the star rating of their fan object. In another example, a Sports Illustrated blog entry by Joe Posnanski, retweeted by Miranda, concerned Posnanski’s daughter Elizabeth’s love of Hamilton, and their bonding experience when they attended the show together. After Miranda retweeted the article and thanked Elizabeth, Posnanski wrote a postscript about his daughter’s experience that exemplifies the kind of intense emotional response contact with Miranda often engenders: When I handed her the iPad, she looked blankly at it, and you could see her mind working around it. Hey, this is a tweet from Lin-Manuel Miranda. Hey, he mentions someone named Elizabeth. Hey, wait, that Elizabeth is actually me. And then she just started bawling. It was the most overwhelmed with emotion I think I’ve ever seen her … She just cried and cried, and she didn’t try to stop, and we didn’t try to stop her.30 Fans express such extreme emotional connections to Miranda across digital platforms. While they often articulate increased strength or confidence, sometimes an emotional explosion such as Elizabeth’s represents a path toward that strength. There may, of course, be a dark side to this level of engagement, as one fan’s experience makes clear. Shortly after the book Hamilton: The Revolution—or the “Hamiltome,” as Miranda requested it be tagged on social media—was published, Miranda tweeted, “Alright who wept at the end of the @Anthony Ramos1 chapter?”31 A fan responded, “i havent READ IT YET tag ur f*cking spoilers.”32 A short while later Miranda responded somewhat teasingly, with an overtone of disapproval. What followed appeared to be a mini real-time Twitter breakdown from the fan, who apparently had intended a joking tone. In several tweets throughout an afternoon he expressed concerns about being misconstrued, and responded to increasingly vocal criticism from other Miranda fans: i really hope people dont start yelling at me for not having it all read yet oh my GOD […] lin saw my @ and im not sure how to feel about this. is this the part where he blocks me??? 329

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[…] im gonna just try to breathe. if lin was angry with me he would have blocked me or something. […] i feel so fucking sick i didnt mean to upzset lin i didnt mean to clme off as rude and now he probably hate sme […] lin means so much to me and I would never try to ups@et him. (sic)33 Similar incidents occur frequently in the modern and often volatile world of social media and online shaming. Fans often jump to defend Miranda from any perceived slights, unleashing anger on anyone who might offend him. If a totem holds quasi-spiritual power and offers ­effervescence—increasing strength and confidence—then the totem’s disapproval, and his or her followers’ resultant anger, can have the opposite effect. Examining the connection fans feel with Miranda from the totemic point of view helps explain the explosive emotionality displayed in response to Hamilton, and offers additional reasons why his accessibility on social media holds such power. If Miranda offers quasi-spiritual totemic power to his fans, it makes sense that he also offers solace to them in times of need. As a Broadway World article about Miranda on Twitter states, “when a tragedy strikes in some part of the world, or there’s a reason to rejoice, the tweets we receive from our favorite artists become a part of the experience, offering comfort or good cheer.”34 Some of Miranda’s most favored tweets are in response to celebrities’ passing. For instance, in response to actor Alan Rickman’s death he wrote: Good morning. Listen. It’s going to be that kind of week. Surround yourself with the work they left behind. The work’s not going anywhere.35 This tweet was “liked” over eleven thousand times. When the mass shooting in Orlando occurred the night before the Tony Awards, Miranda took the opportunity to respond in his acceptance speech for Best Score. He wrote a sonnet about his love for his wife and how love can prevail over hate and tragedy, with the key line, “love is love is love is love is love, is love, is love, is love, is love, cannot be swept aside, now fill the world with music, love and pride.”36 Although he gave the speech live, the online response was significant, and comments on various tweets and F ­ acebook posts regarding the sonnet are instructive. For instance, a commenter who lives in Orlando responded to Miranda’s first post-Tonys tweet: I just have to say, after listening to you and your sonnet last night: I want to count you as a friend. I want this, not because of your fame, not because of your talent, but because of your heart … Here it is YOUR moment to shine, YOUR moment to take the lights and be praised, and oh, was that praise deserved … You sacrificed your time to help us heal. For that, we who had the fortune to hear your words are grateful.37 Here, we see echoed the wish for Miranda’s friendship, but we also see words throughout that share roots in spirituality and worship: sacrifice, healing, spirit, praise. Miranda took a moment to distill America’s emotional response to the tragedy; through his followers, his words swiftly took the form of a spiritual, inspirational text. Miranda and Hamilton took on one set of meanings when the musical opened during the Obama era. Yet since the 2016 presidential election, Miranda’s online presence has become markedly more political. Where he was once criticized as being too centrist,38 he has become more outspoken regarding his left-leaning political allegiances. And appropriate to his role as a totem, he has attempted to offer active solace and comfort to liberal Americans reeling from events that have been perceived as fundamentally ground-shifting. On Inauguration Day, he posted previously 330

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unreleased Hamilton demos to fans as a gift to distract them from news that many found upsetting. Fans responded gratefully: A gift to our hearts from a national treasure. @Lin_Manuel always makes life better. You are so good. thank you for all the goodness today. We needed it. ahh thank you God sent angel love you toooo39 In late spring of 2017 Miranda began making musical “mix tapes” (a collection of previously released songs curated around a theme) and releasing them on Twitter. The mix tapes touched on various topics: some were lighthearted, but others were more politically engaged. One was titled “Rise Up” in a nod to a Hamilton lyric, and included pointedly political song choices. Perhaps most important, on election night, Inauguration Day, and during other political moments, fans looked to their totem and the clan following him for direction and comfort in a profoundly destabilizing time: Today, I started singing ‘Raise a glass to freedom/Something they can never take away’ to myself without really realizing what I was singing, and promptly burst into tears when I did. Thank you, Lin, for all that you do for us, and the music you make that gets inside our souls and becomes part of us. I’m reading all of the comments on many of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s posts … What makes our love of him, and his work, into a safe place amid the tumult? Just wondering. I will say this: There is only one man who can give us the command… Rise up!40 Hamilton-inspired protest signs were a feature of the Women’s March on Washington and the March for Science, and were subsequently shared on social media. By quoting Miranda’s words and then sharing pictures of their signs with his followers, Miranda’s fans are crediting him both with inspiring political resistance, and with providing comfort and safety in a time of national need. These are both functions a totem, through a channeling of social electricity, may serve for his clan. Miranda’s response to fans about their fears, both political and more general, seems to imply that he is part of their community—just “one of them,” despite his fame and power. When one fan asked, “how do u stay so positive in life?” Miranda answered, “I’m just as scared as you, all the time. We get each other through with this tweeting thing we’re doing.”41 As with many of the fans quoted herein, Miranda credits Twitter as a site for comfort, community, and spiritual sustenance.42

Commercial Implications Following the intense response to his “love is love” Tony speech, Miranda’s family started a merchandizing site, selling sonnet-emblazoned T-shirts with proceeds going to help the Orlando victims’ families. The shirts immediately sold out. Newer T-shirts on the site sport some of ­M iranda’s inspirational tweets, or quotes from In the Heights, and are designed by fans. This ­M iranda-inspired merchandise is for profit—although a portion of all sales goes to charity— which raises questions about ways the totem as spiritual leader can clash with the celebrity who benefits from their fan following. Does Miranda maintain a totemic online persona for financial gain? Is he merely a self-­described Twitter addict who has found the perfect zeitgeist pop-culture moment? Or is he altruistically using social media to actively help his following? Most of his fans ascribe him the last motivation. An article in Fast Company argues, Miranda has cultivated—and maintained—a level of devotion among his followers that branding agencies only dream of. He insists that there is no gimmick to it, just a raw desire 331

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to connect to other rap, theater, and history nerds. ‘I hate the word branding,’ he says. ‘I don’t feel like an entrepreneur. I feel like a writer who is forced to wear an entrepreneurial hat occasionally.’43 Scholars,44 however, have rightly pointed out the traps and perils of consumption and consumerism as a model of media and fan relationships. Regardless of whether celebrities such as Miranda find personal enjoyment from their online presence, they must still carefully cultivate and manage their persona, just as any “normal” person constructs his or her identity online. In a celebrity’s case, financial gain may be at stake. As Marwick states, “The performance of celebrities interacting with no thought of fans, press, or managers on Twitter is actually managed interaction that creates the perception of intimacy.”45 Certainly, the financial ramifications of cultivating a rabid, spiritually inspired totemic “clan” or fan base are immediately obvious. In one sense, it doesn’t matter why Miranda spends time with fans online, since the end result remains the same. For fans, however, his totemic pull and quasi-spiritual power are strongly rooted to their shared belief that he genuinely enjoys interacting with them; that he enjoys them. Miranda’s actions do seem to strongly imply that he does, in fact, like to interact with fans. His #Ham4Ham shows, for example, seem to have emerged from a desire to entertain and engage with his fan base—to give them a gift. As Vulture magazine puts it, “This is, as far as anyone can remember, unique. Nobody else has tried to offer the equivalent of a DVD extra, live, on a ­Manhattan side street, twice a week.”46 Hamilton biographer Ron Chernow, who served as a historical consultant on the production his bestselling book inspired, believes Miranda’s online presence is neither inauthentic nor constructed for profit. He has pointed out that Hamilton’s record-breaking advance and sold-out status suggest that money cannot be at issue. “Lin is not someone who is shy about publicity or marketing or promotion,” Chernow has noted, “but I have to feel given the amount of time he does this … that there’s a deeper motivation for doing it … it’s not like any of us at this point feel at this point that we need to drum up business for the show.”47 Fans certainly find his presence authentic, and perhaps that remains the most relevant point. More important than Miranda’s personal motivations are his fans’ understanding or expectations of them. Engaged leaders are more effective totems. Social electricity has the power of authenticity when coming from a totem who at the very least seems to genuinely care, rather than someone who appears as if he or she is leading for profit. Fans do not want to feel like, or be perceived as, dupes to false Gods. Fans choose to believe in Miranda’s beneficent reasons for engaging with them, thereby enhancing his totemic pull.

Conclusions Miranda undoubtedly has the largest reach of any Broadway Twitter personality, and his totemic status seems to diverge from the comparatively straightforward fan relationships displayed by other Broadway celebrities. His mastery of social media nonetheless serves as a model to be emulated by many others. Plenty of musical theater stars have developed a strong Twitter presence; among them are Audra McDonald, Laura Osnes, Laura Benanti, Harvey Fierstein, and Neil Patrick H ­ arris. In fact, digital engagement from celebrities is a new expectation of the social media age—so much so that the Broadway stars who purposely refuse to tweet, like Jonathan Groff and Jessie Mueller, are outliers; exceptions who prove the rule. Even lesser-known Broadway performers have become more well-known as a result of their social media mastery; Andrew Chappelle, for example, was a swing in Hamilton who now has 56,000 followers on Twitter. Social media adeptness is not confined to performers; much of the Hamilton creative team, including scenic designer David Korins and music director Alex Lacamoire, have extensive Twitter followings. All Broadway productions 332

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now work to exploit the digital world and social media specifically. As I write, the digital world is the Wild West of Broadway marketing; Miranda has led the way for those eager to emulate his success. He has struck the perfect tonal balance online, and his fans have rewarded him with requisite spiritual worship. As technology continues to change the landscape of the commercial stage musical, we can only speculate on the future. We know that relationships between musical theater stars and their fans will continue to develop through shifting technological means. That will alter the kinds of work artists make, its reach, and the kinds of celebrities or totems fans appreciate or follow. Certainly the emotional intensity Miranda engenders in his followers increases global awareness of musicals far beyond the genre’s historically circumscribed audience base. While it’s ultimately impossible to determine whether following an artist or celebrity totem is always psychologically “healthy” or useful, putting aside judgment and explaining fans’ psychology through the lens of effervescence can prove a useful tool to interrogate the motivations of fan followings. Miranda’s totemic power can offer us crucial lessons in engendering connection and devotion from fans, who ultimately hold the power to keep theater alive in the digital world.

Notes 1 “Lin-Manuel Miranda in Conversation, Part 3.” Filmed [Sept. 2015]. YouTube video: 7:58. Posted [18 Oct. 2015]. 2 Ibid. 3 Lin-Manuel Miranda. Twitter Post. 20 Feb. 2016, 9:12 AM. . 4 Lin-Manuel Miranda. Twitter Post. 31 May 2017, 1:47 PM. . 5 Christopher Bonanos. “How Hamilton’s Free Preshow Performance Became the Best Thing on Broadway.” Vulture. . 6 Michael Dale. “Hamilton’s Lin-Manuel Miranda is Broadway’s Twitter Genius.” Broadwayworld.com. . 7 Maya Rajamani. “Hamilton Star’s Tweets Bring ‘Record Sales’ to Flood-Damaged Bookstore.” Dnainfo.com. Updated Web. 22 Feb. 2016. . 8 Michael Paulson “Lin-Manuel Miranda and Friends Purchase Drama Book Shop.” The New York Times. . 9 Pressure from fans of the show and Miranda, through numerous tweets and meetings with the Secretary of the Treasury, contributed to the decision to replace Andrew Jackson on the twenty-dollar bill instead, although that change has been delayed by the Trump administration. 10 “The [title of show] show,” “Cubby Bernstein” and “Miranda Sings” among them. 11 Doss, 1999, Hills, 2002. 12 Mark Duffett. “Applying Durkheim to Elvis.” Transatlantica [En ligne], 2 | 2012, mis en ligne 2 May 2013, consulté 7 June 2016. , 22. 13 Ibid., 171. 14 Duffett, “Applying Durkheim to Elvis,” 22–23. 15 Ibid. 16 Martin (1964), Riley (2013). 17 Ibid., 172. 18 Also see my article, “Lin-Manuel Miranda: Digital Age Diva” in the special issue of Studies in Musical Theatre, Volume 12, Number 1, March 2018, pp. 109–122, devoted to the Diva. For more on Hamilton’s fan culture see my chapter in iBroadway: Musical Theatre in the Digital Age. Ed. Hillman-McCord. London: Palgrave Press, 2018. 19 The following fan comments are representative examples taken in reaction to Miranda’s tweets, either on Twitter itself or where tweets link to Facebook. Some are also on Hamilton-inspired blogs on Tumblr or Instagram. These comments come only from fans motivated enough to comment, rather than the

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20 21 22 23 24

25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 4 4 45 46 47

larger silent majority, and thus are a limited sample. They do, however, offer the chance to explore the fans’ point of view. Natalie Fisher. “‘Dear Mr. Hamilton…’ Hypable Says Happy Trails to Lin-Manuel Miranda.” Hypable. com. 9 July 2016. . Isolda Peguero. Twitter Post. 12 June 2016, 5:54 PM. . Hanna Ryon. Comment on Lin-Manuel Miranda Status. , 2.20.16 10:30 AM. Lin-Manuel Miranda. Twitter Post. 29 Apr. 2016, 9:01 PM. . That several of these comments have referenced coming out or transitioning points to Miranda’s appeal to LGBTQ+ communities. For more work interrogating Miranda as a male diva, his appeal as non-­ gender-conforming and his troubling of heterosexual cis male associations, see my article in Studies in Musical Theatre: “Lin-Manuel Miranda as Digital Diva,” cited in note 18. Comment on Lin-Manuel Miranda Facebook status. 29 Apr. 2016. . Gabriel Noelle Meija. Comment on Lin-Manuel Miranda Facebook status. 29 Apr. 2016. . “BroadwayCon 2016 – History Is Happening in Manhattan: The Hamilton Panel.” Filmed [22 Jan. 2015]. YouTube video, 42:22. Posted [23 Jan. 2015]. . Paul Booth. Playing Fans: Negotiating Fandom and Media in the Digital Age. Iowa City: The U of Iowa P, 2015. 19. “Go Backstage with Breakout ‘Hamilton’ Star Leslie Odom Jr – TODAY.com.” Web. 21 Apr. 2016. . Joe Posnanski. “Hamilton: What’s Better than Seeing the Hottest Show on Broadway? Creating a Forever Memory.” NBCsports.com. 29 May 2016. . Lin-Manuel Miranda. Twitter Post. 18 Apr. 2016, 6:29AM. . This tweet was removed by its author after its initial posting, likely due to the angry response it received. These tweets were also removed a day after they were released and therefore cannot be cited here. Dale, “Twitter Genius,” Broadwayworld.com. Lin-Manuel Miranda. Twitter Post. 14 Jan. 2016, 8:22AM. . “Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Sonnet / Speech from the 2016 Tonys.” Filmed [12 June 2016]. YouTube video: 00:54. Posted [12 June 2016]. . Facebook comment. 13 June at 8:22 PM . See for example Donatella Galella. “Racializing the American Revolution.” Advocate. 16 Nov. 2015. . “Emily Davis,” “Maria Chavez,” “Serena.” Comments on Lin-Manuel Miranda. Twitter Post. 20 Jan. 2016, 2:29 PM. . “Bailey Guess,” “Vicki Lewis.” Comments on Lin-Manuel Miranda. Facebook Post. 9 Nov. 2016. . Lin-Manuel Miranda. Twitter Post. 1 June 2017, 4:54AM. . Miranda’s modesty and humility here, in being just like his followers, are part of the accessibility and approachability he masterfully creates in his social media profile. For more unpacking of what is required of celebrities or “divas” online, see my article, “Lin-Manuel Miranda: Digital Age Diva” as cited in note 18. Rachel Syme. “How Hamilton Creator Lin Manuel Miranda Is Building a Brand for the Ages.” Fast Company. 16 May 2016. . See Theodor Adorno, plus recent fan scholars such as Paul Booth and Matt Hills. Alice Marwick and Danah Boyd. 2011. To See and Be Seen: Celebrity Practice on Twitter. Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies, 17(2), 139–158. Bonanos, “Hamilton’s Free Preshow Performance,” Vulture. Ibid.

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33 “TRASH TALK AND VIRTUAL PROTESTS” The Musical Genre’s Personal and Political Interactivity in the Age of Social Media Kelly Kessler For nearly a century, the musical has traversed between the footlights and the big screen, allowing lovers of both theater and film to enjoy the toe-tapping goodness of one of America’s foundational genres. In fact, the musical has often been among the earliest content designed for new media forms. It took Hollywood less than five years to move from its introduction of sound in commercial motion pictures to its release of The Broadway Melody (1929), heralded as the first “All-Talking, All-Singing, All-Dancing” feature film. Within its first decade, American television, too, embraced the musical, first with the DuMont Network’s original production The Boys from Boise (1944) and continuing with iconic small-screen productions like Mary Martin’s Peter Pan (1955, 1956, 1960), through to twenty-first-century one-off musical episodes of series like Grey’s Anatomy and Scrubs and, later, a string of “live” musical television events (The Sound of Music Live!, Grease Live!, etc.). The musical has moved and adapted to various media along with shifts in technology and distribution, allowing for different visual, aural, performative, and experiential versions of the genre. Most recently, the musical community has taken to the Internet and social media for its newest sites of production (and reception). Joss Whedon’s 2008 writer’s strike-inspired Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog targeted superfans via its free, anticipation-creating, three-part, staggered online release, and Whedon’s casting of Buffy and Firefly veterans Felicia Day and Nathan Fillion. In the years following, theater artists and fans continued to use the Internet with an increasingly targeted call to personalization. Theater and film artists are capitalizing on the emotional affect commonly associated with music and the musical and using the Internet as a site of political critique, while viewers are embracing the art of hate-watching and live-tweeting live televised musical productions. The musical has invaded and embraced Web 2.0, and done so while integrating the communal and political leanings scholars identify as characteristic of this sharable, spreadable, interactive media landscape. This chapter explores the personalization and politicization of the musical in the era of Web 2.0 through an exploration of the online distribution of and response to politicized Internet musicals and the act of musical-related hate-watching and live-tweeting. Although the genre has historically been somewhat interactive, contemporary technologies have opened spaces for increased political and personal interaction with the musical, and practitioners and fans have embraced these new possibilities. After exploring shifting mores of the genre and the musical’s

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needed inclusion in film theorist Linda Williams’s category of “body genres,” this chapter highlights the significance of the Internet as a site for viral politicized and personal production. Through explorations of both Internet musical productions like Prop 8: The Musical (2008) and Russian Broadway Shut Down (2014) and the rise of interactive televised musical “hate-watching,” specifically in conjunction with network TV’s string of live musicals, it explores the political and increasingly interactive potential of the musical in the era of Web 2.0. Further, the chapter postulates how engagement in the simultaneously personal and public space of the Internet potentially complicates political participation and seamlessly blends with the utopic vision once underpinning many American musicals.

“Oh What a Beautiful Morning” 1 or “The Bitch of Living” 2: Shifting Meanings of Onstage/Onscreen Community in the Contemporary Musical For much of the genre’s history, stage and film musicals have been discursively framed as cultural unifiers. From Oklahoma! (1943) to Grease (1972) and Hairspray (2002), decades of tuners united bickering couples, battling factions, and divided communities, creating fictional utopic worlds of communal potential.3 Since the mid-1960s—a time coinciding with significant racial, gendered, and sexual divisions within US culture—a major subset of musicals emerged on stage and screen that rejected the idealism and unity often narratively and connotatively linked to the genre.4 These vehicles often forewent the conciliatory resolution evoked by a concluding wedding or communal dance and instead ended with death (The Rocky Horror Picture Show [1975], Spring Awakening [2006]), continued unresolved conflict (Nine [1982], Rent [1996]), or a visibly superficial happy ending (Pennies from Heaven [1981]).5 Perhaps more effectively representing contemporary viewers’ own social discord, the genre, at least in part, highlighted divisions and allowed audiences to make peace with their own lack of personal contentment. As Broadway and film musicals more frequently abandoned idealistic narratives, they saw an increase in self-referentiality and self-parody. Exemplified by vehicles like Spamalot (2005) and South Park: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut (1999), these shows draw attention to the often over-the-top tropes of the genre. Numbers like Spamalot’s “The Song That Goes Like This” or South Park’s Les Misérables-inspired “La Resistance” poke fun at the highly dramatic, overwrought styles associated with the genre in the blockbuster or megamusical era.6 They also reflect a trend in sanctioned generic snark.7 Fashionable participatory viewing accompanied the rise of millennial musicals that placed a mocking eye on the genre. Although The Rocky Horror Picture Show had been rebranded as an interactive viewing experience since the seventies, twenty-first-century fans—and those looking to make money off them—converted iconic musicals into touring sing-alongs dripping with affection and mockery (perhaps the two key components to snark or hate-watching). In 2000 the sing-along Sound of Music opened at New York City’s Ziegfeld Theater, encouraging fans to sing along, come in costume, and hiss relentlessly at Eleanor Parker’s Baroness.8 Similar sing-along tours of Grease, Hairspray, and The Wizard of Oz followed, encouraging fans to both embrace the sense of unity once commonly linked to the musical and exhibit a more contemporary, mocking sensibility. Even before the commercialization of the Sound of Music Sing-Along, musicals drove audiences to act. Broadway producers took it as the sign of a hit when audiences left the theater humming a tune from the score. Bernard Rosenberg and Ernest Harburg pose that the score—not the lyrics—is the key to spectators’ emotional connection to the show. They argue you “…can’t always remember the words,” but the music is an “extension of our emotions.”9 By the 1950s, the active emotionality evoked by popular musicals was no longer just helping sheet music and cast 336

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recording sales, but encouraging more antiestablishment responses. After the first screening of Sam Katzman’s 1956 rock’n’roll teenpic Rock Around the Clock, reports emerged of teens leaving the film in a frenzy, vandalizing properties and “snaking” (which sounds menacing, whatever it might mean) down the street.10 The teen-targeted incarnation of the genre had driven them to act on their emotions, as would Rocky Horror two decades later. Considering the musical audience’s propensity for humming and “snaking,” it would be beneficial to consider the genre—and the twenty-first-century Internet-related activities thereof—in the context of Linda Williams’s filmic body genres. In “Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess,” she identifies melodrama, horror, and pornography as genres that elicit bodily reactions. No doubt each oozes with narrative excess, and encourages body-related spectacles (tears, blood, and orgasm), but the musical too, with its musically driven stories that transcend the bounds of “traditional” spoken narrative, relies on excessive bodily performance. These vehicles rely on song and dance, a performative excess that commonly crosses the footlights or screen, making spectators tap their toes or sing their new favorite numbers—the kind of off-screen mimicry addressed by Williams. Like spectators of Williams’s body genres, the musical “spectator is caught up in an almost involuntary mimicry of the emotion or sensation of the body on the screen.”11

Musicals on the Net The twenty-first century brings the notion of the musical-as-body genre into a new context. It goes beyond emotional affects evidenced on the viewers’ bodies alone. It surpasses purchasing or sharing the cast recording. It transcends mere mimicry and adds a level of engagement via the click, share, or comment. Now, the emotional excess drives people to share the music and message, not just with those who can hear them singing, but also with those in their social networks and beyond. Even the language used to discuss spreadable or shared media reflects the biological impulse connected to both the body genres and the tapping toe of the musical spectator. In the introduction to Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture, authors Henry Jenkins, Sam Ford, and Joshua Green foreground––and then challenge––the biological derivation of the term commonly used to represent media spread widely through the power of the Internet: viral.12 Similarly, Zizi Papacharissi evokes the pre-emotional toe-tap of the music listener to explain the concept of affect and its ultimate association with “affective tropes of belonging” (such as the hashtag on Twitter) and “political performativity” via sharable media.13 In the contemporary musical environment, the click that spreads musical content has become the new trace of musical and bodily excess in the age of the Internet. Today’s Internet audiences and creators blend the newer political antiestablishment bent of the genre with the snark ushered in by musical audience participation, and do both with the additional bodily performance of the click. Prop 8: The Musical, Russian Broadway Shut Down, and a recorded flash mob protesting the death of Eric Garner illustrate a contemporary trend that blends the musical, the proliferation of social media platforms, and the art and politics of sharing. All three works highlight (a) the Internet-enabled space for low-tech/high-volume sharing of musical content, (b) the political potential or tendency of these online musicals, (c) physical excess as illustrated via the social media-driven spread of content, and (d) the participatory culture and hybridized functionality of video sharing sites like YouTube and Vimeo. As argued by Jean Burgess and Joshua Green in their study of YouTube, “the circulation of media content within participatory culture can serve a range of interests, some cultural (such as promoting a particular genre or performer), some personal (such as strengthening social bonds between friends), and some political (such as critiquing the construction of gender and sexuality within mass media).”14 The social engagement surrounding these viral musicals brings Burgess and Green’s theory into practice as it unites the 337

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musical’s fan community through identity-based political action, often associated with causes historically linked to the theater community (e.g. queer politics). The first of these sharable, politicized musical works appeared just five months after Dr. ­Horrible. Prop 8: The Musical, brainchild of composer/lyricist Marc Shaiman (Hairspray; South Park: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut), illustrates a new bent for these online vehicles that sets it apart from Whedon’s fan-oriented cult vid.15 Unlike Dr. Horrible, Prop 8’s primary function was political. Sure, Shaiman sought to entertain, but a call to political action inspired and structured the creative work. In November 2008, a month prior to the release of Shaiman’s musical, California had passed a constitutional amendment, informally known as Prop 8, banning same-sex marriage and rendering null and void the same-sex marriage legalization that had previously gone into effect in that state. Protests emerged in various forms during the run up to and passage of Prop 8. Prop 8: The Musical provided something uniquely reflective of twenty-first-century musical sensibilities. Produced on a small budget, the short video brought together a community of performers and fans, took advantage of a popular website, and capitalized on the viral capabilities of social media to spread a political message by radiating outward through social networks. Appearing on the comedy site Funny or Die, the sketch enlisted top talent to skewer the hypocrisy behind the anti-gay legislation. Headlined by John C. Reilly, Jack Black (as Jesus), Allison Janney, and Maya Rudolph, the musical takes the shape of a poorly acted community theater production about a fictionalized Obama-era multicultural utopia—or as they deem it, “a brand new bright Obama day.” As evil, shrimp-loving Christians hawking anti-gay legislation disrupt the paradise, Jesus appears to extol the hypocrisy of religious right rhetoric through Vaudevillian vocal stylings and shtick: JESUS: “Like, you can stone your wife or sell your daughter into slavery” CHRISTIAN 1 ( JOHN C. REILLY): “Well, we ignore those verses” JESUS: “Well then, friend, it seems to me, you pick and choose” CHORUS (DANCING): “We pick and choose” JESUS: “Well, please pick love instead of hate. Besides, your nation was built on separation of

church and state…See you later, sinners.” Functioning as the deus ex machina, mainstream TV and film’s favorite gay poster-boy (and Dr. Horrible himself ) Neil Patrick Harris unites the Prop 8 protesters and supporters through his performance of “There’s Money to Be Made,” a number conveying the economic possibilities of same-sex marriage. The short ends with text directing viewers to click or act: “To find out more about Prop 8 and what you can do to support equal rights for gay and lesbian couples go to jointheimpact.com.” After just 24 hours online, Prop 8: The Musical had received over two million views; by 2017 it had been viewed over eight million times and shared, liked, and commented on over 62,000 times on Facebook via the Funny or Die website.16 These numbers would increase exponentially if they included how often the link had been tweeted or retweeted on Twitter; the data would still exclude forwards in emails, posts on sites like Tumblr, and so forth. But even using only the available data, the shifting form and impact of bodily expression encouraged by the millennial online musical become evident. For a community of fans so inherently linked to bodily responses to the text, the video’s overtly political content and the networked culture into which it emerges allow for participation that transcends mere fandom or affective attachment to the music, and instead couples those elements with a projection of one’s political views or identity. Burgess and Green argue that the various roles available to YouTube users—content creator, commenter, sharer, etc.— function in a similar space, all important to the shape taken by the site and each contributing to the culture of YouTube.17 Within this context of the viral online musical the personal acts of the sharer 338

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become tantamount to those of the creator, as the political or cultural work that creates viral texts like Prop 8: The Musical could not occur without the excessive labor—or clicks—of the spectator. In 2014 Broadway banded together twice more, blending the power of the Internet and the musical’s cachet to register political outrage. In June 2013, six months before Russia was to host the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics, President Vladimir Putin signed a law allowing police to arrest tourists and foreign nationals they suspected of being “pro gay” and hold them for up to 14 days. Fanning the flames, Russian Sports Minister Vitaly Mutko stated, “An athlete of nontraditional sexual orientation isn’t banned from coming to Sochi…But if he goes out into the streets and starts to propagandize, then of course he will be held accountable.”18 As the International Olympic Committee scrambled to assure athletes, coaches, and spectators that the laws would not impact them, LGBT groups railed against the legislation and LGBT activists called for the boycott of Russian products.19 In January 2014 Broadway artists took their talent and umbrage to the Internet and released a 12-minute satirical musical critiquing Russia’s anti-LGBT laws. Russian Broadway Shut Down appeared on actor John Walton West’s YouTube channel on ­January 23, 2014, two weeks prior to the February 7 launch of the winter games.20 Like Prop 8, the musical was made on a shoestring budget with the help of a willing Broadway community. Actors performed gratis, and included the ensemble of the On the Town workshop, which performed one of the larger group numbers during a lunch break.21 Nearly all locations were donated or provided at a discount. Participants came from across the Great White Way, with West directing, Book of Mormon cast member Jason Michael Snow composing, Les Misérables veteran Simon Pearl filming and editing, and Cody Williams of Rodgers + Hammerstein’s Cinderella producing. The cast read like a who’s who of Broadway, with over 100 Broadway denizens including performers Harvey Fierstein, Michael ­Cerveris, Joanna Gleason, Laura Benanti, and Jonathan Groff, and designers, composers, and critics like William Ivey Long, Stephen Schwartz, and Michael Musto donating their time and acting abilities. The 12-minute musical provided a humorously biting, stereotype-rife critique of Russian policy through an imagined retelling of the “Great Red Way’s” dictate to “straighten-up,” and its players’ decision—encouraged by Dan Savage— to “put on a show y’all” and tell a gay love story. Like Prop 8, Russian Broadway Shut Down’s Internet distribution allowed for the musical and its message to transcend a typical Broadway audience, or one comprised of fans of individual stars. Its reach expanded exponentially to audiences networked by those who saw West’s initial YouTube upload, the Broadway.com story on the video, or the Variety feature on the star-studded passion project.22 By October 2015, the YouTube video had garnered 34.2 thousand Facebook shares and an additional 13.5 thousand from a related Variety article. In the summer of the same year, the Broadway community took action alongside the thenyoung Black Lives Matter movement as it responded to the death of Staten Island resident Eric Garner. Less than a month after Garner died at the hands of an NYPD officer’s illegal choke hold, more than 100 Broadway directors, actors, choreographers, and technicians from over a dozen shows descended upon the Times Square police station.23 The flash mob provided a spoken-word performance about police brutality entitled “I Can’t Breathe,” the final words uttered by Garner and captured on cell phone video.24 The Grio website and WalkRunFly, a production company co-founded by choreographer Warren Adams and actor Brandon Victor Dixon, produced the documented protest and released it on the popular video sharing site Vimeo. Dressed for the most part in jeans and black shirts, the chorus hummed and thumped their chests while Daniel J. Watts (In the Heights, Memphis) provided primary vocals. Although certainly a different format than the more traditional narrative styles of Prop 8 and Russian Broadway Shut Down, “I Can’t Breathe” similarly reflects the power of the musical in this twenty-first-century interactive media environment. In the case of “I Can’t Breathe,” the act of sharing and publicizing spanned the areas of theater fandom and racial activism. Stories appeared on Playbill.com, Daily Kos, Upworthy, the MSNBC-linked African-American news/opinion/entertainment site The 339

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Grio, and Black Left Unity.25 By October 2015 the YouTube video had been shared on ­Facebook 38.3  ­thousand times, and by May 2017 shared, commented on, or liked nearly an additional 48.6 ­thousand times via an Upworthy article and 54.6 thousand times via an article from The Grio. This new brand of musical, semi-permanent or stable on YouTube or Vimeo, encourages individual impassioned responses as it rejects the kind of mass mentality of more traditional musicals, those designed to be experienced by unified groups reacting from darkened theaters or cinema spaces. Instead, these new, politicized Internet musicals allow both the projection of social dissent through low-budget, easy distribution methods and the opportunity to share or pass on that social critique. As individuals view from their computer screens, tablets, or phones, they can enact a twenty-first-century virtual form of Williams’s generic bodily excess and have the power to share the dissent imbedded in these musicals from person to person. These mini-musicals allow for fan engagement that transcends the historically self-contained acts of purchasing cast recordings, programs, or souvenirs. They provide small, digestible, sharable pieces of revolt, wrapped in a genre that begs for bodily response. Here, that response moves from toe-tapping and humming to a mouse click that looks to spread the excess.

The Sounds of Snark Alongside politically charged online musicals, a second trend begs musical viewers to react personally and bodily, and to double down on the trend of de-idealizing the genre: the social ­media-driven act of hate-watching as it pertains to the new spate of live television musicals. Although this viewing practice has undoubtedly been around for ages, Emily Nussbaum’s “Hate-Watching Smash” brought it into the light of day as she compared her love/hate relationship with that musical drama to Aaron Sorkin’s failed 2006 self-reflective television dramedy, Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip: Like “Smash,” “Studio 60” was a show that people loved to hate-watch, because it was bad in a truly spectacular way—you could learn something from it, about self-righteous TV speechifying and failed satire and the dangers of letting a brilliant showrunner like Sorkin run loose to settle all his grudges in fictional form. I’m not certain whether this applies to “Smash,” from which I’ve learned mostly how not to wear a scarf. But I could be wrong.26 Darren Franich’s 2012 Entertainment Weekly article, “The Rise of Hate-Watching: Which Shows Do You Love to Despise,” argues that the rise of quality television dramas and comedies like Breaking Bad, Arrested Development, The Wire, and The Sopranos led to a string of ambitious shows “that wanted to be great,” but instead failed on a grand scale.27 For both Nussbaum and Franich, the practice of hate-watching relates to something “spectacular” or with “sky-high ambition.” For both, the superlative falls on the pejoratively framed actualization of the content. In the end, its badness was the best. And so followed the live musicals. The sentiment conveyed through Twitter hashtags associated with The Sound of Music Live! and Peter Pan Live! illustrated a high level of emotional involvement mixed with disdain from the viewers. As with the political musicals, the passion of the viewer led to a click, now in the form of a tweet. Clay Shirky ties the emotion, speed, and outside awareness inherent in Twitter to a broader conceptualization of online activism: “As a medium gets faster, it gets more emotional. […] It makes us part of it. Even if it’s just retweeting, you’re aiding the goal that dissidents have always sought: the awareness that the outside world is paying attention is really valuable.”28 To coopt this more politicized discussion of Twitter, I argue that the Twitter-storm that followed the first two live musicals illustrates another incarnation of the aforementioned bodily excess—one linked to a hashtagged community directing attention to and awareness of their united snark. 340

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On December 5, 2013, approximately a year and a half after Nussbaum reveled in her hatred of Smash, NBC’s The Sound of Music Live! solidified the musical as a top spot for hate-watching. One year later NBC’s Peter Pan Live! would make sure everyone doubled down on that fact. Both television events ushered in a flood of snark as viewers flocked to social media to voice their disapproval, derision, and shock at what many saw as a failed generic experiment—the kind of superior badness Franich had previously linked to the act of hate-watching. This tendency toward self-satisfied mocking reflects television scholars Charles McCoy and Roscoe Scarborough’s take on postmodern viewers; they describe them as wanting to “consume the products of postmodern culture, yet also display their superiority.”29 This viewing practice results in what Todd Gitlin terms an “ironic spiral” that “either mocks the game by playing it or plays it by mocking it.”30 In the twenty-first century’s highly interactive television environment, viewers are able to actively, visibly, knowingly mock the game. In the case of Peter Pan and The Sound of Music, television producers created live musical spectaculars in hopes of capturing large audiences for terrestrial—not DVR’d or Hulu’d—television. They surely captured the audiences they were seeking: The Sound of Music scored 18.5 million viewers and a 4.6 Nielsen rating; Peter Pan attracted 9.2 million viewers and a 2.4 rating.31 The two live events also, however, allowed musical (and television) lovers ample opportunity to “mock the game.” The Sound of Music Live! set the metaphorical stage. As had been the case with the aforementioned political musicals, The Sound of Music Live! drove viewers to exhibit their bodily excess through the click. By the next morning, the show’s big stories were its huge ratings and the high level of snarky Twitter traffic that had accompanied the show. Hollywood.com had even published “A Guide to Hate-Watching NBC’s The Sound of Music Live” prior to its airing. Fans—both famous and not—shared their snark with the Twitter-savvy viewing masses, resulting in 450 thousand unique tweets with 68 million views.32 Blending superiority and contemporary pop culture acumen with musical fandom and a mastery of The Sound of Music, the tweets embraced Gitlin’s notion of viewer superiority and their desire to mock the game while playing it, all while radiating outward and grouping through discrete hashtags. Ronan Farrow, for example, tweeted, “The Sound of Music: the feel good family musical about leaving your fiancée to boink the nanny” (304 retweets/433 favorites), with @FreshParsley quipping, “Was Rolf ’s song the ‘Blurred Lines’ of its day? #The SoundofMusicLive #awkward” and @JFly99 wondering “How drunk do you think Julie Andrews is right now? #SoundofMusic.” By the time Peter Pan Live! aired, viewers and media outlets had prepared for a heightened level of snark, with Entertainment Tonight posting both “How to Live Tweet Peter Pan Live Like a Social Media Star” and “Your Handy Drinking Guide for Watching Peter Pan Live.”33 The Observer published “Peter Pan Live: A Hate Watching Guide.”34 The New York Post directed “Who to Follow on Twitter While (Hate)Watching Peter Pan Live.”35 The cast even attempted to spin and recuperate the production prior to its actual airing, with star Allison Williams declaring to The Daily Beast, “Hatewatching is a thing.” She went on to say, “It’s a whole way of watching something, and it’s not an audience that’s natural to a non-cynical performance. Peter Pan, you cannot watch cynically. If you do, you’re going to hate it, no question.”36 In the end, the snark flew freely, with 475 thousand individual tweets being seen 5.3 million times.37 Television critic Nussbaum tweeted, “I like that Williams is so feminine that it makes the lesbian subtext into bold text” and Pitch Perfect’s Anna Kendrick chimed in with, “Watching a grown woman play an adolescent boy is perhaps the most sexually confusing moment of my life. #PeterPanLive.” Notably, Kendrick’s tweet garnered 4.1 thousand retweets and 15k favorites. Other “fans” went straight for performance critique with @joshgad tweeting “#ChristopherWalken is literally ­doing the best #Walken impression I’ve ever seen. #PeterPan” (147 retweets/349 favorites) and @fordm going after NBC with “#PeterPanLive feels like something Liz Lemon would spend a whole episode talking Jack Donaghy out of.” 341

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In the end, both events were panned in the press, with The Atlantic claiming, “Much like the Sharknado phenomenon, NBC’s newest ratings ploy is based on being ridiculous.”38 Nonetheless, the networks likely accomplished what they had set out to achieve: they wrangled a live and perhaps as importantly active audience in the era of multi-platform viewing and time-shifting. Viewers, tweeters, and Twitter followers fostered both personal and communal voices, and dabbled in contemporary forms of cultural participation. As Jenkins, Ford, and Green argue, this era of spreadable and participatory media blurs the roles of producer, marketer, and audience member and requires a “rethinking of social relations, the reimagining of cultural and political participation.”39 Those who frantically tweeted their disdain may have taken the reigns to create the popular meaning of the productions, but they did so while helping increase viewership and marketability, and providing clear feedback and free advertisement to the networks, which planned future live theatrical projects. With eyes affixed on their televisions and computer, smartphone, or tablet screens, the audience members acted on and against two canonical musicals, voicing their love and derision to millions of potential network consumers.

The Millennial Musical for the Masses This twenty-first-century mediated environment has opened up a new kind of participatory musical space for both creators and fans, one with arguably much greater personal and political potential. Creators can fashion political content on the fly and distribute widely on the (relative) cheap. Fans are able to share these new political musical artifacts and their opinions widely, connecting with others via shares, likes, groups, or hashtags. The toe-tap, the tears, the snark, and the click now travel from viewer to social network and beyond. At the risk of presenting readers with a last-minute bait and switch, how much has anything really changed? Might the digital interfaces or human interactions with those interfaces help reinscribe ideological shortcomings of the classic musical in untraditional ways? Scholarship and journalistic writing surrounding online activism—often referred to as ­slacktivism—comes down on both sides of the divide: one that reflects an increased political potential and another that allows for complacency with an affectation of participation.40 The snarky Twitter-verse may rupture any idyllic musical presentation, and the political edge of these shared online musicals may allow for a virtual assault on the status quo, but how might they still reflect the recuperative ideological projects of the classic musical?41 The very act of sharing media and the ease of the interfaces may recreate these same easy outs. The constructed notions of hope or promise commonly associated with classical stage or film musicals reflect a common critique leveled at online activism, the types of activity associated with online musicals and online musical interaction. Although the click, the share, or the tweet surely pass on something arguably more substantively political or personal than the tune, scholars such as Evgeny Morozov identify the fatal flaw of much online activist activity as the “unrealistic assumption that, given enough awareness, all problems are solvable.”42 He argues that although our digital political efforts may make us “feel useful,” they may also “have zero social impact.” Although the user may click and pass on “I Can’t Breathe” or Prop 8, the act may stop there. The same challenge comes to the online user, sharer, or tweeter as it does to the musical fan. What happens after the show, or after the message or political artifact has been shared? How do subsequent actions impact the real world, or do they just rely on the constructed feeling of togetherness, participation, or activism? David Carr addresses his skepticism of the Web as an online organizing tool in “Hashtag Activism, and Its Limits,” but still argues that such acts “are not only better than nothing, they probably make the world, the one beyond the keyboard, a better place.”43 The ultimate effect of all of this online musical activity falls in the hands of the user. Can the theater community translate this action into something bigger than a hashtag or a fleeting feeling of superiority? Only time will tell. 342

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Notes 1 Oklahoma! written by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II (1943). 2 Spring Awakening, written by Steven Sater and Duncan Sheik (2006). 3 Thomas Schatz. Hollywood Genres: Formulas, Filmmaking, and the Studio System. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1981. Rick Altman. The American Film Musical. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana UP, 1987. Richard Dyer. “Entertainment and Utopia.” Hollywood Musicals: The Film Reader. Ed. Steven Cohan. London and New York: Routledge, 2002. 19–30. Jane Feuer. The Hollywood Musical. 2nd ed. Indianapolis and Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1993. 4 Kelly Kessler. Destabilizing the Hollywood Musical: Music, Masculinity, and Mayhem. London: Palgrave, 2010. 5 Schatz, Hollywood Genres, 33. 6 For more on the megamusial see Jessica Sternfeld. The Megamusical. Bloomington and Indianapolis: ­Indiana UP, 2006. 7 This snark certainly predated Twitter, flourishing in online chat rooms or discussion forums (e.g. the gay gossip site datalounge.com and the catty “All That Chat” section of talkinbroadway.com). 8 Kim Wook. “Von Trapped: ‘Sing-a-long Sound of Music’.” Entertainment Weekly. 22 Sept. 2000. . 9 Bernard Rosenberg and Ernest Harburg. The Broadway Musical: Collaboration in Commerce and Art. New York: New York UP, 1992. 116. 10 Thomas Doherty. Teenagers and Teenpics: Juvenilization of American Movies. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 2002. 82. 11 Linda Williams. “Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess.” Film Quarterly 44.4 (Summer 1991): 4. 12 Henry Jenkins, Sam Ford, and Joshua Green. Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture. New York: New York UP, 2013. 18. 13 Zizi Papacharissi. Affective Publics: Sentiment, Technology, and Politics. London and New York: Oxford UP, 2014. 21–22, 117. 14 Jean Burgess and Joshua Green. You Tube: Online Video and Participatory Culture. Cambridge and Malden: Polity Press, 2009. 35 15 Prop 8: The Musical, Written and Directed by Marc Shaiman (2008), . 16 All data regarding numbers of shares were pulled from either the website in question in May of 2017, Facebook Sharing Debugger in May of 2017, or a query run through an IntelligentHQ beta in October of 2015 (that at time of publication was no longer functional). Alex Altman. “Prop 8: The Musical.” Time. 8 Dec. 2008. . 17 Burgess and Green, You Tube, 57. 18 Hannah Levintova and Ian Gordon. “How Russia’s Anti-Gay Law Could Affect the 2014 Olympics, Explained.” Mother Jones. 16 Aug. 2013. . 19 Roxanna Scott. “Gay Activist Group Supports Boycott of Russian Vodka.” USA Today. 27 July 2013. . 20 Russian Broadway Shut Down, produced by Jay Walton West (2014), . 21 Gordon Cox. “Behind the Scenes of Broadway’s YouTube Musical Comedy about Gays in Russia.” Variety. 4 Feb. 2014. . 22 Damian Bellino. “Watch an All-Star Broadway Cast in Russian Broadway Shut Down Parody.” Broadway.com. 23 Jan. 2014. . 23 Jen Hayden. “‘I Can’t Breathe’: Broadway Stars Come Together to Protest Police Brutality.” Daily Kos. 20 Aug. 2014. . 24 “I Can’t Breathe.” produced by WalkRunFly Productions (2014). . 25 Michael Gioia. “Watch Flashmob Created by Broadway Stars in Response to Death of Eric Garner.” Playbill.com. 31 July 2014. ; Hayden, 2014; Erica Williams Simon. “Not

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26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33

34 35 36 37 38 39 40

41 42 43

Every Flash Mob Has the Guts to do What They Did. Whoa.” Upworthy. 12 Aug. 2014. ; “Broadway Unites to Protest Police Violence and Honor Eric Garner.” The Grio. 31 July 2014. ; “I Can’t Breathe: Broadway Artists FlashMob at Times Square.” Black Left Unity. 2 Aug. 2014. . Emily Nussbaum. “Hate-Watching ‘Smash’.” New Yorker. 27 Apr. 2012. . Darren Franich. “The Rise of Hate-Watching: Which TV Shows Do You Love To Despise?” Entertainment Weekly. 16 Aug. 2012. . Jenkins Ford and Green, Spreadable Media, 42. Charles McCoy and Roscoe Scarborough. “Watching Bad Television: Ironic Consumption, Camp, and Guilty Pleasures.” Poetics. 47 (Dec. 2014): 45. Todd Gitlin. “The Postmodern Predicament.” Wilson Q (Summer 1989): 74. Natalie Jarvey. “‘Peter Pan Live!’ vs. ‘Sound of Music’: Who Won the Twitter War.” Hollywood Reporter. 10 Dec. 2014. . “A Guide to Hate-Watching NBC’s ‘Sound of Music, Live!’.” Hollywood.com. 13 Nov. 2013. . Stacy Lambe. “How to Live Tweet ‘Peter Pan Live’ Like a Social Media Star.” Entertainment Tonight Online. 4 Dec. 2014. ; Leanne Agullera. “Your Handy Drinking Guide For Watching ‘Peter Pan Live!’.” Entertainment Tonight Online. 4 Dec. 2014. . Vinnie Mancuso. “Peter Pan Live: A Hate-Watching Guide.” The Observer. 4 Dec. 2014. . Andrea Morabito. “Who to Follow on Twitter While (Hate)Watching ‘Peter Pan Live!’.” New York Post. 4 Dec. 2014. . Kevin Fallon. “The Cast of ‘Peter Pan Live’ Knows You Hatewatched ‘The Sound of Music’.” The Daily Beast. 2 Dec. 2014. . Jarvey, “‘Peter Pan Live!’ vs. ‘Sound of Music’.” Sophie Gilbert. “Peter Pan Live Was Never Intended to Be Enjoyed.” The Atlantic. 5 Dec. 2014. . Jenkins Ford and Green, Spreadable Media, 7, 3. Katya Andresen. “Why Slacktivism is Underrated.” Mashable. 1 Nov. 2011. ; Henrik Serup Christensen. “Political Activities on the Internet: Slacktivism or Political Participation by Other Means?” First Monday 16.2–7 (2011), ; Leo Mirani. “Sorry, Malcolm Gladwell, the Revolution May Well Be Tweeted.” The Guardian. 2 Oct. 2010. ; Jonathan A. Obar, Paul Zube, and Cliff Lampe. “Advocacy 2.0: An Analysis of How Advocacy Groups in the United States Perceive and Use Social Media as Tools for Facilitating Civic Engagement and Collective Action.” Journal of Information Policy 2 (2012): 1–25. Rick Altman. “The American Film Musical as Dual-Focus Narrative.” Hollywood Musicals: The Film Reader. Ed. Steven Cohan. London and New York: Routledge, 2002. 41–52; Dyer, “Entertainment and Utopia,” 19–30. Evgeny Morozov. “From Slacktivism to Activism.” Foreign Policy. 5 Sept. 2009. . David Carr. “Hashtag Activism, and Its Limits.” The New York Times. 25 Mar. 2012. .

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34 THE GREAT GENERATIONAL DIVIDE Stage-to-Screen Hollywood Musical Adaptations and the Enactment of Fandom Holley Replogle-Wong With the release of Baz Luhrmann’s fantastical jukebox film musical Moulin Rouge! (2001) and Rob Marshall’s film adaptation of the stage musical Chicago (2002), the live-action Hollywood feature film musical enjoyed a resurgence of popularity at the dawn of the twenty-first century. Hollywood studios quickly took steps to capitalize on Luhrmann and Marshall’s successes, developing adaptations of popular Broadway musicals from the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. Unlike the film adaptations made between 1950 and 1970, many of which were produced five to ten years after the premiere of the stage production, filmmakers of the past two decades have found themselves in a unique position where they must navigate a complex market, considering general film audiences as well as multiple generations of musical theater fans. The target audiences for contemporary film musicals have grown increasingly complex. Potential audiences come from different generations, regions, and backgrounds, and those who know the musical in question got to know it in any number of ways—whether by seeing the original or a revival production, hearing the cast album, performing in the show, or attending a local production. In order to have box-office success with an expensive film musical, filmmakers must create an adaptation that appeals to this wide variety of built-in fans—whose preferences for elements like casting, vocal and musical production, and fidelity to the original production may not necessarily align—while also attracting general film audiences who are unfamiliar or have only cursory familiarity with the show. This chapter will explore aspects of film adaptation and fan practice that are highlighted when a stage musical becomes a feature film: how do filmmakers attempt to balance the interests of strong, established fandoms with those of new target audiences? What controversies arise when decisions such as casting, music alterations or eliminations, narrative changes, and the addition or truncation of characters are made for the newer fandom or broader general audience? Relevant examples are drawn from The Phantom of the Opera (stage 1986/film 2004), Rent (1996/2005), Dreamgirls (1981/2006), Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (1979/2007), Les Misérables (1985/2012), and Into the Woods (1987/2014).1 This particular constellation of adaptations demonstrates an array of successes and failures that highlight some of the core challenges at stake in the process of adaptation from stage to screen, with audience gaps spanning one, two, or nearly three decades. Rent, with nine years between stage premiere and film release, has the least amount of distance between productions, and the Broadway production was still running when the film was released. Sweeney Todd has the most,

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at 28 years. Both, however, have enough distance for new generations of musical theater fans to be born, and to grow up in an entirely different cultural paradigm than those who became fans during the original production.2

The Film Musical Film musical adaptations provide audiences with the opportunity to enjoy performances of ­ Broadway shows featuring famous stars. The Jazz Singer (1927) brought stage superstar Al Jolson to a much larger audience, many of whom would not have been able to see him perform onstage due to geographical distance or financial constraints. In the years following the transition from silent film to synchronized sound, film musical adaptations were less focused on fidelity to original theatrical productions, especially since studios were reluctant to pay royalties for songs they did not own. But by the mid-1950s, the Broadway musical was riding a creative tide, spurred by the model of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma! in 1943, and the musical genre was a key player in American popular culture. Songs from Broadway shows topped the record charts, and Broadway stars appeared regularly to sing on the radio or perform on television variety shows. Hollywood began looking to existing stage shows for adaptation. During this time, film musical adaptations were rendered with increasing fidelity to the stage material, and with a relatively small gap of time between the stage premiere and the adaptation. Films from this period allowed audiences access to stage productions shortly after their debuts, during their initial period of currency.3 Through the next two decades, Hollywood enjoyed its fair share of musical box-office successes, including Guys and Dolls (1950 original stage production/1955 film), The King and I (1951/1956), West Side Story (1957/1961), The Sound of Music (1959/1964), My Fair Lady (1956/1964), Funny Girl (1964/1968), and Cabaret (1966/1972). There were also a few spectacular failures: Camelot (1960/1967), Hello, Dolly! (1964/1969), Man of La Mancha (1964/1972), and Mame (1966/1974). These last four films, all lavish, expensive productions that flopped, ended the trend for Hollywood musical adaptations. Scholars and commentators have made much about the “death” of the film musical in the 1970s, but it is unfair to claim that film musicals were truly buried and forgotten. The genre experienced a lull in popularity until The Little Mermaid (1989), which spurred what has been dubbed the “Disney Renaissance,” but the film musical never completely went away, with several enduring successes produced during those decades: Jesus Christ Superstar (1973), Grease (1978), Fame (1980), Footloose (1984), Little Shop of Horrors (1986).4

Musical Theater Fans and Fan Practice Fans of a particular stage musical, whether they’ve seen it or developed an attachment to the original cast recording, tend to expect a film adaptation to keep material from the stage production mostly intact. A film’s treatment of beloved songs, characters (and, with their song assignments, their physical and personal characteristics and motivations), and the order of the narrative are all under scrutiny. However, significant changes may nevertheless be made by filmmakers, who must carefully balance their marketing strategies to retain fans of the stage show while also convincing general audiences to buy a ticket and see their film. This is a challenging balance to strike. Audiences are not simply passive consumers of texts produced by media creators. Fandom is an experience that is simultaneously personal and collective, bound up in the development and enactment of identity. Fans have deeply personal engagements with fan objects, and fandoms develop particular conventions for demonstrating knowledge about the material. As fan scholar Henry Jenkins notes, “Organized fandom is…an institution of theory

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and criticism, a semi-structured space where competing interpretations and evaluations of common texts are proposed, debated, and negotiated and where readers speculate about the nature of the mass media and their own relationship to it.”5 Spaces for organized fandom have a much broader public platform than they did when the musicals under consideration in this chapter were first produced. Fans of the productions discussed herein organized around official or unofficial fan clubs administrated through local gatherings or mail, or via fan-created publications (fanzines) of fan-contributed material including articles, letters, and art. As fandoms migrated to the Internet at the turn of the twenty-first century, message boards, blogs, webpages, and communities like LiveJournal provided instant, round-the-clock forums for discussion, distribution, and the archiving of fan material. Now, fans from across the globe connect through online communities like Broadway World or Reddit, or through social media platforms like YouTube, Facebook, and Tumblr. Forums like Twitter, which allow users to tweet public messages to celebrities and studio entities, give fans a sense of greater access and potential for communication with artists, and even the possibility of influence over decisions made by studios.6 While the Internet has transformed fan communities, one crucial thread of musical fandom runs through all generations: the act of performance. Fans perform their fandom through discussion, engagement with the text of a show, or their knowledge about star performers (and their “texts,” which Richard Dyer describes as the roles, performances, recordings, publicity pictures, interviews, and other media texts that comprise a star’s image), both online and off.7 Many musical theater fans also partake in stage performance in some capacity, whether student, amateur, or professional. Original cast recordings are central to the act of performance: through listening, fans develop a sense of intimacy and familiarity with a star or role. Fans may listen closely and analytically at home, immersing themselves in the story. Or their listening can be more interactive, singing and dancing along, acting out favorite moments either alone or with fellow fans. As Stacy Wolf points out in her ethnographic study of young female Wicked fans on the Internet, attachments that fans develop with characters in a show affect how they perform their fandom: many connect with characters they relate to in terms of personal identity or life circumstances. The connection of a fan’s personal identity to a character contributes to a sense of ownership or protectiveness of a musical. Such activity may also be connected to a fan’s aspirations to perform, whether as an amateur or professional. Wolf argues that the fans in her study expressed empowerment through their relationship to the musical and the process of analysis and debate; “…as aspiring performers themselves, they solicit advice for an audition number and describe their dreams of performing on Broadway.”8 In the earlier Wicked example, a fan’s engagement with a star’s “texts” is discussed as a reciprocal dialogue that is shaped by the fan’s experience and preferences.9 Scholars in fan studies continue to discuss best practices for studying and writing about fandom. An ethnographic study like Wolf ’s centers the experiences of fans, their voices shaping the scholarship. Henry Jenkins asks scholars to embrace and acknowledge their own scholar-fan subjectivity in their work.10 As Mark Duffett notes: Researching fandom – and particularly popular music fandom with its characteristic practices and evident connection to affect – is therefore an opportunity to pursue an empathetic and in some ways autobiographic form of scholarship. This does not mean rejecting critical objectivity or pursuing endless self-reflexivity. Instead, it means that any process of understanding fandom is partly a kind of humanist project.11 When we study musical theater fandom, taking specific types of fan practice into consideration allows us to shift away from narrowly defining fans as passive or pathological consumers, and instead understand fans as active participants—both as individuals and within communities—in the formation of modes of engagement, reception, and the creation of fan-generated content.

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Adaptations and the Question of Relevance Our six musicals under consideration were optioned by Hollywood studios, some very shortly after their initial Broadway success, and then stalled in production for years. Miramax purchased rights to Rent in 1996 and Warner Bros. picked up The Phantom of the Opera in 1989. Columbia Pictures optioned Stephen Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd in 1992 and held the rights to Into the Woods until 1997, when it put the production into turnaround, declaring a loss on development costs and opening the rights for purchase by another studio.12 David Geffen retained the rights to adapt Dreamgirls, but attempts to produce film versions in the 1980s and 1990s fell through. Les Misérables producer Cameron Mackintosh started considering directors for a film adaptation in 1988.13 But it wasn’t until the success of Chicago in 2001 that these films were pulled out of purgatory and placed on the front burner. The show facing some of the greatest challenges in negotiating narrative concerns is the one that had the least amount of time pass between stage and film premieres, and thus makes a fitting case study for the question of relevance: Rent. The other shows are period pieces or fairy tales, and though they bear signifiers of the trends and cultural milieu of their eras of production, Rent is unique in its reliance on the bond between the era of the story and audience. The film adaptation of Rent grapples with several problems arising from the stage musical’s dependence on audiences with an immediate, lived knowledge of the concerns of its time period as the key that unlocks its emotional impact. While the film tried to capture its core audience by using most of the original cast (with two exceptions: Fredi Walker and Daphne Rubin-Vega were replaced, respectively, by Tracie Thoms as Joanne and Rosario Dawson as Mimi), other significant alterations were made. The original production premiered in 1996, and the action of the musical was set around that time. The late-1990s setting addressed the problematics of a rapidly gentrifying New York City (and the complicity of the white bohemian artists in Alphabet City), as well as the ongoing AIDS crisis. Having survived the millennium and realizing that young audiences in 2005 would not necessarily remember the fear AIDS provoked during the 1980s and 1990s, the filmmakers chose to set the film in 1989. Even further removed from its potential new generation of audiences, the earlier time places the action in a grittier, pre-Giuliani New York in the first decade of the AIDS crisis. In doing so, the filmmakers hoped to recapture the immediacy of the crisis and recall a time in America when a diagnosis was widely understood as a death sentence. The director helming the film adaptation of Rent, Chris Columbus, acknowledged these challenges: “Some people weren’t interested in spending the money it would take…Others were afraid, or said things like, ‘Is AIDS still relevant?’ But I remember first seeing the play nine years ago, and I went back again in the next week. I just couldn’t get the songs out of my head.”14 ­Columbus points to the memorable songs as his rebuttal to concerns about the relevance of Rent, and this is borne out strategically with the placement of the hit song “Seasons of Love” at the very beginning of the movie. This is the song with the greatest longevity and relevance; it is recognizable to nonmusical theater audiences through other venues, including high school choir performances and church repertories. Opening the film with the song attempts to hook the casual fan into the rest of the film through familiarity. In the stage musical, “Seasons of Love” opens Act II, breaking the fourth wall in a gesture toward community as the company lines the stage facing the audience to sing. The film replicates this gesture but to very different effect. The film opens with figures appearing in shadow on a stage, but when the lights come up, we see only the main characters singing to rows of empty seats. This device acknowledges the show’s origins as a stage production and demonstrates the effort made to secure its original cast. Rent nevertheless faltered at the box office, failing to break even after both domestic and worldwide releases.15 Hiring original cast members was a risk taken in an effort to appeal to fans of the show that did not pay off in commercial returns; the actors did

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not have enough draw for ticket buyers beyond the fan base, and by the time the film was made the cast was ten years older, which may have negatively affected the film’s reception.16 The energized, uncompromising rebelliousness of a youthful cast was diffused; instead, the film shows characters in their thirties struggling to maintain their bohemian ideals.

Adapting Structure and Style for Film Significant practical and artistic concerns arise when adapting a stage musical for film. Narrative sound films typically obey certain conventions, wherein images and sounds are constructed to appear natural to audiences. A primary concern with adapting a musical thus involves how filmmakers approach the demands of filmic realism. A film is not bound by a theater’s proscenium; actors may be placed within realistic settings (Into the Woods puts the actors in an ancient pine grove), and scenes may transition quickly from one location to another. Whether filmmakers make concessions to the concept of realism (as with the film version of Chicago, which places the musical numbers either on a stage or in Roxie’s imagination), or delve fully into a hyperreal treatment of musical performance, a choice must be made. Tim Burton’s adaptation of Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street bears the director’s distinctive cinematic style, idiosyncratic gothic visual design, and stable of regular collaborators (including actors Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter, who star as Sweeney and Mrs. Lovett). Attaching Burton as director for this film was a sound business move in securing a crossover audience, though initial reactions from fans of Sondheim and the stage production were mixed. Endorsement by or involvement of show creators or crew in a film production is often deployed as a strategy for appeasing fan concerns about fidelity to the stage show and commitment to musical excellence; in this case, Sondheim hit the press circuit before the film’s release, giving his blessing and granting an exclusive interview about the film to Broadway World, an online community that caters to fans of musical theater.17 In this interview, Sondheim specifically addresses the issue of voice, speaking in favor of “actors who sing” over “singers who act,” an argument he revisits for the press in 2014, when Into the Woods was adapted by director Rob Marshall.18 The technologies of film can pull the audience away from the scenic limitations of the theater proscenium and into vivid realistic locations, and bring the audience closer to the subject through close-ups and camera work that permit subtler facial expressions.19 In Sweeney Todd, the film medium allows for greater latitude for a comedic visual excursion in Mrs. Lovett’s song from Act II, “By the Sea.” Burton’s film transports the audience away from a murky, grey-toned London and into a twisted rendering of Mrs. Lovett’s imagination. In a stylistic trope characteristic of Burton’s style, Lovett’s delight in the brightly lit boardwalk and vivid blue sea is humorously juxtaposed with the presence of an unremittingly morose Sweeney Todd at her side. The visual treatment of this scene is the sort of adaptive choice that tends to make little waves with fans: the construction of a creative rendering or restaging of the material with minimal alteration to the text and score is not dissimilar to what a good stage revival would attempt. Other filmic conventions, used to provide clarity to audiences unfamiliar with the musical, may bypass fans with minimal concern, or even be enjoyed as an expansion of the existing universe of interpretive understanding. In Andrew Lloyd Webber’s The Phantom of the Opera, ­Christine’s process toward adulthood is depicted through the growth of her voice and career, and in her relationships with the men in her life: her dead father, her “safe” love for childhood friend and respectable gentleman Raoul, her passion for the Phantom. Love triangles are a common trope in musical drama, and satisfying to audiences when they reconcile themselves into the unions that are anticipated. In The Phantom of the Opera, however, the safe and obvious resolution—Christine choosing Raoul—proved less satisfying to many fans than a union with the Phantom, given the degree of passion and tension those characters explored onstage.20 Phantom fandom (‘Phandom’)

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is a place for fans to explore that ultimate “what-if ”: what if Christine had chosen the Phantom? Fan content that explored this possibility, created following the premiere of the musical, included professional publications like Susan Kay’s 1990 novel Phantom and Frederick Forsyth’s 1999 novel The Phantom of Manhattan. The latter was developed in collaboration with Andrew Lloyd Webber and eventually adapted into the stage musical Love Never Dies (2010), a sequel that makes a sexual relationship between Christine and the Phantom retroactively canonical.21 Throughout the film adaptation of The Phantom of the Opera, director Joel Schumacher inserts brief glimpses of the aged Raoul we meet in the prologue to emphasize the flashback structure and repeatedly remind the audience that we are witnessing action from the past. The final scene, original to the film, returns us to the present and to old Raoul, emphasizing the love triangle by depicting the devotion of both men to Christine after her death. Though she marries Raoul, it is made clear that the Phantom never forgets her; it is suggested that their connection persists even after her marriage to another man. Schumacher’s finale expands the narrative to incorporate fan speculation that ran parallel to the show and fueled its popularity and endurance, offering a “canonical” text, approved by Lloyd Webber, for fans to consume and pick apart. There are, on the other hand, adaptation sins that have proven unforgivable to fans; these include major cuts, alterations, or the restructuring of plot order. Assessments of the changes made to the source material are often at the heart of the engagements musical theater fans have with film versions of shows. The removal or substantial alteration of one element from a show can result in the unraveling of a particular fan’s previously completed tapestry of understanding, interpretation, or sympathy for the characters and narrative, and can alter the depth of their investment in the material. But time constraints of the feature film, or the logic of the narrative as rendered through the film medium, may prompt filmmakers to make controversial edits. Large swaths of music were eliminated from Rent, notably the music for minor characters—homeless people, police, parents—and the “Tune-Up” sequences where Roger tunes his guitar as Mark narrates his attempts at being a documentarian. Parts that were originally sung were rendered as spoken dialogue (Schumacher’s film adaptation of The Phantom of the Opera also adopted this strategy). This is a change that breaks up the endless singing that may have been off-putting to mainstream film audiences, though it results in an off-putting experience for fans familiar with the original score. The cut that brought the strongest criticism from fans, however, was the elimination of Mark’s Act II song, “Halloween.” Though brief, the song had garnered fan affection for its moody encapsulation of the plot as the character attempts to understand his place in the lives of those around him. In a move that similarly angered fans and elicited debate among critics, Tim Burton eliminated “The Ballad of Sweeney Todd” from his film adaptation. All that remains of it is an instrumental version that plays over the opening credits. This is a significant cut: the ballad acts as a framing device, appearing at the start and end of the musical and making brief appearances in transitional moments throughout. Burton goes right to the question of functionality between film and stage in defense of his decision: “Why have a chorus singing about ‘attending the tale of Sweeney Todd’ when you could just go ahead and attend it?”22 Film can immediately immerse the audience through the conventions of filmic realism; the theatricality of the ballad was seen to erect a self-conscious barrier between characters and audience. In the stage production, the ballad offers the audience protection from the grisly unfolding of the action—it reminds us that we are witnessing an old story, immortalized in a moralizing song.23 The dead characters return to sing it once more at the end, closing off the narrative before the audience makes their way out of the theater. Without the ballad and its protective buffer to pull us out of the action and to a safe distance, we are left with corpses, and nowhere else to go. Rob Marshall also made drastic changes to the narrative device in his film adaptation of ­Sondheim’s Into the Woods. The onstage narrator (ultimately revealed to be the Baker’s absent 350

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father) is merged into the role of the Baker. However, this structural change received less attention than the censorship the film version faced from Disney executives: the sexual tension between Little Red and the Wolf is removed, Rapunzel does not die, and the Baker’s Wife does not sleep with Cinderella’s Prince. This time, when Sondheim hit the press circuit, he was blunt about the changes. Addressing a room of high school theater teachers, one of whom expressed her students’ frustration with script alterations required for their school productions, he gave a pragmatic response: “…censorship is part of our puritanical ethics, and it’s something that they’re going to have to deal with. There has to be a point at which you don’t compromise anymore, but that may mean that you won’t get anyone to sell your painting or perform your musical. You have to deal with reality.”24

Negotiating Casting Casting choices can be of utmost concern to fans. Cast lists for film adaptations can cause intense reactions similar to those elicited upon release of a cast list at a school show: surprise, delight, rage, questions about the suitability for a role, doubts about whether the casting was “fair” (“fairness” here defined by fans as a faithfulness to the source material and an ability to render it well). Film cast announcements can result in fan disappointment, but the appeal of known actors to wider audiences has the potential to bring in new fans, who may join fandoms because of their enjoyment and identification with the film. With Moulin Rouge! and Chicago came new expectations for actors in film musicals. During the 1950s and 1960s, studios often hired famous actors who were not strong singers; it was assumed that the actor’s star power would draw audiences while their singing voices, if weak, could be dubbed.25 Since then, however, American audiences have become increasingly invested in a sense of vocal “authenticity,” which demands that a voice must belong to the body from which it appears to be emanating. After Rent’s daring but commercially unsuccessful experiment using original Broadway cast members, studios turned back to a more reliable model: casting actors with Hollywood appeal whose singing voices are good, or could become credible with coaching. For The Phantom of the Opera (2004), Warner Bros. initially pursued John Travolta and Antonio Banderas for the title role, ultimately casting up-and-coming actor Gerard Butler.26 Phantom did not recoup its budget in domestic ticket sales, but soared worldwide and brought a new vitality to the Phandom. After the film’s release, skirmishes erupted on public Internet forums (such as IMDB and YouTube) between fans of the original and subsequent stage casts, and those of the film cast. Three excellent singers were cast as members of the girl-group trio central to the film adaptation of Dreamgirls (2006): Beyoncé as Deena, Jennifer Hudson as Effie, and Anika Noni Rose as Lorrell. Four new songs were added to the film, two of which were written specifically for Hudson and Beyoncé: “Love You I Do” and “Listen,” respectively. The film adaptation tapped into a nexus of fandoms from theater, television, film, and popular music: musical theater fans of an older generation who loved Dreamgirls; American Idol fans eager to see Jennifer Hudson put one over on the judges who eliminated her from that competition; fans of comedian and film star Eddie Murphy; fans of Beyoncé, who was four years into her successful solo excursion at the time of the film’s release; and the rising star power of Jamie Foxx, who won an Academy Award for his portrayal of Ray Charles in the 2004 biographical film Ray. The star texts of Jennifer Hudson and Beyoncé aligned with the characters they played, in ways that were clearly legible and enjoyable for fans. The character of powerhouse talent Effie, who is passed over for another singer, mirrors the star text that emerged around Jennifer Hudson after her elimination from American Idol. Dina, like Beyoncé, emerges from her girl group as a star, and works hard to establish her identity as a performer. 351

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Dreamgirls pulled in a legion of new fans, partly owing to the strong casting choices. But the structure of the show is also accessible to audiences who are not musical theater fans: the songs are typically presented through the logic of the backstage musical. Musical numbers are motivated by reasons for performance, and thus singing happens during rehearsals, in concert, or in a recording session. Even the notable exception—“And I Am Telling You,” in which actors sing their confrontation—takes place in a performance space, on a stage in an empty nightclub. Audiences who would otherwise be put off by characters breaking into song for reasons not immediately apparent (other than the governing logic of musicals) are not challenged by this film to abandon the mode of filmic realism. The 2012 adaptation of Les Misérables makes a key stylistic choice that emphasizes “authentic” voices by requiring actors to sing in real time during filming, rather than using the traditional method of having actors lip-sync on set to recordings of their vocal performances.27 The impact of this directorial decision resonated through the casting decisions, structural details of filming— like photography and editing—and marketing. Casting selections split the difference between A-list film actors with varied singing experience (Anne Hathaway, Russell Crowe) and singers who started in musicals before moving into film and television (Aaron Tveit and Samantha Barks, who played Eponine in the West End). Hugh Jackman complicates this divide: a star-making turn as Curly in a 1999 West End production of Oklahoma! brought him critical acclaim and international attention, though general audiences were likely more familiar with his film output. Casting director Nina Gold addressed the process on the theater website Backstage, explaining that even the stars had to audition. She mentioned Jackman and Hathaway’s auditions specifically, while avoiding mention of Crowe, whose performance—and, in particular, his vocals—received the most backlash from critics and fans.28 Having actors sing in real time departs from techniques developed in the 1930s by directors like Busby Berkeley, who introduced lip-syncing to prerecorded vocals in order to free the motion of the camera and allow for the kaleidoscopic imagery that would become part of his iconic style. In Les Misérables, the apparatus of filmmaking tends to stay close to the actors in order to pick up the details of their performances. Adaptations of musicals from stage to screen are not a simple one-to-one transaction for any of the people involved, be they filmmakers, show creators, or fans. Difficult choices must be made in the adaptation process, and fans must negotiate the new material into their fandom and practice. Conflict is an unavoidable byproduct when texts and performances are repositioned from one context into another, but it is also an indicator of the life and viability of the film musical, and of the fans—whether established or new—and their investment in the genre.

Notes 1 For show synopses, visit “The Guide to Musical Theater.” Web. 28 Jan. 2017. . 2 Rent: nine years between musical premiere and film (Broadway production closed 2008); The Phantom of the Opera: 18 years between musical premiere and film; Dreamgirls: 25 years; Into the Woods and Les Misérables: 27 years; Sweeney Todd: 28 years. Two of these musicals had home-video releases of a filmed stage performance: a 1982 PBS broadcast of Sweeney Todd with George Hearn and Angela Lansbury, and a 1991 taping of Into the Woods for PBS’s American Playhouse with the original cast. 3 Fans unable to see a live show could access some of the experience following the advent of original cast recordings, which reproduced songs with the original cast and orchestra. These albums included images from the production, which helped bolster listener imagination. Decca’s 1943 release of Oklahoma! was the first cast album to feature these elements. This album reached audiences unable to purchase tickets, which were difficult to obtain since the show sold out for four years a week after its opening. Contemporary readers will undoubtedly recognize an analogy regarding accessibility of tickets to Hamilton (2015). 4 The animated feature-film musical had a “comeback” with the start of the so-called “Disney Renaissance” in 1989 with The Little Mermaid (music by Alan Menken; lyrics by Howard Ashman, whose career-defining hit Little Shop of Horrors in 1982 brought them to the notice of Disney), and a series of

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The Great Generational Divide hits through the 1990s. Some films from this period enjoyed reverse adaptations from screen to stage, including Beauty and the Beast (film 1991/stage 1994), The Lion King (1994/1997), Tarzan (1997/2006), The Little Mermaid (1989/2007), and Aladdin (1992/2011). 5 Henry Jenkins. Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture. London: Routledge, 1992. 86. Other key studies on fandom include The Adoring Audience: Fan Culture and Popular Media (1992), edited by Lisa Lewis, Matt Hills’s Fan Cultures (2002), and Understanding Fandom: An Introduction to the Study of Media Fan Culture (2013), edited by Mark Duffett. 6 For more on artist/fan engagement through social media, see Jeremy Wade Morris. “Artists as Entrepreneurs, Fans as Workers.” Popular Music and Society 37.3 (2014): 273–290. 7 Richard Dyer. Stars. London: British Film Institute, 1979. 8 Stacy Wolf. A Problem Like Maria: Gender and Sexuality in the American Musical. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2002. 44. 9 For more on star/fan relationships in fandom scholarship, see Holley Replogle-Wong. “Stars and Fans.” The Oxford Handbook of The American Musical. Ed. Raymond Knapp, Mitchell Morris, and Stacy Wolf. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2011. 378–391. 10 For example, see D.A. Miller. Place for Us. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2000. 11 Mark Duffett. “Introduction: Directions in Music Fan Research: Undiscovered Territories and Hard Problems.” Popular Music and Society 36.3 (2013): 300. 12 Michael Fleming. “’Bliss’ Sticks in Ratings Mire; Col Chops ‘Woods’.” Variety. 22 Jan. 1997. Web. 4 Apr. 2017. . 13 Stephen Schaefer. “Turning Musicals into Film.” Entertainment Weekly. 18 Oct. 1991. Web. 1 May 2017. . 14 Joe Neumaier. “Original Rent Cast Moves Up to Big Screen.” The Seattle Times. 21 Nov. 2005. Web. 15 Apr. 2017. . 15 “Box Office Mojo: Rent (2005).” Web. 4 Apr. 2017. . 16 Margo Whitmire. “From Stage to Screen.” Billboard Magazine. 19 Nov. 2005. 28. 17 Nick Hutson. “Attend the Tale: ‘Sweeney Todd’ Exclusive with Stephen Sondheim.” Broadway World. 20 Dec. 2007. Web. 21 Dec. 2016. . 18 Long-time Broadway and West End music director and Sondheim collaborator Paul Gemignani was brought on board for the film version of Into the Woods and mentioned by name in press about the cast. Anne Midgette. “Streep Sings Sondheim, and Finds Her Voice.” The Washington Post. 19 Dec. 2014. Web. 25 Mar. 2017. . 19 On cinematic versions and adaptations of musicals, see Raymond Knapp and Mitchell Morris. “The Filmed Musical.” The Oxford Handbook of The American Musical. Ed. Raymond Knapp, Mitchell Morris, and Stacy Wolf. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2011. 136–151. 20 The 2006–2012 Las Vegas production of Phantom played up the sexual tension in its poster, pairing the Phantom in a rendezvous with a sexily dressed, long-haired woman who is perhaps less Christine than a reflexive image of a woman in the audience looking at the poster, and the tagline “Be Seduced.” 21 For more about sexuality in The Phantom of the Opera, see Holley Replogle-Wong. “Crossover and Spectacle in American Operetta and the Megamusical.” PhD diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 2009. Regarding changes made to the Phantom between stage and screen, see Jessica Sternfeld. “Ready for His Close-Up: From Horror to Romance in The Phantom of the Opera.” Twenty-First Century Musicals: From Stage to Screen. Ed. George Rodosthenous. New York: Routledge, 2017. Kindle edition. 22 Paul Brownfield. “Tim Burton’s Slasher Movie.” Los Angeles Times. 25 Nov. 2007. Web. 25 Mar. 2017. . 23 For more on the dramatic strategy of the music in Sweeney Todd, see Raymond Knapp. The American Musical and the Performance of Personal Identity. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2009. See also Susan McClary on musical strategies in opera for framing madness in Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2002. 24 Adam Hetrick and Michael Gioia. “Sondheim Reveals Plot Changes for Disney Into the Woods Film.” Playbill. 18 June 2014. Web. 17 May 2017. . 25 For instance, in My Fair Lady (1964), West Side Story (1961), and The King and I (1956), the studio singer Marni Nixon dubbed songs for Audrey Hepburn, Natalie Wood, and Deborah Kerr.

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Holley Replogle-Wong 26 I first saw the trailer for the film adaptation of The Phantom of the Opera in a movie theater in Culver City, home to Sony Pictures and residents connected to (or aspiring to) the film industry. The title card bearing director Joel Schumacher’s name elicited sneering groans from the audience. 27 In some instances, actors may sing live on set, but the vocals that audiences hear in the finished film are not those that come from the performance on-set, but from studio recordings placed in the film during post-production. 28 Sarah Kuhn. “How Casting Director Nina Gold Cast ‘Les Miserables’.” Backstage. 23 Nov. 2012. Web. 21 Feb. 2017. .

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35 PLAY IT AGAIN (AND AGAIN, AND AGAIN) The Superfan and Musical Theater1 James Deaville Fan engagement with musical theater has taken many forms, especially with the proliferation of online platforms that enable the sharing of information and personal experiences, interaction with other fans, and the creation of fan fiction and audiovisual media based on storylines, characters, and existing video material. An increasingly important factor within the theater industry, the fan of the musical has also become a topic for academic research (see for example the work of musical theater scholar Adam Rush).2 Yet we lack a basic understanding of one of the musical’s most publicly fascinating figures: the superfan. This chapter represents an attempt to begin to fill that gap, not through archival research, analysis of text and music, or a cognitive approach, but rather by assembling and presenting the voices of superfans themselves, as a partial explanation for why they engage in the excessive practices associated with the designation “superfan.” First, a definition, with the qualification that each superfan embodies a composite of common characteristics in differing proportions. According to the Oxford Dictionary, the superfan is “a person who has an extreme or obsessive admiration for a particular person or thing.”3 American Studies scholar Daniel Cavicchi has provided a simpler description of the superfan: “To be a superfan means that you are really committed; in other words, you are what we used to call a ‘fan’.”4 The “inflation” of fandom into superfandom occurred within academic discourse over time, as outlined by Van den Bulck and associates: in the 1950s–1970s, fans were considered “freaks and passive victims of the industry”; in the 1980s and 1990s, they reversed roles and became active consumers who had a more complex relationship with producers. Most recently, fandom has functioned as “a normal aspect of everyday life.”5 The normalization of fans left an identificatory gap for those manifesting obsessive, excessive behaviors, who then became “superfans” in the academic literature. Not all scholars have embraced the concept “superfan”, however: media specialist Karen Hellekson, for example, objects to its being “reserved for those who actually engage” with the fan object, since such engagement should characterize fans in general.6 Nevertheless, the term “superfan” has found application in a variety of contexts that include entertainment (sports, film, popular music) and products (Nutella, Louis Vuitton). As a distinctive type of superfan, those for musical theater are zealous enthusiasts who know every line of a show; are familiar with all cast members (and can chat knowingly with them at the stage door); can make significant sacrifices of money, time, and effort to catch performances; and attain untouchable statistics as “repeat attenders.” To satisfy an inner imperative to experience a particular show as often as possible, the musical-theater superfan will regularly undertake pilgrimages that criss-cross the continent and even circumnavigate the globe, though New York’s Broadway and London’s West End most frequently serve as their destinations. 355

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It is the musical superfan as repeat attender that has drawn the attention of the media, which reflects a public fascination with discourses of excess as seen in such monuments to the superlative as The Guinness Book of Records and Ripley’s Believe It or Not Museum. Journalistic accounts of fans who repeatedly attend a particular show necessarily rely upon the rhetoric of the sensational, in attempting to explain why, for example, a person might see Jersey Boys over 650 times (Jo-Ann Wordley),7 or own the world’s largest collection of Cats memorabilia (anonymized Christine).8 But what do the fans themselves say about their extreme, obsessive behavior, which has led to such clever and easily recognizable labels for especially passionate spectators as Rentheads (Rent), Hamilfans (Hamilton), Mizzies (Les Misérables), Jekkies ( Jekyll & Hyde), and Phans (Phantom of the Opera)? They may recognize it as unusual, as Wicked fan Bettie Laven suggests: “No one outside the theater world understands the concept of multiple performances… I know I have lost track of the real number of times I’ve seen Wicked after it reached over 150. After a certain number, people think you are crazy.” However, Laver and her fellow superfans justify their extravagance in pursuit of a specific show through the diversion, the pleasure, even the sense of stability and identity it brings to them.

Beginnings Often, the start of a superfan’s attachment to a particular musical is a matter of chance, or at least of an unexpected attraction. For example, Abe Calimag describes his first visits to the jukebox musical Rock of Ages, which he had seen over 500 times as of October 2014: I saw the show for the first time on July 1, 2009. I had wanted to see Amy Spanger (­Sherrie), but she had officially departed a few days prior, so I was prepared to be disappointed. Just entering the Brooks Atkinson Theater, hearing the pre-show music, and feeling the vibe, I knew I was in for something different. I don’t know if it was when Katherine Tokarz (­Constance Sack) first walked on the stage or when Ericka Hunter (swing/Waitress #1) opened the Venus Club door, but I quickly became hooked on the show.9 I wasn’t much into 80s rock—I’m more of an 80s college alternative/new wave fan, The Smiths, The Cure, Depeche Mode, etc, but I certainly knew every song in the show. I loved the mash-ups and new arrangements of the songs and the way they were used to actually help tell the story – they weren’t just filler or a random collection of greatest hits. The plot is simple, but sweet, and the book is hilarious. The performances were fantastic, and Constantine (Drew) and Savannah Wise (Sherrie) blew me away. I returned as soon as I could, which was the following Monday, July 6th and the next evening as well. Such passages not only provide narratives for the different paths that lead to superfandom for specific musicals, but also furnish insights into what fans value in the first experience of a given show. Thus British superfan Ed from Greenwich provided TimeOut London with details about his first visit to Wicked: I didn’t grow up loving musicals or wanting to perform in them, but about ten years ago I started going to the theater with work friends and got the bug. I just loved the escape of getting immersed in another world for a few hours…In 2010 I got offered a spare ticket to see Wicked. I didn’t really know anything about it, and weirdly I didn’t love it straight away—I actually felt very confused for some of it as there was so much going on. However, I did want to go back and see it again as I felt I’d not fully appreciated what it was all about. I think that’s why I’ve ended up going back at least 40 times, because you discover something new each time and it has become a bit of an obsession.10 356

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And New Yorker Vivian Carlson uses similar language in discussing her first impressions of Come from Away in Washington, DC: I was captivated … for the entire 100 minutes… I was crying most of the time, and laughing at the same time I was crying. I’ve never walked out of a show before feeling like I had to see it again as soon as I could, and just loving it and wanting everyone I know to go see it.11 These comments about first experiences reveal the stages of development in audience members’ process of familiarization with a new show, from initial uncertainty (even perhaps bordering on skepticism) through engagement with characters and their performances to immersion in and emotional commitment to the musical’s narrative. Each of the commentators felt motivated to return—but why?

Repeat Attendance Rationale Superfans often have difficulty explaining their rationale for repeat attendance, and those ­rationales can vary widely. For some superfans, it is the story that continues to captivate; for others, it’s the score. And then again it might be a particular character or performer (as Abe Calimag narrated earlier), or a specific scene from the musical. Most superfans would agree, however, that a profound, salutary stirring of emotion ultimately causes them to return and reexperience the passion that accompanied their first encounter with the show. Time and again, for example, superfans of the musical Come from Away identify the show’s underlying theme—people helping other people in a time of crisis—as the reason for their attachment to it. This was undoubtedly one of the primary factors behind Vivian Carlson’s emotional response to the musical described earlier. Likewise, Kelly Walker has attended the show 15 times because of the musical’s message: I just fell madly in love with it… It made me remember that time and how we were all almost kind of nicer to each other right after 9/11 happened, and just that sense of community that we had after such a tragic event… I kind of feel that we’ve lost that in a sense, so it just made me feel good about humanity again.12 Amanda Jurson of New York City has seen Come from Away over 100 times. Her love of the production bespeaks the emotional satisfaction Jurson receives from the object of her fandom: It wrecked me. I’ve never felt so compelled to see a show that many times before… It’s just a feel-good show. I love the story; it is just one giant hug for an hour and a half… If you have a bad day, you can just go to the show and you feel better about yourself.13 Other musicals evoke similarly strong responses for different reasons, whether nostalgic associations, identification with characters or plot, or the sheer aesthetic pleasure of the spectacle. For Mike Meko from Denver, it’s the lyrics of Wicked that resonate deeply within him, as one way to remember his deceased relative: I love the words to it [“For Good”]—“you’re a handprint on my heart.” That’s how I want to be remembered, as a handprint on people’s hearts. So as long as there’s live theater, I’ll still live a little bit. Like my Aunt Pat. She passed away a few years back, but she lives in every show I see.14 357

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Perhaps the most celebrated repeat attender, “Jersey girl” Jo-Ann Wordley, attempted to articulate to Playbill magazine the justification for having attended Jersey Boys over 675 times, which she did on the basis of the music: I am from Bergen County—up near where Bob Gaudio is from, near Bergenfield… and I grew up on the music. I have to admit I knew the music from when it first came out. I was like nine or ten at the time, and I’ve always been following The Four Seasons, and I just love listening to the music. These guys are just fantastic when they sing it. So that’s why I keep coming back. One big reason why I come back is the music…15 We shall return to Wordley in discussing her repeat-attendance practices—it suffices here to observe that familiarity with the music from an early age has clearly contributed to her identity as a (super)fan. The anonymized Londoner Emily admitted to TimeOut that as of the beginning of September 2017, she had seen Kinky Boots at the Adelphi Theater 199 times because of how it made her feel. As Jersey Boys did for Wordley, so has Kinky Boots become part of Emily’s identity: When I watched it in the West End I found it so inspiring and there was a feeling of elation at the end of the show that made me keep coming back… I see me watching the show as just like listening to a favourite album, but instead I go and see it live… Even though I’ve seen it so often, I never get bored… ‘“Kinky Boots” isn’t my whole life–I have a full-time job and other interests, but it is a big part of who I am.16 Emily’s justification of her fandom accords with the narratives of the other obsessive musical-­ theater repeat attenders cited earlier ( Jurson, Wordley), who feel compelled to explain to the ­public-at-large why they are “fan-atically” drawn to a specific show. The 79-year-old musical theater superfan Jerry Stone—who, with his 82-year-old wife Gayle, has been to the theater nearly 600 times since their wedding 15 years ago—furnishes one of the most pragmatic and compelling rationales for repeat attendance: “You go to a movie twice, you see exactly the same thing… You go to a show twice, somebody does something a little different. It’s never the same.”17 As the preceding personal accounts of superfans demonstrate, their reasons for repeat a­ ttendance at a given musical are as diverse as the shows themselves. Nevertheless, they all attest to experiencing a powerful attraction and special attachment to the musical in question, leading some of the superfans to invite others into their domains.

Sharing the Experience One of the significant variables within the superfan experience of musical theater is whether they attend a show alone or share the experience with others. For some fans, attendance is regarded as a highly personal activity; for others, it’s more of a communal undertaking. The significance of these positions for musical fandom could not be greater. Often, the most excessive repeat attenders choose to visit the theater by themselves and do not participate in the circulation of knowledge about the show within the fan community. There are several reasons for this: (1) the other person(s) may spoil the experience for the superfan through ill-timed comments, skepticism, or uninformed questions; (2) the invitee(s) could disrupt the superfan’s rituals surrounding the event; or (3) the superfan(s) may have difficulty articulating and communicating the reasons for their obsessive behaviors. Those superfans who do try to get others involved may not possess the same superlative statistics when it comes to attendance, memorabilia, etc.; yet their zeal can help to widen the musical’s appeal. 358

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Jo-Ann Wordley falls into the category of the solitary superfan, for whom extreme ­attendance—in her case, at Jersey Boys performances—is a matter of private dedication to the musical. This, however, also has the potential for closer scrutiny that would threaten to uncover and stigmatize her practice and behavior.18 I go by myself [the] majority of the time. I do go with friends on occasion—with girlfriends from around here where I live. We’ll go to lunch at the diner, and then we go to the show… The girl who does my hair—one time I had an extra ticket, and she came because she does my hair so much so I look nice when I go to the show. She said, “I’ll go if you let me pay for the dinner.” I said, “Okay. Fine! No problem.” I brought my brother last year.19 For Wordley these instances of a shared Jersey Boys experience nevertheless represent isolated occurrences in a history of solitary repeat attendance. Rumors about excessive numbers of ­v isits for superfans seem to circulate by word of mouth or on bulletin boards like those for BroadwayWorld and TineOut London; yet the obsessive attenders themselves do not typically contribute to the circulation of knowledge about their musical, and they seem to shun the public attention and scrutiny that media coverage of their practices would entail. It is often likely that an admixture of desire for privacy and a fear of stigmatization motivate the silence of many superfans.20 In contrast, Mike Meko “has become something of a show wrangler, transporting groups to the darkened theater of Oz,” as reported by the Denver Post. Meko himself acknowledges that his Aunt Pat introduced him and his family to the theater, and that he has felt the need to pay the favor back by encouraging members of the community to attend shows as well: “What she did in her life to turn me—and a few of our family members—on to theater, I’ve done it tenfold… Just to get people into live theater… I think live theater is so much more important than anything else.”21 Meko’s enthusiasm for Wicked has manifested itself quite differently than that of Wordley for Jersey Boys. Yet whether or not they choose to engage their communities in a meaningful encounter with the musical, such superfans remain committed to a personal experience of the show as the basis for its appreciation.

Finding Your Seat Unlike the potential audience member who might be discouraged from visiting a show because of the scarcity or price of seats, the superfan possesses such an elevated level of motivation—some might call it a mania—that they must obtain a ticket for the show. However, considering the costs involved in pursuing their passion, the musical superfan often has to invest considerable time and effort, and to become resourceful in finding inexpensive tickets. Like a number of other fans, for example, Jurson relies on rush tickets that many productions make available at the last minute. Her “addiction to the musical” ensures that she will be at the front of the queue. “I get up at 4 or 5 and sit outside the theater and get cheaper tickets… I literally sit outside the theater at 5 a.m. until the box office opens at 10 and I get a discounted ticket.”22 Kinky Boots superfan Emily admits to having undertaken similarly radical approaches to ensure tickets for a London West End performance. “In August 2016, six of us from the fan community camped overnight on The Strand to get the first tickets that were being released with the new cast,” she remembers. “It’s probably the most extreme thing I’ve done for my fandom.”23 Similarly, self-identified “Rock A-holic” Sarah Packard attended Rock of Ages 109 times through a variety of price-cutting methods: Rush tickets help save on the cost, and of course there are discount codes as well… I admit I hardly ever pay full price for the shows I see because I have a limited budget. I work in the theater business, and I am lucky to get invited to a lot of shows. I am also grateful for rush, lotto and standing-room pricing.24 359

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The lottery is one method for obtaining discounted tickets for same-day performances, requiring an online entry into a random draw. Jonathan Cort, a Wicked superfan, comments on the lottery’s usefulness for the audience: “Most of the 48 times I’ve seen Wicked have been via the ticket lottery system… Oftentimes, Wicked fan friends will coordinate and help each other out with [the] lottery when someone wants to see the show.”25 Other inexpensive means to gain access to Broadway musicals include getting tickets through the four TKTS same-day discount booths supported by the Theatre Development Fund, and the annual free Stars in the Alley “theatrical smorgasbord” hosted by the Broadway League in Shubert Alley. Vivian Carlson remarks that through the latter program, “you get to see all those shows in one place and it’s free… I can be part of Broadway without shelling out for a ticket!”26 Of course, expenses rise considerably for superfans who reside outside New York or London and do not have the luxury of repeated performances of a particular musical within a reasonable commute. For instance, Denver resident Meko, who grew up in New York City before moving west, has traveled across the United States to catch performances of Wicked. Possibly to compensate for his inability to attend repeat Broadway or West End productions, he has amassed a collection of over 2,000 musical cast albums. Despite superfans’ ability to find inexpensive tickets, their passion necessitates an inordinate outlay of resources in comparison with those of casual theatergoers, who may attend musicals a few times a year.27 It is coincidental that most of the musical-theater superfans cited in this study either work at jobs that provide an income adequate to support obsessive fandom (Meko or Calimag), or are retired and have the time and money to search out ticket deals (Stone or W ­ ordley). Clearly more research needs to be devoted to the demographics of the superfan, in terms of age, income, background, and marital status.

Stagedooring A long-standing tradition for fans of Broadway musicals is the practice known as “stagedooring,” whereby spectators wait at the stage door after the performance of a show to express their appreciation for the actors’ efforts, get cast members’ autographs or photos as memorabilia, and engage with an actor regarding their performance that night. Besides the theater itself, the stage door is a crucial site for the exercise of (super-)fandom, so much so that Playbill has posted “5 Stage Door Tips Every Broadway Fan Needs to Know.”28 Musical superfans may avail themselves of the stage door, especially when there is a change in cast or when the superfan travels to a different location for the show, as is the case with Rock of Ages fanatic Abe Calimag: At the stage door and at public events, I try to respect the performer/audience member dynamic, but it’s nice to interact with the actors on a personal level from time to time. My first social interaction was being invited to a local bar after a show with the entire Australian cast. They were a big help in planning what I should do in and around Melbourne besides seeing the show. In London, a few individual cast members invited me out on a couple occasions, and I’ve been out with Second National Tour cast members in a couple different cities across the US and Canada.29 Wicked superfan Jonathan Cort has experienced similar side benefits from frequently dropping by the stage door. “I’ve developed relationships with performers just from seeing the show multiple times and talking to them at [the] stage door,” he says. “This can sometimes lead to an actual friendship beyond the stage door.” As an obsessive Les Mis attender, Anthony has developed his own guidelines for visiting the stage door in London’s West End: 360

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Usually when I go to see it I go to the stage door and meet the cast afterward. I am careful to put myself in their shoes, though, and not shove a camera in their faces. I just have so much respect for the performers—they do eight shows a week and have to make each one look like the first time. It’s such an emotional journey. It’s fantastic. The after-show stage door is an important site where fans may not only interact with performers, but may also encounter each other in a zone of contact, albeit one fraught with potential cultural conflicts between casual theatergoers and repeat attenders. The negotiation of this space occurs according to largely unwritten codes of behavior that enable the self-­ regulation of the bodies and voices outside the stage door. In their earlier comments, superfans like Abe Calimag and Anthony express their awareness of the precarity of stagedooring practices, which if rude or excessively raucous could disturb the performers and jeopardize access to them.

Hamilteens One group of superfans has stood out recently, and not just because it is all but impossible to get tickets to the show: teenagers who are devoted to the hit musical Hamilton even though they have never seen it. While it is true that “Hamilton Mania” became a phenomenon far beyond the theater ­curtain—Rolling Stone magazine boldly called it “the cultural event of our time”30 —and much of the US population became fans of the musical sight unseen, these particularly dedicated youths stand out as a demographic for superfandom based on their practices reflecting near-­fanatical devotion to the show. As Erika Milvy wrote in The Guardian, Hamilteens “play the music nonstop, know the lyrics by heart and burst into songs from the show at the slightest provocation.”31 She observes that some of the most passionate fans are 14-year-old girls like “Eliza” (Elizabeth) ­Posnanski, who responded to the cast recording with the comment, “Whoa, this is like crazy cool. This is the best thing ever.” And, once the recording ended, “I’m like, wait; you can’t end it there, there has to be more of this, I want another song.” A high-school senior and self-confessed Hamilton superfan who has never seen the show, Katera Howard, describes how her devotion to the musical has benefitted her: Being a black teen in this society, I want to rise up against prejudice, against injustice, against hate—there’s so much stuff that me and people who look like me can rise up against. ­Hamilton was not like: “I’m just going to sit around and let it be; we need to get out there and make the change!”… With Hamilton, I feel that if I want something, no matter who is set up for that position, I can get it… Hamilton is the best thing ever. It will change your life.32 The special case of Hamilton, as a musical few have seen but many already know quite well, invites consideration of the question of whether attendance is a requirement for superfandom. As already evidenced by Mike Meko’s or Christine’s collecting habits, the gathering of artifacts associated with a show typically accompanies attendance, since for fans and superfans alike, the performance remains central to the experience of musical theater. Fans may actively participate in electronic discussion boards, search online for theater memorabilia, or dress up like their favorite character for Halloween, but none of these activities can substitute for fan engagement with live performances, which drive the cultural economy of musical theater. Also, one could bond with a show through cast recordings, taped performances, or film versions; yet the popular literature from sources like Playbill, BroadwayWorld, or TimeOut London tends to privilege excessive repeat attendance as marking superfandom in their interiews and reports, perhaps because such behavior can be portrayed as extreme or even pathological. 361

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Conclusions Musical theater superfans—Rentheads, (Avenue) Q-Tips, Hamilteens—have found in a given show something personally momentous for their identity; however, the fanatical pursuit of said musical is hard to maintain financially and socially and—for outsiders—sometimes difficult to understand. It is possible that the obsessiveness some superfans display reflects some underlying psychological disorder, whether obsessive-compulsive disorder, a hoarding disorder, or post-­ traumatic stress disorder, just to name three possibilities. But for many, the motivation may be nothing aberrant, but rather a strong affinity with a show that means something exceptional in their lives. There can be no doubt that musical superfans can significantly contribute to a community of fans, should they engage in the circulation of experiences and knowledge through participatory culture. New online platforms facilitate the construction of identity for superfans; yet the extreme material culture of attendance as well as collecting and stagedooring still serve as the key visible markers for the superfan. Of course, resourcefulness in the acquisition and thoroughness in the accumulation of knowledge about a show and its cast also help to authenticate superfans, who build credibility and cultural capital through a lifetime—or at least an extended period—of theatrical experiences. Within musical fandom, superfans will, by definition, remain outsiders, exceptions to the norm; yet their voices articulate the same reasons, conditions, qualifications for the enjoyment of the musical that we all share.

Notes 1 For their assistance in preparing this article I extend my thanks to co-editors Jessica Sternfeld and ­Elizabeth Wollman and graduate assistant Tyler Hall (Carleton University). 2 Adam Rush. “The Phan-dom of the Opera: Gothic Fan Cultures and Intertextual Otherness.” Contemporary Gothic Drama: Attraction, Consummation and Consumption on the Modern British Stage. Ed. Kelly Jones, Benjamin Poore, and Rob Dean. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. 139–160. 3 Oxford Dictionaries, s.v. “Superfan.” Web. 19 Aug. 2018. . 4 Melissa A. Click and Suzanne Scott, eds., “Music Fandom in the Digital Age.” The Routledge Companion to Media Fandom. New York: Routledge, 2018. 201. 5 Hilde Van den Bulck, et al., “Representation of Fandom in Mainstream Media: Analysis of Production and Content of Flemish Television’s Superfans.” European Journal of Cultural Studies 19.6 (2016): 515. 6 Karen Hellekson. “The Fan Experience.” A Companion to Media Fandom and Fan Studies. Ed. Paul Booth. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2018. 119. 7 Michael Gioia. “Meet the Jersey Boys Superfan Who Sees the Show for Her 675th Time Tonight!” Playbill. 15 Nov. 2015. Web. 19 Aug. 2018. . 8 “Repeat Attenders.” DOC NYC. Nov. 2018. Web. 19 Aug. 2018. . 9 Caryn Robbins. “Here I Go Again! BWW Interviews ROCK OF AGES Superfan Abe Calimag on His 500th Show.” BroadwayWorld. 11 Sept. 2014. Web. 19 Aug. 2018. . 10 Natasha Watts. “Meet the Superfans Who’ve Seen London’s West End Shows Hundreds of Times.” TimeOut London. 4 Sept. 2017. Web. 19 Aug. 2018. . 11 Lauren La Rose. “‘Come From Away’ Superfans Keep Returning for Musical’s Message of Kindness.” Global News. 9 June 2017. Web. 19 Aug. 2018. . 12 La Rose, “‘Come From Away’ Superfans Keep Returning for Musical’s Message of Kindness.” 13 David Newell. “Come From Away Superfan Hits 100 Shows…and Counting.” CBC. 3 Sept. 2017. Web. 19 Aug. 2018. .

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Play It Again (and Again, and Again) 14 Lisa Kennedy. “‘Wicked’ Allure Endures for Superfan Mike Meko of Denver.” The Denver Post. 5 Apr. 2012. Web. 19 Aug. 2018. . 15 Gioia, “Meet the Jersey Boys Superfan Who Sees the Show for Her 675th Time Tonight!” 16 Watts, “Meet the Superfans Who’ve Seen London’s West End Shows Hundreds of Times.” 17 Barbara Hoffman. “How Broadway Superfans See Their Favorites Dozens of Times.” New York Post. 29 May 2018. Web. 19 Aug. 2018. . 18 Michelle L. McCudden. “Degrees of Fandom: Authenticity & Hierarchy in the Age of Media Convergence.” PhD diss., University of Kansas, 2011. 123. Web. 19 Aug. 2018. . 19 Gioia, “Meet the Jersey Boys Superfan Who Sees the Show for Her 675th Time Tonight!” 20 The emotion of shame does not seem to serve as a factor behind any superfan reluctance to share their experience with friends or media, at least based on the testimony of the interviews consulted for this study. 21 Kennedy, “‘Wicked’ Allure Endures for Superfan Mike Meko of Denver.” 22 Newell, “Come From Away Superfan Hits 100 Shows…and Counting.” 23 Watts, “Meet the Superfans Who’ve Seen London’s West End Shows Hundreds of Times.” 24 Kelsey Balzli. “Repeat Attenders: The Stories Behind Broadway Superfans.” Playbill. 20 Oct. 2013. Web. 19 Aug. 2018. . 25 Balzli, “Repeat Attenders: The Stories Behind Broadway Superfans.” 26 Hoffman, “How Broadway Superfans See Their Favorites Dozens of Times.” 27 Elizabeth Titrington Craft. “‘Is This What it Takes Just to Make it to Broadway?!’: Marketing In the Heights in the Twenty-First Century.” Studies in Musical Theatre 5.1 (2011): 52. 28 Olivia Clement. “5 Stage Door Tips Every Broadway Fan Needs to Know.” Playbill. 14 Sept. 2017. Web. 19 Aug. 2018. . 29 Robbins, “Here I Go Again! BWW Interviews ROCK OF AGES Superfan Abe Calimag on His 500th Show.” 30 Mark Binelli. “‘Hamilton’ Mania! Backstage at the Cultural Event of Our Time.” Rolling Stone. 1 June 2016. Web. 1 Oct. 2018. . 31 Erika Milvy. “Hamilton’s Teenage Superfans: ‘This is, like, crazy cool’.” The Guardian. 22 June 2016. Web. 19 Aug. 2018. . 32 Brendan Kiley. “The ‘Hamilton’ Effect: How a Musical Changed Three Lives.” The Seattle Times. 1 Feb. 2018. Web. 19 Aug. 2018. .

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36 JOSS WHEDON AND THE GEEK MUSICAL Renée Camus

Joss Whedon, creator of the television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997–2003), is a self-­professed geek. So are many members of the cast and crew—and most of the characters.1 The series, which follows the adventures of Buffy Summers, a California teen with the strength and ability to fight demons and vampires while still facing typical teenage problems, uses demonic situations as metaphors for real life—high school is literally hell—and offers revelations about the human condition. A common theme in Buffy, and all of Whedon’s works, is “the importance of community, of the chosen family.”2 His work speaks to nerds and outcasts worldwide. He’s their patron saint. Whedon creates fascinating worlds with innovative characters that are almost always in the realm of science fiction and fantasy. He is known for creating genre-bending works that incorporate and transgress different styles. Buffy, Whedon’s biggest hit, is simultaneously drama, comedy, horror, action, suspense, romance, and soap opera. His work is often of interest to small, niche audiences and given “cult” status; in other words, his work is hugely popular among geek subcultures. Once a derogatory term describing people who are intelligent or technologically proficient if socially inept and unfashionable, the word geek is changing, particularly as technology becomes more ubiquitous. While the term is still applied to such people, it has become less about intelligence in math and science, and more about fandom. The obsession, not just the object of that obsession, can help define someone as a geek. “The broader, more useful definition includes the brainy, ­single-minded outsiders drawn to a wide range of creative pursuits…who live beyond the mainstream,” says Neil Feineman in Geek Chic: The Ultimate Guide to Geek Culture.3 The term now applies to almost anyone remotely considered an outsider; anyone who is not a jock or cheerleader—or, as in the case of our eponymous hero Buffy Summers, someone who was but is no longer. Whedon is not only a science fiction-, fantasy-, and comic-book geek, but also a fan of musical theater, with a particular fondness for the works of Stephen Sondheim. This might seem incongruous: sci-fi/fantasy nerds and musical theater geeks don’t necessarily inhabit similar realms. A musical theater fanatic myself, for example, I was one of many who would never watch a TV show with a title as ridiculous or campy sounding as Buffy the Vampire Slayer. What finally caused me to take any notice at all of the “Buffyverse” was the season 6 episode, “Once More, With Feeling” (or OMWF), which was a fully integrated book musical, complete with a range of musical styles, lyrics that develop characters, and choreographed dance numbers. Even without knowing much about the show, I was so impressed with the musical episode that after watching it, I began watching the series from the beginning. I was hooked. 364

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I learned that others had the same experience: they were either unfamiliar with the show or had an aversion to the idea of it until they decided to give the musical episode a try. Critic David Klein, who had never seen an episode previously, noted in 2002 that one evening, “as I was flipping past Buffy I saw that some strange musical episode was beginning.” He found it “absolutely captivating,” and “like nothing I’d ever seen on regular series television” in over 20 years of criticism. Hooked, as I was, by the episode, he went back and watched the first five seasons.4 OMWF, then, allowed fans of musical theater an entrance into the world of television fantasy, complete with vampires, demons, and kung-fu fighting—components not typically seen in musicals (at least not the most successful ones). Similarly, by incorporating an original, integrated book musical into a fantasy-horror television show, Whedon gave his geek fan base the opportunity to embrace a musical production—an option many may not have had or wanted before. The heavily advertised television “event” was highly anticipated and critically and publicly successful, and helped bring musicals to a newly appreciative audience. In 2008, Whedon created another original, integrated musical, this time on the web. Dr. ­Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog is a comic-book story of a “low-rent supervillain”5 told over three short episodes that together run about 42 minutes. Hugely successful despite practically no advertising, Dr. Horrible received about 1,000 hits per second following the release of its first segment.6 The demand caused the site to crash, and skyrocketed Dr. Horrible to number one on the iTunes list of television shows.7 It ranked at number 15 on Time magazine’s list of top 50 inventions of 2008,8 and won many awards, including an “Outstanding Special Class” Emmy. That such a strange project, an Internet musical about a supervillain, could become so successful is a testament to the effect geeks have on what is considered popular culture, and to the global reach of the web. It also celebrates Whedon’s creativity, appeal, and ability to seamlessly meld genres and subcultures, as well as the strength of his fan base.

“Once More, With Feeling” as Integrated Musical For Whedon, “there is no more glorious form of expression” than musicals.9 Although influenced by composers and lyricists like Sheldon Harnick and Jerry Bock, Frank Loesser, and Stephen Schwartz, Whedon is particularly fond of Sondheim, especially how he structures his shows, uses language, and exploits moral ambiguity.10 To some extent, Whedon’s love of musicals was handed down: his father and grandfather both wrote for television and the musical theater, and Whedon always dreamed of writing a musical himself—especially for television. While he intended to write “an original book musical with a beginning, middle, and end,” he also knew “it had to be a real episode [of television], one that mattered.”11 In OMWF, he presents something of a history of musical theater, paying homage to the genre and its related constructs. The episode’s 19 numbers run the gamut of influences, from classic Broadway love ballad to heavy-metal anthem to large production dance finale to 1930s pastiche number, all while remaining rooted in the musical theater tradition. OMWF aired in November 2001 during Buffy’s sixth season, shortly after the show’s move from the WB to the comparatively male-identified UPN network.12 UPN added the feminist series in an attempt to expand its programming, widen its viewing audience, and “shed its image as the testosterone-powered jockstrap [network],”13 just when Whedon had decided to write the musical episode. While musical theater is overwhelmingly associated with women (and gay men), Buffy gained a considerable number of male viewers while retaining its largely female viewership.14 Whedon noted that at least in his experience and despite long-standing cultural assumptions about the genre, men are not ultimately “as scared of musical theater as they’re made out to be.”15 OMWF was not the first musical episode of a television series—it wasn’t even the first for a television show in the fantasy genre. Xena: Warrior Princess’s 1998 musical episode “Bitter Suite” 365

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didn’t achieve the same crossover appeal as OMWF.16 Xena’s fantasy backdrop may have proven less relatable to viewers than Buffy’s modern-day setting, and at least one “Bitter Suite” actor lip-synched her vocal parts. Also, “Bitter Suite” was not as welcoming to viewers unfamiliar with the series’ mythology.17 While the same might be said of OMWF, new viewers could nevertheless follow the plot and enjoy the episode’s catchy tunes, colorful visuals, engaging story, and self-­ reflexive approach. As a series, Buffy is known for its sparkling dialogue and frequent pop-culture references. Down to its title, OMWF is rife with allusions and word play. The episode regularly exploits metaphors and double meanings to create deeply emotional lyrics that work on literal and symbolic levels. OMWF is episodic in that its central plot is neatly wrapped up at the end of the allotted time. In the episode, a musical demon named Sweet (played by Tony Award-winner Hinton ­Battle) places the town under a spell that forces its residents to sing their deepest secrets, often while dancing. As in many stage musicals, the story here provides an excuse for the characters to sing. Much of the iceberg, however, is hidden below the surface. For example, Tara’s song “Under Your Spell,” like Sondheim’s “Unworthy of Your Love” from Assassins, seems folksy and full of generic love sentiment, but it’s loaded with character development, double meanings, and sexual innuendo. Tara isn’t just in love when she sings “I’m under your spell”; she is literally being controlled by Willow’s magic. Spike, the “undead” vampire who at this point is more emotionally alive than Buffy the recently resurrected human, also means it literally when he sings, “If my heart could beat.” Context reveals this as a linchpin episode, illuminating character development and plot twists of the overall season arc, and changing the characters’ paths for the rest of the season. A true geek, obsessive about a subject to the point of expertise, Whedon became “a virtual encyclopedia of musical film history” through his enthusiasm for the art, and the episode is his valentine to the musical theater.18 Whedon uses many of musical theater’s principles to help the audience relate to the situation while educating them about the genre, whether they realize it or not. Most of the songs were intentionally written as pastiche, incorporating different genres.19 For example, Whedon wanted the episode to start with an overture, to maintain the musical theater tradition, but also to show the episode’s credits without pulling focus from the singing. He also loved being able to incorporate “something old fashioned in a show with such a pop sensibility.”20 The overture is followed by Buffy’s first song, which Whedon intended as a Disney-style “I want” number, similar to “Part of Your World” from The Little Mermaid. Xander and Anya’s duet “I’ll Never Tell” is a 1930s-style “retro pastiche” like Singin’ in the Rain’s “Good Morning”; and “Walk Through the Fire,” the penultimate call to battle, is Whedon’s answer to the “Tonight” reprise from West Side Story. When not referencing a specific style or musical, Whedon referred instead to particular constructs, such as a “book number” (one written to further the plot), a “breakaway pop hit” that could exist beyond the context of the show, or a “huge production number,”21 like “The Mustard,” an 18-second song that encapsulates the history of colorful dance numbers while showing that the main characters aren’t the only ones afflicted by the spell. When the characters use these terms themselves, it lets viewers in on the joke and also allows them to relate to the situation the way the characters do. Viewers familiar with these traditions could recognize and identify them, while those new to musical theater could learn, perhaps subconsciously, a little of the history of musicals, as well as how to analyze them. The publication of the episode’s script even includes a glossary of expressions, so fans unfamiliar with the terminology could look up what they mean. But more important than capturing the style of past musicals, Whedon wanted OMWF to be “real”: to be organic, develop from what was happening in the story, and maintain and further advance the season arc. It was important to him that the episode not be a gimmick or compendium of mostly unrelated songs. A “real” musical, at least for Whedon’s purposes, is an integrated one. Geoffrey Block, in The Oxford Handbook of the American Musical, lists five criteria for integrated 366

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musicals, the most important of which is that songs help advance the plot.22 Whedon embraces this concept, and has been critical of television series like Ally McBeal and Cop Rock, which attempted musical episodes simply by featuring scenes followed by seemingly unrelated songs. “If the song isn’t the scene, then there’s no point in having the song,” he explains. “If the song isn’t the dramatic climax and culmination and very meat of the scene, then it really is a variety show. You did a skit, then you did a song.”23 For Whedon, then, songs had to enhance the story and its characters. When Buffy visits Spike to see if he has any information about what’s happening, he tries to deny he’s affected by the spell, hoping she’ll leave before he succumbs. When she accuses him of being “bad moody” and asks what’s wrong, he replies with the power ballad “Rest in Peace.” The transition here is seamless, and as evidenced by the title, metaphors for sex and death dominate his lyrics: burying his love in a hole six feet deep, laying his body down but not finding “sweet release.” While too often overlooked as a vitally important aspect of the musical theater, dance can further a plot or heighten the drama. In OMWF, Dawn uses balletic movements to avoid capture (unsuccessfully) by Sweet’s henchmen. Buffy takes out said henchmen during her 11:00 number “Something to Sing About,” dispatching them with violent dance and martial-arts movements while singing platitudes like “where there’s life there’s hope,” and “every day’s a gift.” Finally, orchestral underscoring and accompaniment can complement or advance action in a musical. Buffy’s heartbreaking revelation that her well-meaning friends didn’t save her from a terrifying hell dimension, as they thought they had, but instead ripped her out of heaven, is expressed through a dissonant aching tone, emphasizing the pain and horror they’re all feeling. Whedon’s score fulfills all these criteria, thereby making the episode an actual book musical and no mere parody. The songs are pastiche, an intentional choice to help uninitiated audience members familiarize themselves with what they’re seeing, but pastiche is not the same as parody. Whedon’s “real” musical aims at honesty, concerns serious issues, and is not merely played for laughs, as parody would be. The fan reaction to the musical and its longevity and adaptability to other forms—such as Rocky Horror-type sing-alongs—proves its success.

Confronting Musical Stereotypes in OMWF With “Once More, With Feeling,” Whedon wanted to make musicals accessible for an audience largely unfamiliar or uncomfortable with them. Younger men, in particular, may reject musicals, perhaps for fear of association with the many gay men who make and support the genre, or because, as they stubbornly insist, they “know what they like” (or like what they know). People might say, “I hate musicals… except for this one show,” or “I hate musicals, even though I’ve never seen any.” But as Buffy co-executive producer David Fury has responded, “That’s like saying ‘I hate movies,’ because there’s a lot of bad movies out there. But you can’t make a blanket statement [like that].”24 People make lots of excuses for hating musicals: they dismiss them as unrealistic, old fashioned, saccharine, cheesy, and hard to relate to. Frequently, parody musical numbers in other television shows not only promote but also encourage those attitudes. Paul Attinello argues that musicals are mistrusted because they’re “associated with a sentimental, conformist past”; as such, musical numbers in other television shows, for example The Simpsons, are often treated as “grotesque, alien, even dangerous.”25 Whedon acknowledges that even “the term itself connotes something archaic.”26 Probably the biggest obstacle is the implausibility of someone suddenly bursting into song, coupled with the challenging suspension of disbelief this requires. This aspect of musicals is frequently cited as one reason why people struggle with accepting, let alone embracing, the musical theater. It may even explain why sung-through musicals like The Phantom of the Opera and Les Misérables 367

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have reached wider audiences than many others have: these shows don’t have to struggle with the difficult transition between speech and song. On the DVD commentary for OMWF, Whedon’s frustration with the general opinion of musicals is clear: The biggest problem with musicals that people have [is] that they just don’t buy it—which is of course ridiculous because almost none of the things that happen in movies actually happen, but people don’t have trouble buying them because they’re of their era. Musicals are just of a different era—except that they really aren’t. People love them. They won’t admit it, but they do.27 While mega-hits like Hamilton have caused contemporary attitudes about the genre to shift a bit, many musicals are still too closely associated with the compositions and tastes of an older generation, and as such tend to be stuck in the middle on many accounts: musically, socially, and in terms of scholarship, they lie somewhere between classical music and pop. Their stories, musical and vocal styles, and aesthetics are frequently dismissed as not realistic enough for movies or even nonmusical theater, but not artful enough for opera. The Broadway style of singing is too highbrow to rest comfortably in the realm of pop music, and often too lowbrow to be embraced by many opera buffs. Even rock- and pop-influenced musicals are far enough removed from their original aesthetic to be perceived as authentic or “real.”28 These assumptions about musicals belonging to “a different era” can result in two simultaneously contradictory opinions: uninitiated audiences assume that musicals are campy, excessive, or too lighthearted or inane to deal with important issues. Yet some theatergoers prefer their musicals to be light and frivolous, feeling that weighty or intense topics are not really “musical material.” Even when musicals successfully balance these two conflicting ideals, they’re dismissed by the uninformed as quaint. Rodgers and Hammerstein musicals seem to have such criticism thrust upon them, but if you look at the subjects of their musicals, they take on plenty of serious issues, including bigotry, domestic abuse, fascism, and oppression. Some people unfamiliar with musicals are surprised and delighted to learn that they deal with such intense topics. For whatever reason, some viewers find musicals embarrassing. They feel uncomfortable watching people sing, perhaps because they would feel uncomfortable singing themselves. P ­ erforming is a risky and vulnerable activity; it’s much easier to be a critic. But resistance to musicals isn’t just about feeling. Musicals demand significant attention and careful observation to fully perceive the lyrics, music, and action, especially when the last is represented through dance. One viewer admitted he doesn’t like musicals because “I have a really hard time hearing lyrics set to music. I end up focusing on the rhythm or the melody, so I’ll only catch snippets of lyrics.”29 Whedon addresses these stereotypes and problems head-on in OMWF. In many ways, the fantastical vampire series is perfect for a musical episode, since the over-the-top premise “immediately ­ usicals—people excuses the essential absurd conceit of musicals.”30 The common construct of m bursting into song and dance—is explained by Sweet’s spell; this becomes “a plot mechanism that makes perfect sense in a Buffy universe, where demons’ spells continually undermine order, logic, and the laws of nature.”31 Because of the hex placed on the town, the characters are as uncomfortable with their singing as the audience is seeing them sing. Buffy and the gang refer to their experiences as unusual, “not the natural order of things.” This self-reflection enables the audience to experience the weirdness along with the characters, and allows them to feel more comfortable with the characters bursting into song. Because Buffy was well into its sixth season by the time OMWF aired, loyal viewers were invested in the characters and their histories, and in the actors who played them—actors who were largely untrained in singing or dancing (with a few exceptions). This made it “…enjoyable 368

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watching a cast that you’ve watched for six years do something you didn’t know they could do!”32 The actors themselves may not have known either: it’s well-documented that some were uncomfortable with their new roles as musical theater performers, but as professionals, they did their jobs anyway. Because loyal viewers “grew up” with these people—both the characters and the actors portraying them—they feel they know them intimately. They feel that same embarrassment at performing, and that same sense of banding together to overcome it. They relate to the characters/ actors’ strange new predicament in a more emotional, connected way, and they’re more likely to listen to what their heroes are expressing through song. Remember, part of geek culture is the obsession: involving oneself in the minutia of a show, and feeling an intimacy toward the characters, cast, and crew. Whedon kept all of that intact, “instead of betraying their identities for the purpose of a one-off.”33 Further, the simple fact that OMWF is a television musical makes the genre more accessible. TV is less expensive than live theater; it comes right into your home, and is more private than a live setting, where spectators are surrounded by other people. It was important to Whedon that OMWF be “just” an episode of TV. “I didn’t want to say, ‘look, we’re better than a TV show,’” Whedon says. “I wanted to say, ‘you can do all of this in an episode of television, it just depends on how much you care.’”34

Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog In 2007, Whedon was itching to write more songs, stating, “I never wanted to leave that musical place.”35 The Writer’s Guild Association Strike provided the perfect opportunity, and a year later, the 42-minute musical, Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog, was born. The idea started as an audio podcast, but on the picket line it developed into a more involved production: the creators had time, motivation, and contacts; the strike (a power struggle between Hollywood writers and production companies over residuals from Internet content) inspired a new medium for distribution. Whedon brought in his brothers, Jed and Zack, as well as Jed’s then-fiancée, Maurissa Tancharoen, to help him write the story and songs. Friends and colleagues volunteered their time and talent, turning the viral video into a self-funded, small-budget community production. Dr. Horrible was released in a similarly communal way, in three parts over five days. The musical was initially available free on the web, then as a DVD release. Like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog sports one of Whedon’s typically goofy, easily underestimated titles, which doesn’t convey the depth of its subject. And like OMWF, Dr. Horrible is an integrated book musical with songs that advance the plot. Broadway and television actor Neil Patrick Harris stars as the titular doctor, a “low-rent supervillain trying to get his villainy off the ground,”36 who is also attempting to work up the courage to approach his crush, Penny (Buffy alum Felicia Day). He’s thwarted in both villainy and love by his nemesis, Captain Hammer, played by another Buffy alum, Nathan Fillion. The musical was created as a means of putting power “in different hands”37—those of not just the creators, but also the fans: people on the fringes and subcultures, who admire Whedon’s work and support it through word-of-mouth, blogging, and fan products. At 2008’s Comic-Con in San Diego, Whedon established Dr. Horrible’s intent as “a new form of artistic community that involves all of you guys [the fans], and all of us [the cast and crew], and maybe not so much some other people.”38 In an interview with TV Guide, he explained, “We do it for the fans, we do it as an advertisement for itself and for just this culture, this idea of people who are doing something smaller scale but hopefully in such a way they can reach a lot of people. And maybe then it can make us an eleven-ty kadillion dollars. Or maybe it won’t.”39 Apparently, it did. In 2015, Whedon mentioned that he made more money from Dr. ­Horrible than from writing and directing the hugely successful Avengers movie, which grossed over 369

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$600  million domestically.40 Even before the DVD of Dr. Horrible was released, it had made enough money to pay the cast and crew.41 The success of Internet projects like Dr. Horrible, The Guild (created by Horrible co-star Day), and other viral videos suggests that cult audiences are far larger than mainstream producers realized. No mere superhero story, Dr. Horrible offers a variant on a familiar theme: a Geek competes with a Jock for a Pretty Girl. This plot structure is common in comic books: Clark Kent, for example, can never win Lois Lane’s attention, but she’s all over Superman. While heroes like Superman and Buffy are outsiders because of their strength and power, Dr. Horrible is a different kind of outcast in that he’s nerdy and a villain. As the only character in the musical with an alter ego, Dr. Horrible, especially in the guise of Billy, is shy, awkward, and clearly exceptionally science-minded, but lacking in social graces. At one point he refers to himself as a dork, hoping that Penny will not see him that way, though it soon becomes apparent to the audience—if not to Billy—that Penny is in fact more interested in him than she is in the cheesy, narcissistic jock figure, Captain Hammer. At least initially, the Dr. Horrible plot trajectory is similar to that of the Broadway musical Wicked, in that audiences are encouraged to identify more with the outcast and supposed villain. It remains unclear whether Dr. Horrible, like Elphaba, is actually good or bad, especially since his reputation for evil results more from a series of misunderstandings and accidents than through his own actions. The “hero,” Captain Hammer, is actually the bigger villain. Since he has no alter ego, all that’s left of Hammer is an oversized ego. As Jed Whedon puts it, “The thing you don’t like about heroes is what Captain Hammer embodies. He’s a huge dick!”42 Dr. Horrible is more intimate in scope than OMWF, and is centered primarily on the three main characters: Dr. Horrible/Billy, Hammer, and Penny. There are few secondary roles, including Horrible’s friend Moist and Hammer’s three groupies, whose loyalty and admiration of trivial possessions are commentaries on geeks and fandom. There are no big production numbers, and most of the songs in the piece have no conclusions. Instead, many end on unresolved chords; others stop abruptly when a singer is interrupted by another character’s actions. This approach solves the problem of smoothly transitioning between dialogue and song, especially since there is no live audience to applaud. For Dr. Horrible, Whedon again used actors available to him, though this time he chose actors with singing experience. Neil Patrick Harris has a musical theater background, but at the time was better known as a television actor, which helped Dr. Horrible attract more viewers. Day and Fillion could both sing too, though the latter gained most of his experience as a host at a karaoke bar. The use of singing actors, rather than trained singers, helped normalize the practice of bursting into song since the actors’ singing voices are more an extension of their speaking voices. The techniques Whedon used in OMWF to make viewers more comfortable with the musical genre, however, are not included in Dr. Horrible. For example, Dr. Horrible contains no references to the constructs of musical theater. The songs are germane to the story and presented without elaborate excuses or justifications. The musical numbers are not necessarily pastiches, nor are they presented as fantasies or dreams—or even as performances. Emerging naturally from dialogue, the songs help express character and further plot development. No one voices disbelief or bewilderment when characters begin to sing; there’s no confusion of reality and illusion, of normal and abnormal. In the world that Dr. Horrible creates for audiences, characters all just happen to sing their feelings sometimes. Dr. Horrible is self-contained and doesn’t assume that audiences will come in having any familiarity with the characters. As Whedon stated, “We knew as writers that we could bare our ridiculous souls to the point where people would suddenly, sincerely burst into song—it took six years to achieve that kind of audience trust on ‘Buffy.’”43 In many respects, Whedon used OMWF to introduce the musical form to his non-musical loving audience; once his followers were familiar 370

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with the idea of a televised musical, they could more easily accept the musical genre as it is. It is almost as if he said, “Now that I’ve shown you what to expect, you can handle the real thing.” The simple fact for both of Whedon’s musicals is that they contain catchy, likable songs. As Tamsen Wolff points out, musical theater “relies on the audience’s desire to perform the songs they’ve heard performed, and to form communities based on that desire.”44 Both “Once More, With Feeling” and Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog successfully did this—Whedon himself has noted that OMWF has, in some respects, developed its own following that remains separate in part from the show.45 Both musicals achieved a hard-sought sense of community—a cult following, even within a larger following of geeks. Both musicals developed new lives as live-action musical extravaganzas, where fans dress in costume, attend theatrical screenings, and participate in and recreate the films as they watch them, much in the style of The Rocky Horror Picture Show. The science-fiction convention Dragon*Con held such an event in August 2008; about 3,000 people were admitted, and 500 more were turned away.46 Paste Magazine’s Josh Jackson, who attended, said, “for the first time during the crazy Dragon*Con day, I didn’t feel like an outsider.”47 With “Once More, With Feeling” and Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog, Whedon demonstrates that the musical theater genre can be valid in any medium. Following his successful experiments, more television producers have attempted musical episodes, or even entire series, in a variety of styles: from one-off numbers to jukebox musicals to fully integrated shows. Series as varied as Grey’s Anatomy, That ‘70s Show, Fringe, The Flash, and even the violent prison drama Oz have featured episodes styled after jukebox musicals, while Scrubs, Psych, Community, and the daytime soap opera Passions have attempted musical episodes with original scores. In 1990, Cop Rock scarred television creators enough that they were terrified to try anything like it again. Less than three decades later, however, several musical series—and not just those aimed at children—have seen increasing success. Musical theater-inspired series like Glee, Eli Stone, Galavant, Smash, Rise, and Crazy Ex-Girlfriend have offered variations on the form, and together have helped erase the stigma Cop Rock created. Through the entire series, Buffy the Vampire Slayer used music “to reinforce the communal identity between the program, Buffy, and its fans, all of whom exist on the fringe of mainstream network television.”48 While this applies to the rock and alternative music used throughout the show, nowhere is it truer than in the musical episode. For what is more “alternative” to television audiences than musical theater? “Once More, With Feeling” expanded the Buffy viewership and presented something often considered more “highbrow”—a musical—to its small, devoted following. Then, Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog secured the musical’s place on the small screen.

Notes 1 Laura Miller. “The Man behind the Slayer.” Salon. 20 May 2003. Web. 05 Oct. 2017. . 2 Rhonda V. Wilcox. “Introduction: Much Ado About Whedon.” Reading Joss Whedon. eds. Rhonda V. Wilcox, Tanya R. Cochran, Cynthea Masson, and David Lavery. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2014. 13. 3 Neil Feineman. Geek Chic: The Ultimate Guide to Geek Culture. Corte Madera: Gingko Press, 2005. 13. 4 David Klein. “Emmy-worthy Buffy Musical Slays This Critic.” Electronic Media 21.27 (8 July 2002): 6. 5 “Interview: Joss Whedon,” Prodigeek (blog). 7 July 2008. Web. 30 June 2017. . 6 Gary Strauss. “Dr. Horrible Diagnosis: It’s a Big Hit Online.” USA Today. 17 July 2008. Web. 30 June 2017. . 7 Mike Hale. “In Online Musical, the Mad Doctor Is In.” New York Times. 2 Aug. 2008. Web. 30 June 2017. . 8 “15. The Direct-to-Web Supervillain Musical.” in Time, “Best Inventions of 2008.” Web. 30 June 2017. .

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Renée Camus 9 Joss Whedon. Buffy the Vampire Slayer “Once More, With Feeling”: Original Cast Album. 2002, Rounder, compact disc, liner notes. 10 Joss Whedon. Buffy the Vampire Slayer “Once More, With Feeling”: The Script Book. New York: Simon Pulse, 2002. 63; Len Schiff. “Joss Whedon: Absolute Admiration for Sondheim.” The Sondheim Review 11.4 (Summer 2005). Web. 30 June 2017. . 11 Schiff. 12 In 2006, UPN and The WB combined into what is now The CW. See Kristen Baldwin and Henry Goldblatt. “The Story Behind the WB-UPN Merger.” Entertainment Weekly. 21 Jan. 2006. Web. 25 Nov. 2017. . 13 Josef Adalian. “UPN Sinks Teeth into WB’s ‘Buffy’.” Variety. 23 Apr. 2001. Web. 1 Jan. 2018. . 14 Rick Kissell. “‘Buffy’s’ Boffo in UPN Preem.” Variety. 3 Oct. 2001. Web. 1 Jan. 2018. . 15 Katherine Stroup. “Newsmakers: Put the ‘Vamp’ in Vampire.” Newsweek 138.21 (19 Nov. 2001): 82. 16 The show did another musical episode in 2000 called “Lyre, Lyre, Hearts on Fire.” which was a “jukebox” episode comprising previously existing pop songs. 17 Stefan Blitz. “Xena! The Musical (And the Rise of the Musical Episode).” Forces of Geek. 9 Oct. 2012. Web. 1 Jan. 2018. . 18 John Kenneth Muir. Singing a New Tune: The Rebirth of the Modern Film Musical from Evita to DeLovely and Beyond. New York: Applause Theatre & Cinema Books, 2005. 10. 19 Prodigeek. 20 Joss Whedon. “Once More, With Feeling” commentary, 2001; Beverly Hills: 20th Century Fox, 2005. DVD. 21 Whedon, Script Book, 58–60. 22 Geoffrey Block. “Integration.” The Oxford Handbook of the American Musical. Eds. Raymond Knapp et al. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. 98–99. 23 Muir, 276. 24 David Fury, interview with author at WhedonCon, Woodland Hills. 20 May 2017. 25 Paul Attinello. “Rock, Television, Paper, Musicals, Scissors: Buffy, The Simpsons, and Parody.” Music, Sound, and Silence in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Eds. Paul Attinello, Janet K. Halfyard, and Vanessa Knights. Surrey: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2010. 239. 26 Muir, 287. 27 Whedon, commentary. 28 For more on musicals and authenticity, see Raymond Knapp. “Performance, Authenticity, and the Reflexive Idealism of the American Musical.” The Oxford Handbook of the American Musical. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. 408–421; and Elizabeth L. Wollman. The Theater Will Rock: A History of the Rock Musical from Hair to Hedwig. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006. 24–41. 29 Heptadecagram, response on “Survey Regarding Buffy and Musicals.” Livejournal. 18 Oct. 2008. . 30 Richard Harrington. “Unsung ‘Buffy’: Props for A Magical Musical Moment.” Washington Post. 2 July 2002. Web. 1 Jan. 2018. . 31 Ibid. 32 Funkybeccabecca, response on “Hello, and Informal Poll re: OMWF.” Livejournal. 8 Sept. 2008. . 33 Aesiron, response on “Hello, and Informal Poll re: OMWF.” Livejournal. 8 Sept. 2008. Web. 34 Whedon, commentary. 35 Matt Roush. “Exclusive: First Look at Joss Whedon’s ‘Dr. Horrible’.” TV Guide. 30 June 2008. Web. 1 Jan. 2018. . 36 Joss Whedon, et al. Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog: The Book. London: Titan Books, 2010. 9. 37 Joss Whedon. Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog panel, Comic-Con. San Diego. 25 July 2008. Web. 14 Jan. 2018. . 38 I.e.: studios, networks, and distributors. Ibid. 39 Roush, “Exclusive.”

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Joss Whedon and the Geek Musical 40 Cynthia Littleton. “Joss Whedon Says He Made More Money From ‘Dr. Horrible’ Than The First Avengers Movie.” Variety. 10 Oct. 2015. Web. 13 Jan. 2018. . 41 Joss Whedon. comment on “Dr. Horrible DVD available for pre-order on Amazon.” Whedonesque.com. 28 Nov. 2008. Web. . 42 Whedon, et al. 13. 43 “Q&A: Joss Whedon Examines Dr. Horrible.” Los Angeles Times. 14 July 2008. 4 4 Tamsen Wolff. “Theater.” The Oxford Handbook of the American Musical. Eds. Raymond Knapp et al. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. 134. 45 Muir, 281. 46 Dr. Horrible (user), September 2, 2008, comment on Josh Jackson. “Dr. Horrible & The Buffy H ­ orror Picture Show.” Paste. 31 Aug. 2008. Web. 17 June 2017. . 47 Josh Jackson. “Dr. Horrible & The Buffy Horror Picture Show.” . 48 S. Renée Dechert. “‘My Boyfriend’s in the Band!’: Buffy and the Rhetoric of Music.” Fighting the Forces: What’s at Stake in Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Eds. Rhonda V. Wilcox and David Lavery. Lanham: ­Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2002. 219.

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37 “YOUTUBE! MUSICALS! YOUTUBESICALS!” Cultivating Theater Fandom through New Media Aya Esther Hayashi Every year, the Broadway League releases a report on the audience demographics for the most recent season. The 2015–2016 season was no different from previous seasons, despite an uptick in diversity in casts of shows like Hamilton, Shuffle Along, and The Color Purple: theatergoers were predominantly white, middle-aged, female tourists. A consistent debate among producers is how to make their shows appeal to the majority demographic while also attracting new audiences (Davenport 2016). Perhaps, one key to diversifying audiences lies in developing active ones, thus in cultivating theatrical fandom. The audience demographic report also includes a statistic about “devoted fans,” who in the 2015–2016 season accounted for under 6% of unique audience members but 31% of admissions. The Broadway League defines a “devoted fan” as someone who attends 15 or more performances. But is attendance at so many shows an accurate representation of what Broadway fans do? Far from it. The League’s model of fandom, as it stands, is based entirely on a binary relationship in which producers produce and fans are but one segment of their consumer base. While attending shows is a significant aspect of being a Broadway fan, it is also a privilege only afforded by those with access and expendable income. What the organization has been slow to realize is that there is a swath of younger fans who express their love for professional theater through a variety of other activities.1 Some engage through social media with tweets, memes, and GIFs. Some write fiction based on their favorite shows. Others create original artwork and crafts. And some create their own musicals.2 In this chapter I look at musicals created by the fan production teams of Team StarKid and AVbyte. The members of these two teams are young: all are, as of publication, under the age of 30. They self-identify as fans of musicals. As formally trained playwrights, musicians, actors, and filmmakers, they produce their own parodic, comedy-infused musicals—Team StarKid for the regional stage in Chicago, and AVbyte for film. Both use YouTube to distribute their works to a wider audience and build their own dedicated fan bases. I’ll provide a brief history of the new media musical. I will then turn to the individual histories of Team StarKid and AVbyte, focusing on Team StarKid’s Twisted: The Untold Story of a Royal Vizier (2013) and AVbyte’s Ps4 vs Xbox One – Console Wars the Musical (2013). Analyzing their respective videos and drawing on personal interviews with members of both channels, I’ll dissect how these two teams interact with their fans. In conclusion, I’ll argue that Broadway producers could better engage younger, active audiences by adopting the content production and social media techniques used by Team StarKid and AVbyte.

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A Brief History of the New Media Musical At once a source of streaming video and music, an educational tool, social media platform, grassroots distributor, advertiser, and favorite means to procrastinate, YouTube has become a ubiquitous part of people’s lives. Created in 2005 by Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim, it immediately garnered attention from tech bloggers as a “site to watch.” Purchased by Google in 2006 for $1.65 billion, the site has left an indelible mark on the media landscape. Unlike traditional media companies, YouTube is not a content producer: it is a content aggregator (Burgess and Green 2009, 4). It collects content, serves as a distribution platform, and splits the advertisement revenue with its content creators (Rosenberg 2015). Thus, it sits in a new ­m iddle-zone between independent content producers and established, traditional media companies, functioning as a tool for both camps without being claimed entirely by either. YouTube is many things to its users, and thus its uses and meanings frequently conflict. Theatrical producers usually fall into the corporate camp and resort to using YouTube as another form of advertising. By looking at how fans have created content and used YouTube to reach a large audience, producers can learn the techniques used by fans, all of which can be seen in the genre of new media musical. Drawing on the traditions of the twentieth-century stage and film musical, the new media or Internet musical frequently parodies music-theatrical conventions by merging them with other entertainment genres and subjects that are typically not sung (or danced) about. These subjects include villains, superheroes, films, television shows, video games, comic books, and social media. These musicals vary in length. Some are performed live, but all are filmed and uploaded to the Internet (typically on YouTube, but other platforms like Vimeo and Hulu have been used). The musicals then spread through preexisting social networks, online and person-to-person, to reach a wide audience. Team StarKid and AVbyte trace their appeal to the prototypical Internet musical: Joss ­W hedon’s Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog (2008). Motivated by concerns about the 2007–2008 Writers’ Strike, Whedon wrote and produced this 45-minute, three-act musical with his brothers Zack and Jed Whedon, and his sister-in-law, the actress Maurissa Tancharoen. His chief desire was to create something of his own—something professional, small, and relatively inexpensive. Most importantly, no network could interfere. The cast included musical theater actor and former Doogie Howser, M.D. star Neil Patrick Harris, television actor Nathan Fillion (an alumnus of Whedon’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Firefly), and web series actress and producer Felicia Day. The entire company worked despite no guarantee of future pay (Leonard 2011). In this original musical about the video-blogging, wanna-be villain Billy (codename: Dr.  ­Horrible), the Whedons and Tancharoen mix and match music-theatrical and pop-rock genres, moving, for example, from a whimsical foxtrot to a “he says/she says” pop duet to an intense, Sondheim-inspired patter song. The characters’ awareness that they are singing leads to many gags throughout the piece. Like Whedon’s prior work in the musical episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer (“Once More With Feeling,” 2002), Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog inverts the narrative and musical expectations of the genre. Whedon’s fans were well aware of the musical and the motivations behind its production. When the team released Dr. Horrible on the official website in July 2008, traffic was so high that the website crashed. Later, the musical streamed on Hulu and could be purchased on iTunes. The soundtrack and DVD also sold well once released. Whedon recouped his $200,000 investment and fully compensated his actors and crew. Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog—with its mixture of self-awareness, inversion of expectations, and DIY (“Do-It-Yourself ”) production (albeit by an established television director)—set the aesthetic and genre standards for the new media musical. It also hinted at what online video could offer independent media producers, something that Team StarKid and AVbyte would take full advantage of.

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Team StarKid Team StarKid started on the campus of the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. In 2008, founding members (and brothers) Matt and Nick Lang were theater majors and part of a student-run theater organization called Basement Arts. The organization’s annual 24-hour script challenge, in which members take a full day to translate an original idea into a script, introduced them to musical theater major A.J. Holmes, who wanted to be the first student to write a musical for this challenge. Matt Lang and Holmes teamed up and wrote a draft of the show that became StarKid’s second production, Me and My Dick. Shortly after the 24-hour challenge, the Langs invited Holmes to contribute music for a parody musical they were writing based on Harry Potter. Holmes split songwriting duties with Darren Criss, later of Glee fame. The Langs submitted a proposal of the show, tentatively titled Harry Potter the Musical, to Basement Arts for the organization’s 2008–2009 season. The show was accepted and given a $100 production budget. Harry Potter the Musical was not a faithful adaptation of Rowling’s books. Pulling elements from the first, fourth, sixth, and seventh novels of the series, the show freely played with Rowling’s creation. All characters were parodic distillations of their novel counterparts. Romantic pairings pulled from certain fan-fiction circles, like Draco Malfoy’s crush on Hermione Granger, were interpolated and put alongside canonic relationships like that of Harry Potter and Ginny Weasley. Other purposefully ridiculous elements, like Pigfarts, the wizarding school on Mars, were added, and celebrities from the real world were liberally referenced. The show ran from April 9 to 11, 2009. The Langs recorded each performance so the cast and creative team could share it with friends and family. When the Langs uploaded the show to ­YouTube, the online Harry Potter fandom rapidly spread it through numerous blogs, websites, Twitter, and Tumblr feeds. The creative team realized that their musical had a wider audience, so they took down the video, polished, reedited, and re-uploaded it in July 2009, naming their channel Team StarKid.3 They changed the title of the show to A Very Potter Musical to avoid accusations of copyright infringement. The video went viral again. A Very Potter Musical’s Internet success allowed Team StarKid to catch the attention of the mainstream entertainment industry, making it onto EW.com’s list of best viral videos of 2009 (Lyons 2009). The Langs and their University of Michigan colleagues continued to produce shows through Basement Arts until they graduated. Their fan base grew with their productions of Me and My Dick and A Very Potter Sequel. The soundtrack to Me and My Dick made it onto the Billboard Top Cast Albums chart, earning them more mainstream entertainment recognition. A Very Potter Sequel earned over 160,000 unique views when it was uploaded to YouTube on July 22, 2010, making it the most viewed video of the day. In 2010, the Langs, Criss, and Basement Arts actor and writer Brian Holden decided to consolidate Team StarKid into an official theater company based in Chicago. They found commercial representation with talent agent Pat Brady, a self-proclaimed Harry Potter fan who met the troupe at a fan convention. They retained many of the actors from their Ann Arbor productions who, by this time, also had significant fan followings of their own. These actors worked for scant pay; the gig work mainly allowed them to establish their own professional brands and social media stretch. The first musical produced in Chicago was Starship, in February 2011. In 2012, Team StarKid produced Holy Musical B@man! and performed a staged reading of A Very Potter Senior Year at the Harry Potter fan convention LeakyCon, held in Chicago that year. Their alchemy of pop-culture parody, homage, and tongue-in-cheek humor attracted a young, engaged audience. The troupe interacted with fans regularly through social media and at conventions, while their merchandise sales (t-shirts, posters, soundtracks, etc.) and YouTube advertisement revenue provided a steady if modest income that allowed them to set the bar higher for their next production.

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Twisted Team StarKid’s seventh full production, Twisted: The Untold Story of a Royal Vizier, was the most ambitious project to date. The Lang brothers wrote the book with Eric Kahn Gale. A.J. Holmes returned to compose the music. The musical aimed to be to Disney’s Aladdin (1992) what Stephen Schwartz’s musical Wicked (2003) was to Frank L. Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900) and its iconic 1939 film adaptation. Whereas Wicked’s creative team had freer rein with public domain properties, Twisted’s creative team had to exercise more caution. They were attempting to parody a beloved animated musical that was owned by a company infamous for enforcing copyright claims (Osterndorf 2014). They carefully constructed the story and music, only naming characters who belonged in the public domain and lightly altering other character names without disguising their referent. Twisted reframes the story of Aladdin by making Ja’far the hero of the story. Here, he is a well-meaning city official who, despite his best efforts, is blamed for the failings of the kingdom’s government. Through flashback, we learn that he fell in love with and was married to Sherrezade, of One Thousand and One Nights fame. They are ripped apart, however, when the Sultan kidnaps her for his harem. Ja’far’s subsequent quest for the magical lamp is transformed from a political power grab into a romantic quest to save his wife. Aladdin, in contrast, is recast as a perverse, overgrown man-child whose sole intent is to seduce the kingdom’s princess. The Princess, styled after Disney’s Jasmine, remains oblivious to the motivations of those around her and to her own privilege, but she proves ultimately to be good-hearted. Twisted does not alter any of the plot of the Disney musical but offers unseen moments before, during, and after the movie and different interpretations of overlapping events. Twisted also aimed to parody the scores of Disney musicals, specifically those by composer Alan Menken.4 In previous StarKid productions, songs were often written by one or more composers and styled after popular music genres. They were inserted into the show to highlight emotional moments, but did not play an integral role in the telling of the story. The scores required a standard rock ensemble of piano, guitar, bass, and drums. Specific musical arrangements were usually figured out by the band during rehearsals. Twisted was the first show in which the music itself was part of the parody. A.J. Holmes recognized that emulating Menken’s sound required a larger, more orchestral ensemble. In addition, the songs had to be rooted in the characters’ development, reflect their emotional state, and progress the story. He realized that Twisted could be Team StarKid’s first truly integrated musical. Holmes brought on BMI-trained lyricist Kaley McMahon and orchestrator Andrew Fox. The music team knew they were writing for an audience that was intimately familiar with Disney’s animated musicals, and with stage musicals in general, so they wove references to multiple shows into Twisted. One of the clearest examples is seen in the title song of the show. Similar to Wicked’s “No Good Deed,” Ja’far makes his decision in “Twisted” to be the evil vizier. At the beginning of the song, Ja’far laments that no matter his intentions or what he tries to do, others will always interpret his actions as evil. In his anguish, he slips into a liminal space where he meets Ursula from The Little Mermaid (1989), Scar from The Lion King (1994), and Gaston from Beauty and the Beast (1991). Ursula, Scar, and Gaston each sing about how they too had the best intentions; yet after their deaths, their stories became “twisted.” The villains surround Ja’far and, in unison, sing a descending minor third on the lyric “Twisted.” The orchestra begins a chromatic vamp underneath as an offstage chorus continues singing the “Twisted” motive. Ursula declares, “I only wished to reclaim what was mine!” Scar follows with, “I only wished for equal rights for all!” Gaston proclaims, “I only wished to save her!” They are joined by Maleficent and Captain Hook, who declare their misinterpreted convictions; the villains’ wishes overlap in stretto fashion with the orchestra increasing the dynamics

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and tempo of the vamp. The villains’ cacophony consolidates into repeated statements of “I only wished!” as they circle Ja’far downstage center. Cruella DeVille enters upstage and punctures the moment, shouting, “I only wished to have a coat made out of puppies!” With this song, Holmes and McMahon crafted a multi-referential homage. Ja’far’s opening solo in “Twisted,” with its agitated electric guitar accompaniment and near-breathless delivery, revels in its connection to Wicked and “No Good Deed.” As the villains enter, Fox adds to the Disney homage by subtly altering the orchestral accompaniment of every verse to reflect each villain’s solo in their original movies. The orchestral vamp underlining the “I only wished…” montage and the descending minor third that the villains and offstage chorus sing are the same ones used in the opening of “Another National Headline” from Stephen Sondheim’s Assassins. The villains’ declarations mimic the assassins’ statements of “I did it to….” The music team knew many Team StarKid followers would recognize the Disney musical references; the Assassins reference was more for their own pleasure, since they all cite Sondheim as a major influence on their work. The quote also rewarded StarKid fans who were familiar with the broader musical theater canon.5 As the script and score solidified in February 2013, the ambition of the project revealed itself through production costs. The hiring of McMahon and Fox added to the anticipated budget of the show. Holmes, by the end of the winter, was also encouraging the company to hire Justin Fischer as music director so that he and McMahon could focus on finishing the score. The company also needed to hire a choreographer, costumer, and set designer. Because they were an independent theater company, Team StarKid lacked a commercial producer. However, they realized their large fan base could function similarly, and opened a Kickstarter campaign. Kickstarter is an online crowdsourcing company that allows entrepreneurs, startup companies, and content producers to fund projects through a tiered system of donations, and to spread awareness of their projects through social media. Supporters can donate anything from ten dollars to many thousands. For every donation tier, there is a reward; the more a supporter gives, the better the reward. Sometimes, supporters can earn additional rewards if they share the campaign through their own social media accounts. The campaign manager sets a fundraising goal and a date by which to reach it. The project must meet or exceed its goal by the end date to receive the donations. Team StarKid opened their campaign on March 22, 2013, with the hopes of raising $35,000 in a month. The initial goal would cover the costs the production had already accrued. Rewards included tickets to attend the show in Chicago and copies of the cast album. They achieved their goal by the end of the day, and within a week, they had to remove the ticket and album rewards because providing them would have exceeded the money raised for that reward level. The quick support of their fan base allowed the company to fund other aspects of the project, like hiring a music director, stage manager, choreographer, fight choreographer, lighting designer, and additional actors and pit musicians. By the end of the campaign, the project had raised approximately $143,000. Additional funds allowed them to improve the set, lighting design, costumes, and offer better pay to the cast and crew (Team StarKid 2013a). Twisted ran for three weeks in July 2014, and was met with much acclaim. The cast album and video were released the following November. Holmes, McMahon, Fox, and Fischer also released the digital album Twisted: Twisted. Parodying the 1990s Disney tradition of recording radio-ready pop covers of their movies’ top songs, the album featured an R&B version of “A Thousand and One Nights” and remixes of the songs “Everything and More,” “The Golden Rule,” and “Take Off Your Clothes.” Holmes’ demo tracks for four numbers were also included. Fox and Fischer compiled a piano-vocal score that was made available for purchase, a merchandise first for Team StarKid. In March 2014, the music team also produced an abridged concert version of Twisted at Studio 54 in New York City, which sold out both nights. 378

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Twisted provides a useful touchpoint as to how fans can be engaged in the production of a show. Team StarKid interacts regularly with their fan base through Twitter, Tumblr, and other social media platforms. The Langs and the troupe’s composers, writers, and actors regularly thank their fans for the shout-outs and tags, and even send birthday wishes when requested. In turn, StarKid’s fans support them even when they are doing things unrelated to the troupe. Holmes—a working actor who has played Elder Cunningham in The Book of Mormon’s national tour, London, ­Melbourne, and Sydney productions—noted that a significant number of people he meets at the stage door are StarKid fans. Fan support also translates into funding productions, which can be seen in Twisted’s successful Kickstarter campaign. The troupe’s successes suggest that audiences are eager to be engaged. Some professional theater producers and industry leaders (such as Lin-Manuel Miranda, Jeffrey Seller, and Ken Davenport) have begun to engage audiences through new media. If more of their colleagues were to adjust their notion of what makes a Broadway fan, they could discover other means of diversifying their audience and even funding productions.

AVbyte Run by brothers Antonius and Vijay Nazareth, the YouTube channel AVbyte is known for its mini-film musicals, each under three minutes, which parody pop cultural texts and phenomena. Born in Verona, Italy, the Nazareths grew up in a musical family. Their father, Daniel, was a symphonic and operatic conductor, and his work, as well as their respective studies in piano and cello, carried them all over continental Europe. As children, the brothers’ entertainment consisted of classic Hollywood musicals, film adaptations of Broadway classics like My Fair Lady and The Sound of Music, and 1990s Disney musicals. In 2009, the brothers moved to New York City, where Antonius studied piano performance and Vijay studied film-making. During a semester at New York University, Antonius’ interests turned toward musical theater composition. This fit perfectly with Vijay’s desire to start making original films. Both brothers became fascinated with YouTube as a platform to create content and gain an audience. Simultaneously, mediated musical theater was experiencing a renaissance with the popularity of Glee and the film adaptations of musicals like Les Misérables. The brothers sensed a dearth, though, of new musicals. They decided to produce original ones and use YouTube to distribute them. In October 2011, they registered their channel AVbyte with the intent to create a new minimusical every week; their channel description proclaimed, “YouTube! Musicals! YouTubesicals!” “AV” was a play on their first initials and the analog term “audio-visual”; “byte” was a newer digital term. The brothers saw themselves as fusing an older art form, musical theater, with new media. By creating musicals about things they loved—video games, social media, and television shows—they hoped to expose people who did not normally listen to symphonic music or watch Hollywood musicals to those traditions. They uploaded their first musical, Murdering ­Musical Madness, on January 3, 2012. Over the next few months, their channel gained close to 5,000 subscribers. The general aesthetic and pattern of the channel developed over 2012. The brothers picked topics they liked, sometimes at the suggestion of viewers. For each, Antonius drafted a few versions of the score with music and lyrics. They brought in actors and, on filming day, spent the morning teaching the song to them. They filmed in the afternoon with a click track and recorded piano accompaniment. Costumes, when needed, were designed by one of their actresses, Elizabeth Oldak. Vijay then edited the best takes from the shoot and Antonius orchestrated the accompaniment. The actors returned to rerecord the vocal parts over the finished video and orchestration. New musicals were typically released at the start of the week, with behind-the-scenes videos coming 379

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two days later, and videos responding to viewers’ comments and reactions two days after that. All the while, the brothers were beginning the drafting process for the next musical. Their fan base grew exponentially in April 2012 when noted vlogger Hank Green found their INSTAGRAM—The Musical. Green contacted the Nazareths about collaborating on a musical about Tumblr, the microblogging site popular among their shared young audience. They cowrote the lyrics, and Antonius Nazareth scored it. They filmed their portions separately and stitched the video together through shared cloud services and email consultation. Tumblr: The Musical was released in July 2012 on the Vlogbrothers, the YouTube channel Hank Green shared with his brother, New York Times-bestselling author John. In the video tag after the musical, Hank Green promoted the Nazareths’ channel. At the Vlogbrothers’ suggestion, thousands flocked to AVbyte. Their subscriptions quadrupled within a week. By 2013, the original goal of producing one musical per week proved too strenuous, and production was slowed to a musical approximately every two weeks. Several videos went viral thanks to Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr, as well as popular websites like BuzzFeed. The professional quality of their musicals allowed the brothers to foster productive business relationships with media companies like Disney, Fox, the CW, and Nintendo. The Nazareths have developed a relatively sustainable business model. Most of their income is generated by YouTube’s advertisement revenue; additional income comes from selling music through the iTunes store. This is enough to support the brothers in New York City and maintain production of new videos. It is not enough to pay their actors; as with Team StarKid, working for AVbyte has helped actors build their resumés and social media presence, which are increasingly important to casting directors (Hod 2015). The Nazareth brothers, now considered among the top new media content producers, actively seek to interest new audiences in musical theater through their videos, one example of which is their videogame/West Side Story parody, Ps4 vs Xbox One— Console Wars the Musical.

Ps4 vs Xbox One—Console Wars the Musical Released on July 8, 2013, Console Wars the Musical analogizes the rivalry between the Sharks and the Jets with the rivalry between fans of the Playstation 4 and Xbox One consoles (Weinberger 2015). As avid gamers themselves, the Nazareths wanted to poke fun at this feud using the musical and cinematic languages of West Side Story. The video opens with a panoramic view of a cityscape with title credits superimposed. ­Strident, chromatic chords similar to those at the start of West Side Story’s “Quintet” play. The opening tenor chorus, dressed in shades of blue, represents Playstation loyalists as they sing and dance under New York City’s West Side Highway. Boasting about how their console is better and cheaper than Microsoft’s Xbox One, they tuck jump past the camera in a move redolent of Jerome Robbins’ choreography. The musical jumps to the Xbox One crowd whose members are dressed in green. Unlike the Playstation gang, this group includes women. Antonius explains in the comments video that the holiday weekend left them with a shortage of male actors. However, he justifies the women’s presence by noting that more dance games like Just Dance are only available on the Xbox One, not the Playstation (AVbyte 2013c).6 They sing and dance their response about the innovativeness of their console, ending with Robbins’ iconic relevé-grand battement. The two groups meet underneath a bridge in a park, first circling each other. Vijay includes an overhead shot of the gangs converging. Notable in the swirl are a girl in a white dress decorated with a red ribbon and a young man in a red-and-white plaid shirt, their outfits visually reminiscent of Maria and Tony’s. As the two groups begin fighting, the girl steps out to sing lyrically about the benefits of playing games on PC. She is joined by the boy in plaid who shares her views, 380

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and they gaze lovingly at each other. The camera pans back to the Playstation/Xbox One rumble; the sides shout-sing insults at each other in melodies and rhythms like the Quintet’s “Well, they began it!” Maria and Tony enter the fray, trying to convince their two sides that switching to PC will end the feud. The rivals are gradually convinced by the couple, and unlike the musical’s source material, the two sides happily mix at the end with the girl and boy staring beatifically into the distance, wrapped in a sweetheart’s embrace. The Nazareths are especially proud of Console Wars the Musical. More than their other videogame musicals, they saw this one as bridging the gap between the performing arts and the gaming worlds. Antonius realized after reading the responses that “… the people watching it had never seen a Broadway show, never seen a symphonic concert … [they] were just into gaming.” 7 For viewers who were more familiar with West Side Story than video games, Console Wars translated the intense nature of the console disputes into a familiar visual and musical language. The behind-the-scenes and comments videos mitigate the relationship between the Nazareths and their viewers. As noted earlier, the Nazareths earn a modest income through YouTube: the more people watch their musicals, the more money they are paid by YouTube’s partners. They could get by simply posting their musicals. However, by posting additional videos, they invite dedicated viewers into their creative process. They also engage directly with their fans in the comments videos and suggest other ways to interact with or meet them. In the supplemental videos for Console Wars the Musical, for example, they invite viewers to friend them on Steam, a PC platform for multiplayer games, as well as face-to-face meetups at VidCon and in Central Park, thus moving the producer-fan relationship beyond the boundaries set by YouTube.

New Media, New Possibilities Team StarKid and AVbyte’s practices of creating and distributing content and interacting with their viewers through social media hint at the ways theatrical producers could engage audiences who fall outside the majority demographic. Typically, producers use YouTube as an additional avenue for marketing. They partner with the site as advertisers, and in the business dynamic, are among those paying YouTube or Google and content producers to play their commercials (usually the same spots used for television) before the viewer sees the content they want to see. While many production teams have their own YouTube channels, they often use it as another place to upload trailers. Team StarKid and AVbyte’s successes reveal much about contemporary musical theater fans: they are young, Internet savvy, highly networked, fluent in multiple texts (be they film, television, or musicals), and eager to participate. When properly acknowledged and activated by theater producers, they can take word-of-mouth advertising about shows to new heights. What lessons, then, can producers pull from Team StarKid and AVbyte? Through its musicals, Team StarKid acknowledged fans’ fluency in several genres of musical theater. The members of the troupe worked to get their fans to live performances, and took full advantage of social media to stay connected with those who couldn’t make it in person. They recognized that their audience split their participation in fandom equally between physical and digital spaces (Stein 2015, 175–176). Through the Kickstarter campaign for Twisted, they mobilized their fans and turned them into small-scale producers. AVbyte frequently made musicals that spoke to their fans’ diverse pop culture interests (e.g. Hipster Disney Princesses—The Musical; WHOLOCK THE MUSICAL; and Bronies—The Musical). They also excelled at releasing new content and interacting with fans in a rhythm that was key. Viewers knew that once a musical was uploaded, they could expect a behind-the-scenes video two days later and a comments video four days later. The regularity of these invitations into the Nazareths’ process kept their audience coming back, more likely to share their work, and eager to interact with them on other platforms. While their musicals aimed to be of professional quality, 381

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the brothers purposefully chose a DIY aesthetic—one more commonly seen in video blogs—for the supplemental videos. The camera work was bouncy, and the edits were full of jump cuts. Their purpose was simply to provide an insider’s view. Tapping into this young, networked audience could be the key to diversifying theatrical audiences. This means that producers must see YouTube and social media as sites of interaction rather than simply advertisements. This means providing new media content that this demographic wants to share, and that appreciates their propensity for multi-referential works. This means using new media and the DIY aesthetic to invite audiences into spaces previously closed off to them— into the production and rehearsal process and even letting them help finance shows. Producers must balance this with regular social media engagement on platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and Tumblr, and occasional appearances at in-person events like panels and fan conventions. Recent stage productions have already begun exploring these areas with mixed success. ­Hamilton has established a good rapport with its young audience through its use of new media and social media. Its #Ham4Ham performances trafficked in a multitude of theatrical and pop cultural references: notable performances included Allegiance star Lea Salonga and Lin Manuel-Miranda singing “A Whole New World” from Disney’s Aladdin (Hamilton 2015), the White House performance of “Cabinet Battle #1” in the style of The West Wing (Hamilton 2016a), and the Schuyler sisters singing “Out Tonight” from Rent (Hamilton 2016b). This content, like AVbyte’s behindthe-scenes and comments videos, does not have to be professionally filmed and edited; the more DIY the look, the better. Hamilton and Miranda also feature fan-made art through their Instagram accounts using the hashtag #HamArt, sharing and encouraging the creativity of Hamilton’s fandom (hamiltonmusical 2017). Two recent productions—the 2012 revival of Godspell and George Takei’s passion project Allegiance—have dabbled in crowdfunding (Davenport 2015; Hebert 2012), but raising investment capital through these means could be explored further. Finally, fan conventions, long a practice among science fiction/fantasy and media fans, have started appearing for theatrical fandom. Event management companies Mischief Management and Playbill.com have annually organized BroadwayCon since 2016, thereby creating a space where theater fans can mingle and interact with notable performers, writers, and producers (Piepenburg 2017). All of this—new media production, social media outreach, crowdfunding, and in-person ­interaction—requires careful, constant cultivation. It can be expensive, time consuming, and exhausting. Even with their relative independence and successes, Team StarKid and AVbyte, as channels, are on hiatus as of this writing. Team StarKid’s last show was performed in August 2016 with no future productions in store. Many of the troupe’s writers and actors have moved on to other projects. The Nazareths recently announced that the channel had taken a toll on their relationship and that they would be developing channels independently in the future (AVbyte 2017). Theatrical producers have an advantage that Team StarKid and AVbyte did not: internal infrastructure and the ability to spread tasks across a team. Because of this, they could sustain all this activity longer than StarKid and AVbyte. YouTube and social media have disrupted and transformed the ways producers and audiences interact. If they want to pull in audiences who are not part of the majority demographic, it is time to learn how to use these platforms consistently and well.

Notes 1 The argument that fans are more than just dedicated, active consumers has been at the heart of the discipline of fan studies. Key studies in this discipline include Henry Jenkins’ Textual Poachers (1992), Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (2006), Matt Hills’ Fan Cultures (2002), Paul Booth’s Digital Fandom: New Media Studies (2010), and most recently, Louisa Ellen Stein’s Millennial Fandom: Television Audiences in the Transmedia Age (2015). 2 These activities are not mutually exclusive. Individual fans may be inclined to certain activities over others, but many choose to express their fandom through multiple activities.

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“YouTube! Musicals! YouTubesicals!” 3 “StarKid” is pulled from the musical’s book when Draco Malfoy mocks Harry Potter’s celebrity, saying, “Oh, moon shoes Potter! StarKid Potter! Traversing the galaxy for intergalactic travels to Pigfarts!” 4 Alan Menken’s daughter was classmates with Holmes at the University of Michigan. Through this connection, Holmes sent Twisted to Menken and received unofficial approval. A.J. Holmes, personal interview, 16 Aug. 2014. 5 Andrew Fox, personal interview, 7 Aug. 2014. 6 Antonius Nazareth’s comment, though unintentional, is a sexist assumption. While it is true that Xbox One has more dancing games, it is unverifiable that more women play Xbox One because of those games. In the wake of Gamergate in 2014, Newzoo, a games research firm, conducted a study that showed that the number of women playing on both Xbox One and Playstation grew 70% between 2011 and 2014 (Harwell 2014). 7 Antonius and Vijay Nazareth, personal interview, 11 Sept. 2014.

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38 DUAL-FOCUS STRATEGY IN A SERIAL NARRATIVE Smash, Nashville, and the Television Musical Series Robynn Stilwell If the American musical as a genre has traditionally guaranteed one thing, it’s a happy ending: a resolution of conflict and a romantic pairing. The genre developed a streamlined narrative strategy that combined both, in what musicologist Raymond Knapp terms “the marriage trope.” Marriage, Knapp argues, stands allegorically for the resolution of seemingly incompatible peoples—or families, classes, races, ideas, ideologies, or whatever—into a stabilized partnership…Time and again, within a structure we might usefully term the ‘marriage trope,’ we will find couples whose individual issues mirror or embody larger ones that turn out to be what the musical in question is ‘really’ about.1 The film scholar Rick Altman argues that this symbolic parallel of the romantic couple with some other cultural aspect in need of resolution generates a particular structure specific to film—what he calls the “dual-focus narrative.” The dramatic expositions are based on an alternation of male and female, complementary actions that make the characters’ meeting and eventual pairing seem “inevitable.” This “inevitable” coupling may be accentuated by paired songs or, more powerfully, by a duet linking the couple musically and emotionally, whether through a physical meeting, or a virtual one created with parallel editing that cuts back and forth between their individual spaces.2 This kind of structural/musical parallelism isn’t alien to the theater,3 but film can augment the structure through the use of similarities (framing, editing, use of choruses) and contrasts (lighting, costuming, set design, composition of chorus characters). Television is already a more heterogeneous form than its predecessors; it absorbed and adapted elements from theater, film, and radio. The spectacle of the number—its “break of register” from speaking to singing, or walking to dancing—is part of the musical genre’s appeal. In film, spectacle is largely been framed as part of the “fantasy” or “dream” postulated by the first generations of film theorists. These numbers were held together by the (sometimes gossamer-thin) thread of a narrative in which, most of the time, a heterosexual romantic pairing resulted. Live broadcasts generate energy and excitement by conjuring a shared space and time for the audience. The most recent wave of live musicals, which began with NBC’s The Sound of Music in 2013, has been largely panned critically, but the networks’ persistence in producing them, and their relative popularity in an era of highly fragmented audiences, suggests that television is a medium for musicals that has been perseverant if never entirely stable. 384

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While the more recent television musicals are usually versions of especially beloved stage and screen musicals with large built-in audiences (Peter Pan, Grease, Hairspray), the 1950s saw a significant number of musicals written for television. One of the most popular and enduring was ­Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Cinderella, originally written and produced for Julie Andrews (1957), reshot on videotape with Lesley Ann Warren (1964), and filmed for the Disney Channel with Brandy (Norwood 1997). These television adaptations illuminate aspects of both theater and film, particularly regarding Altman’s concept of the dual-focus narrative, and the structure becomes clearer with each adaptation.4 In the 1957 version starring Andrews, Cinderella is clearly the main character; the Prince doesn’t even appear until the ball. The dual focus, however, emerges clearly in the 1964 version: Cinderella and an incognito Prince meet earlier, and her “My Own Little Corner” is balanced by his solo, “The Loneliness of Evening.” The dual focus is cinematically strengthened even further in 1997: here, Cinderella and the Prince wander through the same marketplace, singing “The Sweetest Sound” as a virtual duet before a classic “meet cute” moment when he picks up spilled items from her basket. A duet intensifies narrative momentum toward resolution, which is enormously helpful in a genre like the musical, where narrative is often sketchy because so much run-time is ceded to musical performance. Resolution, however, is challenging to the continually repeated structure of a television series, where everything resets at the beginning of the next episode. A few television musical series have also been attempted, however, often under the cover of situation comedy. For example, I Love Lucy (1951–1957) often featured musical numbers, but in the context of Ricky Ricardo’s career or Lucy’s attempts to infiltrate show business. The Dick Van Dyke Show (1961–1966) similarly had access to musical numbers via its “situation,” backstage at a variety show. The Partridge Family (1970–1974) was about a family singing group, so musical performances were almost always literal. The drama Miami Vice (1984–1990) introduced a new aesthetic, blending music video with cinematic style in a format that continues to operate in mainstream American television, though rarely with the same impact. However, the failures of Steven Bochco’s Cop Rock and its less-­remembered contemporary, Hull High, in 1990 put an end to the musical genre on television for about a generation. Then Glee (2009–2015) took up Hull High’s interest in young adult drama, built on a generation of shows featuring high-school and college ensemble casts—from Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997–2003) to Dawson’s Creek (1998–2003)—and melded it with the backstage musical, setting off the most recent trend in musical television programs.5 Two television series based in musical milieus premiered in 2012. Smash was about the development of a Broadway musical; Nashville was set in the country music world. Smash functions as a backstage musical more overtly than Nashville, but only as a matter of degree. A striking feature of both premieres is how strongly they adhere to the principle of dual-focus narrative—something no other musical television series had by this point attempted. Each show’s pilot episode demonstrates the flexibility of dual focus as a narrative strategy and uses it to fit musical numbers into forms that have previously resisted such integration. In Smash, the dual focus—neatly structured within a conventional “let’s put on a show” backstage narrative—generates not a romantic but instead competitive pairing between Karen, the ingénue, and Ivy, the experienced Broadway performer, who are vying for the starring role in a new Broadway musical called Bombshell, about Marilyn Monroe. Karen and Ivy come to represent the dichotomy of Monroe: Karen embodies her original identity as “Norma Jean,” the vulnerable naïf, and Ivy exemplifies “Marilyn,” the sex symbol. Nashville also features two women competing, in this case for top-selling female artist in country music. Will it be established star Rayna (Connie Britton), or the rising Juliette (Hayden Panettiere)? More overtly than Smash, Nashville blends musical theater with soap opera aesthetics in examining the lives of country music performers at various levels of success, from artists who play ­stadiums to waitresses who write songs. Rayna is a Nashville superstar in the vein of Reba 385

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McEntire or Faith Hill; Juliette has youthful crossover appeal like Taylor Swift. Complicating this dichotomy is aspiring songwriter Scarlett (Clare Bowen), who offers a third strain: an edgier, folkier, alt-country style that reads as more “authentic” than Rayna’s or Juliette’s. Two duets in the pilot of Nashville emphasize romantic relationships: between Rayna and her guitarist/songwriting partner Deacon (Charles Esten), who’ve worked together for two decades; and between the new songwriting collaborators Scarlett and Gunnar (Sam Palladio). Juliette is pointedly presented as a sexually promiscuous solo artist, in stark contrast to Rayna and Scarlett, who are both depicted as more sympathetic, talented, and conventionally faithful than Juliette. Thus the duet detaches from its main function as joining the two “sides” of the dual focus. Instead, it is moved to a different level of organization, used to contrast Rayna and Juliette rather than to bring them together, demonstrating the flexibility of the dual-focus strategy. The dual-focus narrative is a strategy—a tool for storytelling. While Altman’s original conception is based essentially in gender—the alternation of a male and a female character that drives toward the equilibrium of a heterosexual couple—both Nashville and Smash demonstrate that parallelism need not be defined simply by gender or heteronormative romance. In fact, the drive created by a rivalry offers greater scope for expansion in an open-ended narrative like a television series. The pilots of both series set up this dual-focus strategy well: Smash presents its rivals almost schematically, in contrasting parallel scenes; Nashville is somewhat more complicated, but the central conflict is established—and remains—between Rayna and Juliette. Even the introduction of a third woman and heterosexual romantic pairings ultimately work to heighten the two central characters’ differences.

Smash The pilot episode of Smash is an extended exercise in parallel scenes, which together introduce the rivalry between the naïve Karen (Katharine McPhee) and the experienced Ivy (Megan Hilty), who are competing for the role of Marilyn Monroe in a new Broadway musical called Bombshell. The parallels play out as a series of oppositions—some of which nevertheless resonate as ­similarities—that eventually converge in the call-back auditions and final duet, “Let Me Be Your Star.” (Table 38.1). Table 38.1  D  ual-focus Introduction to Karen and Ivy in the Pilot Episode of Smash Karen

Ivy

“ballad or up-tempo?” (spoken) studio light eye-level camera tight jeans, lace tank top provocative pose that emphasizes figure Ivy is alone Home is empty, looks cold She’s trained and working in a chorus, but not getting a “part” Ivy records new song in studio “National Pastime” rehearsal intercut with fully staged version Derek (director) champions Karen Tom (songwriter) champions Ivy Resolution: Duet “Let Me Be Your Star” (see Table 2)

“Over the Rainbow” (music) stage lights swooping camera sparkly party dress childlike, upward reaching gestures Karen has a support system Home is small but cozy Her CV is “light” and she doesn’t even know what that means Karen sings along to Ivy’s leaked demo Karen’s audition features her fantasy of singing to Dev

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The episode opens on a misty blue stage with a starry background. Marquee-style light bulbs flicker to life showing the title, then fade as the camera descends toward a spotlighted figure. The slim brunette wears a sparkly dress; she is clearly an adult but the cut of the dress, with its abovethe-knee skirt and puffed sleeves, is that of a young girl. She sings an impassioned version of “Over the Rainbow,” the quintessential song of yearning. The performance connects both to Judy Garland’s performance in The Wizard of Oz (1939) and to McPhee’s 2007 performance of the song in the Season 5 finale of American Idol, where she was likewise staged as a dreamy adolescent: here, she wore jeans and a white, sleeveless blouse, sat center stage, and allowed her weight to rest on her hip and hand at points of emphasis.6 In the opening moments of Smash, the camera tracks in and reaches a waist-up framing as McPhee’s character leaps up on “Somewhere” in the second phrase. A phone rings, and suddenly the scene cuts to a dingy rehearsal room with a stationary, eye-level camera, daylight streaming through the windows, and the same young woman wearing a simple print dress. The director at the table answers her phone, dismissing Karen with a simple, “Thanks. That’s all we need.” A jazzy piano riff with high-hat accompaniment creates a non-diegetic soundbridge as Karen leaves the audition room and strides past a blonde in the hallway. The blonde, Ivy Lynn, breezes confidently into the audition room with a cheery, “Hi, you guys!” She puts down her bag, bending over strategically to give the panel a view of her behind in tight blue jeans. As Ivy turns to the audition table, she takes off her jacket, revealing a lacy tank-top and a generous amount of cleavage. “So, do you want the ballad or the up-tempo first?” she asks, and the non-diegetic music punches a brassy hit as she poses seductively with her hands on her hips. This two-minute opening introduces Smash’s two main characters. It functions as a ­narrative sequence of events (one audition following another) and as a set of opposing parallels. Karen is young and innocent; Ivy, sexy and confident. Karen gives us access to her fantasy and thus her subjectivity; Ivy is objectified by her own actions and apparel, but also framed by reality. Everything about their presentation, from the difference in camera movement and framing to the lighting, highlights these parallels, even down to Karen’s introduction in song and Ivy’s in speech. These parallels continue through the episode, interspersed with scenes about the show’s writing team, Julia (Debra Messing) and Tom (Christian Borle). Karen’s ingénue role is frequently emphasized by her surroundings. The apartment she shares with her fiancé Dev (Raza Jaffrey) is small, filled with pillows and throws in warm colors and rich textures, often lit by soft lamplight. She has a strong support system in Dev, who works for the mayor, and her parents, who arrive from Iowa to make sure she’s surviving the competitive atmosphere of New York theater. Neither Dev nor her parents seem to understand her desire for the stage, and a frustrated Karen is repeatedly situated outside the theatrical system—so much so that when she is told she is “light,” she doesn’t know what that means (her resume is “light” on entries). Ivy, by contrast, seems to be an insider: she’s had plenty of professional experience, and is currently a member of the chorus in Tom and Julia’s previous Broadway show. Nevertheless, she laments to Tom that she longs for “a [real] part” in a restaurant scene that parallels Karen’s dinner with her parents and gives audiences the first hint of Ivy’s vulnerabilities. We first hear Ivy sing when Tom enlists her to help record a demo of a number he and Julia have written for Bombshell. She gives a powerful, sensitive performance that ranges from near-whispers to soft, breaking tones and that peaks with a full belt. The lyrics dovetail with Karen’s dinner conversation and Ivy’s own lament to Tom, and end in a poignant twist regarding the failure of men to reciprocate love and not just desire, which reemphasizes the Marilyn Monroe theme. A video recording of Ivy’s performance posted on a website leads us back to Karen, who watches the performance online and sings along, again emphasizing their symmetry. The biggest number staged within the episode is “National Pastime,” with Ivy standing in as Marilyn. The scene starts as a rehearsal in a dance studio, but is accompanied by a full orchestra. 387

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This inexplicable accompaniment demonstrates an already-completed audio-dissolve;7 this both allows and is paralleled by a technique that is pervasive throughout Smash: cutting back and forth between a rehearsal and fully staged version of a number. The same distinctions hinted at in the opening sequence are amplified here: reality is lit with wintry natural light, while the camera is at eye-level and restrained in movement; fantasy engages both the artificiality of theatrical staging (lighting, costumes) and the freedom of a moving camera, swooping in and around characters, sometimes becoming part of the choreography. The familiar logic of the audio-dissolve is used to hold the disjunction together. We may not even notice the unseen orchestra once the rehearsal begins because the convention is so familiar. The dissolve coincides with the entering of fantasy, as we can now retroactively recognize in Karen’s opening audition. It returns in the “Marilyn” audition montage. When other hopefuls show up in various forms of Marilyn Monroe drag, Karen is intimidated; what she doesn’t see is one such imitator being laid bare in the audition room by the realistic diegetic exposure of the auditioner’s uncertain voice, supported only by the rehearsal pianist. Reversing the opening audition, Ivy is called first, but because she is throwing up in the bathroom, Karen is called in her place. Karen’s uncomplicated presentation is refreshing to director Derek ( Jack Davenport), who takes a clear interest. The orchestra takes over from the piano with the shimmer of a bell tree, and Karen imagines herself singing to Dev in an indeterminate space defined by pink lighting and a deep blue background, similar to the opening audition sequence. The scene cuts back and forth between Karen’s fantasy and the reality of the audition room, held together by the music, although we return to the piano alone as the song ends. Karen’s audition balances Ivy’s “National Pastime” number, while Ivy’s demo with Tom is balanced by a scene with Karen and Derek (which also parallels a scene between Karen and Dev). Karen has been asked to “play the sex” in her call-back; she and Dev rehearse by copying a scene from Some Like It Hot. Karen is astride Dev when Derek texts her to come work with him immediately. She arrives 20 minutes later. In their conversation, she realizes that “light” doesn’t mean “unsexy,” as she had assumed, but that her résumé is light: she is “a little green,” according to Derek, who lightly caresses her arm. Karen realizes the trap she has fallen into and escapes to the bathroom to think; when she comes out, her hair is tousled and she’s wearing Derek’s ­button-down shirt. She performs a breathy version of “Happy Birthday, Mr. President,” recalling Monroe’s famous serenade of John F. Kennedy, eventually straddling Derek as she had Dev. As he leans in for a kiss, she pushes him away, declares, “Not gonna happen,” and leaves. In a late scene that parallels the earlier ones of Karen with Dev and her parents, we finally see Ivy alone, talking on the telephone to her mother. In stark contrast with Karen’s cozy apartment and loving familial support, Ivy’s cramped kitchen traps her in its narrow galley, and its whiteness feels cold and empty. Her excitement about her call-back is clearly not reflected on the other end; Ivy tries to be enthusiastic about her brother’s acquisition of a car dealership, a conversation suggesting both that her small-town family doesn’t understand her any more than Karen’s understands her—but that they support her far less.8 We see this similarity in the characters for the first time as we cross a piano bridge into the episode finale, “Let Me Be Your Star.” Here, both Marilyn hopefuls are brought into the same intercut sequence, their parallels and contrasts thrown into relief. As they begin to sing, they are shown preparing for their call-back auditions at home. Karen is framed in her bathroom mirror, Ivy in a full-length one, perhaps a comment on experience rather than age (or on Ivy’s more developed sense of self, at least as she presents to others). Karen wears light makeup and a white dress with a pencil skirt. It is sprinkled with a pattern of twin-stemmed cherries, a symbol of virginity so overt that we might excuse it as Karen’s attempt to “play the sex” as earlier requested. Ivy, on the other hand, is made up as Monroe circa The Seven-Year Itch (1955), when she was at the height of her sexuality in the cultural imagination. Ivy also wears white—a chiffon halter dress reminiscent 388

Dual-Focus Strategy in a Serial Narrative Table 38.2  The Dual-focus Resolution of “Let Me Be Your Star” Karen

Ivy

White dress patterned with paired stem cherries; classic tailored cut Framed in bedroom dresser mirror Dev in background Coming up from subway

Cream-colored chiffon dress tight wrap with halter top Full-length mirror in solo Riding in cab

Meet from opposite directions in front of building, enter together Singing in harmony Camera more mobile around each singer Framing from ribcage-up gradually getting tighter Insets of staged versions

of the famous outfit Monroe wore in the subway grate scene—but it wraps her more tightly and is a warmer, creamier color. Ivy’s finishing touch is to draw Monroe’s beauty mark on her face. In the second verse, the two women travel to the audition. Karen emerges from the subway and walks along the street; Ivy is in the back of a cab, her temple pressed against the window. They meet on the sidewalk outside the building, singing in duet as they turn toward the camera and walk together in the build-up to the chorus. Although they sing together at the audition (itself a fantastical construct), the camerawork continues to isolate each woman in alternation. The established distinctions between “reality” (daylight, relatively stationary camera) and “fantasy” (stage lighting, mobile camera) break down as the camera circles them, the lighting and placement shifting from rehearsal hall to indeterminate stage space of fantasy, until together they hit the last line of the chorus, their plea to the audition panel: “Let Me Be Your Star!” (Table 38.2).

Nashville Like Smash, Nashville sets up two female rivals, but their rivalry is complicated by the presence of a third woman who alternately parallels one rival or the other. While Nashville returns us to the duet as a symbol of heterosexual romance, the duet moves down a level of structure in the ­narrative schema, from end-game to distinguishing factor. This helps open up the potentially closed ­narrative for Nashville’s serial format. A major sequence of the pilot episode is set at the Grand Ole Opry and features performances by the two competitors. Reigning country superstar Rayna performs a number that isn’t, strictly speaking, a duet, but it is shot like one. Although we do not yet know Rayna’s lead guitarist, ­Deacon, he and Rayna are presented as a couple via the staging, framing, and editing. (Figure 38.1). The first two shots (a close-up and a long shot showing the stage and audience) are of Rayna, but between the first and second sung phrases, a nearly full-body two-shot of Rayna and Deacon depicts them exchanging comfortable, familiar smiles. Two more shots of Rayna provide a strong, rhythmic anacrusis to a shot of the two from behind. Cuts that arrive about every two beats show her moving next to Deacon to sing; when she moves back to the center of the stage, the camera stays on Deacon; the giant screen behind him shows a close-up of Rayna, creating another sense of duet. The refrain features three successive cuts on strong beats to the Deacon/Rayna-onscreen shot, two backing vocalists, and a shot that frames Rayna and Deacon together. The camera then tracks around the apron of the stage to center on Rayna during her long final notes. As the song builds to its cadence, we see a quick recapitulation of shots we’ve seen before, ending with Rayna and Deacon looking at each other as he leads the band to a conclusion. The end of the number 389

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Figure 38.1  A  lthough she is singing a solo song, the staging and framing of Rayna and Deacon give the illusion of a duet.

echoes the beginning with a long shot of the arena, then “normalizes” from the quick-cutting editing style to a more regular pace as Rayna and Deacon acknowledge the audience together and walk into the wings. As they leave the stage, he reaches out to put his hand on her shoulder; she reaches back to put her hand over his, barely looking back as her head tilts toward his hand, further signaling their intimacy. By contrast, Juliette’s number is very much a solo effort. The first shot, repeated frequently throughout the number, is of her in front of her own image on the giant screen, in contrast with the use of the screen to pair Rayna and Deacon. Juliette is in the middle of the screen throughout, alternating the doubled image as she touches the outstretched hands of her fans. Her song is a country-rock number that strings together a list of adjectives about her emotional independence. Juliette’s gold-spangled minidress clings to her, and her long, blonde curls are a modern twist on a classic Hollywood look. Toward the end of Juliette’s number, we see Rayna in her dressing room, taking off her boots and watching her young rival on a monitor in distaste. As the song ends, an undeniably charismatic Juliette reaches out to the audience where the camera is situated; the cut to Rayna’s disgusted expression creates a syntax that makes Juliette’s reach seem directed at Rayna, who grabs the remote and punches it sharply, muttering, “Shut UP!” before tossing it to the floor. These two opening numbers thus set up the opposition between Rayna and Juliette. Perhaps only in retrospect does the “duet” of Rayna and Deacon emerge; the way he is featured with her in the frame emphasizes his presence only in relation to her; he thus serves to function here primarily as yet another contrast between Rayna and the comparatively independent Juliette. Between the two numbers, the wings and backstage corridors of the Opry preview relationships that will play out through the season: Deacon introduces his niece, Scarlett, and her boyfriend, Avery ( Jonathan Jackson) to Rayna; Scarlett’s excitement at meeting Rayna seems genuine. By contrast, in her dressing room, Juliette is not pleased at her prospective meeting with Rayna; her manager tells her, nonetheless, to “kiss the ring.” Juliette subsequently encounters Deacon in the hallway and gushes over his playing and songwriting. This, too, seems genuine, but do we trust her? As she walks away, she asks her manager, “Why isn’t he in my band?” and is informed that he and Rayna have been together for 20 years. Juliette then literally runs into Avery. As he stands, stunned, she looks him up and down, drawling, “It’s all right. You should try that again ­sometime — only slower,” as she walks away. Avery stares after her until Scarlett slaps his ­shoulder. (In the second season, Avery and Juliette begin an affair.) 390

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When Juliette finally meets Rayna, she brushes her off in favor of greeting Rayna’s mentor, Watty White ( John David Souther), and then tells Rayna that her mother listened to her when “I was still in her belly.” A poisonously sweet Rayna comments about Juliette having her “girls tucked up” ( Juliette’s minidress makes the most of her décolletage). As they walk away, Juliette’s manager mutters, “Looks like we’ve got a little work to do on that ‘be nice’ deal.” Meanwhile, Rayna’s representatives inform her that her album is not doing as well as expected and suggest she “co-headline” with Juliette (which, as she correctly guesses, means opening for the young upstart—a significant fall for the country queen, whom we know from previous scenes is cash poor because of a big suburban McMansion and the business misfortunes of her husband, Teddy). In the episode’s next act, Juliette is in a recording session while her producer Randy and an e­ ngineer discuss their gratitude for auto-tune, another slight that makes Juliette seem artificial in comparison with Rayna. Juliette’s recording bridges a scene-change to Rayna driving her tween daughters to school. Rayna wants to turn off the radio, but the girls protest and sing along with J­uliette enthusiastically and in excellent harmony, to Rayna’s dismay. In a parallel scene later in the episode, Rayna visits Randy (who is also her producer) and complains about Juliette’s “adolescent crap,” not knowing that Juliette is in Randy’s bed, overhearing Rayna’s unvarnished opinion of her music. In a similar, briefer set of parallel scenes at the Bluebird Café, a Nashville spot for up-andcoming performers, two young songwriters eager for Deacon’s feedback have given him their demos. Deacon practically rolls his eyes at Avery’s description of his music as “alt-country punk, but more cerebral.” But Deacon shows more enthusiasm in his unsolicited response to the demo he has heard by his soundman, Gunnar. Juliette comes to listen to Deacon at the Bluebird incognito; she seems genuinely moved by his performance and meets him afterward in the parking lot. She wants to record one of his songs, and proposes he take over for her guitar player whose wife is about to have a baby, ending her pitch with, “we could have a lot of fun together on the road.” She notes that Rayna isn’t the only woman in the world, and he replies, “You’re a girl.” She gives him a long look that develops into a catlike smile. “That, too,” she concedes, and gets into the car that has arrived for her. Deacon watches her drive off, wondering, “What the hell was that?” The emotional center of the episode is a scene between Rayna and Deacon, during which they discuss her foundering career and his offer from Juliette. The scene reveals part of their backstory, and takes place, symbolically enough, on a bridge. Their conversation reveals their romantic history and Deacon’s alcoholism, which drove them apart. She offers to let him join Juliette’s band if it will make him happy. He replies, “Darlin’, you know good and well there’s only one thing that’s going to make me happy, and I lost that a long time ago.” It is (too) easy to see Deacon as a token of power between Rayna and Juliette, a narrative position usually taken by a female character between two men, although both women demonstrate genuine feelings toward him. Until this point, it is the one potentially positive aspect of Juliette’s personality we’ve seen: in her first scene, she is rude to her staff, and shouts at her assistant not to give her phone number to her mother. The catty scene with Rayna at the Opry reflects poorly on both women. But toward the end of the episode, at the Bluebird, we begin to see another side of Juliette. Her offer to Deacon may be designed to rattle Rayna, but her response to his music seems sincere: she surreptitiously brushes away tears as she listens. And in a later, revealing scene, she hides in a closet, talking to her mother on the phone much the way Ivy does in Smash. We learn that Juliette’s mother is a meth addict who lies for drug money. Sobbing, Juliette refuses to send any and hangs up as Randy comes looking for her; when he opens the door, she pulls him into a desperate kiss, suggesting that her promiscuity is a means of compensating for a lack of emotional connection with her mother. The final sequence centers on the Bluebird Café, where soundman Gunnar has convinced waitress Scarlett to turn her poems about a previous breakup with Avery into songs. The intense 391

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duet that results is actually a cover of “If I Didn’t Know Better” by the Civil Wars and is primarily about the burgeoning songwriting and romantic chemistry between Gunnar and Scarlett.9 It is intercut, however, with three other scenes that parallel or resolve earlier ones. In the first, Randy visits Juliette, who turns him down; upon returning to her living room, she seduces Deacon, with whom she has been writing a song. In the second, mentor Watty calls Rayna to have her listen to the new duo. In the third, Rayna prepares to attend her husband Teddy’s announcement that he is running for mayor with the support of her estranged father, despite the fact that Rayna was originally supposed to play in support of his competitor, an old friend of hers. “If I Didn’t Know Better,” a slow blues shuffle, is reminiscent of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “People Will Say We’re in Love,” in that it lists intimacies the singers would acquiesce to if they let their guards down. The original performers, Joy Williams and John Paul White, were a couple who dissolved their musical partnership when their romantic relationship ended in 2014. As the Civil Wars, Williams and White performed the song teasingly, with a touch of retro camp when they played it live. Scarlett and Gunnar instead amplify the song’s longing and heat. The intertwining melodic lines are also unusual, with the male voice at times soaring above the female voice, but without resorting to falsetto. The constantly drifting camerawork and tendency toward long dissolves from one space to another gives this sequence a feeling of floating. Onstage, Scarlett stands and Gunnar sits on a barstool with his guitar, so the camera can circle almost completely around them in close-up. At times, the camera is so close that we see little more than their eyes as they gaze at each other. Toward the end, the camera frames Scarlett’s parted lips near the microphone as she breathes, “If I didn’t know better…” The ending musical montage is a common strategy for many hour-long dramas on American television, going back to Miami Vice in the 1980s. A diegetic performance, however, is rare. In this duet, the audio-dissolved instruments we hear but don’t see help weave the various spaces together. Despite the intercutting, the intimacy of the song, the way Gunnar and Scarlett’s voices slide over and around each other, and the sensual way the camera presents the two young singersongwriters prime us for the illicit relationship to come. On the surface, Nashville’s use of duets for romantic couplings seems traditional. However, in complex relationships introduced in the pilot, they are part of a web of multiple, fragmented dual-focus strategies. Three prominent strains of country music (mainstream, pop crossover, and alt-country) are represented by Rayna, Juliette, and Scarlett, respectively, but the contrast is drawn between a deep relationship (Rayna/Deacon) and a burgeoning one (Scarlett/Gunnar), while Juliette is isolated as a promiscuous and unreliable solo artist whose talent and behavior are constantly questioned throughout the episode (Table 38.3). Table 38.3  Tri-focal Narrative of Nashville “Pilot” Rayna

Juliette

Scarlett

Traditional/stadium country Duet w/Deacon at Opry

Pop-country crossover Solo at Opry Brushes off meeting w/Rayna Excited by meeting Deacon Randy is producer

Americana Duet w/Gunnar at Bluebird Excited by meeting w/Rayna

Sleeping with Randy Flirting with Avery Seducing Deacon

Boyfriend Avery

Randy is producer Married to Teddy Former lover of Deacon Watty is mentor

Watty “discovers” at Bluebird (pitches to Rayna)

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Conclusions Musicals haven’t fared particularly well on American television. The spectacle of the form seems to threaten the narrative integrity of serialized programming in a way it does not in a free-standing form. Theater revels in breaks of register from speaking to singing and walking to dancing. Film, on the other hand, developed a language that smoothed those transitions either through a carefully cultivated “naturalism” or an escape into fantasy, or both. One-off television musicals share features of theater and film, and draw on architectures that have been established over decades, if not centuries. A series is more of a challenge, but Smash and Nashville negotiated those hurdles better than most, while integrating musical numbers more tightly into the storytelling than even Glee, wherein many musical numbers stand outside the narrative as preexisting scheduled rehearsals, performances, or fantasies. Musical numbers in Smash and Nashville slide along the continuum, while aspects like camerawork or performance style can increase, intensify, or even create narrative elements that do not necessarily exist “on the page.” These pilot episodes draw particularly on cinematic models to create character relationships that would take longer to establish through normal exposition like dialogue or flashback. They both engage the dual-focus structure with greater complexity, and to different ends than most films. Rather than a romantic pairing, Smash sets up a dynamic opposition between Karen and Ivy that emphasizes the dichotomy between the two aspects of Marilyn Monroe, the innocent, vulnerable “Norma Jean,” and the peak and crisis of her life as “Marilyn,” the “bombshell.” Nashville similarly contrasts Rayna and Juliette, while retaining more of an emphasis on romantic relationships through duets. However, it uses the duets to build contrasts between the youthful heat of Gunnar and Scarlett and the depth of Rayna and Deacon, and, in turn, to add further contrast with the troubled—and solo—Juliette. These series demonstrate the flexibility of dual focus as a narrative tool, and use it to fit musical numbers into forms that have previously resisted such integration.

Notes 1 Raymond Knapp. The American Musical and the Formation of National Identity. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005. 9. 2 Rick Altman. The American Film Musical. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987, especially ­chapters two and three. 3 The strategy is less common in theatrical musicals, but even a musical that breaks the “happy ending” guarantee like West Side Story opens with paired songs: Tony sings “Something’s Coming” (with Riff as his interlocutor at the beginning and audience throughout the song) and “I Feel Pretty” (Maria with the bridal-shop girls participating more in the singing, but essentially occupying the same position as Riff, and by extension the other Jets). 4 See also, Rick Altman. “Toward a Theory of the History of Representational Technologies Iris.” 2 (1984): 111–125 for a general conceptual frame for this sort of adaptation. For a more extensive discussion of Cinderella, see Robynn Stilwell. “The Television Musical.” Handbook of the American Musical. Eds. Mitchell Morris, Raymond Knapp, and Stacy Wolf. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011, 152–166. 5 This would include the sitcom Crazy Ex-Girlfriend (2015–2019), which primarily situates musical numbers as fantasies, a trend also seen in the cinematic version of Chicago (Rob Marshall 2002). 6 Her performance also owes something to the 1990s performances of singer Eva Cassidy in ornamenting individual words, though McPhee takes fewer liberties with altering the length and connection of phrases. 7 The audio dissolve is the melding of foreground and background music at the beginning of a musical number—for instance, a character begins singing accompanied by an onscreen piano, but is eventually joined by an unseen orchestra. See Altman, American Film Musical, 62–73. 8 In the second season, we learn that Ivy is the daughter of a Broadway star played by Bernadette Peters, possibly a late alteration made to the show’s “Bible,” or outline of the backstory and canon of a series. 9 The duet was the subject of a “5 things” listicle by The Daily Beast’s Jace Lacob, who declared it “absolutely spellbinding (truly one of the first unforgettable moments of the new season).” Web. 24 July 2017. .

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PART 9

Growth and Expansion Across the Country and Around the World

Stage musicals tend to be written about by scholars and historians in large, general categories that go something like this: the big, ornate Broadway venues concentrated in the Times Square neighborhood of midtown Manhattan in New York City offer the biggest, splashiest, most expensive, most commercial musicals that make the most money and have the most reach, and are thus the most important. The nonprofit companies Off- and Off-Off-Broadway sometimes offer musicals too, but they are fewer and farther between; they are also less expensive and spectacular, a little riskier and more innovative, and sometimes they are successful enough to move to Broadway. The country’s many regional theaters, also all nonprofits, serve up subscription series of mainstream plays and musicals for everyone in the country outside of New York City, but no one in New York pays any attention to them. There are also some musicals that get staged in other parts of the world, mostly in London’s West End, but most Americans don’t pay much attention to them, either. The assumptions in the earlier paragraph are huge generalizations that are, to a one, simply untrue, even as they are perpetuated in the historiography. A majority of books, chapters, reference books, and articles that discuss the most well-known and popular musicals are usually talking for the most part about Broadway, unless they are discussing the West End. This is, in fact, so often the case that exceptions are almost always evidenced in the very few titles that don’t consider Broadway, like Off-Broadway Musicals Since 1919 (Thomas Hischak, Scarecrow Press, 2011) or ­O ff-Off-Broadway Explosion (David A. Crespy, Back Stage Books, 2003) or London Lights: A History of West End Musicals (London: This England Books, 2005). While it might be easiest and least overwhelming—and is thus the norm—for writers to rely heavily on such categories in discussing the musical theater, it is nonetheless important to remember that no entertainment form, in any place or time, ever exists in a vacuum. All realms of theater making, certainly at this point in time, are connected in myriad ways. For example, despite the fact that many regional and Off-Broadway houses are not-for-profit companies while Broadway is comparatively commercial, these distinctions often get blurred, especially in recent decades. New musicals are workshopped either in New York City or elsewhere; these are subsequently developed for Off-Broadway, Broadway, one or more regional theaters, or an international concern based, perhaps, in Germany, England, Korea, or another country with a growing taste for musicals. Similarly, musicals that appear in one regional theater are sometimes funded in part by other regional theaters interested in producing the show and getting a cut of the profits. The same goes for Off-Broadway companies, or teams of increasingly international

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producers hoping to introduce new productions to new audiences, whether or not they are physically close to Times Square or the West End. Further, some musicals are produced by teams of commercial and nonprofit companies, and are developed with Broadway in mind as the primary goal; others never get to Broadway by design, or close quickly when they do, only to find enormous success and long runs elsewhere in the world. Productions that become successful in one regional theater sometimes forego the Broadway route, and instead appear in other regional theaters across the country or elsewhere around the globe. Still others move to Broadway only once they prove successful elsewhere in New York City or in the West End; again, some of these transfers make the transition successfully, while others struggle to find audiences in a new environment. Finally, some nonprofit, Off-Broadway theater companies have done so exceptionally well for themselves that they have been able to open their own nonprofit theaters on Broadway—the most intensely commercial theater district in the United States. Despite assumptions about size, spectacle, quality, and commercialism, the aesthetic distinctions between Broadway, Off-Broadway, regional musicals, and international ones are often just as blurred. Intimate musicals with small casts, scant props, and little in the way of scenery can and do run quite successfully in Broadway houses, often right across or down the street from bigger, more expensive, more extravagant productions; Broadway has also seen its fair share of innovative, risk-taking productions alongside more conventional ones. Off-Broadway has been home to plenty of large, expensive productions with enormous casts, lots of scenery, and multiple producers; it too has nurtured more intimate, experimental fare. Shows that strike a chord with audiences often get transferred to Broadway, just as successful shows that have been running for a while on Broadway and see declines in audiences sometimes get moved to smaller Broadway houses or to Off-Broadway venues. Regional theaters and ones in places far from Broadway—including ­Korea and Germany—are increasingly used, for better and worse, as sites in which producers with aspirations develop productions that eventually get taken on the road or staged in other cities or countries, including but not only on Broadway. The chapters in this section all shed light on ways the Broadway, Off-Broadway, regional, and international realms influence or intersect with one another, especially behind the scenes. First, Amanda McQueen and Jeffrey Ullom consider the American regional theater in their essays. McQueen examines the role Milwaukee, Wisconsin producer Sharon McQueen (no relation) played in altering the theater landscape for that Midwestern city through the 1970s and 1980s by looking to Off-Broadway business models and aesthetics in selecting productions for her intimate, risk-taking, nonprofit theaters. Ullom, too, considers the relationships various regional theaters across the United States have to the musical theater, to Broadway, and to one another. Steven ­Adler discusses the development of the hit musical Big River at La Jolla Playhouse in preparation for its 1985 Broadway premiere; he also explains the way that musical helped solidify the reputations of the Dodgers, a formidable team of theatrical producers, and helped boost La Jolla from a struggling regional theater to one that remains internationally acclaimed. Frédéric Döhl provides a brief history of the way musicals are made, consumed, and viewed in parts of the German-speaking lands since the late twentieth century. Hyunjung Lee then discusses the rise in popularity of the American-style stage musical, and some reasons why ­Koreans took to the genre in the first place. These chapters help provide some explanation as to why Broadway-style musicals have been so successful in cities like Hamburg and Seoul, respectively, especially in recent decades. And finally, in her piece on The Lion King, Susan Bennett explains how that property has become as enormously popular—and lucrative—as it is, by opening in various cities and countries across the globe, influencing local aesthetics and theater making in the process. Together, these chapters remind readers that stage musicals come in all shapes and sizes, and appear all over the world in venues that at this point all communicate with, benefit from, and exert influence on one another. 396

39 SHARON McQUEEN AND MILWAUKEE’S ALTERNATIVE REGIONAL MUSICAL THEATER Amanda McQueen

In the 1980s, local critics declared that theatrical output in Milwaukee, Wisconsin had “reached a level of quality and quantity that favorably compares with any city in the country.”1 Milwaukee’s “golden age” of live theater partly resulted from the emergence of new companies like Clavis Theatre and Theatre Tesseract that expanded the city’s available theatrical repertoire. Founded by producer and actress Sharon McQueen,2 Clavis and Tesseract specialized in contemporary Off- and Off-Off-Broadway productions, importing unconventional and controversial plays and musicals “that have generated high interest in New York theater but probably would not have been done [in Milwaukee] by anyone else.”3 With their inexpensive and often formally experimental productions, these two companies proved instrumental to the development of a localized fringe theater: Milwaukee’s own version of Off-Broadway. Yet while the artistic contributions of McQueen’s “second-tier” professional groups were widely recognized, Clavis and Tesseract nevertheless struggled to secure adequate funding and suitable performance space. Neither company survived into the 1990s. This chapter uses Sharon McQueen’s work with Clavis Theatre and Theatre Tesseract to examine the influence of Off- and Off-Off-Broadway on regional theater. In 1980s Milwaukee, as in many other parts of the country at this time, theatrical artists faced dwindling resources, making it difficult for all but the most established groups to survive.4 The comparatively smallscale and inexpensive productions of Off- and Off-Off-Broadway thus perhaps seemed a viable model for regional companies like McQueen’s contending with a lack of funding and other forms of support. McQueen’s productions of March of the Falsettos (Clavis, 1983), Damn Tango (Tesseract, 1988), and Billy Bishop Goes to War (Tesseract, 1989) aptly demonstrate how adopting the business strategies and aesthetics of New York City’s fringe theater traditions allowed Clavis and Tesseract to differentiate themselves from the local theatrical mainstream and navigate numerous practical constraints. These three musicals reveal how institutional support structures shaped the alternative theater scene in 1980s Milwaukee, and gesture more broadly to the role such structures play in cultivating theatrical cultures beyond Broadway.

The Regional Theater Movement in Milwaukee In the decades after World War II, ambitious people seeking to break Broadway’s hold on American theater culture began founding professional theater companies across the country. Because it was widely understood that these theaters were valuable community assets capable of boosting a city’s 397

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cultural reputation and spurring growth in the business and industrial sectors, the number of regional theaters rose rapidly through the 1960s. The majority of regional theaters are nonprofit operations, supported by government funds, charitable foundations, and donations from private citizens and businesses. The movement was thus also aided by the increase in public and private funding for the arts in the 1950s and 1960s, through organizations like the Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and similar state and municipal groups.5 Milwaukee joined the regional theater movement in 1953 with the founding of Drama Inc., a professional company that evolved over the next decade into the Milwaukee Repertory Theater. Quickly becoming one of the city’s chief cultural assets, the Rep moved into the newly constructed Performing Arts Center in 1968. There, it raised its level of craftsmanship, attracted high profile donors, and expanded its number of season ticket subscribers, thereby securing advance revenue and cementing its artistic reputation.6 By the 1980s, the Rep had become Milwaukee’s establishment theater, with a season budget of around $3 million, a stable of 40–45 resident actors, and the city’s top creative and technical personnel.7 As happened in many cities with a strong establishment theater, a “satellite system” of smaller companies emerged in Milwaukee, offering alternatives to the Rep’s more traditional programming.8 Ranging from the experimental productions of Theatre X (1969–2003) to the literary emphasis of the Milwaukee Chamber Theatre (1975–present) to a plethora of children’s theater groups, these second-tier companies diversified options for local theatergoers. There were even two companies dedicated to musicals. Skylight Comic Opera Theatre (1959–present) produced a variety of musicals and operas by, among others, Gilbert and Sullivan, Sondheim, and Mozart. Melody Top (1963–1987) was a tent theater that staged Broadway musicals with big-name stars, including John Raitt in Oklahoma!, Howard Keel in Kiss Me, Kate, and Betty Hutton in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. Milwaukee audiences could also view high-quality productions from local universities, most notably the Professional Theater Training Program (PTTP) at the University of Wisconsin—Milwaukee (UWM).9 What Milwaukee lacked was a professional theater company dedicated to the works of Off-Broadway. By the 1980s, the lines between Broadway, Off-Broadway, and Off-Off-­Broadway had become increasingly blurred, with the distinctions between them often more contractual than aesthetic. Still, Off- and Off-Off-Broadway were considered more willing to take risks on alternative theatrical fare. Smaller houses—often in converted storefronts, cafes, or other nontraditional spaces—and correspondingly lower production costs meant these theaters were not dependent upon huge audiences to remain financially solvent. Like regional theaters, Off- and Off-Off-Broadway companies also tended to be nonprofits, further reducing their need for commercial success. Such conditions encouraged the exploration of difficult or taboo subjects, unconventional narrative structures, modes of nonverbal communication, audience involvement, and reflexivity. Off- and Off-Off-Broadway’s more formally challenging and often intimate works thus stood in contrast to the lavish, expensive spectacle associated with Broadway, especially the megamusicals of the 1980s.10 Many regional theaters, particularly smaller satellite companies founded in the 1960s and 1970s, including Milwaukee’s Theatre X, were directly influenced by New York City’s Off- and Off-Off-Broadway movements.11 Yet Theatre X was a little too avant-garde for Milwaukee audiences, and the collective was actually better known in Europe than in its home city.12 Skylight Comic Opera and the Court Street Theater, the Rep’s smaller subsidiary, occasionally imported Off-Broadway shows, but on the whole, the familiar, conventional offerings of the Rep and Melody Top dominated the city’s theatrical scene until the early 1980s, when Clavis Theatre and Theatre Tesseract emerged to fill a perceived gap. In March 1983, Sharon McQueen founded Clavis Theatre, which she named for her grandmothers, Clara and Mavis. She brought in director Neal Brenard as her partner, but she then 398

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left the company in April 1984, citing creative differences. Clavis continued under Brenard’s direction, and in June, McQueen formed Theatre Tesseract, which took its name from Madeline L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time. Though critics often thought Clavis was more daring in its selection of properties, they deemed Tesseract’s productions to be artistically superior, and McQueen was routinely praised for her “uncanny ability to mount quality productions … on a budgetary shoe string.”13 Both companies, though, specialized in imports of contemporary Off- and Off-OffBroadway shows, generally those that had experienced some degree of critical success and that were thought to be more accessible to regional audiences than the productions of Theatre X. By associating themselves with New York City’s fringe theater, however, Clavis and Tesseract were still able to position themselves as alternative to more established companies like the Rep. The comparatively small scale of these Off-Broadway productions also allowed McQueen to sustain operations (at least for a while) without much institutional support. Thus by adopting the Off-Broadway model, McQueen was able to carve out a niche in Milwaukee’s theater scene, beginning with a modest production of March of the Falsettos.

March of the Falsettos: Establishing Milwaukee’s Off-Broadway Scene Sharon McQueen was working as an actress and producer in New York City when William Finn’s one-act musical March of the Falsettos opened Off-Broadway in April 1981. When she was denied permission to produce her own version anywhere on the east coast, she suggested bringing the show to Milwaukee instead.14 A native of Grafton, Wisconsin, McQueen had studied theater in Milwaukee and had strong ties to the area, so the opportunity to stage the Midwest premiere of March was an exciting one. There was no guarantee, though, that the musical would succeed in a more conservative part of the country. March focuses on Marvin, a gay Jewish man in New York City struggling to balance relationships with his ex-wife, Trina; his lover, Whizzer; and his adolescent son, Jason. Almost entirely sung-through, the story progresses by way of conversations, fights, and therapy sessions. Such topics were considered “stereotypically New York and not part of mainstream Milwaukee,” and critics questioned whether local audiences were ready for “a gay musical of the 80s.”15 McQueen founded Clavis Theatre to find out. McQueen’s prior experience with both Off-Off-Broadway and regional productions likely informed her strategic use of limited resources. She financed March through two primary investors and an unconventional loan agreement with her grandfather.16 The story goes that on his 45th wedding anniversary, McQueen’s grandfather gave each of his 23 grandchildren a bar of gold. To obtain the $575 for the rights to March, McQueen temporarily sold the gold back to him as collateral. (McQueen reportedly used this method of financing for several subsequent productions.)17 She also took advantage of UWM’s willingness to rent performance space to outside theater companies, securing Room 425 in Mitchell Hall, a 75-seat venue available for less than $15 a day.18 To fit Clavis’s budgetary and space limitations, the small-scale Off-Broadway show, with its cast of five and sets comprised of a few pieces of furniture, was pared down further; the seven-piece band, for instance, was reduced to a single piano.19 In total, McQueen’s production only cost around $2,000 and required only 15 people to assemble.20 March of the Falsettos opened in May 1983, and proved a success. Critics praised the production, with Damien Jaques of the Milwaukee Journal further noting that he never thought March would come to the city, as it was hardly likely to be staged at Melody Top.21 Audiences seemed to like it, too. The show was scheduled for eight performances, but two more had to be added to meet demand, and even at the low ticket price of $5, the production turned a 33% profit.22 Building on this momentum, McQueen and her new partner Neal Brenard began developing Clavis into a more permanent institution, dedicated to staging “Off-Broadway style” productions. In November 1983, they opened The Enclave Theater, a 99-seat storefront venue in the 399

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neighborhood of Walker’s Point. Its arrival was seen as a boon to the area’s ongoing revitalization; close to art galleries and the Milwaukee Ballet studios, the Enclave became a catalyst for converting Walker’s Point into Milwaukee’s “own little SoHo.”23 Crucially, because the building’s owner recognized Clavis’s value to the neighborhood, he initially set rent at $1 a month, which gave the fledgling company time to establish itself.24 Within a year, Clavis had formed a board of directors and filed for nonprofit status, making it easier to build an audience, seek out funding, and brand itself as “Milwaukee’s professional off-Broadway theater.”25 Clavis thus owed its strong start not only to McQueen’s artistic direction but also to the institutional support structures that facilitated the company’s first productions: UWM’s friendly policies, the low-rent Enclave Theater, and the cultural environment of Walker’s Point. McQueen had less luck securing such support for Theatre Tesseract, however, and so the growth of her second company was especially dependent on her ability to provide Milwaukee with a “creative and exciting alternative to the more traditional modes of theatrical fare” staged at the Rep or Melody Top.26 Tesseract’s productions needed to be accessible to a regional audience less familiar with fringe theater traditions, but they also needed to be daring enough to make the company stand out in ­M ilwaukee’s larger theatrical scene. Tesseract’s production of the musical Damn Tango demonstrates how McQueen sought to use Off-Broadway’s alternative aesthetic both to attract patrons with the allure of something different and open up new avenues of institutional support.

Damn Tango: McQueen’s Alternative Aesthetic Like Clavis, Tesseract was “committed to presenting current off-Broadway-style plays from theater centers around the country.”27 There was some concern that regional audiences might be wary of Off-Broadway’s association with the unconventional and avant-garde, and so McQueen did select theatrical properties she felt would “[cut] it commercially at the box office.”28 Yet Clavis had proven there was an audience for alternative theater in Milwaukee, and Tesseract continued courting that audience by promising unique productions on “the cutting edge of artistic controversy.”29 At least one of the four or five plays Tesseract put on each season was a local premiere, and less than a year after its founding, the company had already developed a critical reputation for staging “some of the most innovative, risk-taking theater in [Milwaukee] today.”30 The public also responded positively, to the point that Tesseract was able to survive on ticket sales alone for its first two seasons.31 Damn Tango (1988) was one of the company’s most ambitious projects. At almost $34,000, it was Tesseract’s costliest production to date, featuring a dozen singers and dancers, a six-piece combo, and comparatively elaborate production design.32 To showcase these higher production values, the musical was staged in the largest available venue: the 99-seat Ivory Hall at the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts (LCA). Tango’s scale made it somewhat risky, and indeed the show failed to turn a profit. Yet the musical’s prestigious European pedigree, complex philosophical narrative, and expressionistic style also made it precisely the kind of alternative fare on which Tesseract’s reputation was founded. Damn Tango was an adaptation of Manuel Puig’s Argentinian novel Heartbreak Tango (1969) with a book by Polish director Helena Dynerman, lyrics by Andrzej Olga, and a score comprised of 27 tangos by Janusz Tylman. Dynerman, a graduate of the Theater of Opera and Ballet and the State Professional School of Drama in Warsaw, had first garnered attention for her award-winning revue of Bertolt Brecht songs, Niebo Zawiedzionych (Haven for the Disillusioned), which she staged in Warsaw (1983), Sweden (1985), and Copenhagen (1986).33 Her production of Damn Tango opened in October 1986 in Warsaw, and was still running when Tesseract mounted the musical’s ­A merican premiere in February 1988.

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Significantly, this was not Tesseract’s first collaboration with Dynerman. McQueen had met the director’s husband while moonlighting as an artist’s model at the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design, and in 1987 invited her to make her American debut with the Milwaukee premiere of Ted Tally’s satirical comedy Coming Attractions.34 Being able to announce that a director “acclaimed for her work in Poland and Scandinavia, [was coming] to Milwaukee expressly to work with Theatre Tesseract” gave the little company an air of distinction.35 When critics lauded the “European edge” Dynerman brought to Coming Attractions, McQueen approached her about bringing Tango to the American stage.36 Dynerman’s artistic sensibility shared many tenants with the Off- and Off-Off-Broadway movements, particularly her interest in nonverbal communication and her favoring of symbolism over realism.37 These aesthetic concepts are on full display in Tango, which depicts the life of Juan Carlos, recounted after his death by his mother, sister, and lovers. Based on these accounts, the guides of death—the White Tango and the Black Tango—determine the fate of his soul. With the 27 tangos often seguing into each other, the show is almost entirely sung-through, and rhythmic movement is pervasive. The jarring, episodic narrative structure mimics the pseudo-epistolary conceit of Puig’s novel, and certain songs eschew standard rhyming structures. Props consist mainly of chairs, a sheet, and a mirror, all of which perform multiple practical and symbolic functions. The sheet, for example, serves as Juan Carlos’s death shroud, the bed in which he makes love to his mistress, a flickering movie screen, and a pathway to the afterlife. Costuming is similarly symbolic, playing with variations of dark and light, from Juan Carlos’s white suit, to the black dresses of the mourners, to the garish, white face makeup that gives characters an otherworldly appearance (Figure 39.1).38 This alternative aesthetic became the focal point for the musical’s promotional campaign. ­Tesseract’s brochures and newsletters repeatedly described Damn Tango as “a theatrical pageant of drama, dance and song woven into an expressionistic ritual of love, death and the cyclical nature of life,” and emphasized its European roots and “Brechtian flavor.”39 Advance press coverage similarly played up Tango’s unconventional elements. In the Milwaukee Sentinel, for instance, Jay Joslyn describes the show’s unusual staging: “the action is layered with simultaneous presentations of the dramatic performance of the lyrics in one section of the stage while dancing couples reflect the

Figure 39.1  Juan Carlos (David Cescarini) and his sister (Sharon McQueen) in Theatre Tesseract’s production of Damn Tango (1988). From the Archives Department, University of Wisconsin—­ Milwaukee Libraries.

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passion of the scene in another.” The article also notes the “really important stature [Dynerman and composer Janusz Tylman] have in European theater.”40 It seems that Milwaukee theatergoers were intrigued by these promises of European-style alternative theater. Tesseract sold more individual tickets to Tango than to any other production that season, suggesting the show had garnered the attention of people who were not regular patrons, and many saw the musical more than once.41 A post-performance talkback with Dynerman and primary translator Charles Schaefer had a standing-room only turnout, and multiple patrons requested copies of the song lyrics.42 Some even wrote to thank Tesseract for staging something so “provocative … both intellectually and sensually.”43 Critics praised the show, too. WAM Magazine called it “the highlight of Milwaukee’s theatrical year,” and the Milwaukee Sentinel asserted that “this raw, rugged production breathes the kind of imaginative fire not often found on Milwaukee stages.”44 So though it was not a financial success, Damn Tango was one of Tesseract’s most popular productions, broadening awareness about the company and proving its artistic worth. This latter point was particularly important in Tesseract’s quest for outside support. Like most regional theaters, Tesseract was nonprofit, and depended on donations and grants to cover general operating costs, fund productions, and pay personnel. To secure this funding, Tesseract needed to prove that it could make significant contributions to Milwaukee’s art scene. As McQueen noted in grant applications, Damn Tango was not only unique to the city or the Midwest; it offered something “unavailable anywhere else in the country.”45 It was hoped that advertising such contributions would help secure the institutional support Tesseract desperately needed. By the turn of the decade, Tesseract had a season budget of $190,000, a subscriber base of over 1,000, five full-time staff, a robust volunteer organization, and a much-touted computer.46 Yet the company still faced obstacles in its day-to-day operations. Comparatively lavish productions like Damn Tango were important for attracting new patrons and additional sources of funding, but they could not be a regular part of Tesseract’s programming. As with many small companies, both Off-Off-Broadway and in the regions, Tesseract’s repertoire was frequently dictated by its limited funds and the restrictions of its sub-par performance spaces. Tesseract’s 1989 production of Billy Bishop Goes to War (1978) evidences particularly well how McQueen’s reliance on Off-Broadway style productions was crucial to navigating these constraints.

Billy Bishop Goes to War: Navigating Institutional Constraints In the 1980s, nonprofit theaters across the country began to struggle, as curtailed government spending, changing cultural priorities, and reduced tax-based incentives caused many of the public and private organizations who had subsidized regional and Off-Off-Broadway companies in the previous decades to withdraw their support to varying degrees.47 For a city like Milwaukee, in which large, well-established groups like the Rep existed alongside smaller, upstart groups like Clavis and Tesseract, available funds were more likely to be allocated to the former. For instance, Milwaukee’s United Performing Arts Fund (UPAF), an umbrella nonprofit organization founded in 1967 to raise money for its members, did not accept second-tier companies until 1988, and then did not split its money evenly among them.48 In 1989, UPAF divided $5 million among its seven corporate members, which included the Rep, the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra, and the Florentine Opera Company, but allocated only $200,000 to its 16 associate members, which included Tesseract.49 Without outside support, small regional theaters struggled to implement the long-term fundraising strategies top-tier companies had already established. Thus while the Rep had a large subscriber base, long-standing relationships with charitable organizations, and wellhoned grant application procedures, Tesseract was not able to initiate season ticket subscriptions or hire a dedicated grant consultant until 1987—three years after its founding. 402

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A significant challenge for small companies in the regions and Off-Off-Broadway was a lack of professional performance space. Unable to afford to rent the prominent houses, little theaters frequently resorted to less-than-ideal locations that further burdened their day-to-day operations. This was certainly the case for many groups in Milwaukee, including Tesseract, which was never able to secure a permanent home. The company negotiated with nearly every venue in town and explored multiple vacant properties with the aim of creating a storefront theater like The Enclave, but nothing proved financially feasible. In the mid-1980s, furthermore, UWM changed its policies and stopped renting space to professional companies.50 So in 1985, without any other options and assuming it would be temporary, Tesseract became a resident company of the LCA, a former high school still operated by the Milwaukee Public School (MPS) system. Arts groups could use the building for office and performance space in exchange for a nominal fee and educational outreach.51 However, the building was poorly maintained and administrative difficulties were many, particularly during summer months when MPS staff were not regularly in the office. Though Tesseract sometimes used the larger Ivory Hall (as with Damn Tango), most of its productions were performed in Room 205, a “cubby-hole-classroom.”52 Tesseract had to strike the sets at the end of each performance so the room could be used for other purposes the following day.53 Such institutional constraints naturally dictated the kinds of shows second-tier companies like Tesseract could put on. To successfully perform in Room 205, McQueen needed plays and musicals designed to be produced on a small scale. Tesseract would be less likely to develop a strong reputation and loyal audience if it was seen to be paring down productions to fit the tiny venue. Space restrictions thus further solidified Tesseract’s bent toward Off- and Off-Off-Broadway properties: they were meant to be staged in smaller, more intimate spaces; their production design was meant to be sparse; and their musical accompaniment was meant to be minimal.54 By executing such plays and musicals with a high degree of professionalism and artistic polish, Tesseract demonstrated an ability to transcend its less-than-ideal conditions, which boosted its critical reputation. This was certainly the case with Billy Bishop Goes to War, a Canadian musical by John ­McLachlan Gray and Eric Peterson based on the life of a World War I fighter pilot. This two-man show consists of one pianist, who also supplies accompanying vocals, and one actor who plays 18 different characters including the titular one. Talking directly to the audience in a musical monologue, Billy recounts his time at war, including encounters with various people along the way. The musical requires an actor capable of performing characters of multiple ages, nationalities, and genders, but does not require an elaborate set or full orchestral accompaniment. The minimalism of the show thus made it perfect for Room 205: it was a small musical that could, with care and talent, be turned into tour-de-force theater. Tesseract’s production of Billy Bishop, designed by Michael Duncan, then affiliated with the PTTP, utilized a platform stage containing a piano, an upholstered chair, and a coatrack holding various costume elements. Props were few and versatile, and it was primarily the lighting, by Marty Wallner, Tesseract’s resident lighting designer, that served to transform the space into different settings. Piano accompaniment by Jack Wilson also assisted in establishing mood and pacing.55 Critics praised this simple but “imaginative” production design, particularly how it “transformed a classroom into a handsome and viable performance space.”56 What the show needed to succeed, however, was a talented leading man. This was found in David Cescarini, a well-known player in Wisconsin regional theater and highly regarded as a “Milwaukee favorite.”57 His performance in Billy Bishop only further cemented his strong reputation, with the UWM Post asserting that the “play is worth seeing for Cescarini’s performance alone.”58 Billy Bishop’s small-scale Off-Broadway-style aesthetic thus allowed Tesseract to create a noteworthy production from what was essentially two men in a classroom. It was because of this combination of a “shrewd business savvy” and “inherent artistic sensibility” that Tesseract survived as long as it did.59 New arts groups in Milwaukee had an average lifespan of a year-and-a-half; 403

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Tesseract made it five years before posting its first deficit.60 Yet at the turn of the decade, what few institutional support structures there were for these types of second-tier companies were beginning to collapse further. As was the fate of many regional and Off-Off-Broadway companies in the 1980s and 1990s, without outside assistance, Clavis and Tesseract were forced to close.

Conclusion: The End of Clavis and Tesseract By the 1990s, regional theaters were no longer receiving the degree of support that had facilitated their expansion in the 1960s. The National Endowment for the Arts and corresponding state, county, and city organizations continued to cut funding, and the growth of satellite companies in many cities meant more groups were now competing for fewer resources. In addition, demographic shifts had winnowed the base audience for local theaters, resulting in a drop in season ticket subscriptions and a corresponding decrease in the advance revenue companies needed to mount their productions. In many regions, all but the strongest theater groups were shutting down.61 Conditions in Milwaukee were no different. Clavis Theatre was forced out of the Walker’s Point neighborhood by rising costs a few years after the Enclave opened. The company then moved to Prospect Mall, but this also proved financially untenable, and Clavis closed in December 1989.62 The following year, MPS converted the Lincoln Center building into administrative offices, forcing all arts groups, including Theatre Tesseract, to vacate. In 1988, however, the Rep moved into a new $100 million complex. Anxieties in Milwaukee’s art scene escalated with the proposal to merge the Wisconsin Arts Board with the Board of Tourism to create the Department of Arts, Tourism, and Promotion in 1989. Though this would ostensibly give the arts cabinet standing in the state government, many feared it would only widen the gap between major players like the Rep and smaller groups like Clavis and Tesseract by prioritizing those organizations that could attract visitors to the area.63 McQueen was outspoken against the merger, even making a statement to the Senate Forum about her concerns that Milwaukee’s arts scene, which she already considered impoverished compared with cities like Chicago or Minneapolis, would be reduced to pandering to the lowest common denominator. “Usefullness [sic] to tourism, in my mind,” she said, “should not determine the worthiness of an artist.”64 McQueen’s concerns about the ability to cultivate a rich artistic culture in Milwaukee under the city’s existing institutional structures were not unfounded. In the 1990s, established companies like the Rep and the Milwaukee Chamber Theatre began producing more contemporary Off-Broadway-style plays. With Clavis and Tesseract having already proved that there was an audience for this kind of alternative theater in the city, the larger companies, themselves struggling to find audiences, now hoped to attract new demographics with unusual fare that they could produce more cheaply. Yet this made it harder for small companies to obtain rights to such shows, and Tesseract was consequently forced out of its niche.65 Homeless and no longer able to differentiate itself from the major players, Tesseract merged with the children’s theater company Next Generation, forming Next Act Theatre. After the last official Tesseract production in January 1991, McQueen bowed out, leaving Next Act in the hands of Jonathan Smoots and David Cescarini, who broadened the company’s programming to encompass “a full spectrum of quality theatrical productions, including provocative M ­ ilwaukee premieres, proven contemporary works, and clear vigorous productions of the classics.”66 ­Cescarini still runs Next Act, which today focuses on intimate productions of plays addressing social, cultural, and political issues.67 The institutional difficulties of the 1980s and 1990s did not spell the end of small regional companies, and scrappy theater groups continue to employ the Off-Broadway model, putting on 404

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unconventional shows in unconventional venues in cities across the country, Milwaukee included. Yet the cases of Clavis Theatre and Theatre Tesseract demonstrate how the success of small regional theater companies is contingent on local institutional support structures. As Milwaukee critics repeatedly noted, second-tier companies like Clavis and Tesseract enriched the city’s entire theatrical scene, widening audience tastes and offering more opportunities to cultivate and retain top-notch creative personnel. While the Off-Broadway model helped these groups gain a foothold and find an audience, the policies of groups like UPAF and the funding priorities of legislators, which favored the establishment, were simply not conducive to their long-term survival. The study of regional theater, then, must also be a study of its supporting political, financial, and cultural institutions. For while talent and vision are certainly important in cultivating live theater in regions like the Midwest, fluctuations in funding, a paucity of venues, or a juggernaut establishment company ultimately play a significant role in shaping theatrical culture in places beyond Broadway.

Notes 1 Damien Jaques. “As Theater Town, We’re Big-League.” Milwaukee Journal. 1 Jan. 1989, 1E, 10E, box 5, folder 19, Sharon McQueen Papers, 1981–1999, UWM Mss 157, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Libraries, Archive Department (hereafter McQueen Papers). 2 No relation to the author. 3 Damien Jaques. “Clavis Group Readies Home in Walker’s Point Area.” Milwaukee Journal (30 Oct. 1983), n.p., box 1, folder 15, McQueen Papers. 4 Gerald N. Berkowitz. New Broadways: Theatre Across America: Approaching a New Millennium, rev. ed. New York: Applause, 1997. 113–119. 5 Berkowitz, New Broadways, 69–119; Joseph Wesley Ziegler. Regional Theater: The Revolutionary Stage. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1973. 1–4, 24–26, 62–65, 88–103. 6 Ziegler, Regional Theater, 42–45, 177; Berkowitz, New Broadways, 94; Jonathan West. Milwaukee’s Live Theater. Charleston: Arcadia, 2009. 19–33. 7 Sandra Whitehead. “Welcome to the Golden Age of Milwaukee Theater.” Single Life. Sept./Oct. 1988, 21–24, box 1, folder 16, McQueen Papers. 8 Berkowitz, New Broadways, 131–132; Ziegler, Regional Theater, 192. 9 West, Milwaukee’s Live Theater, 50–56, 60–79, 85–96. 10 Berkowitz, New Broadways, 31–65, 125–131, 140–152; Elizabeth L. Wollman. The Theater Will Rock: A History of the Rock Musical, from Hair to Hedwig. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2006. 120–131. 11 Berkowitz, New Broadways, 32. 12 West, Milwaukee’s Live Theater, 96–100. 13 Bruce Murphy. “Secret Stages: Milwaukee’s Smaller Theater Companies Have Big Artistic Impact.” Milwaukee Magazine. Jan. 1987, 90, box 5, folder 19, McQueen Papers; Damien Jaques. “It was a Year for Shaw.” Milwaukee Journal. 23 Dec. 1984, n.p., box 5, folder 19. 14 Harry Cherkinian. “‘March of the Falsettos,’ Gay Musical, Opens May 5.” Milwaukee Journal. 1 May 1 1983, n.p., box 1, folder 15, McQueen Papers. 15 Damien Jaques. “’Falsettos’ an Improbable Pleaser.” Milwaukee Journal. 6 May 1983, n.p., box 1, folder 15, McQueen Papers; Cherkinian, “‘March of the Falsettos.’” 16 Contract of Agreement, box 3, folder 11, McQueen Papers. 17 Jay Joslyn. “Gold Bars for Troupe.” Milwaukee Sentinel. 4 Jan. 1985, 8, box 5, folder 19, McQueen Papers; Receipt from Samuel French Musicals, March 23, 1983 [sic], box 5, folder 17, McQueen Papers. 18 License Agreement for Use of Fine Arts MIT 425 at UWM, n.d., box 1, folder 17, McQueen Papers. 19 Frank Rich. “Stage: ‘March of Falsettos,’ A Musical Find.” New York Times. 10 Apr. 1981. Web. ; The Clavis Staff. “The History of Clavis Theater.” n.d., box 1, folder 15, McQueen Papers. 20 March of the Falsettos Budget, box 3, folder 11, McQueen Papers; “History of Clavis Theater.” 21 Jay Joslyn. “‘March’ Starts Off on Right Foot.” Milwaukee Sentinel. 6 May 1983, n.p., box 3, folder 11, McQueen Papers; Jaques, “Improbable Pleaser.” 22 Kathy Naab. “Accent on the Weekend: Showcase: ‘Falsettos’ pack ‘em in.” Milwaukee Journal. 13 May 1983, n.p., box 3, folder 11, McQueen Papers; Letter from Neal Brenard and Sharon Trembly to Potential Theater Investor, September 13, 1983, box 1, folder 17, McQueen Papers.

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Amanda McQueen 23 “Welcome to the Enclave Theater!,” Side-by-Side by Sondheim Playbill, box 5, folder 11, McQueen ­Papers; “Good show!.” Milwaukee Journal. 5 Nov. 1983, 10, box 1, folder 16, McQueen Papers. 24 “Welcome to the Enclave Theater!” 25 Damien Jaques. “That Impulse to Self-Destruct.” Milwaukee Journal. 5 Apr. 1984, n.p., box 3, folder 5, McQueen Papers. 26 Qtd. in Brochure for 1988–1989 Season, box 5, folder 8, McQueen Papers. 27 Letter from Sharon McQueen to Archie Sarazin, December 19, 1986, box 5, folder 16, McQueen Papers. 28 Ziegler, Regional Theater, 246; Elfrieda Pantoga. “Survival Their Biggest Role.” Milwaukee Sentinel, n.d., n.p., box 1, folder 15, McQueen Papers; Qtd. in Harry Cherkinian. “Taking Chances: Milwaukee’s Newest Theater Group Rides on Little Money and Big Ideas.” Milwaukee Magazine. May 1985, 108, box 3, folder 5, McQueen Papers. 29 Qtd. in Cherkinian, “Taking Chances.” 30 Cherkinian, “Taking Chances.” 31 Letter from McQueen to Sarazin. 32 1987–1988 Financial Statement, box 1, folder 9, McQueen Papers; Milwaukee Foundation Special Project Grant Application, October 7, 1987, box 2, folder 16, McQueen Papers. 33 Lena Dynerman Resume, box 4, folder 6, McQueen Papers. An alternative translation of this title is Sky Disappointed. 34 Perry Gettelman. “Milwaukee Play Brings This Polish Family Back Together.” Milwaukee Journal. 11 Jan. 1987, n.p., box 1, folder 19, McQueen Papers. 35 “Press Release: Theater Tesseract Announces Exciting 1986–1987 Season!!!!,” n.d., box 5, folder 7, ­McQueen Papers. 36 Jay Joslyn. “Tesseract Show an Attractive Romp.” Milwaukee Sentinel. 13 Feb. 1987, n.p., box 1, folder 19, McQueen Papers. 37 ‘Coming Attractions.’ Art Muscle, 15 Mar./15 May 1987, n.p., box 1, folder 19, McQueen Papers; ­Gettleman, “Milwaukee Play.” 38 DVD 16, McQueen Papers. 39 “In Process: Damn Tango - It Takes More than Two.” Theater Tesseract News. 1987–1988 Season, Issue 1, Fall, box 3, folder 14, McQueen Papers. 40 Jay Joslyn. “Polish Director Ignites Emotions with Fiery Dances.” Let’s Go, Milwaukee Sentinel. 12 Feb. 1988, 13, Microfilm P87–4029, Wisconsin Historical Society Library, Madison. 41 1987–1988 Financial Statement. 42 Charlie Schaefer. “Lookback on Tango.” Theater Tesseract News. 1987–1988 Season, Issue 2, Spring, box 3, folder 14, McQueen Papers. 43 Letter from David F. Gaura and Cecily Ruth Ulrich-Gaura to Theater Tesseract, 7 Mar. 1988, box 2, folder 1, McQueen Papers. 4 4 Qtd. in Brochure for 1988–1989 Season, box 5, folder 8, McQueen Papers. 45 Milwaukee Foundation Special Project Grant Application. 46 Brochure for 1987–1988 Season, box 5, folder 8, McQueen Papers; Theater Tesseract News, 1989–1990 Season, Issue I, Winter, and Issue II, Spring, box 3, folder 14, McQueen Papers. 47 Berkowitz, New Broadways, 110–114. 48 Debra Bremer. “Tough Times for Milwaukee’s Small Theaters.” Art Muscle. May/June/July 1990, 25– 26, box 5, folder 19, McQueen Papers; “History.” UPAF. 2017. Web. . 49 Statement from Sharon McQueen to Senate Forum Re: Wisconsin Arts Board, May 19, 1989, box 6, folder 9, McQueen Papers. 50 Damien Jaques. “Milwaukee Theater Groups Caught in Vexing Chase for Space.” Milwaukee Journal. 4 Nov. 1984, n.p., box 5, folder 19, McQueen Papers. 51 Jaques, “Vexing Chase for Space.” 52 Joslyn, “Attractive Romp.” 53 Paul Bianco. “Billy Bishop Goes to War … and Theater Tesseract Drafts Actor David Cescarini for Multi-Faceted Portrayal.” The UWM Post. 2 Mar. 1989, n.p., box 1, folder 6, McQueen Papers. 54 Berkowitz, New Broadways, 33, 56. 55 DVD 15, McQueen Papers. 56 Jay Joslyn. “‘Billy Bishop’ Production Captures World War I Ace.” Milwaukee Sentinel. 24 Feb. 1989, n.p. box 1, folder 6, McQueen Papers; Damien Jaques. “Impressive Staging of ‘Billy Bishop.” Milwaukee Journal. 24 Feb. 1989, n.p., box 1, folder 6, McQueen Papers.

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Alternative Regional Musical Theater 57 Press Release: “Theater Tesseract Presents ‘Billy Bishop Goes to War,’” February 2, 1989, box 1, folder 6, McQueen Papers. 58 “Tesseract Drafts Actor.” 59 Cherkinian, “Taking Chances.” 60 Statement from Sharon McQueen to Senate Forum. 61 Berkowitz, New Broadways, 218–220; Bremer, “Tough Times,” 25–26; Michael Zahn. “The Great ­Season Ticket Dilemma.” Milwaukee Journal. 3 July 1988, 1E, 3E, box 5, folder 9, McQueen Papers. 62 Neal Brenard. “Milwaukee Loses a Theater Company.” Art Muscle. 27 May/June/July 1989, box 1, folder 13, McQueen Papers. 63 Bruce Murphy. “The Accidental Tourist Bureau.” Milwaukee Magazine. April 1989, box 6, folder 9, ­McQueen Papers. 64 Statement from Sharon McQueen to Senate Forum. 65 Berkowitz, New Broadways, 220; Bremer, “Tough Times,” 25–26. 66 Brochure for Next Act, n.d., box 5, folder 8, McQueen Papers. 67 “About Next Act Theater,” Next Act Theater, 2017. .

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40 MUSICALS IN THE REGIONAL THEATER Jeffrey Ullom

In 1994, the Actors Theatre of Louisville celebrated the grand opening of its third theater, the Bingham: a beautiful, 318-seat arena space and the cornerstone of a $12.5 million revocation project.1 Adding a third theater provided enhanced production opportunities to the institution, which staged six to ten different productions during its annual Humana Festival of New American Plays. The more intimate space reflected current trends in contemporary playwriting, including smaller casts and shows, and artistic director Jon Jory’s desire to explore more minimalist productions.2 Despite the excitement and increased artistic possibilities the Bingham allowed, questions quickly arose about the financial wisdom of building the space, especially since the Actors Theatre had already incurred debt from overhead costs and an inability to fill their theaters during the regular season. One former employee, who wished to remain anonymous, stated, “They’re losing money hand over fist…They can’t keep the audience. It’s too much. They should have two and not three theaters.”3 With the theater running into financial trouble, Jory resorted to a familiar choice that had helped his theater decades before when it struggled to attract audiences: Actors Theatre of Louisville would offer a musical during its regular season.4 A musical, then, was expected to save the theater. If anything has changed over the past 20 years, it’s that many regional theaters are producing musicals less for their artistic merit than as a means to entice audiences into their facilities. By definition, regional theaters are nonprofit institutions funded by private and public subsidies, which produce their own seasons, offer educational programming for their communities, and serve as training grounds for actors, directors, designers, and writers. Theaters like The Cleveland Play House (founded in 1915), the Guthrie Theater (1963), the Steppenwolf  Theatre (1974), and many others have operated as nonprofits, meaning that their production budgets are limited and closely scrutinized. Obviously, hoping to attract audiences by offering musicals can be risky given the substantial added cost of producing larger shows with more working parts, but at the same time, the uptick in musicals demonstrates that they are increasingly vital and prominent entertainments. As the tactic of programming musicals took hold across the country, institutions searched for new avenues and resources to make them more cost-friendly to the theater’s bottom line, often discovering the answer in their own peer institutions. This chapter examines the advantages and pitfalls of including musicals in regional programs and explores how these theaters are discovering new avenues to finance their productions while also addressing issues of inequity.

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The History of Musicals in Regional Theater The American regional theater and musicals have been associated with each other ever since an anomaly of an institution produced an anomaly of a musical that became an international success. During the first few decades of the regional theater movement—roughly, the late 1950s and early 1960s—regional theaters generally adopted as their mission the opportunity to provide culture to their communities by staging classic plays alongside more contemporary works that recently appeared on Broadway.5 In addition to serving as training grounds for burgeoning actors, directors, and designers—and eventually as development centers for new plays—the earliest regional theaters focused on educating audiences. Local theatergoers were often provided with a balance of populist and progressive fare: a mix, for example, of Shakespeare and Greek classics; comparatively modern plays by Ibsen, Chekhov, and the like; and a smattering of populist comedies and postWorld War I dramas. Because most regional theaters were supported, especially in their infancies, by wealthy citizens who prioritized classic works, they reflected a fairly conservative approach to both programming and theater-making.6 Musicals, then, despite their popularity, weren’t produced frequently, with the exception of those deemed more highbrow, artistic endeavors than the typical Broadway hit. For example, in its first 16 years offering mainstage entertainment, the esteemed Seattle Rep staged only two musicals: Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill’s The Threepenny Opera (1968) and Music Is, an adaptation of Twelfth Night (1976).7 Most regional theaters did not program many musicals, and those staged were fairly high-minded as a generalized group.8 It is perhaps surprising, then, that the history of musicals in America’s regions cannot be told without detailing the impact of Hair: The American Tribal Love-Rock Musical (1967). As the inaugural production of producer Joseph Papp’s new Public Theater in New York City, Hair quickly sold out its six-week run. Instead of extending the production, however, Papp closed Hair in favor of a previously scheduled production of Hamlet. Michael Butler, a wealthy, well-connected fan of the show, offered to co-produce the musical with Papp in another location, so the production was remounted in a local discothèque.9 However, Hair failed to find an audience at the new location, and soon closed. The rights reverted to the authors of the show (composer Galt MacDermot and book writers and lyricists James Rado and Gerome Ragni), after which Papp and Butler parted ways, and Papp decided to pursue a production of Hair on Broadway, where it ran for 1,750 performances.10 Although the Public Theater is not classified as a regional theater, it functions under the same financial model and exhibits several characteristics commonly associated with the regional theater movement: it functions in a reclaimed building, claims not-for-profit status, and emphasizes the development of new work as part of its mission. Furthermore, the model established by the Broadway success of a musical that originated at a nonprofit institution prompted members of the League of Resident Theatres (LORT) to explore new musicals as a means to bolster their reputations and national profiles. LORT is the professional theater association that “administers the primary national notfor-profit collective bargaining agreements” with several unions, and also deals directly “with ­personnel and management issues involving theater staff, artists, and craftspeople.”11 When LORT was founded in 1966 in Minneapolis, there were only 26 members. The organization has since tripled in size. However, not all LORT institutions are the same, nor do they all enjoy the same financial security. Of the 75 current members, nearly 40 LORT institutions are located on the coasts, and the majority of those are within driving distance of Los Angeles and New York. With greater attention in the press and by professional critics being paid to the larger cities, the smaller LORT members find it more difficult for their work to garner national attention.12 Furthermore,

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for the theaters in the proximity of New York and Los Angeles, the audience base is ten times that of most LORT members, allowing them to take greater risks, since a sufficient number of interested patrons are more likely to fill their seats. The transfer model established by Hair, which Papp later utilized to send A Chorus Line to the Shubert Theatre after a sold-out run at the Public in 1975, hasn’t necessarily translated quite as successfully to the regions. When Actors Theatre of Louisville attempted to transfer their musical Tricks to Broadway in 1973, for example, the show lasted only eight performances, which hurt artistic director and co-creator Jon Jory’s pride as well as the theater’s finances as anticipated royalties failed to realize. A few transfers from the regions, however, did prove critically and financially successful, and thus slowly instilled the notion that perhaps musicals didn’t need to originate on the east coast between New Jersey and Connecticut to make it on Broadway. A case in point is Big River, which was a commercial hit on Broadway that won seven Tony Awards in 1985, including Best Musical. Big River originated at the American Repertory Theater in February 1984 and transferred to the La Jolla Playhouse for a June 1984 opening.13 Under the direction of Des McAnuff (who took over the helm of the La Jolla Playhouse the previous year), the production underwent substantial artistic changes in California before moving to Broadway.14 McAnuff saw similar success in 1992 with The Who’s Tommy, which also moved to Broadway after a successful run at the La Jolla.15 The La Jolla Playhouse was founded by Hollywood royalty Gregory Peck, Dorothy McGuire, and Mel Ferrer in 1947, and its proximity to Hollywood has supplied it with a larger audience base than those enjoyed by most regional theaters. As noted by journalist Richard Stratton, the La Jolla’s “success in drawing major film and television talent comes from its being just far enough from Hollywood for a bomb to go unnoticed but just close enough to make the journey feasible when a hit is launched. So if a play is popular at La Jolla, film execs will make the journey south to scout.”16 With its consistent level of audience support, the La Jolla Playhouse became a popular destination for pre-Broadway tryouts (Thoroughly Modern Millie and Jersey Boys) and for riskier new work (Randy Newman’s Faust and Dracula the Musical), and thus remains an important site for musical theater production and development in the regions. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, more regional theaters based in major cities, and thus with access to large audience bases that potentially lessen financial risks, began mounting new musicals with varying success. For example, the Alley Theatre in Houston offered Frank Wildhorn and Steve Cuden’s Jekyll & Hyde in 1990. Following its initial run in Houston, the musical toured the country and developed a strong following before premiering on Broadway seven years after its premiere in Texas.17 Having established a relationship with artistic director Gregory Boyd, Wildhorn returned to the Alley Theatre to develop The Civil War (1998), which was popular enough with local audiences that the run was extended twice.18 Critics did not all embrace the show; Variety described the Houston production as “a series of show-stoppers in search of a show to stop.” Some felt that the musical abandoned a traditional narrative in place of “a revue-style presentation of a song cycle…[featuring] individual, self-contained vignettes” of wartime events. Yet most critics lauded the Alley Theatre for taking risks with a new musical, and local audiences embraced the new endeavor.19 Audiences in New York, however, were not as willing to overlook the problematic format of the work and the numerous pans from critics, and the show lasted for only 61 performances on Broadway.20 Nevertheless, audiences throughout the country continue to flock to Wildhorn’s show, enabling him to consistently find opportunities at the regional theater level (including Dracula at the La Jolla Playhouse). Again, and perhaps encouraged by the Alley’s success with Jekyll & Hyde, more LORT began mounting new musicals. The new millennium, however, also brought changes in production practices that lessened the financial risks taken by regional theaters. 410

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Producing Musicals in Today’s Regional Theaters With the growing popularity of the musical (not to mention a remarkably successful Broadway show that has its own chart-topping mixtape featuring popular hip-hop artists), surely it would seem that regional theaters around the country would take full advantage of the increased interest in new musicals following the Hamilton boom. However, musicals continue to grace the stages of such institutions less frequently than might be assumed. According to American Theatre magazine, in the three seasons encompassing 2014–2016, only twice did a musical make the list of the most performed shows at regional theaters: Into the Woods (2014–2015) and Sister Act (2016–2017). While this statistic does not reflect the variety of musicals presented in all LORT, it is representative of the fact that regional theaters, on average, include only one musical production in each six- to eight-production season.21 A primary reason for this is twofold: first is competition from Broadway touring companies, which crisscross the country and dominate the marketplace. ­According to the Broadway League, the touring musical industry is booming—not in attendance, but in profits (thanks to higher ticket prices). For example, in the 1991–1992 season, 12.9 million people attended touring productions that grossed approximately $503 million. Thirteen years later, the number of patrons stayed the same; yet the profits rose by $206 million. In 2015–2016, 14 million people attended touring musicals that provided grosses of nearly a billion dollars ($981 million, a 95% increase in 24 years).22 These various organizations that host these touring musicals commonly enjoy between 30,000 and 50,000 subscribers each year, dwarfing the 3,000–6,000 subscribers that most regional theaters can claim. In addition to competition from national tours, the second reason musicals do not frequent the regional theater stage is perhaps the simplest reason of all: cost. Musicals are not only expensive to mount but also expensive to maintain. If a musical is not a co-production with other regional theaters (for which the production cost is shared when the set travels to each location), then the individual institution is on the hook for extensive set design and construction. This can prove problematic, given that few musicals take place on a single set. The same can be said of costume and lighting design, both of which have to balance the demands of a show with the available budget. In addition, the theater needs to hire union musicians and additional actors to fill out the cast, and each of these individuals needs to be housed and offered a per diem for the extent of rehearsals and the show’s run. In order to compensate, regional theaters are finding ways to offer musicals while also cutting costs. For example, the Cleveland Play House not only produced A Night with Janis Joplin (which required a smaller cast), but in 2016 mounted Little Shop of Horrors, in which the musicians doubled as the backup singers.23 Aside from cost-saving measures in a singular production, two successful productions—The Light in the Piazza and Aida—serve as examples of how regional theaters have utilized new funding avenues and adapted their financing and production practices. For example, composer Adam Guettel collaborated with playwright and director Craig Lucas in 2001 to create A Light in the Piazza at the Sundance Playwrights Retreat in Wyoming. Seattle’s Intiman Theatre presented the musical in a workshop in New York City in February 2003, and later agreed to co-produce it with the Goodman Theatre following its premiere at the Intiman. After celebrated runs in both Seattle and Chicago, The Light in the Piazza opened on Broadway, eventually receiving 11 Tony nominations.24 The concept of co-productions is now a familiar practice within regional theater, and not only for musicals. For example, the Cleveland Play House offered two world premieres in its 2013– 2014 season; in order to minimize financial risks, both shows were co-productions. The musical, ­Tappin’ Thru Life, a biographical revue in which Maurice Hines relates stories of his youth and career with his brother, the legendary dancer Gregory Hines, was co-produced by Arena Stage and Alliance Theatre. Cleveland Play House managing director Kevin Moore explains the benefit of co-productions, noting,

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When I did my analyses of what other theaters we admire are doing, there were a lot of co-productions and a lot of musicals. In the larger theaters, a lot of the co-productions seemed to be driven by artistic reasons rather than financial reasons. … It’s when you choose to do a co-production purely for financial reasons, one that hurts your brand, that you risk your artistic integrity….There are right reasons [for co-productions]: extending the life of work, getting to do something you’re excited about … [and] building a stronger relationship with the national theater community among them.25 Co-productions allowed Moore and the Cleveland Play House to pursue artistic goals, while also producing work with a higher budget than would have been possible without external funds. Kelley Kirkpatrick, Center Theatre Group Associate Artistic Director, also enthusiastically supports the idea of co-productions, and touts the benefit for institutions. “I love co-productions on new works,” she says. “It enables the show to have another life, automatically. It enables a creative team on a new piece to do the initial mounting, and then you usually have a little time to digest and evaluate, and then go back into rehearsals for a week or two or three to work on it again.”26 As opposed to standard productions, which are dependent on support for a continued life after the show has opened (and which forces the producing institution to spend time and money promoting the investment opportunity to potential investors), the co-production model allows the creative team to keep working on a show with the support of two or more organizations in hopes of creating a better product. According to Kirkpatrick, “For the art, that is invaluable.”27 Another current regional trend for musical production is exemplified by the Alliance Theatre’s 1998 Elaborate Lives: The Legend of Aida. Following years of development with support from ­Disney Theatrical Productions, the musical opened in Atlanta on September 17, 1998, co-­produced by artistic director Kenny Leon and his Alliance Theatre. Under the arrangement struck among all parties, the Alliance would receive a portion of the royalties from all future productions. With this new model, instead of renting massive auditoriums to hold out-of-town tryouts for new ­musicals—which had been the modus operandi for decades—Broadway producers opt to work instead with regional theaters that offer productions at lower costs, thanks to “subsidies and favorable union contracts” in addition to lower overhead and a built-in, local audience eager to see new musicals.28 After the Elaborate Lives run in Atlanta, Leon and other members of the creative team were replaced, and the show reopened at the Cadillac Palace in Chicago under the direction of Robert Falls on November 12, 1999. Nevertheless, the Alliance Theatre benefitted financially from the subsequent production. Many other regional theaters took note and eventually tried productions along similar lines. In Cleveland, a producer contacted the Play House and inquired about staging a production of A Night with Janis Joplin during the summer 2011. Former chairman of the board of trustees Alec Pendleton justified the genesis of the production and the benefits of this new model, since the new source of funds allowed for an increase in production budget. This, in turn, was seen to possibly attract bigger audiences. When a commercial producer contacted the Play House about wanting to “get the kinks out of the show,” the theater received money to cover most of the production costs. In addition to the benefits of a lowered financial risk, Pendleton noted, these opportunities allowed the theater to mount shows on a larger scale. For example, instead of purposely choosing to produce a five-person show to keep costs down, “maybe with a commercial tie, we could put on a play with 15 players.”29 Co-produced with Arena Stage and One Night productions, A Night with Janis Joplin proceeded to Broadway in autumn 2013. It had a solid run and its star, Mary Bridget Davies, received a Tony Award nomination. Perhaps even more importantly, at the time of this writing five years later, Davies continues to tour across the country with the show, providing the Cleveland Play House with a constant stream of revenue from the royalties. 412

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In its 2016–2017 season, the Cleveland Play House joined forces with Disney Theatrical Productions to help produce a new musical version of the film Freaky Friday. In a modification to earlier practices, this production conducted a try-out tour at four regional theaters, beginning with Signature Theatre in Arlington, VA, where it premiered in October 2016. It then ran at the La Jolla Playhouse in January and February 2017, followed by Cleveland Play House in April, and the Alley Theatre in June.30 Instead of pursuing a run on Broadway, Disney decided to premiere Freaky Friday as a “music-driven movie for television” on its own Disney Channel in 2018.31 Other Disney productions have attempted this touring model, which avoids Broadway in favor of other options that the company has ample time to consider as the show develops and moves from city to city. Derived from its 1996 animated film The Hunchback of Notre Dame, for example, Der Glöckner von Notre Dame (The Bellringer of Notre Dame) first premiered as a stage musical in 1999 in Berlin, Germany, where it was a huge commercial success. In America, following appearances at the La Jolla Playhouse (October 2014) and the Paper Mill Playhouse in Millburn, New Jersey (March 2015), the company decided, however, not to pursue a Broadway production.32 Like Freaky Friday, the production has instead recouped its costs by touring the country. This model, in which a production secures a healthy run by being staged in a variety of regional theaters that all benefit financially from sharing production credits, may be new to musicals. Nevertheless, the practice of allowing a production to thrive and find a permanent life in the regional theater circuit, eschewing Broadway entirely, has in fact been around for decades. Take, for example, the experience of Jon Jory, artistic director or the Actors Theatre of Louisville. After being lambasted on Broadway following the flop of the musical Tricks, which he wrote the book for and directed at the Alvin Theatre in 1973, Jory decided to rethink what “success” meant in the theater, and realized that it did not necessarily have anything to do with Broadway. He left New York for Louisville, and launched a new play festival there in 1976. The festival eventually became known as the now-legendary Humana Festival of New American Plays. After years of discovering successful scripts (several of which ultimately did receive productions on or Off-Broadway), Jory helped change the landscape of regional theater when he allowed second productions of plays into his festival, arguing that a second production was the “primary need of contemporary ­playwrights.”33 Jory’s decision to alter the definition of a “hit” production allowed new works to travel around the regional theater circuit, earning respect and allowing playwrights to earn royalties and become known by audiences, without ever necessarily appearing on Broadway34 The rise in co-productions and commercial-producer support not only enabled regional theaters to produce new musicals but also allowed these institutions to address three issues that reflect the audiences’ changing demographics and purchasing trends.

Issues of Representation Allowing new musicals to find a new life by having them tour the regional theater circuit not only provides the institutions themselves an opportunity to discover new talent but also to address a problem exhibited more frequently in the current practices of Broadway. In the regions, there is more opportunity for women and minorities to be part of the creative teams for musical productions.35 With a growing number of co-productions and other productions that hope to travel to Broadway, find life in the regions, or become successful via other formats, and as the country changes and diversifies, it is important that regional theaters consider a greater representation of women and minorities offstage. Two productions in the spring of 2018 reveal disparities that require attention. First, in April, the Arena Stage premiered a new musical adaptation of the Pulitzer Prize-nominated novel Snow Child, the tale of a couple struggling to save their marriage in the Alaskan wilderness.36 Three weeks later, Centre Theater Group in Los Angeles opened Soft Power, described as “a bold, 413

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satirical musical…[that] deals with identity and appropriation, subjects that provide the thematic bedrock to the new show.”37 Both shows were directed by women and featured music composed by women; unfortunately, the opportunities for women to assume such respected positions remain rare, both in the regions and especially on Broadway. According to Georgia Stitt, lyricist and co-composer with Bob Banghart for Snow Child, she was one of only two female composers working as a composer in any major LORT; the other is Jeanine Tesori, composer of Soft Power. With more regional theaters producing new musicals, it is critical that equal opportunities be provided for women to serve on creative teams; there’s certainly not enough work toward gender parity being done on Broadway at this point. To be sure, women have made impressive gains in administrative and leadership roles; at the time of this writing, women artistic directors include Diane Paulus at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Laura Kepley at the Cleveland Play House, and Anna D. Shapiro at Steppenwolf in Chicago. However, with the popularity of the musical altering the offerings and producing habits of regional theaters, these institutions could serve as a pipeline for a variety of talents that reflect the shifting demographics of the nation, providing greater opportunities for women and people of color to work on creative teams in hopes that increased diversity will move up the pipeline to Broadway. The term “Great White Way” should only refer to the lights—not to the lack of diversity to which it is often disparagingly applied. Regional theaters can and should play a pivotal role in instigating such change.

Competition for Audiences The regional theater movement was created not only to provide communities with the opportunity to see new works alongside classics but also to serve as valuable resources for new plays and playwrights. Now, as enhancement money has altered the offerings and producing habits of regional theaters, it is more feasible than ever before for LORT to secure additional funding when producing a musical. Yet the reliance on musicals is not problem-free: According to data tracking audience attendance over a 12-month period in three separate years (1992, 2002, and 2008), it is clear that nonmusical theater attendance is dwindling. In the three years measured, the percentage of adults who attended a musical production varied between 17.4% (1992) and 17.1% (2002) and then down slightly to 16.7% in the early results for 2008. For nonmusical theater, however, the numbers show a distinctive downward trend, from 13.5% in 1992 to 12.3% in 2002 to 9.4% in 2008—a 30.1% drop in 16 years compared to a 4% decline for musicals over the same period.38 If these statistics are compared to other data which proves that overall attendance of theater productions is down, then the losses are coming solely at the expense of nonmusical theater ­productions—the bread and butter of the regional theater.39 This puts regional theaters at a crosshairs: do they continue to spend enormous budgets to develop and stage musicals, or remain committed to more diversified offerings?

Ticket-Purchasing Habits Another trend may similarly lead to the increased production of musicals in LORT: theatergoers are increasingly opting out of subscriptions and, instead, becoming single-ticket buyers. Kevin Moore, managing director for the Cleveland Play House, noted that even though overall attendance has remained constant at his theater, a growing reliance on single-ticket buyers will be problematic for regional theaters. “Subscriptions [are] the most economical way of selling a ticket. So a single ticket is the most expensive way of selling a ticket,” Moore explained. “Single ticket buyers cost us more from the marketing point-of-view to get them there.”40 Unlike LORT in larger markets (and their larger audience base), Moore worries that institutions in smaller cities like Cleveland will eventually need to select shows for box office appeal over artistic merit in 414

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times with the company runs with a deficit.41 Former chairman Alec Pendleton, however, sees a silver lining in the shifting trends in ticket purchasing: “Those single-ticket buyers are exactly the demographic we’re aiming for…They’re younger. We have exposed ourselves to a whole new audience.”42 If audiences are more likely to attend a musical than a play, as the data imply, then the continuing shift to single-ticket purchases may also in fact help these institutions attract new attendees and build a theatergoing audience for the future.43 Just as the new play development craze of the 1970s and 1980s led to the discovery and inclusion of new voices and perspectives in the American theater, the new financial models of co-productions and commercial productions make it equally feasible that musicals may lead a reinvigoration of the America’s regional theaters. Furthermore, these institutions can serve as a pipeline for a variety of talents that reflect the demographics of the nation, attracting diverse audiences and also providing greater opportunities for women and people of color to work on creative teams. Musicals in our regional theaters can play a pivotal role in instigating a change for all American theater.

Notes 1 “The History of Actors Theatre.” Actors Theatre of Louisville. ActorsTheatre.org. Web. 1 Feb. 2017. . 2 Jon Jory. telephone interview by Gerald M. Berkowitz, transcript, 19 Dec. 1995. 3 Notes from interviews conducted by the author, Actors Theatre of Louisville, Louisville 1999. Quote cited in The Humana Festival: A History of New Plays at Actors Theatre of Louisville by Jeffrey Ullom. ­Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 2008. 118, 209. 4 It should be noted that Actors Theatre of Louisville enjoyed financial stability; Jory rarely selected musicals for the mainstage season, let alone the works driven by spectacle (The Wizard of Oz in 1997 and Peter Pan the following year) as opposed to more-serious fare (Quilters in 1987). William Mootz. “Thirty Seasons in the Spotlight.” Courier-Journal (Louisville), 30 Aug. 1998; Ullom, 209. 5 Individual theaters have existed since the 1910s, but the regional theater movement refers to the establishment and growth of these institutions following the founding the Theater ’47, the Alley Theater, and the Arena Stage. 6 Susannah Engstrom. “Twin Cities Theater in the 1960s: Negotiating the Commercial/Experimental Divide.” The Sixties, Center Stage: Mainstream and Popular Performances in a Turbulent Decade. Eds. James M. Harding and Cindy Rosenthal. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan P, 2017. 258–263; Jim Volz. Working in American Theater. New York: Methuen Drama/Bloomsbury Academic and Professional, 2007. 55, 207, “Regional Theaters, USA.” The Oxford Companion to Theater and Performance. Ed. Dennis Kennedy. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2010. 500. 7 “Production History.” Seattle Repertory Theater, SeattleRep.org. Web. 25 Jan. 2017. and . 8 “Complete List of Productions.” Goodman Theater, GoodmanTheater.org. Web. 25 Jan. 2017. ; “Production History.” Seattle Repertory Theater, SeattleRep.org. Web. 25 Jan. 2017. . 9 Helen Epstein. Joe Papp: An American Life. Boston: Little, Brown, 1994. 215–216. 10 John Kenrick. Musical Theater: A History. New York: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2008. 315; Hap Epstein. Joe Papp: An American Life. Boston: Little, Brown, 1994. 215–216; “Hair.” Internet Broadway Database, The Broadway League, IBDB.com. Web. 25 Jan. 2017. . 11 “Who We Are.” League of Resident Theaters, LORT.org. Web. 6 Nov. 2018. . 12 There is a lengthy record of numerous critics from Los Angeles and New York dismissing work that originated from smaller regional companies. For example, reacting to a play that transferred from the Humana Festival of New American Plays, critic John Simon bemoaned the “latest trash” from Actors Theatre of Louisville and suggested that “Broadway might as well pack up and go rot in Louisville forever.” John Simon, quoted in “Highly Regarded Louisville is Slipping” by Alan Stern, Denver Post,

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13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20

21

22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32

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31 Mar. 1985; John Simon, quoted in “New York Critics Assail Octette in Inexplicable Ways” by Alan Stern, Denver Post, 28 Mar. 1985. Plotkins, Marilyn. The American Repertory Theater Reference Book. Westport: Greenwood Publishing Group, 2005. 44; Miller 169. Miller, 169. Hurwitz, 214. Richard Straton. “Chateau of the Vampire.” Los Angeles Magazine. Nov. 2001 (46:11), 130. Kenrick, 366. Kenneth Jones and Robert Simonson. “Civil War Extended at Texas’ Alley Theater until Nov. 1.” Playbill, playbill.com. 7 Oct. 1998. Web. 29 June 2018. . Joe Laydon. “The Civil War.” Variety, Variety.com. 28 Sept. 1998. Web. 29 June 2018. . Ben Brantley. “Theater Review; History Soldiering On.” New York Times, nytimes.com. 23 Apr. 1999. Web. 29 June 2018. ; Kenrick, 366; Nathan Hurwitz. A History of the American Musical Theater: No Business Like It. New York: Routledge, 2014. 222. Diep Tran. “The Top Ten Most-Produced Plays of the 2014–15 Season.” American Theater, American Theater.org, 23 Sept. 2014. Web. 19 Mar. 2017. ; Diep Tran. “The Top Ten Most-Produced Plays of the 2015–16 Season.” American Theater, AmericanTheater.org, 16 Sept. 2015. Web. 19 Mar. 2017. ; Diep Tran. “The Top Ten Most-Produced Plays of the 2016–17 Season.” American Theater, AmericanTheater.org, 21 Sept. 2016. Web. 19 Mar. 2017. . Additional data taken from theater profiles for the Guthrie Theater, the Alley Theater, Actors Theatre of Louisville, the Alliance Theater, Cleveland Play House, the Seattle Repertory Theater, and the Pasadena Playhouse. “Theatre Profiles.” Theatre Communications Group, TCG.org. Web. 6 Nov. 2018. . “Statistics – Touring Broadway.” The Broadway League, broadwayleague.com. Web. 29 Mar. 2017 . Andrea Simakis. “Little Shop of Ho-Hum: The Camp Classic Loses Its Fizz in Cleveland Play House Redux.” Cleveland Plain Dealer, Cleveland.com, 18 Jan. 2016. Web. 29 Mar. 2017. . Miller, 230. Kevin Moore, interviewed by the author, Bricco Restaurant, Cleveland, OH, audio recording, 28 Feb. 2013. It should be noted that this quote first appeared in America’s First Regional Theater by Jeffrey Ullom (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2014). Kelley Kirkpatrick, phone interview by the author, audio recording, 17 May 2018. Ibid. “Aida Production History.” TimRice.co.uk. Web. 19 Mar. 2007. ; Hurwitz, 214. Alec Pendleton, interviews by the author, Cleveland, OH, audio recording, 26 Feb. 2013. Mervyn Rothstein. “What to Expect from Freaky Friday the Musical.” Playbill, Playbill.com, 4 Oct. 2016. Web. 19 Mar. 2017. . Erik Pedersen. “Freaky Friday Musical Set at Disney Channel Starring Heidi Blickenstaff and Cozi ­Zuehlsdorff.” Deadline, deadline.com, 29 Sept. 2017. Web. 2 May 2018. . Ryan Gilbert. “Into the California Sunlight! Disney’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame Will Have Its U.S. Premiere at La Jolla.” Broadway Buzz, Broadway.com, 24 Jan. 2014. Web. 19 Mar. 2017. ; “Full Cast Announced for the U.S. Premiere of The Hunchback of Notre Dame.” Paper Mill Playhouse, papermill.org. Web. 19 Mar. 2017. . Jon Jory. “Quo Vadis?” Humana Festival of New American Plays. 10th Anniversary Program; Actors ­Theatre of Louisville, 1986. 3. Gerald M. Berkowitz. New Broadways: Theater across America—Approaching a New Millennium. New York: Applause Theatre Books, 1997. 162; Todd London. The Artistic Home. New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1988. 21. 25, 32, 34.

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Musicals in the Regional Theater 35 The statistics for Broadway bear out the dire situation. Between June 2017 and April 2018, there were 30 new shows on Broadway, and within these productions, women represented only 19% of the directors, 18% of the choreographers, and 16% of the writers. ProductionPro. “Broadway by the Numbers.” ProductionPro Technologies Inc., ProductionPro.com, 2017. Web. 29 June 2018. . 36 Peter Marks. “Snow Child at Arena Stage Fails to Melt Hearts.” Washington Post, washingtonpost.com, 30 Apr. 2018. Web. 29 June 2018. . 37 Jordan Riefe. “Soft Power: Theater Review.” Hollywood Reporter, hollywoodreporter.com, 17 May 2018. Web. 15 June 2018. . 38 National Endowment for the Arts. “All America’s a Stage: Growth and Challenges in Nonprofit T ­ heater.” arts.gov. Web. 29 Mar. 2017. . 39 Gordon Cox. “Legit Theater: Why It’s Too Simple Just to Say the Audience Is Dwindling.” Variety, Variety.com, Variety Media, 14 Nov. 2013. Web. 29 Mar. 2017. . 40 Kevin Moore, interviewed by the author, Cleveland Play House, Cleveland, audio recording, 26 June 2013. 41 Ibid. 42 Pendleton, interview. 43 Ibid.

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41 BIG RIVER A New Road to Broadway Steven Adler

The opening night of a Broadway musical is a dazzling, star-studded, nerve-wracking event. The evening pulses with anticipation because the livelihood and professional reputations of hundreds of theater-industry professionals—to say nothing of millions of dollars of investment capital—rest on the outcome.1 Opening night on Broadway is an iconic theatrical tradition, and a vivid symbol of the entrepreneurial spirit and can-do optimism that has made musical theater one of America’s signal contributions to the performing arts. Some few productions will enjoy long runs and earn healthy profits. Others, unable to generate sufficient box-office advance sales, will close within weeks, or struggle at the margins for a period of time before succumbing to the inevitable. One fundamental precept drives producing on Broadway, where most shows are commercial endeavors: in order to generate profits for investors, a production must earn more money at the box office than it costs to operate. Roughly one of four shows will recoup (earn back) its investment by the time it closes, let alone make a profit. The others will lose some—or all—of the money it took to reach opening night. Making theater, then, is not for the faint of heart. At the helm of this risky enterprise is the producer, who shepherds a production from page to stage. While contemporary Broadway Playbills may list 20 or 30 producers, most of these are investors who have little or no artistic input in the production. The crucial decisions are made by one person, or at most a small handful of “lead producers.” In the early twentieth century, the fanciful term “impresario,” which originated in the world of opera, was often used to describe this theater czar. These masters of Broadway had the fortitude and practical wisdom to choose material, obtain rights, raise money, hire an artistic team, and steer a show to opening night. Through much of the twentieth century, following rehearsals in New York City, the producer would usually mount the production out of town in a “road house” located in a city near New York, like New Haven or Boston. If the signs looked auspicious after a month or two, which involved performances complemented by furious rewriting and grueling daily rehearsals, the show would return to New York and open on Broadway. This model seemed unassailable, even though it frequently presented significant hurdles for the producer and the artistic team. However, this gold standard of producing would eventually yield to a new model that would offer producers and creators a different path to the Great White Way. In this chapter, we will examine the journey of one particular musical. Big River, an adaptation of Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, opened on Broadway in 1985. The story of Big River’s road to opening night is key to understanding the sea change in producing practices over the last several decades. 418

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Tradition First, a cautionary tale from personal experience to set the stage for our examination of Big River: Before I became a professor, I spent ten years working in professional theater and had the opportunity to stage manage three Broadway musicals. One of these, Dance a Little Closer (1983), appeared to have the hallmarks of a hit: it was adapted from a Pulitzer Prize-winning play; it was the product of two Broadway masters, Alan Jay Lerner and Charles Strouse, who between them had won five Tony Awards for writing and composing legendary shows like My Fair Lady and Annie; and it starred Len Cariou, who had made an indelible mark a few years earlier for originating the title role in Sweeney Todd. Frederick Brisson, an experienced Broadway producer, had intended to follow traditional practice and try out the show at the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC, prior to a Broadway opening. However, investments were hard to come by, so Brisson had to decide either to postpone until he could secure additional funding or proceed directly to Broadway, thereby saving the substantial expense of an out-of-town tryout. The first approach carries risks, since the availability of the artists and facilities is not guaranteed in the event of a delay. On the other hand, the express purpose of a pre-Broadway tryout is to work out a show’s inevitable wrinkles, away from the prying eyes of New York media and Broadway gossips.2 Brisson decided to take a risk and open the show “cold” on Broadway. It closed after three weeks of previews and one performance due to uniformly negative reviews, losing its investors their entire $2 million investment. It is impossible to know whether Dance a Little Closer would have succeeded had it first played out of town. Fixing its many flaws would have taken considerable time, not to mention money for theater rent, advertising, salaries, and the cost of moving the physical production from and back to New York. A Broadway opening usually follows hard on the heels of an out-of-town tryout, allowing for little if any time to make extensive changes. It is no guarantee of success. There was never a singular moment when producers realized that other approaches might prove more cost-effective and allow greater flexibility in developing their shows. Could notfor-profit, institutional theaters provide a viable alternative to the out-of-town tryout? At first, this seemed hard to imagine. The regional theater movement was largely a post-World War II phenomenon, although local theaters, many of them amateur, dotted the nation before that. This network of professional, not-for-profit, institutional theaters with the shared goal of establishing ­community-based artistic homes away from the commercial and often conservative Broadway arena gained momentum and national visibility in the 1960s. The larger institutions banded together under the umbrella of the League of Resident Theatres (LORT). Trailblazers like the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis and Arena Stage in Washington, DC led a renaissance of high-quality and often innovative work. By 1985, 77 LORTs were operating, funded by federal and state arts councils, philanthropic organizations, corporate sponsors, and ticket sales. The crucial financial difference between these theaters and commercial Broadway producers is that any profits are returned to the LORT organization, rather than paid to commercial investors. While many artists developed careers in both worlds, the not-for-profit theaters and Broadway producers typically worked in separate spheres, employed different financial models, and saw little reason to collaborate or interact. An attempt in 1974 to bring together Broadway producers and institutional theater leaders at a symposium to discuss common goals was remarkably unproductive. Nevertheless, there was some minimal crossover between the two. Several Broadway musicals originated at the not-for-profit Goodspeed Opera House in Connecticut, including Man of La Mancha (1965) and Annie (1976). Yet Michael Price, Goodspeed’s longtime artistic director, did not accept funding from commercial producers. Instead, the theater was well supported by ticket sales, philanthropy, and royalty income from its occasional Broadway transfers. “We had an economic structure that goes back to 1971,” said Price. “We never dealt with producers. We

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dealt only with authors. Authors generally don’t change; producers can change.”3 The Goodspeed, then, produced these premieres on its own; any commercial producers attached to a show would fund the Broadway production once it left the Goodspeed.

The Headwaters of Big River In 1985, two years after Dance a Little Closer, I stage managed the Broadway production of Big River. The show’s journey from inception to opening night is an exemplary tale of a new approach to producing a Broadway musical. Big River had an idiosyncratic genesis and was developed in two productions at regional theaters a continent apart: American Repertory Theater (ART) in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and La Jolla Playhouse in San Diego, California. The show was the first Broadway-bound musical intentionally developed at a not-for-profit regional theater with a commercial investment enhancing the regional theater budget. Born in St. Louis, Missouri, the producer Rocco Landesman earned a PhD at the Yale School of Drama and later ran a private investment fund. In the late 1970s, Landesman and then-wife Heidi Landesman (now Ettinger), along with childhood friend and fellow producer Rick Steiner, offered financial resources to help a small group of colleagues establish themselves in New York as fledgling producers and general managers. Naming themselves the Dodgers,4 the group eventually became a formidable producing force on Broadway, with shows ranging from Into the Woods (1987) to Jersey Boys (2005) to Matilda (2013). Landesman himself became co-owner of Jujamcyn Theaters, which owns five Broadway houses, before leaving to serve as the head of the National Endowment for the Arts during Barack Obama’s first administration. In 1982, the Landesmans were driving to a concert by the Grammy Award-winning ­country-western singer-songwriter Roger Miller. “I was a Roger Miller acolyte,” said Landesman. “I thought he was the greatest songwriter that ever lived. I still think it.”5 On the way to the concert, the Landesmans chatted about the possibility of Miller writing a Broadway musical. “Heidi said, ‘Huckleberry Finn is your favorite novel, and that would suit his voice.’”6 The fact that Landesman had never produced on Broadway was not a deterrent. The Landesmans approached Miller, who seemed bemused by the prospect, but the singer’s wife, Mary, was intrigued. Although this was a fallow period for Miller— “He hadn’t written a song in about ten years,” said Landesman—persistence paid off. Eventually, with much gentle coaxing, Miller agreed to write songs for a musical version of Twain’s novel. Landesman invited a fellow Yale alumnus, playwright William Hauptman, to write the book. Further, Landesman enlisted a founding member of the Dodgers, director and playwright Des McAnuff, whose productions of Off-Broadway plays as varied as Henry IV, Part I and his own The Death of von Richtofen as Witnessed from Earth had resulted in a post as artistic director of the newly revived La Jolla Playhouse, a LORT in San Diego.7 McAnuff’s contributions would prove vital in sculpting the dramatic contours of Big River. McAnuff was originally skeptical of Miller as composer and preferred another popular ­singer-songwriter, Randy Newman; however, McAnuff points out, “Rocco was the producer and had invested in developing the project, so he had every right to suggest the composer of his dreams. Rocco was much more knowledgeable about Roger’s music than I was.”8 Once the core artistic team was in place, the musical began slowly—sometimes painfully—to take shape. Landesman recalls, None of us knew what we were doing. This was a show written by a composer who had not only never written a score for a Broadway musical, he had never seen one. Bill Hauptman had never written the book for a musical. We had never produced a musical, not even in summer camp. Des had never directed a musical on Broadway. We were all complete novices, so our chances should have been about zero. 420

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The team’s initial challenge was to determine the most effective way to produce the show. A traditional out-of-town tryout was not realistic, said the Dodgers’ Michael David, since “we didn’t have a lot of money to do this. We had a running show on Broadway [Pump Boys and Dinettes], which was a feeble amount of cred. Broadway theaters weren’t in demand, so there were available theaters, but that was it.”9 Costs aside, the team realized that for a relatively inexperienced group to develop a musical from a complex novel like Huckleberry Finn, the standard out-of-town tryout would not serve the work: that method would be too frenetic and compressed. A different strategy—one that would offer the necessary arc of time and creative latitude to rethink, rewrite, and restage—was necessary. Not afraid to gamble, Landesman approached his mentor, the scholar and Yale Repertory Theatre founder Robert Brustein, who in the late 1970s had become head of a new Harvard-affiliated nonprofit called the ART. Brustein agreed to produce the new musical, to be called Big River,10 during ART’s 1983–1984 season. The collaborators realized that a second production would be essential to refine the musical, so McAnuff offered them a slot at La Jolla Playhouse in the summer of 1984.

Cambridge, Massachusetts Landesman’s gambit to stage the show at ART ran the risk of creating fundamental artistic disagreements between the theater’s leadership and the show’s producers. Brustein was a vocal champion of not-for-profit theaters as innovators in their own right, independent of the commercial imperatives of Broadway. Landesman was keenly aware of this: “Bob Brustein … didn’t believe in using resident theaters to transfer shows to Broadway. He spent a whole career railing against that.”11 Brustein was adamant that no commercial funds should enhance the costs of mounting the show. Although enhancement money has become a necessity for most regional theaters producing Broadway-bound musicals today, in those early years there were no established practices. Michael David, another former Brustein student, noted, “Brustein didn’t want any enhancement; he thought that would taint him.” Big River was thus produced at ART without commercial funds augmenting that theater’s budget. The essential nature of the work was also potentially problematic. McAnuff noted that “Dr. Brustein didn’t have an awful lot of time for musicals. He certainly didn’t see ART as a theater that was going to produce musicals.” What swayed Brustein was the involvement of so many of his former students. “I showed him the book by Bill Hauptman, who had been a Yale playwriting student,” said Landesman, “and Bob liked the play so much he was willing to do it as a play. He knew that I wanted to take the show to Broadway, but he was using largely his company and he thought of it as a production for ART.” McAnuff added, “The emphasis for Dr. Brustein was not on the music; it was definitely on Bill’s play. Rocco, on the other hand, was quite determined that this was going to be a musical, and I guess that would have been my bias as well. But we were a long way from having a musical, as Roger hadn’t written a single song.” The team’s lack of Broadway producing experience and Brustein’s refusal to commingle commercial and not-for-profit financial interests resulted in a highly idiosyncratic approach to producing the show in Cambridge. Michael David remembered negotiating the contract with Brustein: ART did receive a continuing financial interest if the show moved to Broadway. I remember well negotiating that—there were no lawyers, it was us in a room with Bob—and we decided what the profit was by flipping a coin. They did really well—they got about 1.5 percent of the gross and 3.5 percent of the profits, and something in the end. Whether Bob liked it or not, [Big River] was sending money to ART for some time. By the time the show opened at ART, Miller had written a handful of songs. At this point, Big River resembled a play with music, where songs comment on the action or provide color, rather 421

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than a traditional musical, in which songs typically advance the action or explore character. The show opened to mostly positive reviews in February 1984, and the team, confident that it had the raw material in place, began to look ahead to La Jolla that summer.

La Jolla, California A brief respite after Cambridge afforded the team some breathing room to assess the results at ART and focus on the upcoming production in La Jolla. Landesman and McAnuff (who was starting his second season as artistic director at La Jolla Playhouse) knew that a fleshed-out book and score would require commensurate growth in the physical production. This would, in turn, entail a larger budget than the Playhouse could afford. Landesman had invited potential investors to see the show in Cambridge, and had amassed $200,000 in enhancement money to augment the Playhouse budget. There, the total cost would approach $600,000—a sum considerably higher than most regional theaters spent on one production. Because most of the actors in Cambridge were members of ART’s resident company, there was wholesale recasting in La Jolla. The designers refined their visual interpretations. Miller and Hauptman rewrote some songs and added four more. An authentic, country-folk sound was needed, so the team invited the well-known Red Clay Ramblers to anchor the seven-member orchestra. “By the time we got to La Jolla, the show was the promise of a musical,” remarked McAnuff. Regardless of the work still to be done before New York, Big River was a hit with most San Diego audiences and critics. Dan Sullivan, in the Los Angeles Times, wrote that the “­ opening-night audience took mightily to Big River, with good reason. It’s a cheerful, sprawling show with tunes you can hum and a certifiably American subject.” He felt that the show “doesn’t compromise Twain’s book—any more than it compromised itself. (He, too, had a popular audience to please.)”12 Welton Jones of the San Diego Union was similarly positive, writing, “Students of the book may disagree, but many others will find that Big River captures precisely the flavor and humanity of Mark Twain’s masterpiece, not through dogged authenticity…but with a clever mixture of period detail and modern resonance…The choice of Roger Miller to compose this score is the shining example. Mark Twain would have approved of Miller…”13 Not every critic was enthusiastic. Landesman and McAnuff cite an insightful but highly negative review by Los Angeles Herald-Examiner critic Jack Viertel as the most helpful piece of advice they received from a critic. Viertel criticized the writers for selling short Twain’s hard-edged vision of antebellum America and “its color, its racism, its mad pioneering and appalling religious hypocrisy.” He added that the novel’s “rambling, almost chaotic spill of events doesn’t fit easily on a stage, and librettist William Hauptman has decided to give us all of it…In the entire event, there isn’t a scene that develops deeply enough to involve us.” While Viertel acknowledged Miller’s talent, he noted that “…his songs that attempt real theatricality or character-delving inevitably fall short. What Miller has composed here is, in fact, a series of decorations for a show that badly needs to be deepened by its music. The score feels too trivial for such a big project.”14 Viertel ended the review with this pronouncement: “Big River has been announced as a musical for Broadway, but how McAnuff will ever fix it is hard to imagine. At the moment, nothing about it works, and there’s nowhere to begin rewriting, because the creative team hasn’t even gotten started yet.” Though stung, McAnuff took Viertel’s criticism to heart. “Rocco and Bill Hauptman, in ­particular—I was probably more thin-skinned—took that on and it became advice. As you have to do with all musicals, we edited out some of the sections that we weren’t going to be able to fulfill. That was a breakthrough.” Eventually, the team would find a viable balance as they rewrote, restaged, and created greater stylistic continuity throughout the show. As a postscript to this incident, Landesman later hired Viertel as a creative executive at Jujamcyn Theaters, where they developed many shows at not-for-profit theaters.

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From La Jolla to Broadway The team wanted to capitalize on momentum and open the show during the 1984–1985 Broadway season, so they had to draft a new budget. As they do now, expenses on Broadway—salaries and artists’ fees, theater and equipment rentals, advertising, insurance, set and costume construction—far exceeded those in regional theaters. The producers would need to raise considerably more than the $600,000 spent in La Jolla. According to Michael David, “We did what we found out afterward is called zero-based budgeting: ‘How much can we raise? Okay, we’re going to do it for that much.’ It rarely happens that way now, but everybody accepted that it was the only way to get the show up. It was $2.5 million; it was all we could raise.” With the money lined up, Landesman had to secure a Broadway theater. In the mid-1980s, a challenging artistic period for Broadway with a relative scarcity of long-running productions, theater availability was not a problem. However, the two largest theater chains, the Shubert and Nederlander organizations, were unwilling to book their theaters to producers with no Broadway track record. The smallest chain, Jujamcyn Theaters, however, had five empty houses that they needed to fill, so Landesman and company had their pick. The show was not physically imposing and its folksiness might have been lost in a cavernous space, so they chose the 1,100-seat Eugene O’Neill Theatre, because its relative intimacy would serve the show well. The producers had contemplated a commercial tryout in New Haven in the winter of 1985 for one final chance to refine the show, but with two regional productions under their belt, they decided to forgo the considerable expense of an out-of-town production. As rehearsals drew near, more songs were written and several scenes excised. The Red Clay Ramblers’ sound was deemed too gently “folk” for Broadway, so veteran orchestrators Danny Troob and Steve Margoshes were brought in to oversee and orchestrate the music. Musical director Linda Twine was hired to conduct a ten-piece band, which included three costumed musicians whose frequent onstage presence contributed to a polished Broadway-country sound. Once again, the team made wholesale alterations to the cast. Of the 21 cast members, only one continued from La Jolla: John Goodman, who would soon enjoy an impressive TV and film career, remained as Pap Finn. Two well-regarded veteran actors were cast as the King and the Duke, the river vagabonds who prey on Huck and Jim: Bob Gunton had created the role of Juan Perón in Evita, and René Auberjonois had appeared in several Broadway productions as well as TV and major films. The roles of Huck and Jim were taken by Daniel Jenkins and Ron Richardson, respectively, to anchor the play’s moral core. There were no actors in the cast who might prove to be substantial box-office draws, so no actors’ names appeared above the show’s title. The lack of star power, however, was to some degree balanced by the lack of star salaries, which kept the running costs lower than they might have been otherwise. The larger Broadway budget gave the designers more room for creativity, although they retained the initial vision that had developed from Cambridge to La Jolla. Heidi Landesman’s striking unit set, deceptively simple in its suggestion of nineteenth-century lithographs that evoked the Mississippi River without ever attempting a realistic reproduction, was augmented by ­R ichard Riddell’s atmospheric lighting and Patricia McGourty’s handsome costumes. The show was relatively low-tech—another cost-saving aspect of this production—even by the standards of the mid-eighties: the only complicated piece of automated scenery was the all-important raft, which drifted and swiveled via mechanized winches. After rehearsals concluded in New York, the show previewed for three weeks at the Eugene O’Neill, undergoing script, music, and staging changes during the day, while nights and matinees were given over to performances before audiences. On April 25, 1985, only 14 months after it debuted in Cambridge, Big River opened on Broadway. The reviews were mixed, but the New York Times critic Frank Rich, despite some misgivings about the book and music, gave the show the boost it needed. Big River was the last musical to open on Broadway that season, but ­according to Rich, “it is the first that audiences can attend without fear of suffering either

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profound embarrassment or terminal boredom. This show has a lot going for it: a tuneful score by the country-music songsmith Roger Miller, exuberant performers and a gifted young director, Des McAnuff, who is full of clever ideas about how to bring Mark Twain’s masterpiece to the stage.”15 While not always as strong, most of the other reviews featured enough plaudits to quote in advertisements, an essential component in a show’s marketing campaign. Big River’s modest critical success and lack of serious competition resulted in multiple Tony Award nominations. The announcement of the nominations in May is always a crucial moment for a new musical; Landesman remembered that “it was tooth and nail to see if we could get to the Tonys without going broke. But we were able to do it.” At the ceremony in June, the show won seven Tonys, including the awards for best musical, score, book, direction, sets, lighting, and featured actor (for Ron Richardson as Jim). Awards in hand, the producers capitalized on the show’s family friendly nature, built a respectable box-office advance, ran for two and a half years (1,005 performances), and generated two national tours. Big River was not a blockbuster, but it beat the odds and paid back its investors. The show cemented the profiles of Des McAnuff, Rocco Landesman, La Jolla Playhouse, and the Dodgers; together and separately, they would bring many new musicals, revivals, and plays to Broadway. Big River became a staple of summer stock and amateur theaters, and in 2003, an innovative Deaf West Theatre revival made a splash in Los Angeles and on Broadway. Landesman offered this reflection on the show’s impact on his career: It was very gratifying, because we were feeling our way around and didn’t know what we were doing, and it paid off. I wouldn’t have had a career if it hadn’t been for that show. It proved to me that to have a career, you really need just one idea. I had one idea, which was that Roger Miller was a genius and could write a Broadway show. Everything else over all the years came from that.

The Legacy Big River began a producing trend that quickly grew, especially as the Dodgers gained traction on Broadway. Just two years after Big River played at La Jolla, Landesman and his partners spent $1 million on the development of the new Stephen Sondheim-James Lapine musical Into the Woods at the Old Globe Theatre in San Diego. Initially, the regional and Broadway communities were uncertain if the new producing model was sustainable. Might the demands of a commercial production sweep aside institutional considerations and derail the theater’s mission? Could the theater’s staff cope with the pressures of mounting a pre-Broadway production? Was the response of a regional theater audience—many of whom were season subscribers and perhaps inclined to root for their theater’s Broadway-bound production—an accurate reflection of a Broadway audience’s reaction? Despite these concerns, both theaters and producers agreed that the new producing model was worth the gamble, both artistically and financially. Des McAnuff, who served two terms as artistic director of La Jolla Playhouse and directed several productions there with commercial partners, notes that the financial challenges many institutional theaters face can result in an unhealthy reliance on commercial enhancement money. “It’s a sign of the times we live in. Our theaters are subsidized very generously by individuals and foundations, and to some extent corporations, but we don’t have the kind of government funding that they enjoy in Canada or Great Britain or Europe, so we have to sing for our supper.” This, in turn, can lead theaters to produce work that might not serve the institutional mission. “That’s most unfortunate and soulless,” says McAnuff, “and that’s where you can get conflicts of interest, where theaters are no longer doing art that they believe in. That’s where money can corrupt. That’s ultimately the path not just to compromise, but to mediocrity, something that’s never 424

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acceptable in the arts. It’s acceptable to fail but never acceptable to aim low to keep the motor running.” The lure of financial solvency, to say nothing of national exposure from a successful Broadway run, is understandably appealing to many theaters, but it signals a marked departure from the original mission of most regional theaters, which once stood firmly in opposition to the commercial imperatives that drive Broadway. Michael David has collaborated with several regional theaters in creating new productions. He asserts that a strong relationship with a not-for-profit theater is just as essential to the commercial producer as it is to the theater. It’s not about saving a buck, except in the long run. It’s not about how to build the thing cheaply and get it done there. It’s all about learning what you’ve got. [Our goal is] the acquisition of wisdom, it’s how to get smarter without losing five-million dollars in the process. So almost every time, we have built in a long gap after we finish at one place to apply what we’ve learned there on the next step. What we give the non-profit is room. We give up control and liability to the non-profit. They’re in charge, and we come and learn. He notes, however, that enhancement money for new shows has grown exponentially since the $200,000 spent at La Jolla 1984, and can reach more than $2 million today. Still, this model is generally less expensive for the producer than an out-of-town commercial run. The host theater typically contributes a percentage of the total production budget, many of the production staff and crew are already on the theater’s seasonal payroll, and salaries are paid at a lower, not-for-profit scale, as compared to the much higher rates in an out-of-town tryout or on Broadway. Producers are wise to do all they can to hone their material in advance, considering the ­expense and financial risk of a Broadway production. Developmental productions, whether in workshop or full staging at regional theaters or in New York’s not-for-profit theaters—or in some ­combination—are now exceedingly common. Of the 16 original musicals running on Broadway in 2017, seven were developed in regional theaters, and most of the remaining nine either premiered in London or received one or more workshops in New York City before out-of-town tryouts in a commercial house or direct Broadway openings. The regional theaters that have launched successful Broadway musicals have benefited from the income streams and heightened publicity from commercial runs. Since Big River, La Jolla Playhouse has groomed many new musicals and revivals; while not all of them have transferred to Broadway, several enjoyed great success there, including The Who’s Tommy (1993), Thoroughly Modern Millie (2000), Jersey Boys (2005), Memphis (2009), and Come from Away (2017). As artistic director of ART since 2008, Diane Paulus has championed bridging the gap between the two arenas: under her direction, ART has premiered Broadway-bound revivals of Porgy and Bess and Pippin, as well as the new musicals Finding Neverland and Waitress. As reasonable and perhaps even laudable as it might have seemed 50 years ago, the divide between the nonprofit and commercial theater worlds is no longer practical for either constituency. While relatively few institutional theaters serve as launching pads for Broadway productions, this relatively new producing model has irrevocably changed the nature of making theater in America. Although the new methodology demands compromises from both parties, it offers the prospect of considerable benefits. It has also demonstrated that the production of new musicals will continue to evolve.

Notes 1 Theater reviewers usually attend a preview performance before opening night, to allow time to write the review. However, most media outlets adhere to tradition and do not release the reviews until after the final curtain on opening night.

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Steven Adler 2 Today, the internet offers fans the opportunity to post updates of out-of-town or regional tryouts, making distance from New York City less critical. 3 Michael Price, telephone interview with author from Connecticut, 30 Jan. 2017. 4 The Dodgers owed their name to the legendary Brooklyn baseball team because the group was formed when several of the founders worked at Brooklyn Academy of Music. The Dodgers are Michael David, Doug Johnson, Rocco Landesman, Des McAnuff, Ed Strong, and Sherman Warner. 5 All Rocco Landesman quotes are from an interview with the author, New York City, 10 Nov. 2016. 6 Big River was not the first musical adapted from a novel about life on the Mississippi. In 1927, Florenz Ziegfeld gambled that Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II could create a spectacular musical from Edna Ferber’s massive novel, Show Boat, a hunch that proved wildly successful. 7 La Jolla Playhouse started as a summer theater in San Diego in 1947. In 1965, it ceased producing and did not reopen until 1983, when a new theater was built on the campus of the University of California, San Diego. McAnuff served as artistic director from 1983 to 1994 and again from 2001 to 2007. 8 All Des McAnuff quotes are from an interview with the author, New York City, 15 Mar. 2016. 9 All Michael David quotes are from an interview with the author, New York City, 24 Mar. 2016. David’s comment here reveals how different circumstances were on Broadway in the early 1980s, when the theater district was still reeling from a severe economic downturn in New York City and money to produce shows was very hard to raise. 10 The title of the show was the invention of playwright Hauptman; local Native Americans called the river “misi-ziibi” (Mississippi), which translates roughly into “great” or “big river.” 11 Joseph Papp, founder and longtime artistic director of the Public Theater, an Off-Broadway mainstay since the 1950s, viewed his domain as a vital producing organization; due to the success of Public shows like A Chorus Line, Papp eventually saw the strategic wisdom of moving certain hits to Broadway. Income from these shows helped subsidize the production of many offerings at the Public. 12 Dan Sullivan. “’Big River’ Survives a Few Snags in La Jolla.” Los Angeles Times. 26 June 1984. 13 Welton Jones. “La Jolla’s ‘Big River’ Flows Without Ripple.” San Diego Union. 25 June 1984. 14 Jack Viertel. “There’s a Big Raft of Trouble on ‘Big River’.” Los Angeles Herald-Examiner. 26 June 1984. 15 Frank Rich. “Stage: With Huck Finn on the ‘Big River’.” New York Times. 26 Apr. 1985.

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42 THE THIRD BIGGEST MARKET Musical Theater in Germany since 1990 Frédéric Döhl

This chapter is an introduction to the German market for musicals since about 1990, the year of German reunification. Some comments are included, as well, on the German-speaking and closely linked musical theater markets of Austria (especially Vienna) and Northern Switzerland.1 These German-speaking lands represent the main market for music and theater in central Europe; for musical theater, it is the third biggest market in the world in terms of productions, audiences, and turnover.2 The musical theater industry in this region differs in significant ways from those in the United States and the United Kingdom. In the first place, the market is decentralized: there is no “­German Broadway” or “German West End” (though such a concept existed in Berlin before 1933). The best-attended and reviewed productions appear in major cities like Berlin, Hamburg, and Vienna; in provincial theaters in Linz, Braunschweig, and St. Gallen; and in countryside summer festivals like the Bad Hersfelder Festspiele and the Freilichtspiele Tecklenburg. Second, subsidized, nonprofit public theater plays a significant role here, especially beyond the metropoles. There is a strict gap in repertoire between the public theaters and the urban-based, Broadway-style private musical theaters, too. Third, the German-speaking market for musicals is largely based on Anglo-­ American imports, and is weak on the export of homegrown originals. Yet while musical theater in German-speaking Europe lacks the peaks of Broadway production in creativity, quality, revenue, costs, and international resonance, it offers a rich diversity of professional musical theater within a strong theater system. In 2015–2016, the last season for which data are published, a total of 137 different musicals were mounted in 293 different productions.3 Ours is not a small version of the US market; it is a different kind of market that just partly overlaps in terms of structure and output.

History until 1990 Popular musical theater has a long tradition in German-speaking countries. Well before World War II, there was an exceptionally long history of global success that came from German musical theater forms of the past. Think, for example, of internationally loved pieces like The Bat (Die Fledermaus, 1874), The Merry Widow (Die lustige Witwe, 1905), The Threepenny Opera (Die Dreigroschenoper, 1928), and The White Horse Inn (Im weißen Rößl, 1930). There was more in the way of interchange between English- and German-speaking musical theater as well: musically, key early influences from the English-speaking world, like jazz and the blues, influenced musical theater 427

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across central Europe.4 Organizational structures were also modeled on American ones, as in the case of Erik Charell and The White Horse Inn.5 Yet as with cinema, the German-speaking popular musical theater never fully recovered from the massive losses in expertise and artistic excellence due to murder or migration while the region was under the Third Reich (1933–1945). This is due in large part to the disproportional importance of Nazi-targeted groups like Jews, gays, and leftists to the arts world in general. In the postwar era, Anglo-American musicals were subsidized in Germany, and thus began appearing in German-speaking public and private theaters.6 The process, however, was slow. Between 1945 and 1960, there were just 15 premieres of major American musicals that had mostly been translated for German audiences—still standard procedure here for musical theater, in contrast to opera. Almost all of these took place in subsidized state and municipal theaters. Some of the earliest to be staged in the years after the war were Porgy and Bess (1955, Zurich), Oklahoma! (1951, Berlin, in an English-speaking touring production), Street Scene (1955, Dusseldorf ) and Annie Get Your Gun (1957, Vienna).7 Important early stepping-stones for the Anglo-American musical in Germany were the successes of the first German productions of Kiss Me, Kate (1955, Frankfurt am Main)8 and My Fair Lady (1961, Berlin).9 The market for popular musical theater, however, at this point was dominated by the domestic production of operetta, which saw ten times the number of premieres of new works between 1945 and 1960. This period also saw the return to German stages of Nazi-banned works by Jewish light opera and operetta composers and lyricists like Leo Fall, Paul Abraham, and Emmerich Kálmán.10 Despite the American and British occupation of parts of Western Germany, and the major presence of American popular culture in Germany after 1945, it took decades for the Anglo-American musical to gain substantial ground there. It was Andrew Lloyd Webber’s megamusicals of the 1980s that finally prompted the creation of a large-scale, privately financed popular musical theater system in Germany, as well as a kind of gold-rush atmosphere that had not existed since the demise of the Weimar Republic (1919–1933).11 This trend started in full with the production of Cats in Hamburg, which ran from 1986 to 2001 following the success of an earlier production in Vienna that ran from 1983 to 1990.12 Starlight Express followed in Bochum in 1988; that production is still running. Again following a successful Viennese production between 1988 and 1993, The Phantom of the Opera opened in Hamburg in 1990 and ran until 2001. Prior to this glut of Lloyd Webber works, contemporary musicals had crept more slowly into the repertoire, especially when it came to minor regional, state, and municipal theaters.13 After 1990, things changed rapidly.

The Dual German-Speaking System for Musical Theater Today: Private and Public Considering the fact that German-speaking Europe is roughly the size of the state of Texas, the overall market for musical theater is astonishing. The passion for contemporary musicals might stem from the enormous support of opera, the market for which is by far the biggest worldwide. Typically, over 7,000 opera performances are produced each season in Germany alone, including about 50 premieres of new operas. The United States, by comparison, is the third largest opera market; typically, there are between 1,500 and 2,000 productions and about 20 premieres of new operas per season nationwide. In contrast to opera, however, a stable, binary theater system began to develop around the time of German reunification in 1990 for popular musical theater in reaction to the success of Andrew Lloyd Webber. On the one hand, there is the older system of subsidized, not-for-profit, public, repertoire-driven theaters. These are mostly focused on opera and straight plays, but they regularly produce musicals nowadays as well. On the other hand, there are private musical theaters, which follow the Anglo-American model in both aesthetics and economic approach.14 About 428

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2,250 performances of musicals are programmed per season in the German-speaking public theater sector alone, plus touring productions during the summer months. Adding the private theater sector, which takes a run-based approach to musical theater programming, the numbers mount to more than 8,000 single performances of musicals annually in German-speaking theaters and ­festivals—more than opera. The private and public musical sectors equally share spots in the annual Top 20 of most-performed musicals with their respective, seldom overlapping repertoires.

Musical Theater on Public Stages Germany alone has about 800 professional theaters, a quarter of which are privately owned. The rest are run by about 150 public companies or institutions that are active in the subsidized, nonprofit German state and municipal theater scene. For subsidized, nonprofit public theater, three elements are key: first, most of these theaters are multipurpose venues, called “Mehrspartenhaus,” for opera, ballet, musicals, experimental plays, and concerts. Second, the system focuses on canonical repertories, to which new works are added only occasionally and thus remain in the minority when it comes to programming. Programming in general features a constant mix of very different productions, many of which are offered in repertory. This mix contrasts markedly with the Broadway and West End models, which typically offer the same works performed repeatedly around eight times each week. Third, almost all these theaters have repertory companies, or “standing companies,” which appear in most of the productions, again in contrast with the Broadway or West End model of casting each production anew.15 Total public funding for this theater and music system is about €3.5 billion annually, or about a third of all public art and culture funding in Germany.16 Of the subsidies, about €2.4 billion go to straight and musical theater institutions, and 99.5% of the subsidies come from federal states and municipalities. These institutions rely heavily on public funding, and bring in only about €550 million annually from tickets sales, donations, and private sponsors. Comparing subsidies and revenues makes clear how important public funding is within this system; usually, it is accountable for 70%–80% of the annual budget for each venue. The cultural and political priorities behind the subsidies are clear: they aim to provide versatility in production content; affordable ticket prices; excellent productions across the region, and not just in the metropolitan centres; regular jobs in permanent ensembles; and safe spaces for risk, experimentation, and innovative artistic approaches.17 Despite flaws, this German theater and orchestra scene was nominated as a coherent cultural entity to be included in the United Nations’ intangible cultural heritage list in 2019 due to its uniqueness, richness, and longevity.18 A scene for musicals in schools—especially universities with music programs, most of which are public—exists as well, but it is very small compared to the rich traditions, especially in this sector, in the United States.19 With regard to the field of the so-called noncommercial “independent” or “free,” mostly avant-garde theater scene, musicals play an even more limited role: what few are staged mainly appear in specific, small institutions like the Neuköllner Oper in Berlin.20 When it comes to the public theater, musicals flourish, especially in provincial state and ­municipal theaters in mid-sized and smaller regional centres, where they are patronized overwhelmingly by local audiences. Consider, for example, the towns where Stephen Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd has been produced since 2000: there have been 31 productions with 480 single performances, which have taken place between 2000 and 2018 in state and municipal theaters in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. Only three major cities—Berlin, Munich, and Vienna—are among the sites for performances; the rest took place in smaller towns. The backbone of subsidized public musical theater remains the production of older musicals. In the public sector, classics thrive: My Fair Lady has enjoyed 337 different productions throughout the region between 1999 and 2016; in this same time, Fiddler on the Roof and Cabaret have been revived 429

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for 166 different productions each. While many other musicals are staged in German-speaking lands, these are the three most often produced in the public realm. Considering the infrastructure of standing orchestras in the subsidized state and municipal theaters, it is surprising to see that musicals with extensive symphonic scores that premiered on Broadway during the 1990s and early 2000s—for example, The Secret Garden (1991), Passion (1994), Titanic (1997), Ragtime (1998), Parade (1998), and The Light in the Piazza (2005)—have only been staged occasionally here. The subgenre of “movicals,” or musicals based on films, which has become a mainstay on ­Broadway in recent years, has had a mixed, comparatively limited reception on German public stages. In the 2015–2016 season, productions of Catch Me If You Can (one in Dresden), Fame (four in ­A nnaberg-Buchholz, Halle, Radebeul, and Schwerin), Flashdance (three in Chemnitz, Darmstadt, and St. Gallen), Footloose (one in Amstetten), and Legally Blonde (one in Lüneburg) were all on offer. The Disney-movicals have been the most successful in Germany, but solely on private stages. Rock musicals have had only a limited reception on German-speaking public stages as well. Season 2015–2016 saw productions of works like Avenue Q (one in Hagen), Hedwig and the Angry Inch (one in Linz), The Last Five Years (three in Bielefeld, Gera, and Hollfeld), Next to Normal (four in Berlin, Dortmund, Fürth, and Lüneburg), Spring Awakening (two in Freiburg and Wiesbaden), and Rent (one in Trier). These kinds of musicals are performed rarely, with short runs of between a handful and two dozen performances. Mostly staged in small, regional theaters, these products tend to appeal to insider fans, and don’t appeal as much to the mass market.

Musical Theater on Private Stages German private musical theater is much closer to the Broadway model in economic, aesthetic, and organizational approaches. In terms of cost, ticket prices are comparable to Broadway, typically in the range of €70–100, and only musicals and straight plays are produced. Operas, ballets, and operettas are almost never done, except in a few festival contexts.21 There is no reason for the private sector to pursue much in the way of classical performances since the public sector is so heavily invested in those repertoires; there is not much of a chance to rival it due to the subsidies and the infrastructure, so the private sector looks elsewhere for its profits. Imported and Broadway-style domestic original musicals, however, are big business in major cities here, too, especially in Berlin, Hamburg, and Stuttgart. They are also quite popular in metropolitan areas, especially the so-called “Rhein-Ruhr-Gebiet” in Western North-Rhine ­Westphalia.22 Domestic tourists are the main audience; they are catered to with special offers that can be purchased in combination with travel and accommodation arrangements via the advertising pages of German print media.23 The aforementioned gold-rush atmosphere for musicals peaked in the second half of the 1990s.24 At this time, Stella—the first major German private musical company, which grew out of the success of Cats in Hamburg 1986—owned eight theaters nationwide.25 However, due to a combination of heavy investments in new theater buildings, an inefficient company structure, the eventual closings of hit productions, and a number of flops, Stella ultimately filled bankruptcy in 1999 and was dissolved in 2002 after years of crisis.26 Since then, Stage Entertainment (formerly Stage Holding), founded in 2000, has become the single largest private producer of musicals in Germany and is now as powerful as Stella once was. It dominates the market, and has about 1,700 employees, €300 million in revenue, and its theaters have been visited by 3.5 million visitors overall as of the 2015–2016 season. At the time of this writing, Stage Entertainment operates about a dozen theaters in five cities, including Berlin and Hamburg.27 A second company, which is much smaller than Stage Entertainment though still successful, is Mehr! Entertainment.28 Mehr! Entertainment runs several theaters in Berlin, Bochum, Cologne, Dusseldorf, and Hamburg, and also handles touring productions. 430

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These two companies dominate the realm of mainstream blockbuster musicals in the private sector; other companies, like BB Promotion, handle tours.29 A small if active Off-Broadway-sized theater scene emerged in the private sector during the 1990s around Berlin and Hamburg as well. This scene still regularly offers original musicals, and rounds out a small but stable and productive private musical theater scene.30 In most cases, however, the once-dominant strategy of privately owned theater companies to build and run new theaters has not paid off in the German market, especially due to the high fixed costs that come along with it.31 Smaller, independent private companies that run just one theater were important factors in the German market during the 1990s, and were especially prevalent outside the major metropoles, in places like Füssen, Duisburg, Mönchengladbach, ­Niedernhausen, and Offenbach. These have vanished completely as significant factors since the turn of the century.32 Some of these houses are home now solely to touring productions (like Bremen, Cologne, Essen, and most recently the Theater am Potsdamer Platz in Berlin).33 There is also a tendency toward ever-shorter runs in Germany’s private musical theater sector with rotation between different cities34; rare exceptions include Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Starlight Express in ­Bochum, which has been running now for 30 years in a theater especially built for it,35 and The Lion King in ­Hamburg, which premiered on December 2, 2001 and also continues to run. Regarding repertoire, private musical theater in Germany exhibits less versatility than musicals on Broadway. Here, the developments around 1990 still influence, to a large extent, what kinds of musicals are imported to or specifically written for the German market three decades later. Because the works of Lloyd Webber and Schoenberg (esp. Les Misérables) had such an early impact, the names and styles of those composers quickly became synonymous with success in the business. This created a kind of blueprint: extravagant staging, usually not seen in public musical theater productions, became a primary selling point, as did a specific style of pop-score that is heavy on synthesizers and popular song forms. Since 2000, the emphasis of the imports has shifted toward the Disney-version of the megamusical (Aladdin, Mary Poppins, Tarzan, Beauty and the Beast, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, The Lion King) as well as to jukebox musicals like Mamma Mia! (ABBA) and We Will Rock You (Queen). At the same time, Broadway blockbusters like Chicago, Wicked, or Kinky Boots only had limited runs here. Older musicals of the great tradition are only rarely produced in German private theater, and then solely in the context of touring productions.

Homegrown Musicals Overall, German-speaking musical theater is largely if not totally an import market for ­A nglo-American shows (and occasionally works from other countries like France). About 25 original musicals premiere each season in Germany (about 40 with Austria and Switzerland included) but only occasionally in major houses with major budgets.36 However, the German-speaking musical theater has generated few national hits (Elisabeth, Tanz der Vampire), and has yet to make a significant impact on the Anglo-American market. Both the private and public sectors of musical production in German-speaking countries are equally active in creating new works. Even joint ventures happen nowadays, as in the case of Ghost—Nachricht von Sam (2017), a co-production of the Austrian public theater in Linz and the private Stage Entertainment company. Original productions of movicals have been attempted several times; there have been productions of Tanz der Vampire (1997; film 1967), Der Schuh des Manitu (2008; film 2001), Das Wunder von Bern (2014; film 2003) and Fack ju Göhte (2018; film 2013).37 Like in the United Kingdom and United States, jukebox musicals, which replicate repertoires of well-known artists, ensembles, or music genres, are also popular in German-speaking countries. Notable examples are Miami Nights (2002; 1980s international pop hits), Ich war noch niemals in New York (2007; Udo Jürgens), 431

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Ich will Spaß (2008; hits from an early 1980s German-speaking post punk/new wave genre called “Neue Deutsche Welle” or NDW38), and Hinterm Horizont (2011; Udo Lindenberg).39 Unfortunately, there are few significant German-speaking, original rock musicals since 1990 in the spirit of recent Broadway or Off-Broadway works that have achieved critical acclaim, commercial success, frequent stagings, or cult followings among domestic audiences. There have been two exceptions. The first is the series of stylistically conventional, accessible concert- and stage-musical versions of half-a-dozen concept albums based on the fictional comic character Tabaluga, a little green dragon, by Peter Maffay.40 And The Black Rider (1990, Hamburg), with music by Tom Waits and book, lyrics, and staging by Robert Wilson and William Boroughs, is a unique theater piece deeply rooted in opera and romantic-era aesthetics that has conquered a repertoire position in the German-speaking state and municipal theaters. It was, however, created by Americans.41 In addition, there are some well-crafted small-scale shows at private off-theaters like Schmidt Theater/Schmidts Tivoli in Hamburg (like Swinging St. Pauli, 2001; Heiße Ecke, 2003; and Villa Sonnenschein, 2005) or the Neuköllner Oper in Berlin (like Das Wunder von Neukölln, 1998; and Stella, 2016). But although they can generate significant audiences (Heiße Ecke, for example, had 153,914 visitors in the 2015–2016 season), they tend to stay local phenomena (Heiße Ecke was only performed in one theater: Schmidts Tivoli in Hamburg). Whether new musicals are created in public or private theater realms, the localization of time and space, and the “Germanization” of plot and content, are dominating strategies. Besides the key factor of cost control, one major reason for investing in original works is the chance to customize the topics of musicals for the German-speaking market. Many artistically or commercially significant musicals on Broadway in recent years, from Rent to Hamilton, The Producers to The Book of Mormon, Jersey Boys to In the Heights, Chicago to A Bronx Tale, and Ragtime to Parade, are quintessentially American in approach and content, and thematically too far removed from typical German theatermakers and musical audiences.42 Of the 12 most-staged musicals in Germany since 2000, ten are of Anglo-American origin, but only West Side Story, which comes in at number 11, features an American setting and plot; its composer, Leonard Bernstein, is a classical musician of particular prominence in Germany. In any case, archetypal American musicals often go unproduced here, and when they are, they generally are not successful. One way to react to this phenomenon is to produce original musicals that focus on archetypal German protagonists, stories, historical events, and locations. And has been a frequent tactic since the massive domestic success of Elisabeth (1992), based on the story of a nineteenth-century empress from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, made especially prominent through a series of movies from the mid-1950s starring Romy Schneider. Other examples of this “Germanization” strategy include musicals like Das Wunder von Neukölln (1999; Neukölln is a part of Berlin), Mozart! (1999), Ludwig II – Sehnsucht nach dem Paradies (2000; nineteenth-century Bavarian king), Heiße Ecke – Das St. Pauli-Musical (2003; St. Pauli is a part of Hamburg), Martin L – Das Luther-Musical (2008), Hinterm Horizont (2011; 1980s East/West Germany story), Tell (2012; Swiss national hero), and Das Wunder von Bern (2014; referring to the Soccer World Cup triumph of 1954). ­ ermanThe second dominating strategy of homegrown musicals concerns size. There are G speaking musicals that are often performed in private and especially public theaters: The revue Sekretärinnen (Secretaries, 1995),43 by Franz Wittenbrink, and Heute Abend: Lola Blau (Tonight: Lola Blau, 1971),44 a musical for one actress and piano by Austrian cabaret singer and songwriter Georg Kreisler, have been staged 145 and 143 times, respectively, between the 1999–2000 and 2015–2016 seasons; they are fourth and fifth, respectively, in the top-ten musicals staged most often in German-speaking countries. These works, however, are so small in scale that they are closer to recitals or chamber musicals than to fully fledged musical productions. While unavoidably paying a price in expressive possibilities, these chamber musicals nevertheless get staged, in part 432

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because they can be performed in virtually any setting for very limited cost while still offering significant entertainment quality. Notable names in the field of original German-speaking musicals include composers like ­Wolfgang Böhmer, Frank Nimsgern, Sylvester Levay (Hungarian), Martin Lingnau, Marc Schubring, Frank Wildhorn (United States), and Thomas Zaufke, as well as some older popular artists like Rainhard Fendrich or Konstantin Wecker. Book writers and lyricists include Wolfgang Adenberg, Michael Kunze, and Peter Lund. Yet with the exception of Kunze, there is no household name that has achieved a significant international profile in musical theater, as Andrew Lloyd W ­ ebber or Lin-­ Manuel Miranda have. (The only real international star coming from Germany since 1990 with a significant career on Broadway and in the West End is singer and actress Ute Lemper.) When it comes to education, it is hoped that study programs, scholarships, and commissions will help encourage domestic musical authors in the future.45 Until such a system is in place, however, creative individuals who are active in the field of domestic musical production remain limited. And overwhelmingly male: There is no German Nina Lannan, Jeanine Tesori, or ­Susan Stroman: of the 137 new musicals produced in the 2015–2016 season, only one had a female co-composer; of the 293 total productions, only 13 had a female musical director and 41 a woman director. High-profile exceptions include Uschi Neuss, CEO of Stage Entertainment since 2013.

Conclusion: German Musical Theater Today It is a bit speculative to think about why the status quo is as rich, but at the same time as limited, as it currently is. However, there are starting points. First of all, with regard to domestic production, there are deficiencies in the education system. A lack of first-class, versatile, “triple threat” performers, necessary in many cases to develop and perform musicals, is still a problem. Specializations at Germany’s famous but classical-music oriented music schools have only gradually begun to change for performers since the 1990s,46 and have yet to change to accommodate composers, lyricists, book writers, arrangers, directors, and choreographers. There is nothing similar to the BMI Lehman Engel Musical Theater Workshop or the ASCAP Foundation Musical Theater Workshop. This is clearly a limiting factor. This underdevelopment in higher education, with only a few programs at prestigious schools like Berlin, Essen, and Munich (focused on performers), is an expression of the lack of aesthetic prestige of musical theater within the German performing arts. As Johannes Mock-O’Hara, CEO of Stage Entertainment for five years, once stated, “To get the top classical-theater actors into our theaters, on stage or in the audience, is very, very difficult.”47 As a result, there is also no established workshop or audition infrastructure, or funding system in place to develop musicals cooperatively over several years. There is also no nonprofit institution for the development of first-class popular musical theater, like the Public Theater in New York. Nonprofit theater can provide a kind of protected environment for the development of musicals. As heavily subsidized public theater, nonprofit theater exists to a much bigger extent here than in the United States. It is an even more pressing, open question, then, why no public institutions have yet evolved to focus on the long-term development of original musicals. The much bigger prestige of operas and straight plays might be a decisive factor here: huge budgets for new works and their productions are almost exclusively reserved for these fields. With regard to the limited aesthetic diversity of the repertoire produced here, things are clearer: the conservative programming of musicals in the public sector is in line with the conservative programming of operas. There is a reason why My Fair Lady and The Magic Flute always rival each other in terms of productions, performances, and audiences: there tends to be most focus placed on ever-new productions (and interpretations) of the most well-tested, canonized repertoires. With regard to the predominant repertoire of the larger private musical theater companies, the problem 433

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is different. Here, it arises from a lack of aesthetic versatility during the early German musical boom. Audiences came to expect that musicals in private theaters, with typically high ticket prices, would look and sound like Lloyd Webber and Schoenberg productions or its contemporary version, the Disney musical. This is the price tag that came along with the gold-rush atmosphere of 1990s; it still hounds musical theater in Germany, in that it quickly became, and remains, very difficult to sell anything else.48 As the world’s third-biggest market, German-speaking musical theater is economically important. However, with regard to the overall quality of domestic production in works, performers, and staging, German-speaking musical theater is still in its early development phase, even though much has happened since 1990 to elevate musical theater within the performing arts here. What is perhaps most needed now is a kind of German Hamilton: a socially relevant piece that will reach the popular culture mainstream and find enormous economic success while also being aesthetically ambitious, unique, and local in both musical approach and storyline. It has happened before: The Threepenny Opera (Die Dreigroschenoper, 1928) was monumentally important to Germany in the early twentieth century; a modern equivalent could provide the initial spark for a new phase of German-speaking musical theater to reach new levels in domestic production, much like Cats did for the import to Germany of Anglo-American musicals in 1986. Until then, the German-speaking market enjoys and relies upon specific upsides. The substantial size of the market has not just resulted in significant additional income in both private and public sectors. Distances audiences must cover to see musicals anywhere in the region are ­insignificant by American standards. Average ticket prices, too, especially in the public realm, are about a quarter of what they cost on Broadway. All this allows theatergoers to take full advantage of the decentralized musical theater scene and the versatility of its productions. Furthermore, ­golden-age musicals tend to be performed by large, often excellent opera house and festival orchestras; this especially benefits symphonic scores from shows like West Side Story and Sweeney Todd to The Light in the Piazza. And while domestic production is comparatively small compared with imported musicals, German-speaking countries have particular strength when it comes to producing small-scale, cabaret-style musicals. Much has changed for musical theater in central Europe during the last three decades since the German premiere of Cats in 1986. Today, the position of musical theater within the performing arts is safe and substantial. Based on this stable fundament, it will be exciting to see how domestic artists will push for unique homegrown originals in the future.

Notes 1 In some cases, available data are not separated by country, which is the case with several statistics of the Deutscher Bühnenverein (German Stage Association). The problem of translation is also absent in this combined market. 2 See Wolfgang Jansen. Cats & Co. Geschichte des Musicals im deutschsprachigen Theater. Leipzig: Henschel, 2008. 243; Jürgen Schmude and Philipp Namberger. “Musicals als tourismuswissenschaftlicher Forschungsgegenstand: Grundsätzliche Überlegungen und Marktsituation in Deutschland im Jahr 2012.” Kulturtourismus zu Beginn des 21. Jahrhunderts. Ed. Heinz-Dieter Quack and Kristiane Klemm. Oldenbourg: München, 2013. 255–264, here 255. 3 All data in this article are taken from the following sources if not noted otherwise: Arnold ­Jacobshagen, ­Musiktheater, 2013. ; Deutsches Musikinformationszentrum: Ur- und Erstaufführungen der Musiktheater in Deutschland, 2015. ; Statistische Ämter des Bundes und der Länder, Spartenbericht Musik 2016, 2017. ; Statista, Dossier Theater, 2016. ; Statista, Dossier Musikindustrie, 2017. ; Bundesverband Musikindustrie, ­Musikindustrie in Zahlen 2017, 2018. ; Jonas Menze. Musical Backstages. Die Rahmenbedingungen und Produktionsprozesse des deutschsprachigen Musicals, Münster: Waxmann, 2018; Thomas Siedhoff, Deutsch(sprachig)es Musical, Freiburg im Breisgau: ZPKM, 2018. ; Statistische ­Ämter des Bundes und der Länder, Kulturfinanzbericht 2018. , ­Operabase, Opera Statistics 2017/18. , as well as the annual statistics of the Deutscher Bühnenverein (German Stage Association) called Werkstatistik. All websites were accessed 25 May 2018. 4 With regard to popular musical theater, see Thomas Siedhoff. “Aufstieg, Fall und Emanzipation des deutschen Musical.” Die Rezeption des Broadwaymusicals in Deutschland. Ed. Nils Grosch and Elmar Juchem. Münster: Waxmann, 2012. 43–60, here 43f. 5 See Frédéric Döhl. “Zur Figur des Produzenten im Spiegel von Urheberrecht und Musiktheatergeschichtsschreibung. Erik Charell und das ‘Weiße Rößl’.” “Im weißen Rößl.” Kulturgeschichtliche Perspektiven. Ed. Nils Grosch and Carolin Stahrenberg. Münster: Waxmann, 2016. 43–50. 6 See for an introduction to the arrival of the postwar Anglo-American musical to the German market after World War II Jansen, 2008, 11–39; Wolfgang Jansen. “‘I’ve Grown Accustomed….’ Das ­Musical kommt nach Deutschland, 1945–1960.” Die Rezeption des Broadwaymusicals in Deutschland, Ed. Nils Grosch and Elmar Juchem. Münster: Waxmann, 2012. 21–42. 7 See Jansen, 2012, 21f. 8 See Jansen, 2012, 32f; Siedhoff, 2012, 53. 9 See Wolfgang Jansen. “Exkurs: Musical in der Produktion. Zur Realisierungspraxis als Konstituens des Werkes.” Musical. Das unterhaltende Genre. Ed. Armin Geraths and Christian Martin Schmidt. Laaber: Laaber, 2002. 265–292, here 265. 10 See Jansen, 2012, 22. 11 Regarding Berlin, e.g. with half a dozen major private musical theaters at the time, Tobias Becker. ­Inszenierte Moderne. Populäres Theater in Berlin und London, 1880–1930. München: DeGruyter ­Oldenbourg, 2014. 12 See Arnold Jacobshagen, Musiktheater, 2013. , 12; Werner Heinrichs. “Kulturbetrieb.” Glossar Kulturmanagement. Ed. Verena Lewinski-Reuter and Stefan Lüddemann. Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, 2011. 131–137, here 131; Schmude and Namberger, 2013, 256. 13 See Siedhoff, 2018, 6. 14 See Michael Söndermann, Öffentliche und private Musikfinanzierung, 2010. . 15 For introductions comparing the situations in the United States and Germany, see Stefan Toepler. Kulturfinanzierung. Ein Vergleich USA – Deutschland. Wiesbaden: Gabler-Verlag, 1991; Stefan Höhne (ed.). “Amerika, Du hast es besser?” Kulturpolitik und Kulturförderung in kontrastiver Perspektive. Leipzig: Leipziger Universitätsverlag, 2005; Barbara Lueg. Kulturfinanzierung in Deutschland. Ein internationaler Vergleich mit Frankreich, Großbritannien und den USA. Saarbrücken: VDM-Verlag Müller, 2007; Krista Schölzig. ­Ö ffentliche Kulturförderung in Deutschland und den USA. Ein Vergleich vor dem Hintergrund leistungsstaatlicher und gewährleistungsstaatlicher Modelle. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2007. 16 For the history of this system of subsidies, see Michael Mihatsch. Öffentliche Kultursubventionierung. Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1989; Wolf-Dietrich Tillner. Die öffentliche Förderung des Musiktheaters in ­Deutschland. Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1999. For a recent, widely discussed fundamental critic, see Dieter ­Haselbach, Armin Klein, Pius Knüsel, and Stephan Opitz. Der Kulturinfarkt. Von allem zu viel und überall das Gleiche. Eine Polemik über Kulturpolitik, Kulturstaat, Kultursubvention. München: Albrecht Knaus Verlag, 2012. 17 See Jacobshagen, 2013, 7f. 18 See . 19 Well-known exceptions are the regular student productions at the few established higher education institutions that run musical theater study programs, including University of Arts Berlin, FolkwangUniversity Essen, and Bavarian Theater Academy August Everding Munich. 20 See Matthias Rebstock. “Varieties of Independent Music Theater in Europe.” Independent Theater in Contemporary Europe. Structures – Aesthetics – Cultural Policy. Ed. Manfred Brauneck and ITI Germany. Bielefeld: transcript, 2017. 523–574, here 529. 21 See Karl-Heinz Reuband. “Der Besuch von Opern und Theatern in der Bundesrepublik. Verbreitung, Trends und paradoxe Altersbeziehungen.” Jahrbuch für Kulturpolitik, ed. Institut für Kulturpolitik der Kulturpolitischen Gesellschaft. Essen: Klartext Verlag, 2014. 359–374, here 359.

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Frédéric Döhl 22 See Schmude and Namberger, 2013, 257. 23 See Anna Schmittner. Musical-Tourismus im deutschsprachigen Raum. Hintergründe und Perspektiven für den Tourismus- und Freizeitmarkt. Saarbrücken: VDM Verlag Dr. Müller, 2006; Armin Klein. Der exzellente Kulturbetrieb. 3rd ed. Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, 2011. 273. 24 See Jansen, 2008, 188, 216. For development between 1986 and 2000, see also Hubert Schäfer. Musicalproduktionen. Marketingstrategien und Erfolgsfaktoren. Wiesbaden: Gabler-Verlag, 1998. 25 See Jansen, 2008, 188, 248; Siedhoff, 2018, 10. 26 See Jansen, 2008, 238f. 27 See Oliver Schmale. “Musicals für Millionen.” FAZ. 13 Nov. 2016. ; . 28 www.mehr.de/. 29 www.bb-promotion.com/. 30 See Jansen, 2008, 224–231. 31 See the interview with the current CEO of Stage Entertainment, Uschi Neuss, in Der Tagesspiegel. 16 Aug. 2017. . 32 See Schmude and Namberger, 2013, 260. 33 See Schmude and Namberger, 2013, 257; Neuss, 2017. 34 See Siedhoff, 2018, 11. 35 See Schmude and Namberger, 2013, 260. 36 See Deutsches Musikinformationszentrum, 2015; Menze, 2018, 81–85. See Siedhoff, 2018 for portraits of all these works. 37 See Jonas Menze. “‘Der Schuh des Manitu.’ Zum Einfluss des Broadway-Megamusicals auf die deutsche Musical-Landschaft.” Die Rezeption des Broadwaymusicals in Deutschland. Ed. Nils Grosch and Elmar Juchem. Münster: Waxmann, 2012. 203–216. 38 See Barbara Hornberger. Geschichte wird gemacht. Die Neue Deutsche Welle. Eine Epoche deutscher Popmusik. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2011. 39 See Nico Thom. “Votan Wahnwitz hinterm Horizont. Udo Lindenberg und das Musiktheater.” Lied und populäre Kultur 58 (2013): 157–172. 40 See Christoph Specht. Das neue deutsche Musical. Musikalische Einflüße der Rockmusik auf das neue deutsche Musical. Berlin: Frank & Timme, 2009. 183–207. 41 See Gregor Herzfeld. “Zur Romantikrezeption in ‘The Black Rider’ von William Burroughs, Robert Wilson und Tom Waits.” Die Schaubühne in der Epoche des Freischütz. Theater und Musiktheater der Romantik, Vorträge des Salzburger Symposions 2007. Ed. Jürgen Kühnel, Ulrich Müller, and Oswald Panagl. Mueller-Speiser: Anif/Salzburg, 2009. 330–343. 42 It is a similar case with the trend toward great American operas during the last two decades; this new subgenre is based on famous American novels and plays with renowned film adaptions. The trend started in 1998–1999 with Little Sisters, A Streetcar Named Desire and The Great Gatsby, all of which are rarely performed in Germany. Frédéric Döhl. “About the Task of Adapting a Movie Classic for the Opera Stage: On André Previn’s ‘A Streetcar Named Desire’ (1998) and ‘Brief Encounter’ (2009).” In Search for the ‘Great American Opera’: Tendenzen des amerikanischen Musiktheaters. Ed. Frédéric Döhl and Gregor Herzfeld. Münster: Waxmann, 2016. 147–175. 43 See Barbara Hornberger. “Der Wittenbrinkabend. Musikalisches Theater zwischen Pop und Postdramatik.” Lied und populäre Kultur 58 (2013): 173–205. 4 4 See Frédéric Döhl. “Broadway-Rezeption im Kammerformat. Georg Kreislers ‘Heute Abend: Lola Blau’.” Die Rezeption des Broadwaymusicals in Deutschland. Ed. Nils Grosch and Elmar Juchem. Münster: Waxmann, 2012. 159–176. 45 See Jansen, 2008, 181, 264. 46 See Jansen, 2008, 221f, 264. A major side effect of the aforementioned two obstacles is that foreign performers reign on German musical stages, and they perform German-sung musicals with heavy accents— which among other things becomes a constant point of attack for caricature, especially if it occurs in combination with bad lyrics/translations of lyrics. 47 See J. Kelly Nestruck. “Rocky the Musical Heading to Broadway – By Way of Germany.” The Globe and Mail. 25 Sept. 2013. . 48 See Jansen, 2008, 173.

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43 THE KOREAN SELF/AMERICAN OTHER Korean Musical Theater in the Context of National Cultural Development Hyunjung Lee Since the Cold War era, the musical theater genre in South Korea has been primarily perceived through an aura of “American-ness,” and thus as a symbol of affluence associated with modernity. This perception resulted from the influence of imported American popular culture products like Hollywood films and jazz records, and from musical performances in small venues in the country’s urban centers. Herein, I trace the influence of Americanization in the Pacific Rim on the development of Korean musical theater from the 1960s to the 1980s, with a focus on how musical theater as a genre evolved concurrently with Korea’s rapid push toward modernization. In considering the development of musical theater in South Korea, it is crucial to consider both the demand and overall reception of American theatrical forms within South Korean cultural scenes. For South Korean theater artists in the postwar era, a central question asked was how to successfully transplant unfamiliar Broadway-style musicals, still displaying their American contexts and characteristics, into the field of Korean theater. For these theater artists, who were committed to modernize their artistic arena, the idea of a fully Korean musical theater became an alluring objective. How does a culture so interested in replicating a foreign artistic genre balance that goal with by expressing its own cultural pride and heritage? This chapter examines South Korean producers’ pursuits of these clashing objectives. The overall rationale behind the early staging of musical productions in South Korea demonstrates how, in the modern era, both the concept and practice of “the musical” evolved amidst contradictory imperatives within national cultural development. In other words, the significance of musical theater worked both as a guideline for South Korea’s cultural modernization under the influence of American cultural hegemony, and as a tool for establishing original Korean performing arts and culture. Period discourses about musical theater or, more precisely, the importance of adopting the genre for Korean theater artists, almost always return to the need to cultivate and popularize a Korean theater that could reflect the lives of local audiences. The issues of borrowing and transplanting the aesthetic forms and styles of American musical theater into the Korean context, and using this process as a way to build a sense of Korean identity, thus merged with salient discourses among major playwrights, directors, and theater critics in South Korea in the mid- to late-twentieth century.

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American Cultural Hegemony and the Asian Context By examining the sociocultural significance of musical theater in South Korea, I also attempt to explicate Broadway as an example of American cultural hegemony in the larger context of the Asian region. Broadway, as a potent symbol of American modernity in the Asian region, simultaneously supports and supplants Asian national and regional consciousness. Its popularity reflects American strategic influence, which, in turn, is carried out by its promotion of cultural understandings of America. In South Korea, starting in the mid-1980s, a variety of Broadway musicals including Guys and Dolls, Annie, and Man of La Mancha were translated and adapted for performance by Korean actors. These performances had aimed to directly translate and replicate the original Broadway pieces; however, due to the lack of infrastructure (a limited number of musical actors, incompatible staging techniques, and not enough staff, among other problems), scenes that required especially elaborate or unique props, scenery, or stagecraft had to be eliminated. Nevertheless, local audiences at the time enjoyed the already well-known stories from Broadway (most of these shows had flown through films versions and recordings via the US military bases in South Korea), despite their presentation within the boundary of limited resources. The initial popularity of these shows, which has only continued to grow since the 1980s, was fueled by the onset of rapid globalization in the early 1990s. As the Korean taste for ­A merican-style musical theater increased through the decade, South Korean theater producers who saw how Broadway musicals had secured the local market began to create musical companies, along corporate lines, that could attract domestic investment, train professional actors and staff, and eventually compete in domestic and even international markets. In South Korea, the perception of Broadway musicals as a vision of modernity “had a jump start in acquiring the specific capacity and implicit charge of projecting a mainstream sense of ‘America.’”1 In the spirit of “catching up” with America, global cultural hegemony as well as South Korean theater productions, their modes of representation, and the discourses around them conflate “Broadway” with something both “distinctively American” and as “modern.” Gradually, through the last decades of the twentieth century, the idea of Broadway was simultaneously adopted and internalized as a yardstick with which to measure South Korea’s cultural capacity. Unlike the first wave of Broadway musicals in the 1980s and 1990s, however, current musical productions in South Korea demonstrate that while the Broadway aura can still exert power for domestic fans of the stage musical, spectators no longer search for or expect exact replicas of Broadway musicals in performance. The aura of Broadway now works more as a catalyst that enables popular local actors to attract a larger domestic fan base. Generally speaking, using local casts, instead of original Broadway ones, in imported musicals draws more interest from Korean musical theater fans, the numbers of which have grown exponentially in South Korea. When contemporary South Korean social issues or problems are subtly inserted or reflected into the frameworks of original Broadway productions, local audiences can better relate to and identify with the performances. Moreover, such productions strive to make shows more relevant to audiences by casting local celebrities or K-pop stars, many of whom have been specially trained for the musical stage. Broadway musicals are American imports, but the specificities of Asian history and current events have kept the genre from remaining mere translations of American cultural patterns.

Emulating America for National Development A prototype of musical theater called Music Play (akkuk) was introduced via Japan in Korea during the Japanese colonial period (1910–1945) as part of colonial modernity. Music Play was staged in a form of music drama with an overtly melodramatic, tear-jerking plot and excessively sentimental 438

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tune of music. Most of the songs featured in Music Plays were then-popular songs. A band generally consisting of an accordion, a drum, and a trumpet would accompany the action on stage. Music Play’s popularity declined drastically in Korea after independence from Japan was obtained in 1945, and disappeared almost completely during the Korean War (1950–1953). Following the consequent national division, American popular culture flooded the South Korean cultural arena. Hollywood movies, popular songs, and other Western entertainment forms pervaded the military clubs of the Eighth Army Corps, which were scattered across the country. Most South Koreans during this period encountered American popular music through the American Forces Korea Network, and were exposed to Broadway musicals through the film versions of South Pacific and The King and I.2 Native Koreans gained more direct contact with American popular culture after the Korean War, as the US Eighth Army Corps were stationed in South Korea.3 To meet the entertainment needs of “more than 150 camps and bases around the country,” local Korean entertainers were hired.4 The US military base, also known as the “Eighth Army stage” [mipalgun mudae], remained at the center of South Korean show business well into the 1960s, since the US military was a major client of show troupes managed by local entertainment agencies. The Eighth Army Stage was not only a powerful symbol of America as a whole but also functioned as a trendsetting arena, where one could catch the latest in American blues, jazz, soul, and rock ’n’ roll. By this time, the Eighth Army Stage had even become known as “Seoul’s Las Vegas,” because it offered acts by a great number of talented Korean singers, show troupes, and musicians. Some notable singers whose reputations grew through the Army Stage were eventually invited to the United States: Kimchi-Cats, Yoon Bok-hee, Patti Kim, and the Kim Sisters, all of whom had debuted on the Eighth Army Stage, performed on Las Vegas’s stages after becoming celebrities in Korea.5 The genre Korean show troupes staged, known as “show-musicals,” were basically variety shows featuring singing, dancing, comedy, and live music.6 The shows themselves were typically associated with pro-Americanism and a desire to emulate the Western world. Show-musicals are often perceived as the catalyst for present-day musical theater in South Korea. Heavy incorporation of rock ’n’ roll, dances like the twist, and, later, psychedelic visuals in performances; ­English-language content and titles like Summertime Show, Black Eyes Show, and Western Jubilee Show reflected an interest in American popular culture.7 Nonetheless, the pro-American ideals embedded in the framework of show-musicals, along with the wide infatuation with anything that had to do with America, simultaneously produced anxiety about the contamination of native culture. In the 1960s, some public figures, like the South Korean politician Kim Chin-man, began to express concern about the ways show-musicals and other American entertainment forms seemed to have penetrated the lives of South Koreans. Kim’s concerns—that “South Koreans today madly imitate the American language, the American gestures, and the American popular music”—reflected the fear that show-musicals and other entertainments that developed under the patronage of the Eighth Army had become too influential, and, in heightening the popularity of Americana, would consequently diminish Korean culture.8 Nevertheless, opinions were divided on what the presence of such American-inspired entertainments was doing to Korean culture: while some agreed with Kim’s argument, many others interpreted the underlying goal of show-musicals nationalistically, as “efforts to imitate the style of American [entertainment] to create an infrastructure necessary for cultivating a show-musical genre that is truly Korean in content, catering to the domestic Korean audience.”9

Foreign Theater (Translated Plays) versus Original Korean Theater Until the late 1960s, translated nineteenth-century Western realist dramas comprised the mainstream of Korean dramatic theater. But in the early 1970s, some emerging theaters abandoned the 439

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tradition of realist drama. Young theater groups began instead to explore new theater aesthetics from abroad, as well as to seek ways to create original Korean theater by cultivating and incorporating traditional Korean culture [minjok munhwa]. Their output included works inspired by folktales, folksongs, and historical events that were reenacted for audiences. Theater groups like Durama centa [Drama Center] and Silhom kukjang [Experimental Theater] were notable for their interest in and adaptations of current trends in American theater. Artistic movements that broke new ground in the West in the 1960s—like the avant-garde, politically minded troupes the Living Theatre and Open Theater, as well as new innovations in the musical theater—were emulated by young Durama centa directors like Yu Dok-hyong, An Min-su, and Oh, Tae-sok. For instance, Silhom kukjang staged Ionesco’s The Lesson as its first show in 1962; in 1976, its production of Peter Shaffer’s Equus received critical acclaim, as did Don Quixote, their 1975 production of Man of La Mancha. Other theater groups staged small-scale musicals. For example, Tom Jones and Harvey Schmidt’s The Fantasticks, staged by Kakyo Theater, ran from 1973 to 1978 under the title Ch’olbujidul [The Immatures]. This production was performed in a traveling tent-theater, a first in modern South Korean theater history. Directed by Lee Seung-kyu, this traveling production was first staged at Daechon Beach, mainly for audience members on their summer holidays. Staged in a big top that held about 200 spectators, the musical was successful enough to open again in the summer of 1975 at Kyungpo Beach. These young Korean dramatists, influenced by the spirit of the American avant-garde and counterculture, attempted to revolutionize Korean theater despite President Park Chong-hee’s repressive military regime, which lasted from 1963 to 1979. The objectives of their revolution were twofold: reclaiming the traditional culture of Korea and adopting new performance aesthetics from the United States. As much as these young artists wanted to employ the spirit of American avant-garde and counterculture in their new projects, the task of defining a Korean performance has been both constantly discussed and linked to the quest for ways to constitute a uniquely ­Korean subjectivity. As a result, directors from the 1970s required actors to master mask dance, pansori, and other forms of Korean traditional performance. The directors claimed that the incorporation of Korean traditional performance elements as devices for actors’ physical training would allow them to produce “genuine Korean body movements [momjit] and sounds [sori],” and thereby to project the “real” Korean self in the theater.10 However, the features and objectives of their search for tradition did not resemble the 1970s ideology of “national culture” that the military government appropriated as part of its authoritative agency. Rather, the use of tradition in these young theaters would turn out to be a progressive method in criticizing the authorities and for revealing the follies of the social reality. The major concerns and issues these young people and artists had were definitely the termination of the military dictatorship which would lead to the democratization of South Korea and freedom of expression. In light of these conflicts and contradictions, precautions about adopting foreign theater often turned into anxious rhetoric about reviving and healing Korean national art. A 1972 dialogue in an impactful Korean theater journal between Park Hyon-suk, then-president of Chechak kukhoe [Production Theater Group], and Kim Ch’ang-ku, then-president of the National Theater of ­Korea, reveals the tensions that developed between the performances of translated foreign plays and those of original Korean theater. Both Kim and Park—who were conservative, authoritative figures in Korean theater—problematize the trend in which young dramatists and audience members would take translated plays as the sole markers of fashionable modernity (“Foreign plays sell; thus, there is no other way but to put on more translated plays”), while original Korean theater was dismissed as boring, backward, and unpopular. They even sent out an explicit message of advice to the young generation: “Please refrain from following the American trend of dramatization. 440

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We also need to establish a dramatic literature that could reflect our [South Korea’s] current reality and living standard.”11 The conservative authorities and members of the repressive government were especially hostile to and critical of new media (e.g. TV and film) as potential contaminants of Korean national theater; the same forces also painted American popular culture as something foreign and therefore unquestionably negative. In this context, the influence of American popular culture, which was already associated with materialism, also became associated with violence and moral decadence. This gradual relocation of America from a source of inspiration and modernity to an increasingly contradictory ground—both the site of inspiration for young South Korean dramatists and apex of modernity, but also a dangerous, morally corrupting invader—rerouted the desire for American modernity into nationalistic discourse about recapturing and reviving the “true” Korean spirit.

Musicals as State Propaganda As noted previously, theater groups like Experimental Theater and Drama Center translated and adapted various forms of 1960s American avant-garde theater for use in South Korea. These works appealed to young Korean audiences whose cultural desires had been repressed during Park’s dictatorship. The immanent control and repression of the military state became incremental as the country moved into the 1970s, which ultimately resulted in Park’s assassination in 1979. At the same time, authoritative figures were suspicious of such experimental performances, dismissing them as the result of a blind pursuit of any aspect of American culture. Experimental theatrical form and content, especially the kind that came from the United States, were deemed unacceptable and dangerous by Korean conservatives. To be sure, the pursuit of American cultural influences conflicted with the early-1970s state discourse of nationalism. This was no accident: President Park Chong-hee launched his nationalist project to strengthen the legitimacy of his regime, which was by this point turning into a long-term rule [yushin]. Both the reinvention of tradition and the establishment of national culture were seen as crucial for proving the authenticity of Park’s state and the legitimacy of his rule. Large-scale, government-sponsored theater groups like National Theater of Korea and Yegreen Musical Theater [Yegurin Akdan] were established to create enormous musicals from old Korean folktales, folksongs, and historical events. In 1966, Yegreen Musical Theater staged “a Grand Musical Drama,” Salchagiopsoye [Sweet, Come to Me Stealthily; hereafter, Sweet]. The piece was written by Kim Yong-su (1911–1977), composed by Choi Chang-kwon (1929–2008), and directed by Im Yong-wung (1936–present). This spectacular production involved a cast of more than 300 performers.12 Although the plot was based on an old Korean folktale, the extravaganza was recognized as an attempt to translate and adapt Korean content through the medium of the Broadway-style musical. Sweet premiered in 1966 at Seoul Citizen Center (now the Sejong Center for the Performing Arts). As the first full-fledged Korean musical, it was broadly spectacular, and similar to a Broadway-style musical in terms of its content and structure. It marked the emergence of Korean musical spectatorship and set the bar in Korea for commercial success. Sweet’s narrative and performance structures, musical arrangements, stage art, and performers’ vocal styles demonstrate an ideal liaison between Korean culture and Broadway-style musical staging. Sweet was based on the classic Korean novel Baebijang-jeon, which dates to the late Chosun ­D ynasty (1392–1910). The story, set on Jeju Island, revolves around Aerang, a Korean courtesan [kisaeng], and Bae, a staff member for a newly appointed minister of the island. Bae, in mourning for his late wife, has declared celibacy in her absence. Aerang plans to trick Bae by seducing him; she does not believe that men from the gentry class are capable of fidelity. The satirical Baebijang-jeon, itself derived from the orally transmitted pansori theater, long associated with the 441

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working classes, is filled with ridicule of the Chosun upper class. The core of its narrative concerns how Bae ­becomes a laughingstock because of Aerang’s seduction. To conform to the standards of Western musical theater, the musical version of Sweet diminished the satirical elements of this plot in exchange for a potential romance between Aerang and Bae. The performance structure also follows the usual form of Western musicals: Sweet is in two acts, divided into 12 scenes (seven in the first act and five in the latter). Korean folk art forms were consistently modernized for the production. For example, the sailors’ group dance featured 300 dancers enacting contemporary dance forms in Korean traditional costumes before a background that realized the grandiose natural scenery of Jeju Island, including its gigantic waterfalls. These dancers, recruited from the Korean Folk Dance Company, had to be retrained in modern ballet in order to blend Korean folk dance styles and modern ballet techniques. The score mostly featured the melodic structures and call and response typically found in Korean folk music, while the arias and duets, especially in scenes where characters confess their deepest emotions, utilized Western vocal techniques. The orchestration consisted of a mixture of strings, winds, and Korean traditional instruments. President Park’s national cultural project existed mainly to disseminate government propaganda and mobilize citizens around nationalist ideals. State-sponsored theater groups participated by staging officially sanctioned performances, mostly in the form of large-scale musical dramas. Development of national culture as part of the state’s nationalist discourse—in turn a part of the nation’s modernization project [chokuk kundaehwa]—meant that the government now controlled the cultural sector. As a result, the concept of tradition diverged. The concept of traditional or national [minjok] culture became like the two sides of a coin: on the one hand, it served the governmental rhetoric of citizen mobilization, but on the other hand, it also provided motivation for youth activists, artists, and student demonstrators to harness folk elements (traditional mask dance, madangkuk, etc.) in their resistance against dictatorship.13 The establishment of a grand theater to present South Korea’s version of mega-musicals was essential, both for projecting the state’s ideology of nationalism and to mobilize citizens for the modernization project.14 The rebuilding and expansion of the National Theater of Korea in Changch’ung-dong, Seoul, was completed in 1973; it became a perfect venue for large-scale ­Korean musicals. These, in turn, helped create a sense of national culture and also worked to revive tradition. The fact that the government was a sponsor of such musicals was driven by the state’s implicit competition with North Korea, which already possessed grand theaters like the Mansu Arts Theater, the People’s Cultural Palace, and the Pyongyang Grand Theater.15 The large-scale musicals of the 1970s were original Korean productions, usually produced and staged by the National Theater of Korea or the Yegreen Musical Theater group. Most of the productions dealt with themes related to Korean history, nation building, or heroes from Korea’s remote past. One example was a musical called Songwung Yi Sun-shin [The Holy Hero Yi Sun-shin], written by Yi Jae-hyun and (1940–2016) directed by Hur Kyu (1934–2000), which premiered at the National Theater in 1973. This spectacular piece was about a sixteenth-century Korean general named Yi Sun-shin (b. 1545), who bravely protected his country from Japanese intruders and eventually died in battle. The production functioned as the perfect device for promoting Park’s nationalism project. Yi Sun-shin was a Korean navy admiral and a beloved national hero. His naval victories were essential in preventing Japanese invasions of Korea during the Imjin War of the 1590s. Admiral Yi Sun-shin emerged as a symbol of national defense in the 1970s, when he became revered to the point of near-sainthood. His actual lifetime narrative of military brilliance, bravery, endurance, and patriotism provided the perfect basis upon which to resuscitate the image of Park Chong-hee, himself a former member of the military. Stories of a heroic figure saving the nation in danger (first Yi, now Park) were inserted into performance repertories at a time when 442

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the Korean government was eager to emphasize the importance of militarism and patriotism as major state discourses. Historic figures like Yi Sun-shin were already well known, and narratives associated with them appealed to a wide range of spectators from different social backgrounds. The Holy Hero Yi Sun-shin, featuring an almost entirely male cast, presented spectacular scenes featuring masses of sailors, flamboyant costumes based on traditional Korean attire, and intricate props created by multiple national arts companies. To highlight the hero’s importance as a public figure dedicated to the welfare of the nation, Yi’s character here is desexualized. To underscore how much this ill-fated loyal savior is exclusively dedicated to his fatherland, as well as to reemphasize Yi as the “holy hero,” the play utilizes unworldly archaic speech forms in his lines that are rarely spoken in everyday contexts. The play’s simple narrative structures and characterizations, along with its clear message, were all designed to educate and appeal to popular audiences of the day. Its moral: political disunity or disputes cannot be tolerated, because eventually they undermine state authority and open the gates to intruders (in Yi’s day, Japan; later, North Korea). Such a historical narrative proved a useful tool not only for establishing the ruling ideology of Park’s state but also for justifying the perceived necessity of a masculinist developmental rhetoric of modernization. The story of a military hero who willingly sacrificed himself to save the country was easily transferred into the message that a strong military governance is the only way to protect a nation in crisis. Here, nationalism and patriotism are used in the theater as tools for the imposition of state power. Similarly, a history play titled Namhan Fortress (written by Kim Ui-kyong, directed by Yi ­Jin-sun) premiered at the National Theater in 1974, and has frequently been staged since them. The overall presentation, including the characterization, staging, and images, closely resembles that of Yi Sun-shin. This overwrought, hypermasculine play, which deals with the seventeenth-century humiliation of Korea’s King Injo (1595–1649) by the emperor of the Chinese Ming Dynasty, features exaggerated diction and an all-male cast.16 Many of King Injo’s lines are delivered through soliloquies as he prays for his army and his people. Although Injo’s character projects the image of an honest, self-sacrificial monarch, the performance ironically characterizes him as a man who also has the desire to cling onto his power. By also highlighting the value of filial piety, the play implies that the Korean people are Injo’s children and should obey him as their father. And, of course, the entire plot of the play, as well as Injo’s character, argues for the need to mobilize the country as one voice to successfully build the nation. By the 1970s, these and other original musicals had dramatized the tragedy of the Korean War, along with other crucial events in Korea’s history. By reminding audiences of their shared trauma during past national crises, these plays aimed to convince contemporary viewers of the ideological dangers of Communism and the physical dangers posed by the existence of North Korea. They also strongly implied that a strong, authoritative government was the only way to counter both threats. By emphasizing the notion that Koreans have always overcome hard times, the performances were intended to uplift, inspire, and unify the people.

Conclusion Broadway became an impetus for the development of Korean national culture, to the point of functioning as a mode of reconstructing the “Korean self ” through an American system. However, in order to be effective, this system requires never-ending efforts to define true Korean identity and culture. This psychological mechanism reappeared in the 1990s, when the South K ­ orean government declared globalization [segyehwa] a state policy. The notion of globalization has continued well into the new millennium. The number of musical companies and professional performers as well as an active musical fandom (both in South Korea and abroad) drastically increased and created a sudden boom since the early 2000s. New South Korean musicals, whether created by 443

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South Koreans or adapted from Broadway, have not only gone transnational but also differ from their predecessors in terms of content and marketing. While different from the nationalist rhetoric from the past, still the nationalist sentiments remain in effect behind the international expansion of these Korean productions. In essence, both the perpetual desire for the modern and the perpetual condition of colonial modernity function in the context of South Korea as an insatiable thirst, a divided self-image that can never be fully merged.

Notes 1 Raymond Knapp. The American Musical and the Formation of National Identity. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2005. 8. 2 Pil Ho Kim and Hyunjoon Shin. “The Birth of ‘Rok’: Cultural Imperialism, Nationalism, and the Glocalization of Rock Music in South Korea, 1964–1975.” Positions 18.1 (2010): 200. 3 Pil Ho Kim and Hyunjoon Shin, 203. 4 Ibid., 204. 5 N.n, “Shomusical ui yoram” [The Cradle of Show Musicals]. Dong-A Ilbo 3 Nov. 1962: 5. 6 N.n, “Shomusical un hanch’ang ina,” [Despite the Show-Musical’s Popularity], Dong-A Ilbo 27 Sept. 1962: 5. 7 N.n, “Shomusical ui yoram” [The Cradle of Show Musicals]. Dong-A Ilbo 3 Nov. 1962: 5. 8 Chin-man Kim. “Hankuk munhwasokui Americanism” [Americanism in Korean Culture], Shindong-A, (Sept. 1966): 261. 9 N.n., “Shomusical ui yoram” [The Cradle of Show-Musicals], Dong-A Ilbo 3 Nov. 1962: 5. 10 Bang-ok Kim. “Exploring the Traditional Elements in Korean Modern Acting.” Hankuk Yonkukhak [ Journal of Korean Theatre Studies] 28 (2006): 68. 11 Ch’ang-ku Kim and Hyon-suk Park. “Hankukyonkuk ui munjechom” [The Problem of Korean Theatre], Hyondae yonkuk [Modern Theatre] 4 (1972): 44–48. 12 Digital Archive for Arts and Culture, “Salchagiopsoye.” Web. 7 July 2010. . 13 Suk-hyon Kim, 23. 14 Ho-sun Chung. “1970 nyondae kukjang gwa yonkukmunhwa” [Theatres in 1970s and the Culture of ­Performing Arts], Hankuk kukyesul yonku [Korean Theatre Art Research] 26 (2007): 202. 15 In-kyong Yu. “1970 nyondae yoksamusical yonku” [A Study on 1970s Historical Musicals], Minjok munhaksa yonku [National Literature Research] 24 (2004): 413. 16 I discuss the version performed by Chon, Mu-song (as King Injo) at the National Theater of Korea, Seoul, Korea, on 4 Apr. 1990.

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44 THE LION KING An International History Susan Bennett

In 2014, Disney’s The Lion King “claimed a new crown”: top box-office title of all time, with its 22  productions worldwide having generated gross earnings of more than $6.2 billion.1 As ­Charlotte Alter noted, this made The Lion King more successful economically than any Hunger Games movie, or Frozen. Avatar, which is the highest-grossing movie in history, has made less than half of what The Lion King musical has made, at $2.8 billion worldwide gross. The Associated Press reports that The Lion King musical eclipsed The Phantom of the Opera, the previous highest-grossing work, late this summer [2014].2 The Lion King showed little sign of losing its appeal some three years later and in its twentieth-­ anniversary year. The New York version continues, its audience appeal evidenced in the breathtaking $3,098,330 gross box-office revenue from nine performances in the first week of 2017. There are six other productions on world stages, and a first international tour (the show’s ­t wenty-fifth global production) opened in Manila in 2018 with planned stops in four other countries through 2019. With such financial returns and stage longevity, it’s no surprise that the origin narrative for The Lion King has become an oft-repeated tale. I am interested here in looking not just at the mythology Disney has spun for The Lion King, but also examining how adroitly crafted marketing strategies have sustained the show’s extraordinary economic success and bolstered the Disney brand. How the musical version of The Lion King was inspired and created is a story with artistic, political, and corporate components. The show’s roots are, of course, in Disney’s animated film that premiered at Radio City Music Hall in New York on June 19, 1994. The film’s box-office returns exceeded $1 million in the first week, and more than $40 million a week later when it opened nationwide.3 In that same year, Disney Theatrical Productions “came to life under the leadership of Robert McTyre and director Robert Jess Roth, who brought the animated film Beauty and the Beast to life on the stage and marked the beginning of a new Disney business.”4 In the foreword to The Lion King: Pride Rock on Broadway, Thomas Schumacher (then Executive Vice President and now President of Disney Theatrical Productions) describes a meeting, held after Beauty and the Beast had earned $150 million in profits from its first few years on Broadway,5 to discuss which other Disney films might make successful stage shows. “Of greatest interest to [Michael] Eisner was The Lion King,” Schumacher recalled, “which I promptly told him was the worst idea I had ever heard.”6 445

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In this telling of the story, Schumacher suggests Eisner raised the topic regularly over the following year; when Schumacher realized his boss was determined to see a Lion King musical created for the stage, he had only one person in mind for the project: Julie Taymor. Schumacher had been aware of Taymor’s theatrical work for some time, and had long regretted not booking her production Liberty’s Taken for the biennial Los Angeles Festival in 1985 when he had been the Festival’s Associate Director.7 The Lion King Study Guide describes the same story: During the 1980s, Schumacher had come into contact with Julie Taymor, an avant-garde director whose use of innovative, sometimes larger-than-life puppetry and breathtaking staging had taken the theatrical world by storm. Once Taymor agreed to direct the project, the artistic vision fell into place.8 Taymor’s version of the creation story runs a little differently. She describes a process involving concepts from Disney Theatrical Productions (including a Radio City spectacular and a more traditional stage version) and her own ideas for “environmental, non-traditional settings: taking over Madison Square Garden, or a planetarium or putting up a huge tent and doing the show in the Cirque du Soleil manner.”9 The director notes, however, that Eisner insisted The Lion King be “a legitimate Broadway musical,” and so she was commissioned “to devise a concept that would transform the film into a full-fledged musical.”10 Her account in The Lion King: Pride Rock Comes to Broadway explains how she developed the work from preparation of the book through to character development, by way of expanding the score and crafting a series of visual images. The fact that each of the principals in the show’s development narrates the origin myth a little differently speaks perhaps to the risks involved in the show’s conception. It also suggests how much The Lion King means to their individual professional resumés. In any event, Taymor led the show’s cast through five weeks of rehearsals in New York before preview performances at the Orpheum Theater in Minneapolis, where the production opened on July 31, 1997.11 Notwithstanding the fact that the first audiences for the new Disney show were more than 1,000 miles west of New York City, the impact The Lion King had on that city’s landscape and, in particular, on the redevelopment of Times Square has become legendary. It was Disney chairman Michael Eisner who struck a deal with city and state governments to renovate the long-dilapidated 1,700-seat New Amsterdam Theater in return for a low-interest loan for most of the improvement costs. Disney’s contribution to the theater’s restoration was $8 million, while the city and state governments contributed $26 million. Eisner also secured a 49-year lease on the New Amsterdam “in return for 2 percent of all ticket receipts from shows staged at the theater”12—a bargain in comparison to the $20,000 a week and 3% of ticket receipts that Disney was paying for its lease of the nearby Palace Theater, where Beauty and the Beast was on stage.13 Moreover, as Elizabeth Wollman has explained, Disney was encouraged to expand its presence in Times Square through the development of other properties, including a Disney store; the ESPN Zone, a dining and sports-related entertainment venue; a street-level studio for Disney-owned ABC television; and new musicals … staged in other Broadway theaters.14 The addition of other Disney-controlled, revenue-generating outlets in close proximity to the New Amsterdam Theater materially diluted the risk for Disney in the show’s development; these businesses provided “ancillary streams” that could more than compensate for The Lion King’s front-end costs, weekly operating budget, and the possibility that the show would lose money.15 Maurya Wickstrom trenchantly defined the development model as marking “a certain height of Disney hubris; Michael Eisner was in business with Mayor Giuliani and the Times Square 446

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Development Corporation,” and “the flagship Disney store, which opened right into the theater, was a centerpiece of a newly ‘revitalized’ and sanitized Times Square, a very magnet for tourists wishing to experience the centerpiece of global capitalism.”16 Indeed, even as the “ancillary streams” proved as lucrative as hoped, a substantial return on The Lion King investment was almost immediately at hand, both politically—for Mayor Rudy Giuliani and the State of New York—and economically—for the Disney Corporation—given the show’s instant acclaim with both audiences and critics. Ben Brantley, in his New York Times review, called The Lion King “a visual tapestry” and wrote, “there is simply nothing else like it.”17 Greg Evans in Variety summed up the show as “a marvel, a theatrical achievement unrivalled in its beauty, brains and ingenuity.”18 The show won six Tony Awards in 1998—not just extraordinary recognition for the stage performance, but an indicator that the musical version might prove even more successful than the animated film that had started its screen life in the same city. For the city and state governments, The Lion King’s popularity was a crucial step toward their political goals: luring other high-profile investors and bringing tourists flooding back to New York’s theater district.19 If these elements of The Lion King story are well known, there has been less evaluation of the show’s robust history beyond this “original” production in New York City.20 Yet as its website advertises, The Lion King has been seen by more than 90 million people worldwide via 24 global productions.21 It is impossible to dispute the accomplishment of a $6.2 billion return on Disney’s initial investment of around $15 million in the show and around $6 million in the theater as anything other than exceptional. Mike Budd has emphasized, too, that The Lion King’s success was decisive in advancing Disney’s cultural capital, “revaluing the company’s image upward among tastemakers of the professional-managerial class by demonstrating that a definitively middlebrow culture producer could impress with conspicuous displays of aesthetic distinction.”22 Thus, the company promptly capitalized on the positive reviews for the Broadway production by opening shows in Tokyo (1998) and London (1999). By 2015 there had been 10,000 performances of The Lion King in Japan in cities including Osaka, Nagoya, and Fukuoka; at the time of this writing, there are productions in Tokyo and Sapporo.23 The London production, which continues at the Lyceum Theater where it first premiered, is now the sixth-longest-running musical in West End history.24 The popular and critical success of The Lion King in New York, Tokyo, and London prompted interest from theatrical producers elsewhere in the world; the benefits of a long-running, ­revenue-generating production are many, not the least of which is the predictability of venue use over an extended period. But the history of The Lion King demonstrates not just Disney’s ability to take advantage of those producers’ eagerness, but also its capacity for innovation through the development of a new economic model for the international circulation of theater productions. As Dan Cox and Greg Evans explain, profitability for Disney Theatricals was conceived from the outset as underwritten on the one hand by the “ancillary streams” aligned with the redevelopment of Times Square and on the promise of “output deals with producers in countries like Japan, Australia, Germany, Austria, and the United Kingdom and Latin America” on the other hand.25 In effect, Disney took their model for film distribution and applied it to their emergent theater business. If, for example, a foreign producer wanted to stage The Lion King, Disney would insist on a “package deal”: “The company will provide seven multimillion-dollar musicals over the next decade to a producer, who must choose at least five of them.”26 Successful Broadway producer Cameron Mackintosh (Cats, Les Misérables) provided another part of this business model, having championed the idea of exporting productions internationally that replicated exactly what one would experience on Broadway, so that all audiences the world over would feel as if they were getting the real deal. In 2000, Disney partnered with the Amsterdam-based theater production company Stage Entertainment. Their “package deal” licensing agreement led to a rapid expansion of Stage 447

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Entertainment across Europe, building an audience on the continent for musical theater through the Disney brand. Of Stage Entertainment’s 34 productions in theaters in 2017, three were of The Lion King; there were also productions of other Disney standards like Aladdin, Cinderella, and Tarzan. In Hamburg, The Lion King has been on stage at the Theater im Hafen since 2001 and is, by now, Germany’s most successful musical. In Madrid, the first Spanish-language production has played at the historic Lope de Vega Theater since 2011; it takes the title of the longest-­ running production in Spain’s history. A third production opened in October 2016 at the AFAS ­Circustheater in The Netherlands’ capital city, The Hague Stage Entertainment had purchased the Circustheater, built in 1904, in the early 1990s from the city for the token amount of one guilder on condition that it was repaired and renovated. Under Stage Entertainment’s ownership, ­Circustheater has regularly produced Disney musicals, including an earlier staging of The Lion King (2004–2006). Given the economic model that returned the Circustheater to its original grandeur and made it a premium venue for large-scale musical theater, it is tempting to see this landmark project by the Dutch company as an immediate precursor to, and perhaps even a model for, Disney’s New Amsterdam Theater and Times Square ambitions. The Lion King has also played a role more recently in the redevelopment of a postindustrial site in Mexico City. A project by Carlos Slim, a businessman whose accumulated wealth ranks him among the richest in the world, Plaza Carso is considered to be the largest mixed-use development in Latin America. Its composition is exemplary of recent urban redevelopment sites previously occupied by industrial activity—residential towers, office buildings, a high-end shopping center, museums, and theaters. The Museo Soumaya, one of two museums in the Plaza Carso, contains Slim’s own art collection: 66,000 works spanning 30 centuries. The Teatro Telcel was constructed explicitly to accommodate Broadway and West End shows, with 1,400 seats and advanced technological capacity. It opened in 2013 with a production of Wicked. Since May 2015, the Teatro Telcel has housed the first Spanish-language production of The Lion King in Mexico (an English-­ language production played in Mexico City for four weeks in 2008). Whether at the Plaza Carso or at the AFAS Circustheater or any of the 20-plus venues where The Lion King is being staged, the musical has been instrumental in the creation of what David Savran calls “a newly deterritorialized Broadway.”27 Beyond the partnership model Disney has developed with both cities and theater producers, the company has also exploited the opportunity to cross-fertilize among its own ventures. As ­Wollman puts it, “[s]ynergy allows a company to sell itself along with any product it hawks.”28 Thus, The Lion King can draw on intra-venue marketing, and can bolster the success of individual locations through the widespread sales of merchandise. When, in April 1998, less than six months after The Lion King’s premiere in New York, Animal Kingdom was officially opened at Disneyworld, a Lion King tie-in was both obvious and compelling. The new park had been designed as “the marketplace of Harambé,” a fictional East African port that Susan Willis describes as characterized by “sienna hues, brightly costumed cast members, imported South African musicians, East African craftsmen, and saucy aromas wafting from the Tusker Restaurant.”29 Willis’s discussion focuses on the construction of the so-called Harambé Research Station, a multimedia theater equipped with sound booths, video and computer monitors, and performance areas that demonstrate veterinary care, nutrition, and animal tracking. Here, guests are bombarded with images of some of the conservation projects Disney funds.30 If the Research Station is, as Willis puts it, “a spectacle” that promotes the corporation’s philanthropy, 31 encouraging park visitors to share in the glow of beneficence that their spending produces (a feel-good moment rather than a call to action), then another of the new park’s sites was more plainly in the business of selling tickets to their other African experience, The Lion King. The Festival of the Lion King promises a 30-minute entertainment for all ages, with the “pageantry and puppetry of this big-as-Broadway show celebrating Simba, the lion cub who 448

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would be king!”32 Included in the park’s admission cost, the Festival of the Lion King is offered hourly in an in-the-round staging that includes some of the Broadway show’s best-known songs (from “Hakuna Matata” to “a heart-stirring rendition of ‘Circle of Life’”) and a “tribal celebration” that invites audience participation, following each of four actors “to act like a giraffe, a warthog, a lion or an elephant.”33 The Festival of the Lion King is, simply put, an extended trailer for the “real thing,” serving to whet the audience’s appetite for future Disney spending at one of the musical’s productions worldwide and, especially, at the one on Broadway. Similarly, touring versions of The Lion King not only provide additional audiences and revenue, but build desire to see the “original” version in New York City for spectators of various North American tours: 11 cities in 2002 and 2003 starting in Denver, Colorado; across Canada in 2015; and in 2017 and 2018, again across the United States, starting in Baltimore. Spectators for the 2012 UK tour might similarly be prompted to see the show at London’s Lyceum Theater. Of course, even if all versions of The Lion King are more or less the same,34 it is nonetheless true the New York and London productions have stronger casts and larger theater spaces that accommodate the show to its best advantage. The Lion King also served as the keystone in the branding of Disney’s newest theme park, which opened in Shanghai in June 2016. Primed by an earlier English-language touring version seen in the city in 2006, a Mandarin-language production was designed to occupy the 1,200-seat Walt Disney Grand Theater, “an anchor of the colossal $5.5 billion Shanghai Disney Resort.”35 As Amy Qin elaborated in her review for The New York Times, there were a number of alterations to the show to appeal to the tastes of Chinese audiences: “different regional dialects; riffs on Chinese pop songs; and, for the first time, a new character, the Monkey Master, who is based on the Monkey King, a figure of Chinese legend.”36 The introduction of this character required new material from Julie Taymor, who acknowledged that “the Monkey King is China’s favorite character. These little touches of familiarity are absolutely what you have to do. It makes the show recognizable.”37 Jonathan Kaiman’s article in the Los Angeles Times noted the introduction of a Peking Opera-inspired musical number, and shadow puppet lions and giraffes as further nods to local culture.38 Felipe Gamba, director of international production and strategy for Disney Theatrical, suggested to Qin that The Lion King was “a very universal piece” that “transcends the musical theater genre, which has made it successful in places where musical theater is not a deeply rooted tradition.” One of those places is, of course, China: American playwright David Henry Hwang has spoken of his many invitations to China “for advice on how to program Broadway-styled shows” but that the sector has not yet developed.39 Not surprising, then, that the Mandarin production of The Lion King was not exactly the universal crowd-pleaser Gamba anticipated: it closed not much more than a year later, in October 2017. It was replaced in 2018 by a Mandarin production of Beauty and the Beast, suggesting that Disney has not yet given up on developing a Chinese appetite for the American musical. If the Shanghai production turned out to be a rare failure in the story of The Lion King, no account of the show’s international impact should neglect the significance given to the tenth anniversary production at the Montecasino Teatro in South Africa. Widely reported in the press, the staging in Johannesburg opened on June 6, 2007. Christelle de Jager, writing for Variety, opened her review by proclaiming that “[t]en years after ‘The Lion King’ [first] bowed on Broadway, Simba has come home.” Kyle Brodsky, for the Associated Press, was similarly effusive. “‘The Lion King’ came home Wednesday, showered by celebrities, music and dance,” he reported. “The musical is celebrating its 10th anniversary, and the South African run has been called a homecoming for the show whose score, choreography and story all have roots in the country.”40 Brodsky’s article also quotes one of the opening-night celebrity guests, Oprah Winfrey, who argued, “There would be no ‘Lion King’ without South Africa. This is where the umbilical cord was first cut.” 449

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In contrast to Winfrey’s shrewd assessment, The Lion King Study Guide, produced by the Education Department of Disney Theatricals, includes a description of the Johannesburg production that features a remarkable gloss on this topic of “home”: Just as Simba returns to claim his kingdom, the theme of ‘returning home’ has great meaning for the South African people. In the 1950s, the South African government imposed apartheid, a cruel system of racial segregation. Apartheid was abolished in the early 1990s and the first multi-racial elections were held in 1994.41 Whether it is the emphasis at Orlando’s Animal Kingdom on the conservation and preservation of wildlife species, or this collapsing of South Africa’s history into the Lion King story, Disney insists on reaching beyond popular and economic success to advertise its altruism and “efforts to be a good corporate citizen”42 The Montecasino Teatro was, like many of The Lion King’s international venues, purpose-built to accommodate large-scale musical productions. Tsogo Sun Gaming spent 100 million rand to construct the 1,870-seat space. The investment generated a 36-week run of the Disney musical that broke “all box office records in South Africa, with over 550,000 people having watched the show.”43 The South African version was co-produced by Pieter Toerien, a local theater impresario, and Lebo M., who, along with Elton John, Tim Rice, and Mark Mancina, had developed the music and lyrics for the show and earlier film, and has long been credited with bringing the “South African sound” to The Lion King.44 Toerien secured a partnership with the state telecommunications company Telkom to subsidize ticket prices, which were “significantly less than in London or New York,”45 and Lebo M. was charged with “tweaking the script” for South African audiences. For example, he insisted that Mufasa was “a dignified leader—very much the Mandela type.”46 Lebo M. also emphasized the opportunity The Lion King would give to South African theater professionals hired to work on the production “Anybody that works in ‘The Lion King,’” he explained, “because of its technical complexity, it’s almost like you now have this university certificate where you can work anywhere else in the world with any other show.”47 The much-publicized celebrations around The Lion King’s return “home” after a decade of triumph elsewhere in the world were, however, not a little misguided. Just the previous year, in 2006, a legal challenge on copyright for one of the show’s iconic songs, “The Lion Sleeps Tonight,” had been settled. Originally written and recorded in 1939 by Solomon Linda and the Evening Birds and called “Mbube” (Zulu for “lion”), the song’s rights had been sold in 1952 to the South African company Gallo Music for 10 shillings, or less than $1; Mr. Linda “also got a job sweeping floors and making tea in the company’s packing house.”48 He died in 1962. Starting with Pete Seeger and the Weavers, who recorded the song as “Wimoweh” in 1948, “Mbube” has been widely covered; as many as 150 versions exist. Eventually, the song was incorporated into The Lion King. But due credit to Linda would remain evasive until journalist Rian Malan published an article in Rolling Stone in May 2000 titled “In the Jungle: How American Music Legends Made Millions off the Work of a Zulu Tribesman Who Died a Pauper.”49 Malan detailed the way Linda’s song became an American popular standard, and sought the opinions of expert lawyers as to what might be a reasonable estimate of royalty and other revenue income for the song. Most, he concluded, “felt that $15 million was in the ballpark.” Malan’s exposé is a harrowing account of how American musicians and music publishers profited from Linda’s work. Suffice to say, however, that Linda’s family estimated they had received only about $17,000 in royalties over the years before they brought their legal suit, for which they asked $1.5 million in damages, in 2004. Their case was based on an obscure 1911 law “under which the song’s copyright reverted to Mr. Linda’s estate 25 years after his death.”50 Abilene Music, who at this point owned the rights to the song and from whom Disney 450

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had licensed it, eventually agreed to pay back royalties from 1987 to the Linda family. Sharon ­L afraniere reported in the New York Times that a “representative for Disney would not discuss the circumstances behind the lawsuit, but the company said in a statement that Walt Disney Pictures had licensed ‘“The Lion Sleeps Tonight” in good faith’ and was pleased that the litigation had been resolved ‘to everyone’s satisfaction.” Some injustices, however, cannot be redressed: in 2001, Mr. Linda’s daughter Adelaide died of AIDS at age 38, unable to afford life-saving antiretroviral treatment. The history of “Mbube”/“The Lion Sleeps Tonight” stands in marked contrast to the one so often told about Disney’s The Lion King and Disney’s commitment, in its Corporate Social Responsibility program, “to bringing happiness & comfort to those in need.”51 It is a reminder, too, of what David Savran has called Disney’s “jealously dictatorial” conduct: “they control intellectual property rights, collect sizable royalties, package tours, outsource production, and often dictate exactly how plays are to be performed.”52 It is important to remember that as much as claims to universal appeal and exceptional performance quality have instated The Lion King as an exemplary model for musicals intended for the international marketplace, the show has also played a significant and ongoing role in the promotion—and, when necessary, protection—of the Disney brand. In 2017, The Lion King celebrated its twentieth anniversary on Broadway. As Gordon Cox noted in The New York Times, the anniversary belongs to more than just the show itself; “it also marks two decades of the New Broadway.”53 The New York City production, now at the Minskoff Theater, celebrated by reuniting its creators and surprising the audience with a curtain-call performance by its composer, Elton John. For them it was a celebration of the show that helped legitimize the studio’s stage arm in the eyes of the theater industry, becoming the signature smash of its ongoing Broadway input.54 While the “original” Broadway production is feted for its accomplishments, Disney Theatricals has not slackened in making plans for The Lion King. Along with a 2017–2018 North American tour, the show will continue its geographic expansionism with its first international tour. This started in 2018 in Manila, with subsequent dates in 2019 for Singapore, Korea, Taiwan, and, again, South Africa. A new CGI live-action film version is also scheduled for 2019, with the cast who will voice the roles already creating a buzz: James Earl Jones as Mufasa, Chiwetel Ejiofor as Scar, Donald Glover as Simba, and Beyoncé as Nala.55 A debut trailer, released over US Thanksgiving weekend in 2018, immediately generated “224.6 global views.”56 Such a frenzy of interest surely predicts huge box-office receipts when the film arrives in movie theaters and a potential to boost interest in seeing the “live” version on stage whether in New York, London, Hamburg, Tokyo, Sapporo, Scheveningen, Madrid, or on tour. Indeed, much of the international tour seems to have been scheduled precisely to take advantage of a screen-stage synergy. Twenty years on, then, Disney’s innovations for The Lion King are not all on stage, but remain dedicated to keeping the show itself running on numerous stages across the globe. On the website, fans and prospective audience members can access a 360-degree HD version of the New York production’s performance of “Circle of Life,” and can download “Broadway’s first Snapchat lens,” allowing “exclusive” access to Simba and Nala masks that can then be deployed in this popular social media format. In other words, the economic and cultural energy behind The Lion King hardly seems exhausted, and Disney’s marketing strategies continue to adapt to exploit new opportunities. The show will continue to prove a critical case study not only for understanding the making and remaking of the Disney entertainment brand but, more generally, for evaluating commercial theatrical production, nationally and internationally, in the twenty-first century. 451

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Notes 1 Gordon Cox. “Broadway’s ‘The Lion King’ Becomes Top Grossing Title of All Time.” Variety. 22 Sept. 2014. Web. .   In 2017, there are 24 productions worldwide. 2 Charlotte Alter. “The Lion King Musical Is Now the Highest-Grossing Box Office Draw Ever.” Time. 22 Sept. 2014, 1. 3 Figures from imdb.com. Web. 30 Aug. 2017. . 4 Thomas Schumacher. “Foreword.” The Lion King: Pride Rock on Broadway, Eds. Julie Taymor and Alexis Greene. New York: Hyperion, 1997. 14. 5 Richard Zoglin. “The Lion King a Different Breed of ‘Cats’.” Time. 28 July 1997, 65. 6 Schumacher, 14. Eisner was, from 1984 to 2005, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of The Walt Disney Company. 7 Ibid., 14–15. 8 The Guide can be downloaded from the Education section of Disney’s website for the show: Web. 30 Aug. 2017. . Quotation from page 7. 9 Taymor, 21. 10 Ibid. 11 The Lion King: Pride Rock on Broadway ends with a brief “Afterword” by Taymor written “two hours” before the first New York preview at the New Amsterdam Theatre (15 Oct. 1997), 190. 12 Elizabeth L. Wollman. “The Economic Development of the ‘New’ Times Square and Its Impact on the Broadway Musical.” American Music 20.4 (Winter 2002), 447. 13 Michael Goldstein. “Broadway’s New Beast: The Inside Story of How Disney Turned a Smash Hit Movie into a Smash Hit Musical (It Hopes).” New York Magazine. 14 Mar. 1994, 44. 14 Wollman, “The Economic Development,” 447. 15 See Dan Cox and Greg Evans. “B’way Rules Rewritten to Head ‘Lion’s’ Roar.” Variety 369.7 (22 Dec. 1997): 1. 16 Maurya Wickstrom. “The Lion King, Mimesis, and Disney’s Magical Capitalism.” Rethinking Disney: Private Control, Public Dimensions. Eds. Mike Budd and Max H. Kirsch. Middletown: Wesleyan UP, 2005. 115. 17 Ben Brantley. “Cub Comes of Age: A Twice-Told Cosmic Tale.” New York Times. 14 Nov. 1997. Web. 30 Aug. 2017. . This second phrase is still featured on The Lion King’s Web. 5 Nov. 2017. . 18 Greg Evans. “The Lion King.” Variety. 13 Nov. 1997. Web. 30 Aug. 2017. . 19 In the 1970s and 80s, Times Square had been best recognized for its high crime rate and as a center of the drug and sex trades—a place for tourists to avoid rather than seek out. See Deblina Chakraborty’s. “When Times Square Was Sleazy.” cnn.com. 18 Apr. 2016. Web. 25 Nov. 2018. . 20 The Lion King moved from the New Amsterdam Theatre to the Minskoff Theater in 2006. 21 Web. 30 Aug. 2017. . 22 Mike Budd. “Introduction: Private Disney, Public Disney.” Rethinking Disney, 19. 23 The Shiki Theater: Web. 28 November 2018. . 24 According to data collected by the Society of London Theaters: Web. 5 Nov. 2017. . Les Misérables (which opened in 1985 and continues) has recorded more than 13,000 performances in comparison with The Lion King’s approximately 7,400. 25 Cox and Evans, “B’way rules.” 26 Ibid. 27 David Savran. “Trafficking in Transnational Brands: The New ‘Broadway-style’ Musical.” Theater Survey 55.3 (Sept. 2014): 320. 28 Elizabeth L. Wollman, “Economic Development,” 449. 29 Susan Willis, “Disney’s Bestiary,” Rethinking Disney, 54. 30 Ibid., 56. 31 Ibid. 32 Web. 5 Nov. 2017. . 33 Ibid.

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The Lion King 34 See my review of the Toronto production. “Disney North: The Lion King.” Canadian Theater Review. 105, Winter 2001, 67–68. I note there that the insertion of particularly Canadian/Toronto references was very popular with the audience. 35 Amy Qin. “Can You Say ‘Hakuna Matata’ in Mandarin?” New York Times. 17 June 2016. Web. 5 Nov. 2017. . 36 Ibid. 37 Ibid. 38 “‘The Lion King’ at Shanghai Disneyland as Broadway Comes to China.” Los Angeles Times. 14 June 2016. Web. 5 Nov. 2017. .   Puppet theater in China dates back to the Tang era (618–906) and remains a popular performance format: see “A Survey of Puppetry in China (Summers 2008 and 2009)” by Fan Pen Li Chen and Bradford Clark (Asian Theater Journal 27.2 (2010): 333–365) for an account of their fieldwork in 13 Chinese provinces. 39 See my “China’s Global Performatives: ‘Better City, Better Life’.” Performance and the Global City. Eds. D.J. Hopkins and Kim Solga. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013, 82. 40 Christelle de Jager. “‘Lion King’ back to Africa.” Variety. 15 June 2007. Web. 10 Nov. 2017. ; Kyle Brodsky. “‘The Lion King’ Comes Home to South Africa.” Associated Press. 6 June 2007. Web. 10 Nov. 2017. . 41 Study Guide, 7. 42 Corporate Social Responsibility Update 2017: Web. 28 Nov. 2018. . 43 Montecasino website: Web. 10 Nov. 2017. . Since the theater’s inauguration with The Lion King, it has staged many top-selling musicals including Beauty and the Beast as well as Disney ice shows. 4 4 Brodsky, “The Lion King.” 45 De Jager, “Lion King.” 46 Ibid. 47 Ibid. 48 Sharon Lafraniere. “In the Jungle, the Unjust Jungle, a Small Victory.” New York Times. 22 Mar. 2006. Web. 10 Nov. 2017. . 49 Malan’s article is republished by Longform: Web. 10 Nov. 2017. . 50 Lafraniere, “In the Jungle.” 51 Corporate Social Responsibility Update 2017, 2. 52 Savran, “Trafficking,” 333. 53 Gordon Cox. “How ‘The Lion King’ Ushered in the Era of the Blockbuster on Broadway.” New York Times. 14 Nov. 2017. Web. 14 Nov. 2017. . 54 Ibid. 55 See Olivia Clement. “Beyoncé to Play Nala in Live-Action Lion King.” Playbill. 1 Nov. 2017. Web. 14 Nov. 2017. . 56 Ben Child. “Is Disney’s Remake of the Lion King Too Nostalgic?” The Guardian. 28 Nov. 2018. Web. 28 Nov. 2018. .

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AUTHOR BIOGRAPHIES

Musicologist Jessica Sternfeld (PhD Princeton, 2002) specializes in the cultural work of recent musicals. Her book The Megamusical (Indiana University Press, 2006) focused on cheesy 1980s blockbusters, and she publishes and presents about stage, television, and film musicals. Her work appears in The Oxford Handbook of the American Musical, Studies in Musical Theatre, and The Oxford Handbook of Music and Disability Studies. Her forthcoming book for Oxford University Press, “Words Fail”: Trauma and the Musical, focuses on how recent musicals present narratives of trauma and overcoming. She is Associate Professor and Director of the BA in Music at Chapman University. Elizabeth L. Wollman is Professor of Music at Baruch College, City University of New York, and a member of the doctoral faculty in the theater department at the City University of New York Graduate Center. She has written a lot of articles and book chapters about contemporary musicals, and is the author of the books The Theater Will Rock: A History of the Rock Musical From Hair to Hedwig (University of Michigan Press, 2006), Hard Times: The Adult Musical in 1970s New York City (Oxford University Press, 2012), and A Critical Companion to the American Stage Musical (Bloomsbury/Methuen, 2017). *** Steven Adler, Professor Emeritus of Theater and Provost Emeritus of Earl Warren College at the University of California, San Diego, received his BA from SUNY Buffalo and MFA in directing from Penn State. His stage management career included productions on and off Broadway, on national tour, and in regional theater. He is the author of two books: Rough Magic: Making Theatre at the Royal Shakespeare Company and On Broadway: Art and Commerce on the Great White Way. Alex Bádue  received his PhD in Musicology from the University of Cincinnati’s College-­ Conservatory of Music. His research interests and scholarly work focus on musical and dramatic genre conventions in the history and development of the American musical. He is also interested in the relationship between musical theater and popular music from outside the theater. He has conducted research and written about the inception, compositional processes, musical structure, reception, and social impact of musicals by Jason Robert Brown, William Finn, Michal John ­LaChiusa, Jonathan Larson, Andrew Lippa, and Jeanine Tesori. 455

Author Biographies

Susan Bennett  is a University Professor in the Department of English at the University of ­Calgary, Canada. She is widely published on a variety of topics in theater and performance ­studies with particular interest in the international circulation of live performance and its ­contributions to ­ t raditional and burgeoning tourism markets. Recent publications include Ivo van Hove: From Shakespeare to David Bowie (co-edited with Sonia Massai, Bloomsbury Methuen 2018) and Theatre & Museums (Palgrave 2013). She is co-editor with Kim Solga of the Bloomsbury drama series “Theory for Theatre Studies.” Ryan Bunch is a musicologist and a PhD student in the Department of Childhood Studies at Rutgers University-Camden. His research on musicals has focused on adaptations of The Wizard of Oz, musical-theatrical tropes in Disney’s Frozen, social media participation in recent live television musicals, and musical childhood in The Sound of Music. His publications appear in the journal Studies in Musical Theatre and several edited collections. He has served as music director for school and community theater musicals and conducted ethnographic research with youth and adults concerning their performances and fandom. He has taught at Rutgers University-Camden, Temple University, the Community College of Philadelphia, and Holy Family University. Renée Camus is a writer, dancer, and pop culture junkie living in Los Angeles, California, with her animator husband and four beautiful cats. She has written about dance and entertainment for the Los Angeles Times, Los Angeles Magazine, LA Weekly, New York Observer, The Toast, The Billfold, and JSAM, among others. She teaches social dance and produced a video called Dancing through the Centuries. She served on the Society for American Music board, and was acquisitions editor for scholarly publishers Scarecrow Press, Inc. She also worked as associate story producer for the reality television show Ultimate Ninja Challenge. John M. Clum is Professor Emeritus of Theater Studies and English at Duke University. He is the author of several books and essays on modern and contemporary British and American drama and musical theater. Much of his work has focused on gay theater. His most recent work includes Terrence McNally and Fifty Years of American Gay Drama, 1965–2015, and The Works of Arthur ­L aurents: Politics, Love, and Betrayal. He is co-editor of and contributor to two volumes in the New Perspectives in Edward Albee Studies series for Brill. John currently resides in Chicago. Elizabeth Titrington Craft is Assistant Professor of Musicology at the University of Utah. Her research examines musical theater from the early twentieth century to the present, focusing on racial and ethnic representation, immigrant narratives, constructions of nationhood, marketing, ­ usical, and reception. Her published work appears in The Critical Companion to the American Stage M Crosscurrents: American and European Music in Interaction, 1900–2000, and the journals American Music and Studies in Musical Theatre. James Deaville  teaches in the School for Studies in Art and Culture at Carleton University, Ottawa. He edited Music in Television (Routledge, 2010) and co-edited Music and the Broadcast Experience (Oxford, 2016) and is editing The Oxford Handbook on Music and Advertising. He has published in Journal of the American Musicological Society, Journal of the Society for American Music, and Nineteenth-Century Music Review, and has contributed to books published by Oxford, Cambridge, and Routledge, among others. In particular reference to fan studies, he published “Recut and Retuned: Fan-produced Parody Trailers,” in The Journal of Fandom Studies 4, no. 2 (2016). Todd Decker is Professor of Music and Chair of the Music Department at Washington University in St. Louis. He has published four books and numerous articles on American popular music 456

Author Biographies

and media, including Show Boat: Performing Race in an American Musical (2013). He has lectured on the stage and screen musical at the Library of Congress and London’s Victoria and Albert ­Museum. In fall 2016, he was a visiting International Chair at Labex Arts-H2H, a humanities center at Université Paris VIII. He will serve as the editor of the journal American Music from 2020 to 2022. Joanna Dee Das, PhD, is Assistant Professor of Dance at Washington University in St. Louis. She is the author of Katherine Dunham: Dance and the African Diaspora (Oxford 2017). Along with Ryan Donovan, she was the co-guest editor of the “Dance in Musical Theatre” special issue of the journal Studies in Musical Theatre, published in 2019. She has won several fellowships and awards for her research, including a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship in “Dance Studies in/and the Humanities” at Stanford University. She is also a Certified Instructor of Dunham Technique. Frédéric Döhl is a musicologist and lawyer who currently holds positions as Senior Lecturer in Music Journalism at University of Technology Dortmund (Germany) and Head of Digital Humanities at German National Library in Leipzig. He teaches courses in musicology as well as dance, film, and theater studies as Privatdozent at Free University Berlin. His main research focuses on adaptation and borrowing, music journalism, genre history and theory, copyright law, and digital humanities. He has published monographs on barbershop harmony as an invented tradition, André Previn and musical versatility, as well as mashup, digital musical borrowing, and copyright law. Ryan Donovan earned his doctorate in Theatre and Performance at the Graduate Center, City ­University of New York in 2019. His research examines histories of casting embodied difference in ­Broadway musicals. He is co-editor of the forthcoming Routledge Companion to Musical Theatre. He also co-edited a special issue of Studies in Musical Theatre on dance and musical theater and his article “Acts of Recognition: Gesture and National Identity in Agnes de Mille’s ‘Civil War Ballet’” was also published in that journal. He was a professional musical theater dancer before pursuing his PhD. Sarah Taylor Ellis is Senior Lecturer in Musical Theater at the University of Chester in the UK, where she is establishing a new undergraduate musical theater program. She is the composer of These Girls Have Demons (in development with Pittsburgh CLO); The Trojan Women (libretto by Ellen McLaughlin); and a steampunk Regency adaptation of Jane Austen’s Emma. Her scholarship focuses on queer temporality and the aesthetics and politics of the musical; her work has been published in American Theatre, Studies in Musical Theatre, and anthologies with Palgrave and Routledge. Sarah holds a PhD in Theater & Performance Studies from UCLA. Christin Essin is Associate Professor of Theater History at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. She has published numerous essays on theater design artistry, technology, and backstage labor in publications such as Theatre Journal, Theatre Topics, and Theatre History Studies, and her first book, Stage Designers in Early Twentieth Century America (2012), won a Golden Pen award from the United States Institute for Theater Technology. She is currently writing her second book, a cultural history and ethnography of unionized technicians in the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees who work in New York City’s commercial theater industry. Choreographer Liza Gennaro’s  credits include The Most Happy Fella and Once Upon A ­Mattress on Broadway; Off-Broadway and Regional credits include the Roundabout, Carnegie Hall, A ­ ctor’s Theatre Of Louisville, The Old Globe, Guthrie Theater, The Goodspeed Opera House, Pioneer Theatre, Paper Mill Playhouse, The St. Louis “Muny” Opera, and the national tour of Annie. She has written for The Oxford Handbook of the American Musical and The Oxford 457

Author Biographies

Handbook of Dance and Theater and is Associate Dean and Director of Musical Theatre at Manhattan School of Music. She is a Tony Voter and member of the Executive Board of Stage Directors and ­Choreographers Society. Aleksei Grinenko  received the PhD in Theatre and Performance from the Graduate Center, City University of New York. His dissertation investigates the overlapping histories of madness, the psych fields, and the US stage musical. He has contributed articles and reviews to Theatre Journal, Studies in Musical Theatre, European Stages, and Slavic and East European Performance. His ­Russian-language translations of the American songbook and musicals (most recently Next to ­Normal) have been p­ roduced in Belarus and Russia. Elissa Harbert  is Assistant Professor of Music at DePauw University. She earned her PhD in musicology from Northwestern University, where she was awarded the Alvin H. Johnson AMS 50 Dissertation Fellowship. Her articles “‘Ever to the Right’? The Political Life of 1776 in the Nixon Era” and “Hamilton and History Musicals” appear in the journal American Music, where she also served as Book Review Editor. She has contributed several chapters to edited collections on musical theater and is working on a monograph about history musicals and cultural memory. Aya Esther Hayashi  earned a PhD in Music from the Graduate Center, City University of New York. Her dissertation, “Musicking, discourse, and identity in participatory media fandom” (2018), examined the musical communities surrounding filk (folk music of science fiction/fantasy fandom), wizard rock (the punk/DIY music movement inspired by the Harry Potter franchise), and the YouTube musicals of Team StarKid and AVbyte. With Jessica Getman, she co-edited and wrote the introduction to the Journal of Fandom Studies special issue “Musicking in media fandom” (4:2, 2016). She works as Development Associate at Pan Asian Repertory Theatre, the pioneer Asian American theater company on the East Coast. Jessica Hillman-McCord  is Professor of Theater and Dance at the State University of New York at Fredonia, where she teaches musical theater performance and history. She has published in journals including Studies in Musical Theatre, TDR: The Drama Review, and Theatre Survey. Her first book, Echoes of the Holocaust on the American Musical Stage was published in Fall 2012. She is the editor of and contributor to iBroadway: Musical Theatre in the Digital Age, from Palgrave ­Macmillan Press. As a scholar of American music and culture, Jake Johnson studies how communities t­ hroughout the country use music, sound, and voice to perform an American identity. Currently he is Assistant Professor of musicology at Oklahoma City University’s Wanda L. Bass School of Music, where he also maintains a vibrant vocal coaching studio. Jake’s journal articles have been published widely, including in American Music, Journal of the Society for American Music, Journal of Popular Music Studies, and Twentieth-Century Music. He is the author of Mormons, Musical Theater, and Belonging in America and is finishing a second book about musicals, deception, and the American Midwest. Stefanie A. Jones  (“SAJ,” they/them/theirs) holds a PhD in Theatre and Performance from the City University of New York Graduate Center. They work at the intersection of cultural studies and politico-­economic critique, with a focus on legacies of racial violence and social transformation. SAJ is an adjunct at City University of New York and New York University, the co-editor of Lateral: Journal of the Cultural Studies Association, and a New York-based community organizer and activist working for racial, economic, gender, and disability justice. They have published in edited collections, GPS: Global Performance Studies, and Theatre Journal, and have forthcoming work in Theatre History Studies. 458

Author Biographies

Michael M. Kennedy  is a PhD candidate in historical musicology at the University of ­Cincinnati’s College-Conservatory of Music. His primary research interests are musical theater and film music, with particular focus given to these genres’ orchestrational processes and styles. His dissertation examines the sonic plurality of orchestral scoring on Broadway since the late 1960s, while considering issues of aesthetics, technology, economics, and labor. He also holds degrees in orchestral conducting and double bass performance, and he has worked extensively as a theater music director, accompanist, and orchestral musician in professional, community, and educational settings. Kelly Kessler  is Associate Professor of Media and Cinema Studies at DePaul University. Her work focuses primarily on US television and film and the musical across stages and screens. Her book Destabilizing the Hollywood Musical: Music, Masculinity, and Mayhem explores gendered ramifications of the genre’s latter twentieth-century shift and she’s currently working on her second book, Broadway in the Box: Television’s Lasting Love Affair with the Musical. Her work can also be found in locales such as Studies in Musical Theatre, Television and New Media, Journal of Popular Music Studies, Feminism at the Movies, and Televising Queer Women. Raymond Knapp is Distinguished Professor of Musicology and Humanities at UCLA, where he is Academic Associate Dean for the Herb Alpert School of Music and Director of the Center for Musical Humanities. He has authored five books and co-edited two others, including The ­American Musical and the Formation of National Identity (2005; winner of the George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism), The American Musical and the Performance of Personal Identity (2006), The Oxford Handbook of the American Musical (2011, with Mitchell Morris and Stacy Wolf ), and Making Light: Haydn, Musical Camp, and the Long Shadow of German Idealism (2018). Zelda Knapp is a playwright, blogger, poet, short fiction author, avid theater-goer, and occasional actor. She graduated from NYU with a BFA in Drama and a minor in Creative Writing. Produced plays include Butterflies, This Is Hell, Something on Your Mind, and Evidence. Theater writing and reviews can be found on aworkunfinishing.blogspot.com, and television reviews on oncemorewithextremeprejudice.blogspot.com. Her short fiction has been published by Standard Culture and The Biscuit, along with her ebook, This Is What They Made It Out Of: tales from the end of the world. She has recently turned to academic writing in collaboration with Raymond Knapp. Paul R. Laird  is Professor of Musicology at the University of Kansas. His research ­interests ­include musical theater, Leonard Bernstein, and the villancico. Co-editor (with William A. ­Everett) of three editions of The Cambridge Companion to the Musical (2002, 2008, 2017), his books include Leonard Bernstein: A Guide to Research (2002), The Chichester Psalms of Leonard ­B ernstein (2010), Wicked: A Musical Biography (2011), The Musical Theater of Stephen Schwartz (2014), ­L eonard ­B ernstein: A Research and Information Guide (2nd edition with Hsun Lin, 2015), and Leonard B ­ ernstein in the Critical Lives series (Reaktion Books, 2018), among others. Hyunjung Lee  is Professor of Performance and Asian Cultural Studies at Kansai Gaidai ­University, Osaka, Japan. She has a diverse teaching background having previously taught in the United States, South Korea, and Singapore. Her publications have appeared in Theatre Research International and the Journal of Popular Culture, among others. She has contributed numerous book chapters in edited collections from major international publishers. She has also co-edited a journal special issue entitled “Colonial Modernity and Beyond: the East Asian Contexts” in Cultural ­Studies (2012). She is the author of Performing the Nation in Global Korea: Transnational Theatre ­( Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). 459

Author Biographies

James Leve is Professor of Musicology at Northern Arizona University. He received a PhD in musicology from Yale University (1998). His musical theater publications include Kander and Ebb (Yale University Press, 2009), American Musical Theater (Oxford, 2015), and the co-edited essay collection Children, Childhood, and Musical Theater (Routledge, forthcoming 2019). He is currently working on a major study of disability in musical theater. He has also published on early Italian comic opera, including an edition of the 1657 opera Il Potestà di Colognole. He is the recipient of the Virgil Thomson Fellowship, two Fulbright Fellowships, and three NEH Summer Stipends. Sissi Liu has been a Visiting Scholar at Brown University since she earned her PhD in Theatre and Performance at the Graduate Center, City University of New York, in 2018. Her work as a theatre and music practitioner has been seen in venues such as Carnegie Hall, Briggs Opera House, PS122, and the Juilliard School, where she was trained in composition and o ­ rchestration. Her writing is seen in the peer-reviewed journals Performance Research, Studies in Musical ­T heatre, Asian Theatre Journal, among others, as well as several books on musical theatre. Her book m ­ anuscript, Shapeshifter Consciousness, or Wukongism, explores new approaches of theorizing Asian/American performance. SissiLiu.net. Matthew Lockitt  holds a PhD from Monash University (Australia). His research includes “‘Proposition’: To Reconsider the Non-Singing Character and the Songless Moment” (2012) and “‘Love, Let Me Sing You’: Liminality in LaChiusa’s Bernarda Alba” (2014), and focuses on musical theater dramaturgy. He is also a director, dramaturg, and occasional lyricist. While at Monash he introduced students to the craft of writing for musical theater creating Aesop’s Fables, Sticks and Stones, and Metamorphoses. In 2016 he relocated to the United Kingdom to be Senior Lecturer and Programme Leader for the new musical theater program at the University of Winchester. Mary Jo Lodge  is Associate Professor of Theater at Lafayette College and holds a PhD from Bowling Green State University and an MA from Villanova, both in Theater. She’s published numerous articles and chapters on the musical and has directed and choreographed a wide range of professional, college, and summer stock productions. She was a Fulbright scholar on the musical at the University of Roehampton in London, and is co-editing, with Paul Laird, and contributing to a forthcoming collection of essays on the musical Hamilton, published by Oxford University Press. James Lovensheimer is Associate Professor of Musicology at Vanderbilt University’s Blair School of Music. He attended the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music for four years without finishing his degree in Musical Theater Performance. He later graduated summa cum laude from the University of Tennessee-Knoxville with a degree in Music History. An actor, musical director and coach, and composer as well as a musicologist, Jim worked in the professional theater for a number of years before returning to academia. He is the author of South Pacific: Paradise Rewritten (Oxford University Press) and is writing a study of Oscar Hammerstein II. Ben Macpherson is Course Leader for Musical Theater at the University of Portsmouth, UK. His research interests primarily focus on musical theater and voice studies. He is the author of Cultural Identity in British Musical Theatre, 1890–1939: Knowing One’s Place (Palgrave) and has published widely on a numerous aspects of musical theater. With Konstantinos Thomaidis, he co-edited Voice Studies: Critical Approaches to Process, Performance and Experience (Routledge) and is founding co-editor of Journal of Interdisciplinary Voice Studies (Intellect) and the book series Routledge Voice Studies (Routledge).

460

Author Biographies

Amanda McQueen  studies the history of the musical in all its forms, focusing on how the genre is shaped by industrial conditions. Much of her scholarship, including her dissertation and her published anthology chapter on Broadway adaptations in 1960s Hollywood, examines how the breakup of the Studio System impacted the American film musical. She also studies the backstage musical on television, and has published on the narrative, aesthetics, and ideology of the series Glee. She received her PhD from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and is currently a ­Lecturer in the School of Communication and Journalism at Auburn University. Holley Replogle-Wong received her PhD in Musicology from UCLA in 2009. She is currently a Lecturer in Musicology at UCLA, and the Program Director of the UCLA Center for Musical Humanities. Holley is a regular speaker for the LA Opera’s educational outreach programs, including the Opera for Educators and Discover Opera series. Holley has music directed youth music and musical theater programs at Crossroads, Harvard Westlake, and the Creative Artists Theater Space, and she sings with various Los Angeles-based vocal ensembles and for the occasional film soundtrack. Arreanna Rostosky is a recent PhD graduate in musicology from the University of C ­ alifornia, Los Angeles, having received her BM in Voice from the Blair School of Music at Vanderbilt University. She has presented multiple papers on Stephen Sondheim’s musicals at national and international conferences. Her current research interests include theater sound design, projection mapping, theme park entertainment, and contemporary Broadway musicals. She is an avid fan of Sondheim, megamusicals, Disney shows, and beyond, all of which she wrote about in her dissertation, “Reconsidering the ‘Golden Age’ Narrative for the American Musical in the New Millennium.” Phoebe Rumsey  received her PhD in Theater from the Graduate Center, City University of New York, in 2019. She holds an MA in Performance Studies from New York University, an MA in Theater from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and a BFA in Dance from Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, BC, Canada. She has presented papers at IFTR, ATHE, ASTR, and PSi. Recent publications include “The New Choreography of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Allegro” in Studies in Musical Theatre. A choreographer and dancer, she currently teaches Body Movement and Theater History at The City College of New York. Robynn Stilwell is a musicologist who teaches in the music, dance, writing, and film and media studies programs at Georgetown University. Her research interests center on the meaning of music as cultural work, and music as an expression, or impression, of movement and space. Publications include essays on Beethoven and cinematic violence, musical form in Jane Austen, rockabilly and “white trash,” figure skating, French film musicals, psychoanalytic film theory for female subjects, and the boundaries between sound and music in the cinematic soundscape. Current projects include a historical study of audiovisual modality in television; and music and sound in podcasts. Dominic Symonds  is Professor of Musical Theater at the University of Lincoln, UK. He is co-editor of Studies in Musical Theatre and co-founded the conference series “Song, Stage and Screen.” He jointly edits the book series Palgrave Studies in British Musical Theatre and Critical Approaches to Musical Theatre (OUP). His own publications include We’ll Have Manhattan: the Early Work of Rodgers and Hart (OUP, 2015), Broadway Rhythm: Imaging the City in Song (University of Michigan Press, 2017), and the co-authored Economies of Collaboration: More than the Sum of the Parts (Palgrave, 2018).

461

Author Biographies

Millie Taylor, a former freelance musical director, is Professor of Musical Theater at the University of Winchester, UK. Her latest book, Theatre Music and Sound at the RSC: Macbeth to Matilda (Palgrave, 2018) has just been published. Other publications include British Pantomime Performance (Intellect, 2007), Singing for Musicals: A Practical Guide (Crowood Press, 2008), ­Musical Theatre, Realism and Entertainment (Ashgate Press, 2012/Routledge 2016). She is co-­author of Studying Musical Theatre (Palgrave, 2014) and British Musical Theatre Since 1950 (Methuen, 2016), and co-editor of Gestures of Music Theater: The Performativity of Song and Dance (Oxford University Press, 2014). Aaron C. Thomas is Assistant Professor in the School of Theatre at Florida State ­University. His major research area is theatrical discourse surrounding sexuality and violence, and he writes primarily about images of masculinity in contemporary culture. As an antidote to thinking about violence, he also writes in the field of musical theater studies, where his work, again, ­focuses on discourse surrounding sexuality, masculinity, and violence. His essay “Dancing toward ­Masculinity: Newsies, Gender, and Desire” appears in The Disney Musical on Stage and Screen, and his first book, Sondheim and Wheeler’s Sweeney Todd, was published in 2018. Jeffrey Ullom teaches theater history and serves as Director of Undergraduate Theater Studies at Case Western Reserve University. His two books—The Humana Festival: A History of New Plays at Actors Theatre of Louisville (Southern Illinois University Press, 2008) and America’s First Regional Theatre: The Cleveland Play House and Its Search for a Home (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2014)—chart the growth of the nation’s leading institutions and their ability to endure economic, administrative, and artistic challenges. He also has published his work internationally in numerous journals, including Theatre History Studies, Contemporary Drama, Theatre Topics, Studies in Musical Theatre, Theatre Journal, and others. ­ ssistant Bryan M. Vandevender is a director, dramaturg, and musical theater historian. He is A Professor in the Department of Theater and Dance at Bucknell University. He holds an MA in Performance Studies from New York University and a PhD in Theater from the ­University of Missouri. His research centers on the American musical in revival. His writing has appeared in ­ ngland Studies in Musical Theatre, Theatre Journal, Theatre History Studies, Theatre Annual, New E ­T heatre Journal, Texas Theatre Journal, The Palgrave Handbook of Musical Theatre Producers, and ­iBroadway: Musical Theatre in the Digital Age. Katie Welsh is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Princeton University, where she concentrated in ­ nglish (Theater and Performance Studies) and received a certificate in Theater. As a scholar, she E has served as a research assistant for several book projects, including Jill Dolan’s Wendy Wasserstein and Stacy Wolf ’s Beyond Broadway. As a singer, she presents “informative cabarets,” evenings of song that blend performance and scholarship, with recent solo engagements at Feinstein’s/54 ­Below, the Princeton Club of New York, Don’t Tell Mama, The Duplex, the Metropolitan Room, and BroadwayCon. She has given interviews to Everything Sondheim and Musical Theater Today. Stacy Wolf  is Professor of Theater, Director of the Program in Music Theater, and Director of the Princeton Arts Fellows at Princeton University. She is the author of Changed for Good: A Feminist History of the Broadway Musical, A Problem Like Maria: Gender and Sexuality in the American Musical, Beyond Broadway: The Pleasure and Promise of Musical Theatre Across America (forthcoming), and the co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of the American Musical (with Raymond Knapp and Mitchell Morris).

462

Author Biographies

Trudi Wright is Assistant Professor at Regis University where she investigates musical ­theater history, American music, and world music with her students. One of her current teaching techniques calls on training she received as an undergraduate vocal performance major. Her case study, “Engaging the Community: A Public Speaking Performance Class,” was recently published by Palgrave in The Performing Arts as High-Impact Practice. Her other scholarly interests include the intersections between musical theater and the American labor movement. Her 2016 article, “Lost in The Cradle: Marc Blitzstein’s ‘FTP Plowed Under’ (1937),” was published in American Music (Illinois University Press).

463

INDEX

Note: Italic page numbers refer to figures. Abbott, George 49; see also Damn Yankees; Music Is; New Girl in Town; Pajama Game, The; Robbins, Jerome Abdul, Paula 55 Abraham, Paul 428 Abzug, Bella 157 Academy Awards 51, 143, 145, 163, 216, 351 Act, The (Kander, Ebb) 33, 35, 36 Acting Gay (Clum) 166 Actors’ Equity Association (AEA) 137, 144, 199, 200 Adams, Warren 339 Adding Machine, The (Rice) 285 Adenberg, Wolfgang 433 Advocate (magazine) 166, 168 Ahmed, Sarah 271 Aida ( John, Rice) 121, 146, 411–12 AIDS 174, 175, 226, 229, 231–3, 269, 348, 451 Ain’t Misbehavin’ (Waller, Maltby, Horwitz) 190–1 Akutagawa, Ry ū nosuke 101; see also See What I Wanna See (LaChiusa) Aladdin (Menken, Ashman, Rice, Beguelin) 40, 80, 81–4, 82–4, 94, 137, 146, 174, 377, 382, 431, 448 Albee, Edward 287 Alcoff, Linda 192 Aldridge, Theoni 132 Allegiance (Kuo) 186, 189, 201, 216, 382 Allegro (Rodgers, Hammerstein) 286 Allen, Debbie 50 Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) 278, 279, 369 Alter, Charlotte 445 Altman, Rick 384 Altman, Robert 386 Amélie (Messé, Tysen, Lucas) 150

American Idiot (Armstrong, Mayer, Cool, Dirnt) 80, 85, 94, 356, 359 American Idol (television series) 351, 387 American in Paris, An (Gershwin, Gershwin, Lucas) 246, 251–3; original film version (1951) 251 American Psycho (Sheik, Aguirre-Sacasa) 291 amplification 79–85 Anastasia (Flaherty, Ahrens, McNally) 9 “And I Am Telling You I’m Not Going” (Dreamgirls) 352 Andrews Sisters, The 228–9 Andrews, Julie 80, 341, 385 Annie (Strouse, Charnin) 419, 438 Annie Get Your Gun (Berlin, Fields) 428 Anthony, Shawn 276 Antoon, Jason 239 Any House (Davis, Davis) 285 Anyone Can Whistle (Sondheim, Laurents) 98 Anything Goes (Porter) 2, 85 Apartment, The (film) 165; see also Promises, Promises Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City (Shears, Garden, Whitty) 122, 124, 126 Asch, Sholem 227–9 Ashley, Christopher 201 Ashton, Frederick 251 Asian American Performers Action Coalition (AAPAC) 201 Askew, Melvin 305 Assassins (Sondheim, Weidman) 22, 107, 239, 314–15, 316–17, 366, 378 Assumption of Hannele, The (Hauptmann) 285 Aston, Elaine 145 Atlantic, The (magazine) 168, 342 Attinello, Paul 367 Auberjonois, René 300, 423

465

Index audience interactivity 340–2; see also hatewatching; Rocky Horror Picture Show; Sound of Music singalong; superfans Auslander, Philip 69 AVbyte 374–5, 380–2; Bronies – The Musical (Nazareth, Nazareth) 381; Hipster Disney Princesses – The Musical (Nazareth, Nazareth) 381; INSTAGRAM – The Musical (Nazareth, Nazareth) 380; Murdering Musical Madness (Nazareth, Nazareth) 379; Ps4 vs Xbox One – Console Wars the Musical (Nazareth, Nazareth) 374, 380–1; Tumblr – The Musical (Nazareth, Nazareth) 380; WHOLOCK THE MUSICAL (Nazareth, Nazareth) 381 Avengers, The (film) 280, 369 Avenue Q (Lopez, Marx) 9, 73, 183, 184, 186, 188, 189, 206–14, 216, 362, 430; “Everyone’s A Little Bit Racist,” 206, 208–10, 212–13; race depictions in 206–13 Avian, Bob 133 Axell, Katherine 58 Babes in Arms (Rodgers, Hart) 284 Bacharach, Burt 79–80, 121, 122, 123; see also David, Hal; Promises, Promises; Simon, Neil; Some Lovers Bailey, Pearl 196, 198–200, 203; see also Hello, Dolly! Baker, Roger 174 Baker’s Wife, The (Schwartz, Stein) 154 Balanchine, George 238, 248 Ballet Ballads (Moross, Latouche) 286 Banderas, Antonio 351 Bandwagon, The (Schwartz, Dietz, Kaufman) 284 Banghart, Bob 414; see also Snow Child; Stitt, Georgia Bareilles, Sara 121, 122, 124; see also Waitress Barks, Samantha 352 Barlow, Gary 120, 122, 124, 125, 126; see also Calendar Girls; Finding Neverland; Kennedy, Eliot; Take That Barrios, Jarrett 163–4, 168, 170 Barthes, Roland 22–3 Bat Boy: The Musical (O’Keefe) 18 Battle, Hinton 366 Baudrillard, Jean 19 Baum, L. Frank 44; Wonderful Wizard of Oz, The 44, 278, 377 Beast in the Jungle, The (Kander, Stroman, Thompson) 302, 308–9 Beastie Boys 114 Beatlemania (Gill, Obst, Lennon, McCartney) 136–7 Beatles, The 114, 156 Beautiful: The Carole King Musical (King, Goffin, McGrath) 12, 37, 64, 85, 150, 192 Beauty and the Beast (Menken, Ashman) 40, 145, 189, 237, 377, 431, 445, 446, 449 Beazer, Tracee 194 Bechdel test 144–51

Bechdel, Alison 144; see also Fun Home; “Dykes to Watch Out For” (comic strip) 145 “Before the Parade Passes By” (Hello, Dolly!) 197–8, 203 Beggar on Horseback (Kaufman, Connelly) 285 Beggar, The (Sorge) 285 Bell, Hunter 18–23; see also Bowen, Jeff; [title of show] Benanti, Laura 339 Bennett, Michael 34, 75, 132–3, 137, 201; see also Chorus Line, A Bennett, Robert Russell 106, 110 Bennett, Susan 7 Bergen, Sadie 316 Bergman, Allison 73 Berkeley, Busby 59, 352 Berkowitz, Edward D. 31 Berlin, Irving 121; see also Annie Get Your Gun; Irving Berlin’s White Christmas; This Is the Army Berliner, Emile 92 Bernarda Alba (LaChiusa) 97 Bernstein, Jed 241 Bernstein, Leonard 161, 265, 294, 317, 432; see also Laurents, Arthur; Lerner, Alan Jay; Mass; Robbins, Jerome; Schwartz, Stephen; Simon, Paul; 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue; Sondheim, Stephen; West Side Story Bernstein, Shirley 154 Berresse, Michael 20; see also [title of show] (Bell, Bowen) “Better Than Before” (Next to Normal) 283–4, 289 Beyoncé, see Knowles, Beyoncé Big Deal (Fosse) 49, 55 Big River (Miller, Hauptman) 186, 396, 410, 418–25; see also Deaf West Theatre; Ettinger, Heidi (Landesman); Huckleberry Finn (Twain); La Jolla Playhouse; Landesman, Rocco; McAnuff, Des Bildungsromane 39–40, 45 Billboard (trade magazine) 121 Billy Bishop Goes to War (Gray, Peterson) 397, 402–4 Billy Elliot ( John, Hall) 121 Billy’s Hollywood Screen Kiss (film) 166 Birdcage, The (film) 175; see also Cage aux Folles, La Birkenhead, Susan 152, 156; see also Working Björnson, Maria 135 Black Crook, The (Barras, Baker, Kennick) 50, 58 Black Lives Matter 230, 339; see also Garner, Eric; “I Can’t Breathe” (flashmob protest performance) Black Musical Theater from Coontown to Dreamgirls (Woll) 2 Black Power (Ture, Hamilton) 207 Black Rider, The (Waits, Wilson, Burroughs) 432 Black, Dustin Lance 163–4, 167–8, 170 Black, Jack 338 blackface minstrelsy 1, 267, 268 Blackwell, Susan 18; see also Bell, Hunter; Bowen, Jeff; [title of show] Blake, Eubie 65; see also Shuffle Along; Sissle, Noble

466

Index Blankenbuehler, Andy 217, 221, 235, 255–61, 257; see also Hamilton; In the Heights; Miranda, Lin-Manuel Blige, Mary J. 114 Block, Geoffrey 366–7 Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson (Friedman, Timbers) 70, 71, 194, 316 Bloom, Harold 268 Bloomer Girl (Arlen, Harburg) 252 “Civil War Ballet” (de Mille) 252–3 Blues in the Night (Epps) 190 BMI Musical Theatre Workshop 122 Bochco, Steven 385 Bock, Jerry 98, 145, 226, 365; see also Fiddler on the Roof; Fiorello!; Harnick, Sheldon; She Loves Me; Stein, Joseph Boese, Jim 9 Böhmer, Wolfgang 433 Bollick, Duane 41 Bolton, Guy 63 Bonanos, Christopher 326 Bond, Christopher 24; see also Sweeney Todd Bonham Carter, Helena 349 Bonilla-Silva, Eduardo 207, 213 Boockvor, Steven 155 Book of Mormon, The (Parker, Stone, Lopez) 8, 70, 73, 186, 189, 263, 266, 268–70, 271, 339, 379, 432 Booth, Paul 329 Borle, Christian 387 Botkin, Benjamin 61 Boublil, Alain 111, 112, 113, 134, 257; see also Misérables, Les; Miss Saigon; Schönberg, Claude-Michel Bourdieu, Pierre 237 Bowen, Clare 386 Bowen, Jeff 18–23; see also Bell, Hunter; [title of show] Bowie, David 177 Boy from Oz, The (Sherman, Enright, Allen) 37 Boy George 177 Boyd, Gregory 410 Boys from Boise, The [Medoff ] (1944 television musical) 335 Bracegirdle, Anne 167, 169 Brady, Pat 376 Brady, Wayne 179 Braxton, Toni 189 Brecht, Bertolt 400, 409; see also Threepenny Opera, The; Weill Kurt Brenard, Neal 398, 399 Brice, Fanny 229 Bridges of Madison County (Brown, Norman) 194 Bring It On: The Musical (Miranda, Kitt, Green, Whitty) 146, 184, 217, 219–20, 220 Britten, Benjamin 306 Britton, Connie 385 Broadway League, The 185, 360, 374, 411 Broadway Melody, The (film) 335

Broadway Musicals, Show by Show (Green, Ginell, eds.) 146, 147 Broadway Sound, The (Bennett) 106 BroadwayWorld 330, 347, 349, 359, 361 Brodsky, Kyle 449 Brohn, William David 107, 110–14, 112, 113, 117; see also Mary Poppins; Ragtime; Wicked; orchestrations, Miss Saigon 110–14, 112, 113 Bronies – The Musical (AVbyte) 381 Bronx Tale, A (Menken, Slater) 7, 432 Brooks, Daphne 208 Brown, Candy 53, 54 Brown, Jason Robert 114, 123, 314; see also Bridges of Madison County, The; Last Five Years, The; Parade; Uhry, Alfred Bruce, Andrew 89 Brustein, Robert 61, 199, 421 Buckley, Betty 13 Budd, Mike 447 Buffett, Jimmy 65 Buffy the Vampire Slayer (television series) 280, 335, 364–71, 375, 385; see also Whedon, Joss; “Once More, With Feeling” episode 364–71, 375 Bullets Over Broadway (Kelly, Allen) 194 Burgess, Jean 337–8, 375 Burroughs, William S. 432 Burston, Jonathan 87, 88–9, 90, 91, 93 Burton, Tim 349, 350; Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (film) 345, 348, 349, 350 Butler, Gerard 351 Butler, Judith 175 Butler, Michael 136, 409 BuzzFeed 380 Bye Bye Birdie (Strouse, Adams, Stewart) 194 Byrds, The 42 Byrne, David 123; see also Here Lies Love; Joan of Arc: Into the Fire Cabaret (Kander, Ebb) 22, 51, 62–3, 193, 302, 346, 429; film version (1972, Fosse) 51, 346 Cage aux Folles, La (Herman, Fierstein) 173–4, 175–7, 178, 191; Birdcage, The (1996 non-musical film version) 175; Cage, La (1973 stage farce) 175; original film version (1978) 175 Caird, John 294, 298; see also Children of Eden; Schwartz, Stephen Calendar Girls (Barlow, Firth) 120, 125 Call Me Mister (Rome, Auerbach) 173 Callaway, Ann Hampton 191 Calloway, Cab 196 Camelot (Lerner, Loewe) 265–6, 266, 271, 346 Can’t Help Singin’: The American Musical on Stage and Screen (Mast) 2 Can-Can (Porter) 50 Capeman, The (Simon, Walcott) 121, 124, 126, 174, 194 Captain Louie (Schwartz) 294 Carey, Drew 300 Cariou, Len 419

467

Index Carlson, Marvin 7, 8 Carnelia, Craig 152, 156–61, 161; see also Fantasticks, The; Imaginary Friends; Is There Life After High School?; Poster Boy; Schwartz, Stephen; Sweet Smell of Success; Working; “Just a Housewife” (Working) 34, 142, 152, 153, 154, 156–61 Caroline, or Change (Tesori, Kushner) 104, 230 Carousel (Rodgers, Hammerstein) 61–2, 79, 98, 144, 189, 202, 261, 273 Carr, David 342 Carter, Elliott 108 Carter, Jimmy 265 Case, Sue-Ellen 145–6 casting diversity 185–94 Cat and the Fiddle, The (Kern, Harbach) 284 Catanese, Brandi Wilkins 201 Catch Me If You Can (Shaiman, Wittman, McNally) 430 Cats (Lloyd Webber) 7, 9, 11, 13, 22, 37, 60, 71, 80, 85, 110, 179, 258, 323, 356, 428, 430, 434, 447 Cavicchi, Daniel 355 Celluloid Closet, The (Russo) 165, 176 Cephas Jones, Jasmine 258 Cerveris, Michael 339 Cescarini David 401, 403, 404 Changed for Good: A Feminist History of the Broadway Musical (Wolf ) 135, 146 Channing, Carol 174, 198–9, 202 Chapelle, Andrew 332 Charell, Erik 428 Charles, Ray 351 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (Shaiman, Wittman, Greig) 8, 9 Chen, Steve 375 Chenoweth, Kristin 45, 163–70 Chernow, Ron 114, 220, 257, 332 Chicago (Kander, Ebb) 8, 22, 49, 55, 60, 189, 242, 302, 345, 348, 349, 351, 431, 432 Children of Eden (Schwartz, Caird) 40, 43–4, 294, 295, 296, 298–9, 300, 301; “Spark of Creation, The” 44, 298–9 Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (Sherman, Sherman, Sams) 94 Chorus Line, A (Bennett, Hamlisch, Kleban, Kirkwood, Dante) 8, 19, 30, 33–5, 43, 70, 73, 104, 131–3, 137, 153, 185, 186–7, 188, 192, 201, 217, 243, 258, 410 Church, Joseph 121 Cibber, Colley 169 Cinderella (Rodgers, Hammerstein) 201, 339, 385 Circle in the Square 36, 135 Civil Rights Movement 27, 183, 198, 199, 200, 210, 230, 265 Civil War 24, 252, 253 “Civil War Ballet” (Bloomer Girl) [de Mille], 252–3 Civil War, The (Wildhorn, Murphy) 317, 318, 410 Clapton, Eric 327 Clarke, Gerald 60 Clueless (film) 46

Clum, John 166, 168; Acting Gay 166 Cohan, George M. 121 Coleman, Gary 208, 209 Color Purple, The (Norman, Willis, Bray, Russell) 10, 12, 63, 186, 189, 192, 374 Columbus, Chris 348; Rent (film) 348–9, 348, 351 Come from Away (Sankoff, Hein) 37, 150, 315–16, 317, 357, 425 Company (Sondheim, Furth) 21, 22, 30–1, 75, 94, 104, 168, 291 Connelly, Marc 285 Connick, Harry Jr. 121, 123; see also Thou Shalt Not Contact (Stroman, Weidman) 235, 236–43 Coontz, Stephanie 30 Cooper, Alice 177 Corden, James 327 “Corner of the Sky” (Pippin) 42–3, 44, 295 Cox, Dan 447 Craft, Elizabeth 236 Crawford, Michael 93 Crazy for You (Gershwin, Gershwin, Ludwig) 60–1, 63, 73, 238 Crespy, David A. 395 Criss, Darren 376; see also Glee; Team StarKid critics: Acocella, Joan 51; Armstrong, Linda 303; Barnes, Clive 199–200, 236, 313; Billington, Michael 274; Brantley, Ben 61, 62, 64, 169, 178, 179, 240, 260, 312, 313–14, 315–16, 318–19, 447; Canby, Vincent 51, 314, 318–19; Collins, William 317; Cooke, Richard P. 199; Dziemianowicz, Joe 165; Evans, Greg 319, 447; Filichia, Peter 156; Gerard, Jeremy 242; Gottfried, Martin 31; Green, Jesse 10, 260, 306, 315; Gussow, Mel 52, 65; Holdren, Sara 309; Isherwood, Charles 219, 314, 318; Jaques, Damien 399; Jones, Welton 422; Joslyn, Jay 401; Kalem, T.E. 54; Kerr, Walter 135, 199, 313, 316, 317–18; Kisselgoff, Anna 242; Klein, David 365; Lahr, John 240; Lyons, Donald 240; Macaulay, Alistair 242; Marks, Peter 260; Morley, Sheridan 242; Musto, Michael 339; Newman, Barbara 242; Nussbaum, Emily 340, 341; Ouzounian, Richard 168, 169; Paulson, Michael 317; Rich, Frank 7, 135, 315, 317, 423–4; Richards, David 315; Riedel, Michael 169–70, 314; Rosen, Jody 315; Rothstein, Melvyn 315; Scheck, Frank 165; Sullivan, Dan 422; Tallmer, Jeffrey 41; van Matre, Lynne 275; Viertel, Jack 422; Wallenstein, Andrew 164; Watt, Douglas 49; Watts, Richard Jr. 199; Wilson, Edwin 54 Crosby, Bing 80 Crow, Sheryl 121, 122, 124, 125; see also Diner: The Musical; Levinson, Barry crowdfunding 378, 381, 382 Crowe, Russell 352 Crowley, Bob 84 Cryer, Gretchen 35–6; see also Ford, Nancy; I’m Getting My Act Together and Taking It On the Road

468

Index Cuden, Steve 410; see also Jekyll & Hyde; Wildhorn, Frank Culture of Narcissism, The: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations (Lasch) 29 Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime, The (Stephens) 94 Curry, Tim 273 Curtains (Kander, Ebb, Holmes) 194, 302, 306 D’Angelo 114 Damn Tango (Tylman, Olga, Dynerman) 397, 400–2, 401 Damn Yankees (Adler, Ross, Abbott, Wallop) 49, 50, 146 Dance a Little Closer (Strouse, Lerner) 419–20 Dancer’s Life, The (Rivera) 49 Dancin’ (Fosse) 50, 55, 237, 240 Daniele, Graciela 101, 152, 305 Dante, Nicholas 35 Davenport, Jack 388 Davenport, Ken 374, 379, 382 David, Hal 79–80, 121 David, Michael 421, 423, 425 Davies, Mary Bridget 412 Davis, Robert H. and Owen 285 Dawson, Rosario 348 Day Before Spring, The (Lerner, Loewe) 286 Day Well Spent, A (Oxenford) 196; see also Hello, Dolly! Day, Felicia 280, 335, 369–70, 375; see also Buffy the Vampire Slayer; Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog; Firefly; Guild, The de Beauvoir, Simone 149, 157; Second Sex, The 149 de Giere, Carol 41, 155 de Jager, Christelle 449 de Mille, Agnes 50, 238, 248, 252–3; see also “Civil War Ballet” (Bloomer Girl); Oklahoma! de Rossi, Portia 168 Deaf West Theatre 7, 424; see also Big River; Spring Awakening Dear Evan Hansen (Pasek, Paul, Levenson) 10, 37, 114, 121–2, 124, 141, 291, 323 Debussy, Claude 108 Decker, Todd 58 Del LaGrace Volcano 174 Depp, Johnny 349 Der Glöckner von Notre Dame see Glöckner von Notre Dame, Der; Hunchback of Notre Dame, The Derrida, Jacques 22 Destiny’s Child 114 Devil Wears Prada, The (John, Taub, Rudnick) 123 Diamond, I.A.L. 165 Dimanche après-midi sur l’île de la Grande Jatte, Un (Seurat painting) 107–9; see also Sunday in the Park with George Diner: The Musical (Crow, Levinson) 122 Direct from Death Row the Scottsboro Boys (Stein) 303 Disney Theatrical Productions 3, 71, 83, 145, 237, 243, 366, 377–8, 379, 412–13, 445–51;

see also Aida; Aladdin; Beauty and the Beast; Freaky Friday; Glöckner von Notre Dame, Der; Hunchback of Notre Dame, The; Lion King, The; Little Mermaid, The; Newsies; Tarzan; Germany, productions in 430, 431, 434 Dixon, Brandon Victor 339 DMX 114 Dobie, Edgar 241 Doctor Zhivago (Simon, Weller) 134, 194 Dolan, Jill 69 Doyle, John 62, 63, 94, 305 Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog (Whedon, Whedon, Whedon, Tancharoen) 274, 278–80, 323, 324, 335, 338, 365, 369–71, 375; “My Freeze Ray,” 279–80 Dracula, the Musical (Wildhorn, Black, Hampton) 410 Drag (Baker) 174 drag performance 142, 173–81 Drag Time (documentary) 176–7 Dream Play, A (Strindberg) 285 Dreamgirls (Krieger, Eyen) 74, 194, 345, 348, 351–2; “And I Am Telling You I’m Not Going,” 352 Duffett, Mark 327–9, 347 Duncan, Michael 403 Dunn, Don 59 Durkheim, Émile 325, 327–8; effervescence 325, 327, 329–30, 333; Elementary Forms of Religious Life, The 327 Dürrenmatt, Friedrich 304–5; Visit, The [Der Besuch der alten Dame], 304–5 Dyer, Richard 347 “Dykes to Watch Out For” (Bechdel comic strip) 145 Dynerman, Helena 400–2 Ebb, Fred 33, 63, 75, 302–10; see also Act, The; Cabaret; Chicago; Curtains; Kander, John; Kiss of the Spider Woman, The; Rink, The; Scottsboro Boys, The; Thompson, David; Visit, The Ebersole, Christine 20 Edison, Thomas 92 Edwards, Sherman 313; see also 1776; Stone, Peter Eisner, Michael 445–7 Ejiofor, Chiwetel 451 Elaborate Lives: The Legend of Aida, see Aida Elementary Forms of Religious Life, The (Durkheim) 327 Ellington, Duke 190, 217; see also Sophisticated Ladies; Strayhorn, Billy Eminem 114 Emmy Awards 51, 280, 365 Emperor Jones, The (O’Neill) 285 Enchanted, The (Kander, Pierce) 307–8; see also Intermezzo (Giraudoux) Encores! (New York City Center series) 60, 65, 192 Eng, Steven 202 Engel, Lehman 122 Entertainment Weekly (magazine) 340

469

Index Epperson, John 177 Equus (Shaffer) 440 Escape to Margaritaville (Buffett, Garcia, O’Malley) 65 Esten, Charles 386 Estill, Jo 72 Ettinger, Heidi (Landesman) 420, 423 Eubie! (Blake, Rose) 190 Evans, Greg 124 “Everyone’s A Little Bit Racist” (Avenue Q) 206, 208–10, 212–13 Evita (Lloyd Webber, Rice) 9, 102, 104, 317–18, 423 “Evolution of Dance in the Golden Age of the American ‘Book Musical’” (Gennaro) 259 Evreinov, Nikolai 285 Facebook 10, 329, 330, 338, 339, 340, 347, 380, 382 Fairchild, Robert 251 Fall, Leo 428 Falls, Robert 412 Falsettoland (Finn, Lapine) 229 Falsettos (Finn, Lapine) 37, 98, 107, 184, 226, 230–33; see also In Trousers; March of the Falsettos Fame (Margoshes, Levy, Fernandez) 430 Family Affair, A (Kander, Goldman, Goldman) 302 fandom 325–33, 340–2, 345–52, 355–62, 374–82; interactivity, viewer 340–2; new media and 374–82; superfans 355–62 Fantasticks, The (Schmidt, Jones) 156, 440 Fantôme de l’Opéra, Le (Leroux) 92; see also Love Never Dies; Phantom of the Opera Faser, Barbara Means 30 Faso, Nina 155, 296; see also Working “Fathers and Sons” (Working) [Schwartz], 153, 154, 294, 296 Feineman, Neil 364 Fela! ( Jones, Lewis, Kuti) 37, 194 Feldman, Lucy 145 Felman, Shoshana 283, 284 Feminine Mystique, The (Friedan) 149, 157 feminism 141–2; female employment and 148–50 Feminism and Theatre (Case) 145 Fendrich, Rainhard 433 Ferrer, Mel 410 Feuer, Cy 52 Fiddler on the Roof (Bock, Harnick, Stein) 98, 145, 184, 193, 226–33, 246–8, 254, 297, 327, 429 Fierstein, Harvey 126, 173, 176, 178–9, 339; see also Cage aux Folles, La; drag performance; Herman, Jerry; Kinky Boots; Lauper, Cyndi; Torch Song Trilogy Fillion, Nathan 335, 369–70, 375; see also Buffy the Vampire Slayer; Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog; Firefly “Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess” (Williams) 337

film versions of musicals 324, 345–52; American in Paris, An 251; Cabaret 51, 346; Camelot 346; casting 351–2; Chicago 345, 348, 349, 351; Dreamgirls 345, 348, 351–2; Fame 346; fandom and 345–52; Footloose 346; Funny Girl 346; Grease 346; Guys and Dolls 346; Hello, Dolly! 346; Into the Woods 345, 348, 349, 350–1; Jesus Christ Superstar 346; King and I, The 346; Kiss Me, Kate 49–50; Little Shop of Horrors 346; Mame 346; Man of La Mancha 346; Misérables, Les 345, 348, 352, 379; My Fair Lady 346; Phantom of the Opera, The 345, 348, 349–50, 351; Porgy and Bess 199; Rent 345, 348–9, 350, 351; Sound of Music, The 336, 346; Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street 345, 348, 349, 350; Sweet Charity 51; West Side Story 346; Wizard of Oz, The 45, 336, 377, 387 Finding Neverland (Barlow, Kennedy) 120, 124, 125, 126, 425 Finn, William 108, 125, 226, 399; see also Falsettoland; Falsettos; In Trousers; Lapine, James; March of the Falsettos; New Brain, A; 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee Fiorello! (Bock, Harnick) 98 First Daughter Suite (LaChiusa) 97, 102–3, 291 First Lady Suite (LaChiusa) 97, 98–9, 102 Firth, Tim 125 Fischer, Justin 378; see also Team StarKid Fisher, Rob 251 Fitzgerald, Richard 138 Five Guys Named Moe ( Jordan, Peters) 190 Flack, Roberta 36 Flashdance (Roth, Cary, Hedley) 430 Fledermaus, Die [The Bat] (Strauss) 427 Flower Drum Song (Rodgers, Hammerstein) 192, 218 Floyd Collins (Guettel, Lucas) 75 Fogg, Rachel 71 Follies (Sondheim, Goldman) 22, 30, 32–3, 36, 291 Fontanne, Lynn 305 Footloose (Snow, Pitchford, Bobbie) 430 Ford, Nancy 35–6; see also Cryer, Gretchen; I’m Getting My Act Together and Taking It On the Road Ford, Sam 337, 342; Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture (with Jenkins, Green) 337 Forsyth, Frederick 350; see also Lloyd Webber, Andrew; Love Never Dies Phantom of Manhattan, The 350 Forty-Second Street (Warren, Dubin, Stewart) 19, 194 Fosse (Maltby, Reinking, Walker, Ebb) 237–8, 240 Fosse Style, The (McWaters) 48 Fosse, Bob 3, 28, 42, 48–56, 62, 75, 137, 154, 237, 238, 295; see also Abbott, George; Allen, Debbie; Big Deal; Brown, Candy; Chicago; Dancin’; Feuer, Cy; How to Succeed in Business without Really Trying; LeDonne, Peter; Little Me;

470

Index MacLaine, Shirley; McKechnie, Donna; New Girl in Town; Orbach, Jerry; Ostrow, Stuart; Pajama Game, The; Pippin; Redhead; Reinking, Ann; Robbins, Jerome; Rubinstein, John; Sousa, Pamela; Sweet Charity; Verdon, Gwen; Vereen, Ben; choreographic style 48–51, 55–6; television commercials 51–6 Foucault, Michel 168 Fox, Andrew 377–9 Foxx, Jamie 351 Fragonard, Jean-Honoré 239; Swing, The (painting) 239 Francois, Ryan 191 Franich, Darren 340, 341 Frank, Anne 101 Frankel, Scott 120 Freaky Friday (Kitt, Yorkey, Carpenter) 413 Freud, Sigmund 285–91 Friedan, Betty 149, 157; Feminine Mystique, The 149, 157 Friedman, Michael 316 Friedman, Peter 316; see also Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson; Timbers, Alex Frith, Simon 71 Frum David 29, 35 Fun Home (Tesori, Kron) 12, 37, 104, 135, 145, 146, 150; see also Bechdel, Alison Funny Girl (Styne, Merrill) 230, 346 Funny or Die (website) 338 Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, A (Sondheim, Shevelove) 273 Fury, David 367 Gaines, Boyd 239 Galati, Frank 305 Gale, Eric Kahn 377 Gallo, Fred 134–5 Gamba, Felipe 449 Gamerman, Ellen 69 Garden, John 122, 124 Garland, Judy 387 Garner, Andre 123 Garner, Eric 337, 339; see also Black Lives Matter; “I Can’t Breathe” (flashmob protest performance) Gates, Eleanor 285 Gattelli, Christopher 249–50, 251 Gaudio, Bob 358; see also Jersey Boys Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) 163, 164, 168 Geek Chic: The Ultimate Guide to Geek Culture (Feineman) 364 Geffen, David 348 Gender Trouble (Butler) 175 Gennaro, Liza 259–60; “Evolution of Dance in the Golden Age of the American ‘Book Musical’,” 259 Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder, A (Lutvak, Freedman) 85, 146

Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (Styne, Robin, Loos, Fields) 398 George-Graves, Nadine: Oxford Handbook of Dance and Theater, The, introduction 236 Geppetto (Schwartz, Stern) 294, 300; see also My Son Pinocchio: Geppetto’s Musical Tale Germany, musicals in 395, 427–34; Annie Get Your Gun (Berlin, Fields) 428; Black Rider, The (Waits, Wilson, Burroughs) 432; Cabaret (Kander, Ebb) 429; Cats (Lloyd Webber) 428, 430, 434; Disney Theatrical Group 430, 431, 434; Elisabeth (Levay, Kunze) 431, 432; Fack ju Göhte (Triebel, Rebscher, Schroeder) 431; Fiddler on the Roof (Bock, Harnick, Stein) 429; Ghost – Nachricht von Sam [Ghost the Musical] (Stewart, Ballard, Rubin) 431; Heute Abend: Lola Blau [Tonight: Lola Blau] (Kreisler) 432; Hinterm Horizont (Lindenberg, Brussig) 432; Ich war noch niemals in New York ( Jürgens, Struppeck) 431; Ich will Spaß (van de Waterbeemd) 432; jukebox musicals 431; Light in the Piazza, The (Guettel, Lucas) 434; Lion King, The ( John, Rice) 431, 448; Lloyd Webber, Andrew 431, 434; Ludwig II – Sehnsucht nach dem Paradies (Hummel, Barbarino) 432; Martin L – Das Luther-Musical (Kverndokk, Wiik, Schief ke, Kopf ) 432; Miami Nights (Haseloff ) 431; Misérables, Les (Schönberg, Boublil, Kretzmer) 431; movicals 430; Mozart! (Levay, Kunze) 432; My Fair Lady (Lerner, Loewe) 428, 429, 433; Oklahoma! (Rodgers, Hammerstein) 428; Phantom of the Opera, The (Lloyd Webber, Stilgoe) 428; Porgy and Bess (Gershwin, Heyward, Gershwin) 428; privatelyfunded productions 430–3; public subsidies 428–9; rock musicals 430, 431; Schönberg, Claude-Michel 431, 434; Schuh des Manitu, Der (Lingnau, Wohlgemuth, von Duffel) 431; Sekretärinnen [Secretaries] (Wittenbrink) 432; Stage Entertainment (production company) 430, 431, 433, 447–8; Mock-O’Hara, Johannes 433; Stage Holding (production company) 430; Starlight Express (Lloyd Webber, Stilgoe) 428, 431; Stella (Böhmer, Lund) 432; Stella (production company) 430; Street Scene (Weill, Hughes) 428; Sweeney Todd (Sondheim, Wheeler) 429, 434; Tabaluga (Maffay) 432; Tanz der Vampire (Steinman, Kunze) 431; West Side Story (Bernstein, Sondheim, Laurents, Robbins) 432, 434; Wunder von Bern, Das (Lingnau, Ramond) 431, 432; Wunder von Neukölln, Das (Böhmer, Lund) 432 Gershwin, George 63, 121; see also American in Paris, An; Crazy for You; Gershwins’ Fascinating Rhythm, The; Gershwin, Ira; Girl Crazy; Nice Work if You Can Get It; Oh, Kay!; Porgy and Bess; Strike Up the Band Gershwin, Ira 63; see also American in Paris, An; Crazy for You; Gershwins’ Fascinating Rhythm,

471

Index The; Gershwin, George; Girl Crazy; Lady in the Dark; Nice Work if You Can Get It; Oh, Kay!; Porgy and Bess; Strike Up the Band; Weill, Kurt Gershwins’ Fascinating Rhythm, The (Gershwin, Gershwin) 190 Gerstenberg, Alice 285 Ghost the Musical [Ghost – Nachricht von Sam] (Stewart, Rubin, Ballard) 75, 431 Giant (LaChiusa) 97 Gilbert, W.S. 114 Gilmore, Ruth Wilson 207 Ginell, Cary 146; Broadway Musicals, Show by Show (with Green) 146, 147 Giraudoux, Jean 307–8; Intermezzo 307 Girl Crazy (Gershwin, Gershwin, Bolton, McGowan) 60–1, 63 Gitlin, Todd 341 Giuliani, Rudolph 446–7 Glaspell, Susan 285 Gleason, Joanna 339 Glee (television series) 277, 326, 371, 376, 379, 385, 393 Glöckner von Notre Dame, Der (Schwartz, Lapine) 413; see also Hunchback of Notre Dame, The Glover, Donald 451 Gmorning, Gnight!: Little Pep Talks for Me & You (Miranda) 326 God of Vengeance (Asch) 227–9; see also Indecent; Vogel, Paula Godfrey, Dominic 130 Godspell (Schwartz, Tebelak) 11, 28, 40, 41–2, 43, 46, 71, 80, 152, 154, 155, 265, 268, 294, 382 Gold, Nina 352 Golden Apple, The (Moross, La Touche) 21 Golden Boy (Strouse, Adams) 21 Golden Rainbow (Marks, Kinoy) 21 Golden, Fred 52 Goldilocks (Anderson, Kerr, Kerr) 21 Goldman, James 32, 302, 307–8; see also Enchanted, The; Family Affair, A; Kander, John Goldman, Nina 240 Goldman, William 302, 306, 307–8 Goldsberry, Renée Elise 188, 258 Goldstein, Lynda 36 Good News (Henderson, Brown, DeSylva) 18 Goodman, Benny 239–40 Goodman, John 423 Goodwin, Clive 84–5 Google 375, 381 Gordon, Joanne 31, 32, 33 Gotonda, Neil 201 Gottfried, Martin 51 Grable, Betty 199 Graham, Martha 253 Grand Night for Singing, A (Rodgers, Hammerstein, Bobbie) 190 Grandmaster Flash 114 Grant, Micki 152–3, 156; see also Working

Gray, John McLachlan 403 Grease ( Jacobs, Casey) 71, 80, 335, 336, 346, 385; live television broadcast 335 Green, Amanda 219; see also Bring It On: The Musical; Kitt, Tom; Miranda, Lin-Manuel; Whitty, Jeff Green, Hank 380; see also AVbyte Green, John 380; see also AVbyte Green, Joshua 337–8, 342, 375; Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture (with Jenkins, Ford) 337 Green, Stanley 146, 197; Broadway Musicals, Show by Show (with Ginell) 146, 147; World of Musical Comedy 197 Greenberg, Gordon 154 Greenwich, Ellie 191 Greif, Michael 283 Greskovic, Robert 242 Groff, Jonathan 168, 332, 339 Guettel, Adam 75, 411; see also Floyd Collins; Light in the Piazza, The; Lucas, Craig Guevara, Che 318 Guild, The (web series) 370 Guillaume, Robert 189 Gunton, Bob 423 Gutkin, Lisa 226 Guys and Dolls (Loesser) 2, 145, 258, 346, 438 Gwon, Adam 122; see also Ordinary Days Gypsy (Styne, Sondheim, Laurents) 69, 193 Haas Effect 81, 83, 88 Habermas, Jürgen 269 Hagen, Daron 270 Hair (MacDermot, Rado, Ragni) 10, 12, 40, 69, 71, 80, 88, 106, 136, 137, 183, 274, 409, 410 Hairspray (Shaiman, Wittman, Meehan, O’Donnell) 10, 175, 186, 193, 267, 336, 338, 385 Hairy Ape, The (O’Neill) 285 Halberstam, Jack ( Judith) 174, 275 Hall, G. Stanley 39 Halperin, David 167, 170; How to Be Gay 170 Halva, Aaron 226 Hamilton (Miranda) 1, 2, 8, 10, 23–4, 24, 37, 43, 64, 74, 75, 80, 94, 104, 107, 114–17, 115, 116, 121, 123–4, 126, 141, 144, 145, 146, 184, 189, 216, 217, 220–2, 235, 255–61, 266–7, 304, 312, 315–16, 316, 325, 326–7, 328–33, 356, 361, 368, 374, 382, 411, 432, 434; Hamilton: The Revolution (Miranda, McCarter) 329; Lacamoire, Alex orchestrations 114–17; “What’d I Miss,” 256, 259; “Yorktown (The World Turned Upside Down)” 115, 116, 117, 221, 256, 258 Hamilton, Charles 207; see also Ture, Kwame Hamlisch, Marvin 33, 35, 156; see also Chorus Line, A; Imaginary Friends; Sweet Smell of Success; They’re Playing Our Song Hammerstein, Oscar II 3, 58, 59, 61, 73, 98, 114, 183, 267, 368, 385; see also Allegro; Carousel;

472

Index Cinderella; Flower Drum Song; Grand Night for Singing, A; Kern, Jerome; King and I, The; Oklahoma!; Rodgers, Richard; Show Boat; Sound of Music, The; South Pacific; Very Warm for May Hammond, Mary 72 Harbert, Elissa 114 Harburg, Ernest 336 Hardiman, Alan 82 Harline, Leigh 300; see also Pinocchio (film); Washington, Ned Harmon, Charlotte 52 Harnick, Sheldon 98, 145, 226, 365; see also Bock, Jerry; Fiddler on the Roof; Fiorello!; She Loves Me; Stein, Joseph Harris, Jerry 134 Harris, Neil Patrick 164, 168, 174, 179, 278–9, 338, 369–70, 375; see also Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog; Tony Awards Harry Potter (Rowling franchise) 165, 376 Hart, Lorenz 239 Harvey-Piper, Penny 74 Hasty Pudding Club (Harvard) 173 hate-watching 340–2 Hathaway, Anne 352 Hauptman, William 420–2; see also Big River; Ettinger, Heidi (Landesman); La Jolla Playhouse; Landesman, Rocco; McAnuff, Des; Miller, Roger Hauptmann, Gerhart 285 Hayes, Sean 142, 163–70; see also Apartment, The; Barrios, Jarrett; Black, Dustin Lance; Chenoweth, Kristin; Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD); Harris, Neil, Patrick; homosexuality; Newsweek; Promises, Promises; “Straight Jacket” (Setoodeh); Tony Awards Healy, Patrick 164 Hearn, George 72 Heartbreak Tango (Puig) 400 Hebert, Clay 382 Hedwig and the Angry Inch (Trask, Mitchell) 18, 85, 94, 173–4, 177–8, 179, 430 Heilman, John 242 Heim, Caroline 10 Heimlich, Jesse 137 Hein, David 315; see also Come from Away; My Mother’s Lesbian Jewish Wiccan Wedding; Sankoff, Irene Heinen, Alex 280 Hellekson, Karen 355 Hello Again (LaChiusa) 97, 99–100 Hello, Dolly! (Herman, Stewart) 149, 174, 184, 196–204, 346; all-Asian version (2013) 196, 198, 200–4, 202; all-Black version (1967) 196, 198–200, 203; “Before the Parade Passes By,” 197–8, 203 Hendrix, Jimi 136 Herbert, James 65

Here Lies Love (Byrne, Fatboy Slim) 94, 123, 201 Herman, Jerry 21, 173, 175, 179, 191, 198, 202; see also Cage aux Folles, La; Fierstein, Harvey; Hello, Dolly!; Jerry’s Girls; Mack and Mabel; Mame; Stewart, Michael; Hill, Faith 386 Hilty, Megan 386 Hines, Gregory 191, 411 Hines, Maurice 411 Hingston, Seán Martin 241, 242 Hinterm Horizont (Lindenberg, Brussig) 432 Hipster Disney Princesses – The Musical (AVbyte) 381 Hirson, Roger O. 295; see also Pippin; Schwartz, Stephen Hischak, Thomas 395 historical subjects, musicals on 264, 312–19 History of Singing, A (Potter, Sorrell) 69 Hoffman, Warren 313 Holden, Brian 376; see also Team StarKid Holler If Ya Hear Me (Shakur, Kreidler) 80 Hollywood Reporter 163–4, 165 Holmes, A.J. 376–9 Holy Musical B@man! (Team StarKid) 376 Holzman, Winnie 45; see also Schwartz, Stephen; Wicked homosexuality 34, 141–2, 141, 163–81, 187–8, 227–33, 279, 307, 337–40, 399 hooks, bell 157 House of Flowers (Arlen, Capote) 199 How to Be Gay (Halperin) 170 How to Succeed in Business without Really Trying (Loesser) 49 Howard, Elizabeth 74 Huckleberry Finn (Twain) 418, 420; see also Big River Hudes, Quiara Alegría 217; see also In the Heights; Miranda, Lin-Manuel Hudson Scenic Studios 130–1, 134–5, 138 Hudson, Jennifer 351 Hudson, Richard 130, 135 Huffington Post 164 Hulu 341, 375 Humana Festival of New American Plays (Louisville, KY) 408, 413 Hunchback of Notre Dame, The (Schwartz, Menken) 40, 43, 44, 46, 294, 413, 431; see also Glöckner von Notre Dame, Der Hunter, Ericka 356 Hurley, Chad 375 Hutton, Betty 398 Hwang, David Henry 449; see also Soft Power; Tarzan; Tesori, Jeanine Hytner, Nicholas 61–2 “I Can’t Breathe” (flashmob protest performance) 339–40, 342; see also Black Lives Matter; Garner, Eric I’m Getting My Act Together and Taking It On the Road (Ford, Cryer) 30, 35

473

Index Ian, Janis 36 IATSE (International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees) 131, 137, 138 Ibsen, Henrik 288 If/Then (Kitt, Yorkey) 13, 150, 187–8, 193 Imaginary Friends (Ephron, Hamlisch, Carnelia) 156 In the Heights (Miranda, Hudes) 75, 80, 94, 114, 187–8, 216–18, 219, 221, 222, 257, 259, 260, 327, 331, 333, 339, 432 “In the Jungle: How American Music Legends Made Millions off the Work of a Zulu Tribesman Who Died a Pauper” (Malan) 450 In the Stage-Wings of the Soul (Evreinov) 285 In Trousers (Finn) 31, 229; see also Falsettoland; March of the Falsettos Indecent (Vogel, Gutkin, Halva) 226, 227–9, 230, 233; see also God of Vengeance Instagram 13, 380 INSTAGRAM – The Musical (AVbyte) 380 “Integration” (Block) in The Oxford Handbook of the American Musical 366–7 Intermezzo (Giraudoux) 307; see also Enchanted, The internet musicals 337–40; see also AVbyte; Team StarKid; Whedon, Joss Into the Woods (Sondheim, Lapine) 8, 9, 75, 98, 345, 411, 420, 424 Irene (Tierney, McCarthy) 59 Irving Berlin’s White Christmas (Berlin, Ives, Blake) 194 Is There Life After High School? (Carnelia, Kindley) 156 It Aint’ Nothin’ But the Blues (Bevel, Gaithers, Myler, Taylor, Wheetman) 190 Jackman, Hugh 352 Jackson, Jonathan 390 Jackson, Josh 371 Jacob, Abe 88–9, 136–7 Jacobs, Bernard 132 Jaffrey, Raza 387 Jamaica (Arlen, Harburg) 199 James, Henry 308 Jamison, Judith 191 Janney, Allison 338 Jauss, Hans Robert 7 Jay-Z 114 Jazz Singer, The (1927 film) 346 Jefferson, Margo 242 Jekyll & Hyde (Wildhorn, Bricusse, Cuden) 146, 356, 410 Jelly’s Last Jam (Wolfe, Birkenhead, Morton, Henderson) 37 Jenkins, Daniel 423 Jenkins, Henry 337, 342, 346–7; Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture (with Ford, Green) 337 Jensen, Michael 163 Jerome Kern Goes to Hollywood (Kern, Vorburgh) 190–1

Jerry’s Girls (Herman) 190–1 Jersey Boys (Brickman, Elice, Gaudio) 7, 64, 192, 356, 358, 359, 410, 420, 425, 432 Jesus Christ Superstar (Lloyd Webber, Rice) 52, 69, 70–1, 72, 75, 80, 87–9, 98, 136, 268, 346 Jewish identity 226–33; see also Falsettos; Fiddler on the Roof; Indecent Jim Crow 210 Joan of Arc: Into the Fire (Byrne) 123 Jodorowsky, Alejandro 275; Topo, El (film) 275 Joel, Billy 243 John, Elton 121, 122, 123, 450, 451; see also Aida; Billy Elliot; Devil Wears Prada, The; Lion King, The; Rice, Tim Johns, Glynis 75 Johnson, Christine Toy 196, 202–4, 202; see also Hello, Dolly! Johnston, Jill 157 Jolson, Al 346 Jones, James Earl 451 Jones, John Bush 268 Jones, Tom 440; see also Fantasticks, The; 110 in the Shade; Schmidt, Harvey Joplin, Janis 412; see also Davies, Mary Bridget; Night with Janis Joplin, A Jory, Jon 408, 410, 413 Joseph, Stephen M. 33 Joyce, James 286 Judgment at Nuremberg (film) 303 Jujamcyn Theaters 420, 422, 423 “Just a Housewife” (Working) [Carnelia], 34, 142, 152, 153, 154, 156–60 Jux will er sich machen, Einen [He’ll Have Himself a Good Time] (Nestroy) 196; see also Hello, Dolly! Kail, Thomas 217, 221, 260, 261; see also In the Heights; Miranda, Lin-Manuel Kaiman, Jonathan 449 Kajikawa, Loren 114 Kálmán, Emmerich 428 Kander, John 33, 62–3, 69, 73, 75, 136, 264, 302–10; see also Act, The; Beast in the Jungle, The; Cabaret; Chicago; Curtains; Ebb, Fred; Enchanted, The; Family Affair, A; Kid Victory; Kiss of the Spider Woman, The; Landing, The; Pierce, Greg; Rink, The; Scottsboro Boys, The; Thompson, David; Visit, The Kanner, Bernice 52 Karim, Jawed 375 Katz, Natasha 133–4 Katzman, Sam 337 Kaufman, George S. 285; see also Band Wagon, The; Beggar on Horseback (with Connelly) 285 Kaufman, Moisés 201 Kay, Susan 350 Keel, Howard 398 Keeler, Ruby 59 Keenan-Bolger, Andrew 11

474

Index Kelly, Gene 251 Kendrick, Anna 341 Kendrick, Lynne 94 Kennedy, Eliot 120, 125; see also Barlow, Gary; Finding Neverland Kennedy, Jacqueline 98–9, 265, 266, 271 Kennedy, John F. 265, 266, 271 Kent State shootings 29 Kepley, Laura 414 Kern, Jerome 58; see also Cat and the Fiddle, The; Hammerstein, Oscar II; Jerome Kern Goes to Hollywood; Show Boat; Very Warm for May Keyes, Gillyanne 74 Kid Victory (Kander, Pierce) 302, 307 Kidd, Michael 50 Killen, Andreas 32 King and I, The (Rodgers, Hammerstein) 59, 61, 85, 149, 201, 202, 246, 249–51, 254, 346, 439 King, Carole 13, 36; see also Beautiful: The Carole King Musical King, Martin Luther Jr. 200 Kinky Boots (Lauper, Fierstein) 121, 126, 173, 175, 178–9, 358, 359, 431; original film version (2005) 178 Kirkpatrick, Kelley 412 Kirkwood, James 35 Kirle, Bruce 250–1 Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara 60–1 Kiss Me, Kate (Porter) 49–50, 398, 428; film version 49–50 Kiss of the Spider Woman (Kander, Ebb, McNally) 22, 37, 291 Kitt, Tom 219, 283; see also Bring It On: The Musical; Green, Amanda; If/Then; Miranda, Lin-Manuel; Next to Normal; Whitty, Jeff; Yorkey, Brian Kivy, Peter 70, 126 Klausner, Terry 191 Kleban, Edward 35 Knapp, Raymond 384 Knowles, Beyoncé 55, 114, 351, 451 Koestenbaum, Wayne 167, 168; Queen’s Throat, The 168 Korea, musicals in 395, 437–44; American influences and hegemony 438–9; An Min-su 440; Black Eyes Show 439; Chechak kukhoe (Production Theater Group) 440; Choi Changkwon 441; Durama centa [Drama Center], 440; foreign theater in Korean translation 439–41; Hur Kyu 442; Im Yong-wung 441; Kim Ch’ang-ku 440; Kim Chin-man 439; Kim Ui-kyong 443; Korean Folk Dance Company 442; Korean prototypes 438–39 ;Korean theatre, indigenous 440–3; Korean War 439, 443; Lee Seung-kyu 440; Mansu Arts Theater 442; Namhan Fortress (Yi Jin-sun) 443; National Theater of Korea 440, 441, 442; Oh Tae-sok 440; Park Chong-hee 440–2; Park

Hyon-suk 440; People’s Cultural Palace 442; Pyongyang Grand Theater 442; Salchagiopsoye [Sweet, Come to Me Stealthily] (Choi Changkwon) 441–2; Seoul Citizen Centre (now the Sejong Centre for the Performing Arts) 441; Silhom kukjang [Experimental Theater], 440; state propaganda, as 441–3; Summertime Show 439; Western Jubilee Show 439; Yegreen Musical Theater [Yegurin Akdan], 441; Yi Jae-hyun 442; Yi Jin-sun 443; Yi Sun-shin [The Holy Hero Yi Sun-shin], 442–3; Yu Dok-hyong 440 Korie, Michael 120 Korins, David 332 Kreisler, Georg 432 Kristeva, Julia 22 Kron, Lisa 150; see also Bechdel, Alison; Fun Home; Tesori, Jeanine Kuhn, Judy 72 Kunze, Michael 433 Kushner, Tony 287; see also Caroline, or Change La Cage aux Folles, see Cage aux Folles, La Lacamoire, Alex 107, 114–17, 115, 116, 124, 221, 332; see also Dear Evan Hansen; In the Heights; orchestrations, Hamilton 114–17, 115, 116 LaChiusa, Michael John 68, 97–104; see also Bernarda Alba; First Daughter Suite; First Lady Suite; Giant; Hello Again; Little Fish; Marie Christine; Queen of the Mist; See What I Wanna See; Wild Party, The Lady in the Dark (Weill, Gershwin, Hart) 106, 286 La Ronde see Hello Again; Ronde, La Lafraniere, Sharon 451 Laird, Paul 41, 42, 264 Lam, Nina Zoie 202 Landers, Matt 152, 158 Landesman, Rocco 420–5 Landing, The (Kander, Pierce) 306 Lang, Matt 376–7; see also Team StarKid Lang, Nick 376–7; see also Team StarKid Lannan, Nina 433 Lansbury, Angela 305 Lapine, James 107, 108, 125, 226, 424; see also Falsettoland; Falsettos; Finn, William; Glöckner von Notre Dame, Der; Into the Woods; March of the Falsettos; New Brain, A; Passion; Sondheim, Stephen; Sunday in the Park with George Lasch, Christopher 29 Last Five Years, The (Brown) 430 Lauper, Cyndi 121, 122, 123, 126, 173, 178–9; see also Fierstein, Harvey; Kinky Boots; Working Girl Laurents, Arthur 176; see also Anyone Can Whistle; Bernstein, Leonard; Gypsy; Sondheim, Stephen; West Side Story Lawson, John Howard 285 Lazarus, Paul 160, 296; see also Working Leader of the Pack (Greenwich, Beatts) 190–1 League of Professional Theatre Women 143–4

475

Index League of Resident Theatres (LORT) 409–10, 411, 414, 419, 420 Lebrecht, Norman 18 LeDonne, Peter 53, 55 Lee, Baayork 133, 201–3 Legally Blonde (O’Keefe, Benjamin) 37, 430 Lehár, Franz 304 Lehmann, Hans Thies 20, 23 Lemper, Ute 433 Lenson, Adam 123 Leon, Kenny 412 Lerner, Alan Jay 145, 266, 317, 419; see also Bernstein, Leonard; Camelot; Dance a Little Closer; Day Before Spring, The; Loewe, Frederick; My Fair Lady; On a Clear Day You Can See Forever; 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue; Strouse, Charles Leroux, Gaston 92 Les Misérables, Les, see Misérables, Les Lesson, The (Ionesco) 440 “Let Me Be Your Star” (Smash) [Shaiman, Wittman], 386–9 Leung, Telly 188 Levan, Martin 89, 93 Levay, Sylvester 433 Levenson, Michael 287 Leviathan Lab 201 Levinson, Barry 122; see also Crow, Sheryl; Diner: The Musical Lewis, Leona 13 Lewis, Norm 189 Life, The (Coleman, Gasman, Newman) 187–8, 193 Light in the Piazza, The (Guettel, Lucas) 194, 411, 430, 434 Lil Wayne 220 Lincoln Center 61, 214, 236–42, 249, 404 Linda, Solomon 450–1 Lingnau, Martin 433 Lion King, The ( John, Rice) 12, 71, 94, 121, 130, 135–6, 141, 174, 188–9, 237, 377, 396, 431, 445–51; Broadway production, history 445–7, 451; Festival of the Lion King (tie-in) 448–9; international productions 447–51; Lion King, The: Pride Rock on Broadway (Taymor) 445–6; Linda, Solomon royalties lawsuit 450–1; Shanghai Disney Resort production 449; South Africa production 449–51; Taymor, Julie 446, 449 Lisanby, Charles 298 Little Fish (LaChiusa) 97, 101 Little Me (Coleman, Leigh, Simon) 52 Little Mermaid, The (Menken, Ashman, Slater) 40, 94, 346, 366, 377 Little Night Music, A (Sondheim, Wheeler) 75, 193 Little Shop of Horrors (Menken, Ashman) 267, 346, 411 Littrell, Tom 133–4 Living Theatre 440

Liza with a Z (television special) 51, 53 Llana, Jose 188 Lloyd Webber, Andrew 3, 22, 52, 70, 71, 87–94, 102, 317–18, 349–50, 349, 428, 431, 433, 434; see also Cats; Evita; Forsyth, Frederick; Jesus Christ Superstar; Love Never Dies; Phantom of the Opera, The; Rice, Tim; School of Rock: The Musical; Song and Dance; Starlight Express; Stilgoe, Richard; Sunset Boulevard; Woman in White, The Loesser, Frank 145, 365; see also Guys and Dolls; How to Succeed in Business without Really Trying; Most Happy Fella, The; Perfectly Frank Loewe, Frederick 145, 266; see also Camelot; Day Before Spring, The; Lerner, Alan Jay; My Fair Lady London Lights: A History of West End Musicals (Whitehouse) 395 Long, William Ivey 339 Longoria, Eva 143 Look of Love, The (Bacharach, David, Thompson, Ellis, Loud, Reinking) 190 Lopez, Robert 206; see also Avenue Q; Book of Mormon, The; Marx, Jeff; Parker, Trey; Stone, Matt Lord of the Rings (film) 164 Loudon, Dorothy 191 Louis-Dreyfus, Julia 300 Love Never Dies (Lloyd Webber, Slater, Elton, Forsyth) 350; see also Phantom of the Opera, The Lucas, Craig 75, 251, 411; see also Amélie; American in Paris, An; Floyd Collins; Guettel, Adam; Light in the Piazza, The; Three Post Cards Lucus, Midge 130 Ludwig, Ken 63 Luhrmann, Baz 345; Moulin Rouge! (film) 345, 351 Lumière, Auguste and Louis 92 Lund, Peter 433 LuPone, Patti 9, 20 Lyotard, Jean-François 22 MacDermot, Galt 409; see also Hair; Rado, James; Ragni, Gerome Mack and Mabel (Herman) 124 Mackintosh, Cameron 9, 71, 73, 111, 134–35, 348, 447 MacLaine, Shirley 51 MacMillan, Kenneth 251 Madama Butterfly (Puccini) 111 Maffay, Peter 432 Magic Flute, The [Die Zauberflöte] (Mozart) 433 Magic Show, The (Schwartz, Randall) 41, 152 Maguire, Gregory 44; Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West 44 Making Americans: Jews and the Broadway Musical (Most) 2, 229–30 Malan, Rian 450–1; “In the Jungle: How American Music Legends Made Millions off the Work of a Zulu Tribesman Who Died a Pauper,” 450

476

Index Malloy, Dave 104, 122; see also Natasha, Pierre, & the Great Comet of 1812 Maloney, Patrick 136–7 Mamas and the Papas, The 136 Mame (Herman, Lawrence, Lee) 149, 174, 191, 346 Mamma Mia! (Ulvaeus, Andersson, Johnson) 12, 64, 65, 80, 179, 192, 431 Man of La Mancha (Leigh, Darion) 346, 419, 438, 440 Mancina, Mark 450 Mandelbaum, Ken 133 Manly, Lorne 122 Mann, Barry 64; see also Weil, Cynthia “Manson Trio” (Pippin) 48, 53–4 Mantello, Joe 317 March of the Falsettos (Finn, Lapine) 108, 229, 291, 397, 399–400; see also Falsettoland; In Trousers Marconi, Guglielmo 92 Margoshes, Steve 423 Marie Christine (LaChiusa) 97 Marshall, Rob 63, 345, 349, 350; Chicago (film) 345, 348, 349, 351; Into the Woods (film) 345, 348, 349, 350 Martin, Mary 80, 335 Marwick, Alice E. 332 Marx, Jeff 206; see also Avenue Q; Lopez, Robert Mary Poppins (Sherman, Sherman, Stiles, Drewe, Fellowes) 94, 110, 135, 194, 431 Maslow, Abraham Harold 31 Mass (Bernstein, Schwartz, Simon) 263, 265, 266, 270–1, 294 Mast, Gerald: Can’t Help Singin’: The American Musical on Stage and Screen 2 Masteroff, Joe 63; see also Cabaret; Mendes, Sam Matchmaker, The (Wilder) 196; see also Hello, Dolly! Mathis, Stanley Wayne 189 Matilda (Minchin, Kelly) 130, 420 Ma-Yi Theater Company 201 Mazzella, Neil 131–2, 134, 135, 138 McAnuff, Des 410, 420–2, 424 McClure, John 269 McCoy, Charles 341 McDonald, Audra 13, 189 McDormand, Frances 143 McElroy, Steven 10 McEntire, Reba 385–6 McFadden, Syreeta 315 McGourty, Patricia 423 McGowan, John 63 McGuire, Dorothy 410 McKechnie, Donna 50 McKellen, Ian 164 McMahon, Kaley 377–8; see also Team StarKid McMillin, Scott 74–5, 104 McPhee, Katharine 386 McQueen, Sharon 396, 397–405, 401; Clavis Theatre (Milwaukee) 397–400, 402, 404–5; Theatre Tesseract (Milwaukee) 397–405

McTyre, Robert 445 McWaters, Debra 48 Me and My Dick (Team StarKid) 376 Me and My Girl (Gay, Furber, Rose) 65 Me Nobody Knows, The (Friedman, Joseph, Livinston, Schapiro) 33–4, 153 Meatloaf (né Michael Lee Aday) 273 Megamusical, The (Sternfeld) 135 Mekas, Jonas 275 Meltzer, Françoise 285 Memphis (Bryan, DiPietro) 186, 339, 425 Mendes, Sam 63; see also Cabaret; Masteroff, Joe Menken, Alan 377; see also Aladdin; Beauty and the Beast; Bronx Tale, A; Hunchback of Notre Dame, The; John, Elton; Little Mermaid, The; Little Shop of Horrors; Newsies; Pocohontas; Schwartz, Stephen; Sister Act Menzel, Idina 13, 20, 45, 169 Meola, Tony 81 Merchant of Yonkers, The (Wilder) 196; see also Hello, Dolly! Merman, Ethel 69, 72–4, 80, 136 Merman, Varla Jean 176 Merrick, David 121, 154, 196–200, 203 Merrily We Roll Along (Sondheim, Furth) 22, 37 Merry Widow, The [Die lustige Witwe] (Lehár) 304, 427 Messing, Debra 387 #MeToo movement 141, 143–4 Metropolitan Opera 136 Micale, Mark 284–5 Middleton, Richard 71 Miller, Arthur 287 Miller, Chris 122; see also Tuck Everlasting; Tysen, Nathan Miller, D.A. 2, 168–9, 176; Place for Us [Essay on the Broadway Musical], 2, 168 Miller, Douglas 32 Miller, Roger 420–2, 424; see also Big River; Deaf West Theatre; Ettinger, Heidi (Landesman); Hauptman, William; La Jolla Playhouse; Landesman, Rocco; McAnuff, Des Millet, Kate 157 Milvy, Erika 361 Milzoff, Rebecca 121–2 Minden, Michael 40 Miner, Bobby 136–7 Minnelli, Liza 51, 73; see also Cabaret (film); Fosse, Bob; Liza with a Z Miranda, Lin-Manuel 8, 24, 75, 104, 115, 116, 121, 123, 126, 154, 184, 216–23, 255–61, 315, 324, 325–33, 379, 382, 433; see also Blankenbuehler, Andy; Bring It On: The Musical; Green, Amanda; Hamilton; Hudes, Quiara Alegría; In the Heights; Kail, Thomas; Kitt, Tom; Lacamoire, Alex; Whitty, Jeff; #Ham4Ham shows 8, 326, 332, 382; cultural influence 325–33; fandom 325–33; Gmorning, Gnight!: Little Pep Talks for

477

Index Me & You 326; Hamilton: The Revolution (with McCarter) 329; merchandising 329–33; mix tapes 331; totem, as 328–31; Twitter, on 325–33 Misérables, Les (Schönberg, Boublil, Kretzmer) 40, 43, 44, 60, 70, 71, 72, 74, 80, 94, 98, 110, 111, 134, 183–4, 189, 237, 241, 242, 257, 298, 336, 339, 345, 348, 352, 356, 360–1, 367, 379, 431, 447 Miss Saigon (Schönberg, Boublil, Maltby) 71, 72, 98, 107, 110–14, 112, 113, 117, 135, 183; Brohn, William David orchestrations 110–14 Mitchell, Jerry 126 Mitchell, John Cameron 173; see also Hedwig and the Angry Inch; Trask, Stephen Mitchell, Joni 36 Mobb Deep 114 Mondrian, Piet 133, 134 Monroe, Marilyn 385, 386–9, 393 Monteiro, Lyra D. 222 Moore, Kevin 411–12, 414 Moore, Mary Tyler 18 Moore, Tracey 73 Mordden, Ethan 59, 173 Morozov, Evgeny 342 Most Happy Fella, The (Loesser) 98 Most, Andrea 2, 229, 287; Making Americans: Jews and the Broadway Musical 2, 229–30; Theatrical Liberalism 229 Mostel, Zero 230 Mother Camp (Newton) 174–5 Moulin Rouge! (film) 345, 351 Movin’ Out (Tharp, Joel) 237–8, 243 Mueller, Jessie 332 Murder Ballad (Nash, Jordan) 104 Murdering Musical Madness (AVbyte) 379 Murphy, Donna 8 Murphy, Eddie 351 Murphy, Ryan 163, 168 Music Is (Adler, Holt, Abbott) 409 Music Man, The (Willson) 149, 168 Music Theatre International (MTI) 160, 300 Musser, Tharon 131, 132–4 My Fair Lady (Lerner, Loewe) 144, 145, 149, 346, 379, 419, 428, 429 “My Freeze Ray” (Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog) 279–80 My Mother’s Lesbian Jewish Wiccan Wedding (Sankoff, Hein) 315 My Son Pinocchio: Geppetto’s Musical Tale (Schwartz, Stern) 294, 295, 300, 301; see also Geppetto

National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) 398, 404, 420 National Public Radio (NPR) 165 Nazareth, Antonius 379–82; see also AVbyte Nazareth, Vijay 379–82; see also AVbyte “Neat to Be a Newsboy” (Working) [Schwartz], 34, 294, 296 Nestroy, Johann 196 Neuss, Uschi 433 New Brain, A (Finn, Lapine) 98, 291 New Girl in Town (Merrill, Abbott) 50 New York City Center 59; see also Encores! New York City Opera (NYCO) 201–2 New York Post 169 New York Theatre Workshop (NYTW) 174 New York Times 7, 9, 10, 52, 61, 62, 65, 69, 120, 122, 135, 144, 149–50, 160, 164, 165, 169, 199, 200, 221, 240, 242, 312, 313, 315, 323, 380, 423, 447, 449, 451 Newman, Randy 420; see also Randy Newman’s Faust Newsies (Menken, Feldman) 11, 80, 84, 356, 359 Newsweek (magazine) 164, 168, 170 “Straight Jacket” (Setoodeh) 163–70 Newton, Esther 174–5 Next to Normal (Kitt, Yorkey) 70, 263, 267, 283–92, 288, 430; “Better Than Before” 283–4, 289; electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) in 283, 289–91; psychoanalytic reading 283–92 Nice Work if You Can Get It (Gershwin, Gershwin, DiPietro) 63, 189 Night with Janis Joplin, A ( Joplin, Johnson) 411, 412 Nimsgern, Frank 433 Nine (Yeston, Kopit) 37, 291, 336 Nixon, Cynthia 168 Nixon, Richard 29 No Strings (Rodgers, Taylor) 156 No, No, Nanette (Youmans, Harbach, Caesar) 59–61, 61, 168 Noonan, Peggy 315 Norwood, Brandy 385 Notorious B.I.G. The 114, 220 Nowak, Marion 32 Nunn, Trevor 298

Naharin, Ohad 248 Nash, Juliana 104 Nashville (television series) 324, 385–6, 389–93, 390 Natasha, Pierre, & the Great Comet of 1812 (Malloy) 10, 94, 104, 122 National Asian American Theater Company (NAATCO) 201 National Asian Artists Project (NAAP) 201–3

O’Brien, Richard 274–6; see also Rocky Horror Show, The O’Connor, Flannery 270 O’Hara, Kelly 13, 250 O’Keefe, Michael 136; see also Bat Boy: The Musical; Legally Blonde O’Neal, Frederick 200 O’Neill, Eugene 285, 287; Emperor Jones, The 285; Hairy Ape, The 285; Where the Cross Was Made 285 O’Neill, James 165 O’Toole, Laurence 69 Obama, Barack 222, 315, 330, 338, 420 Obama, Michelle 312, 315, 316

478

Index Odom, Leslie, Jr. 222, 255, 329 Oedipus Rex (Sophocles) 285, 305 Off-Broadway Musicals Since 1919 (Hischak) 395 Off-Off Broadway Explosion (Crespy) 395 Oh, Kay! (Gershwin, Gershwin, Bolton, Wodehouse) 63 Oklahoma! (Rodgers, Hammerstein) 2, 50, 58, 59, 60, 61, 104, 145, 168, 202, 228, 258, 267, 286–7, 336, 346, 352, 398, 428 Oldak, Elizabeth 379; see also AVbyte Olga, Andrzej 400 Oliver, Ryan Scott 123; see also 35mm Omi, Michael 207; see also Winant, Howard On a Clear Day You Can See Forever (Lane, Lerner) 291 On Your Feet! (Estefan, Dinelaris) 80, 186, 192 Once (Hansard, Irglová, Walsh) 10, 70, 80, 84–5, 94, 141 “Once More, With Feeling” (Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode) 324, 364–71, 375 Once on this Island (Flaherty, Ahrens) 146 Once Upon a Mattress (M.Rodgers, Barer) 194 110 in the Shade (Schmidt, Jones) 189 Open Theater 440 Orbach, Jerry 55, 169–70, 169 orchestrations 106–15 Ordinary Days (Gwon) 122 Osterndorf, Chris 377 Ostrow, Stuart 42, 48, 53, 54 Otello (Verdi) 183 “Over the Rainbow” (The Wizard of Oz) 386–7 Overtures (Gerstenberg) 285 Oxenford, John 196 Oxford Handbook of Dance and Theater, The (George-Graves, ed.) 236 Oxford Handbook of the American Musical, The (ed. Knapp, Morris, Wolf ) 366–7 Pacific Overtures (Sondheim, Weidman) 24, 111, 239 Pajama Game, The (Adler, Ross, Abbott, Bissell) 49, 53 Palladio, Sam 386 Pan Asian Repertory Theater 201 Panettiere, Hayden 385 Papacharissi, Zizi 337 Papp, Joseph 35, 132, 409, 410 Parade (Brown, Uhry) 74, 230, 314, 317, 318–19, 430, 432 Parker, Eleanor 336 Parker, Trey 268; see also Book of Mormon, The; Lopez, Robert; South Park: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut; Stone, Matt Parks, Rosa 303 Partial Faiths (McClure) 269 Parton, Dolly 122, 123 Pasek, Benj 121, 122, 126; see also Dear Evan Hansen; Paul, Justin Pask, Scott 130 Passing Strange (Stew) 37, 80, 216 Passion (Sondheim, Lapine) 8, 98, 430

Patinkin, Mandy 75 Paul, Justin 121, 122, 126; see also Dear Evan Hansen; Pasek, Benj Paulson, Michael 9, 144 Paulus, Diane 62, 125, 126, 414, 425 Pearl, Simon 339 Pearlman, Gordon 132, 133 Peck, Gregory 410 Peggy-Ann (Rodgers, Hart, Fields) 284 Pence, Mike 222 Pendleton, Alec 412, 415 Pène du Bois, Raoul 59 Perfectly Frank (Loesser, Soims) 190 Perón, Eva 317–18 Peter and the Starcatcher (Elice, Barker) 94 Peter Pan (Charlap, Styne, Leigh, Comden, Green) 335, 340–1, 385; live television broadcast 340–2 Peterson, Eric 403 Phantom (Kay) 350 Phantom of Manhattan, The (Forsyth) 350; see also Love Never Dies Phantom of the Opera, The (Lloyd Webber, Stilgoe) 7, 9, 10, 13, 40, 43, 71, 72–3, 80, 81–3, 85, 87, 92–4, 98, 110, 133, 134–5, 136, 141, 189, 237, 345, 348, 349–50, 351, 356, 367, 428, 445; see also Love Never Dies Piepenburg, Erik 382 Pierce, David Hyde 164 Pierce, Greg 302, 305–8; see also Enchanted, The; Kander, John; Kid Victory; Landing, The; Slowgirl 305 Pinocchio (Disney film) 300; see also Harline, Leigh; My Son Pinocchio: Geppetto’s Musical Tale (Schwartz, Stern); Washington, Ned Pippin (Schwartz, Hirson) 28, 31, 36, 40, 41–3, 44, 45, 46, 48, 49, 50, 51–5, 54, 62, 80, 137, 152, 154, 294, 295, 296, 301, 425; “Corner of the Sky,” 42–3, 44, 295; “Manson Trio,” 48, 53–4; television commercials 51–4 Pitch Perfect (film) 341 Place for Us [Essay on the Broadway Musical] (Miller) 2, 168 Playbill 9, 10, 12, 13, 188, 191, 192, 219, 240, 242, 339, 358, 360, 361, 382, 418 Playwrights Horizons 107–8 Pocahontas (Schwartz, Menken) 43, 44, 294 Poor Little Rich Girl, The (Gates) 285 Porgy and Bess (Gershwin, Heyward, Gershwin) 13, 192, 199, 218, 425, 428; film version 199 Porter, Billy 178 Porter, Cole 3, 267; see also Anything Goes; Can-Can; Kiss Me, Kate Posnanski, Joe 329 Poster Boy (Carnelia, Tracz) 156 Potter, John: History of Singing, A (with Sorrell) 69 Potter, Mick 82 Presley, Elvis 327–8 Pretty Woman (Adams, Vallance, Marshall, Lawton) 141, 144

479

Index Price, Michael 419–20 Prince (né Prince Rogers Nelson) 327 Prince of Egypt, The (Schwartz, LaZebnik) 294 Prince, Harold 197, 318 Problem Like Maria, A: Gender and Sexuality in the American Musical (Wolf ) 2, 146 Producers, The (Brooks, Meehan) 10, 194, 432 Promises, Promises (Bacharach, David, Simon) 79–80, 121, 123, 163–5, 169, 170; see also Apartment, The; Hayes, Sean Prop 8: The Musical (Shaiman) 336, 337, 338–9, 342 Proust, Marcel 286 Pryce, Jonathan 111 Ps4 vs Xbox One – Console Wars the Musical (AVbyte) 374, 380–1 Public Theater 35, 36, 75, 123, 132, 260, 316, 326, 409, 433 Puig, Manuel 400 Pulitzer Prize 63, 132, 413, 419 Pump Boys and Dinettes (Wann, Morgan, Monk, Hardwick, Schimmel, Foley) 421 Putting It Together (Sondheim, McKenzie) 190

Annie (Strouse, Charnin) 419; Arena Stage (Washington, DC) 411, 412, 419; audiences 414; Banghart, Bob 414; Big River (Miller, Hauptman) 396, 410, 418–25; Boyd, Gregory 410; Brustein, Robert 421; Cadillac Palace (Chicago) 412; Center Theatre Group (Los Angeles, CA) 412, 413; Civil War, The (Wildhorn, Murphy) 410; Clavis Theatre (Milwaukee) 397–400, 402, 404–5; Cleveland Play House 408, 411–15; Come from Away (Sankoff, Hein) 425; co-productions 411–15; Dance a Little Closer (Strouse, Lerner) 419–20; David, Michael 421, 423, 425; Dracula, the Musical (Wildhorn, Black, Hampton) 410; Escape to Margaritaville (Buffett, Garcia, O’Malley) 65; Falls, Robert 412; Finding Neverland (Barlow, Kennedy) 425; Freaky Friday (Kitt, Yorkey, Carpenter) 413; Goodman Theatre (Chicago) 305, 411; Goodspeed Opera House (East Haddam, CT) 419–20; Guthrie Theater (Minneapolis, MN) 408, 419; history of 409–10; Hunchback of Notre Dame, The (Schwartz, Menken) 413; Intiman Theatre (Seattle, WA) 411; Into the Woods (Sondheim, Lapine) 411, 424; Jekyll & Hyde (Wildhorn, Bricusse, Cuden) 410; Jersey Boys (Brickman, Elice, Gaudio) 410, 425; Jory, Jon 408, 410, 413; Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts (Washington, DC) 265, 419; Kepley, Laura 414; Kirkpatrick, Kelley 412; La Jolla Playhouse 65, 396, 410, 413, 420–5; League of Resident Theatres (LORT) 409–10, 411, 414, 419, 420; Leon, Kenny 412; Light in the Piazza, The (Guettel, Lucas) 411; Man of La Mancha (Leigh, Darion) 419; McAnuff, Des 410, 420–2, 424; Melody Top (Milwaukee) 398, 399, 400; Memphis (Bryan, DiPietro) 425; Miller, Roger 420–2, 424; Milwaukee, in 397–405; Moore, Kevin 411–12, 414; Newman, Randy 420; Night with Janis Joplin, A ( Joplin, Johnson) 411, 412; Old Globe Theater (San Diego, CA) 424; Paper Mill Playhouse (Millburn, NJ) 413; Paulus, Diane 425; Pendleton, Alec 412, 415; Pippin (Schwartz, Hirson) 425; Porgy and Bess (Gershwin, Heyward, Gershwin) 425; Price, Michael 419–20; Randy Newman’s Faust (Newman) 410; Seattle Repertory Theater 409; Shapiro, Anna D. 414; Signature Theater (Arlington, VA) 413; Sister Act (Menken, Slater) 411; Snow Child (Stitt, Banghart) 413–14; Soft Power (Tesori, Hwang) 413–14; Steppenwolf Theater (Chicago, IL) 408, 414; Stitt, Georgia 414; Tappin’ Thru Life (Hines) 411; Tesori, Jeanine 414; Theatre Tesseract (Milwaukee) 397–405, 401; Thoroughly Modern Millie (Tesori, Scanlan) 410, 425; Tricks ( Jory, Blatt, Burstein) 410, 413; Waitress (Bareilles) 425; Who’s Tommy, The (Townshend) 410, 425; women and minorities, representation in 413–14; Yale Repertory Theater 421

Qin, Amy 449 Queen of the Mist (LaChiusa) 97 Queen’s Throat, The (Koestenbaum) 168 race and ethnicity 185–235; see also Avenue Q; Bring It On: The Musical; Chorus Line, A; Falsettos; Fiddler on the Roof; Hamilton; Hairspray; Hello, Dolly!; If/Then; Indecent; In the Heights; Life, The; Lion King, The Radcliffe, Daniel 165 Rado, James 409; see also Hair; MacDermot, Galt; Ragni, Gerome Ragni, Gerome 409; see also Hair; MacDermot, Galt; Rado, James Rags (Strouse, Schwartz, Stein) 294, 295, 296–8, 301 Ragtime (Flaherty, Ahrens, McNally) 8, 110, 183, 186, 189, 219, 430, 432 Raitt, John 398 Ramone, Phil 79–80 Randy Newman’s Faust (Newman) 410 Ravel, Maurice 108 Ray (film) 351 Raye, Martha 199 Reagan, Ronald 27, 72, 103 Reams, Lee Roy 174, 202 Rebellato, Dan 73 Reddit 347 Redhead (Hague, Fields) 50 Reed, Lou 177 regional musical theater 396, 397–415; Actors Theatre of Louisville 408, 410, 413; Aida ( John, Rice) 411–12; Alley Theatre (Houston, TX) 410; Alliance Theater (Atlanta, GA) 411, 412; American Repertory Theater [ART] (Cambridge, MA) 414, 420, 421–2, 425;

480

Index Reich, Steve 108 Reilly, John C. 338 Reimer-Torn, Susan 227 Reinking, Ann 49, 50 Rent (Larson) 2, 8, 10, 43, 71, 74, 80, 141, 174, 187–8, 188, 263, 336, 345, 348, 350, 351, 356, 362, 382, 430, 432; “Seasons of Love” 74, 348 Revel Horwood, Craig 94 revivals 58–65 Rice, Elmer 285, 287, 303; Adding Machine, The 285 Rice, Tim 52, 88, 102, 450; see also Aida; Aladdin; Evita; Jesus Christ Superstar; John, Elton; Lion King, The; Lloyd Webber, Andrew Richardson, Ron 423, 424 Rickman, Alan 330 Riddell, Richard 423 Rigoletto (Verdi) 306 Rink, The (Kander, Ebb, McNally) 22, 73 Rivera, Chita 8, 49, 50, 55, 73, 191, 305; Dancer’s Life, The 49 Riverdance 237–8 Robbins, Jerome 49, 197, 230, 238, 246–50, 251, 254, 380; see also Abbott, George; Bernstein, Leonard; Fiddler on the Roof; Laurents, Arthur; Pajama Game, The; Sondheim, Stephen; West Side Story Roberts, Julia 144 Robinson, Bill “Bojangles,” 49 Rock Around the Clock (film) 337 Rock Music: Culture, Aesthetics and Sociology (Wicke, Fogg) 71 Rock of Ages (D’Arienzo) 80, 356, 359 Rocky Horror Picture Show, The (film) 273–7, 336–7, 367, 371; performative reenactments 275–7, 367, 371; Sins o the Flesh (performance troupe) reenactments of 275–6 Rocky Horror Show, The (O’Brien) 71, 274 Rodgers and Hammerstein Organization 202 Rodgers, Mary 152, 156; see also Once Upon a Mattress; Working Rodgers, Richard 3, 58, 73, 79, 98, 114, 145, 156, 239, 267, 368, 385; see also Allegro; Babes in Arms; Carousel; Cinderella; Flower Drum Song; Grand Night for Singing, A; Hammerstein, Oscar II; Hart, Lorenz; King and I, The; No Strings; Oklahoma!; Peggy-Ann; Sound of Music, The; South Pacific Roesner, David 87, 91 Roger Bloomer (Lawson) 285 Rolling Stone (magazine) 361, 450 Rolling Stones, The 177 Ronan, Brian 78 Ronde, La (Schnitzler) 99; see also Hello Again Roots, The 114 Rorty, Richard 269 Rose, Anika Noni 351 Rose, Lloyd 34 Rosenberg, Bernard 336, 375

Roth, Robert Jess 445 Royal Shakespeare Company 298 Rubinstein, John 51 Rubin-Vega, Daphne 348 Rudolph, Maya 338 Runaways (Swados) 153 Rupert, Michael 55 Rush, Adam 355 Russell, Susan 73 Russian Broadway Shut Down (Snow) 336, 337, 339 Russo, Vito 165, 170, 176; Celluloid Closet, The 165, 176 Ryan, Irene 52 Sager, Carole Bayer 33 Salonga, Lea 382 Sanders, Scott 122 Sankoff, Irene 315; see also Come from Away; Hein, David; My Mother’s Lesbian Jewish Wiccan Wedding Saroyan, William 308 Saturday Intermission Pics (SIP) 11 Saturday Night Fever (Gibb, Gibb, Knighton) 12 Savage, Dan 339 Savran, David 168, 285, 287, 448, 451 Saxton, Alexander 267 Scarborough, Roscoe 341 scenography 130–8 Schechner, Richard 6, 7, 10, 12–13 Schelling, Steven 166–7 Schmidt, Harvey 440; see also Fantasticks, The; 110 in the Shade; Jones, Tom Schneider, Romy 432 Schnitzler, Arthur 99 Schönberg, Claude-Michel 111, 112, 113, 134, 257, 431, 434; see also Boublil, Alain; Misérables, Les; Miss Saigon School of Rock: The Musical (Lloyd Webber, Slater) 70, 94 Schubring, Marc 433 Schulman, Michael 261 Schumacher, Joel 350 Schumacher, Thomas 445–6 Schwartz, Stephen 28, 39–46, 55, 122, 152–61, 264, 265, 294–301, 339, 365, 377; see also Baker’s Wife, The; Bernstein, Leonard; Caird, John; Captain Louie; Children of Eden; Geppetto; Glöckner von Notre Dame, Der; Hunchback of Notre Dame, The; Magic Show, The; Mass; My Son Pinocchio: Geppetto’s Musical Tale; Hirson, Roger O.; Holzman, Winnie; Lapine, James; Menken, Alan; Pippin; Pocohontas; Prince of Egypt, The; Prop 8: The Musical; Rags; Séance on a Wet Afternoon; Stein, Joseph; Stern, David I.; Tebelak, John-Michael; Terkel, Studs; Wicked; Working Scott, Derek B. 94 Scottsboro Boys, The (Kander, Ebb, Thompson) 216, 302, 303–4, 306

481

Index Séance on a Wet Afternoon (Schwartz) 294 “Seasons of Love” (Rent) 74, 348 Sebastian, Mitch 295 Second Sex, The (de Beauvoir) 149 Secret Garden, The (Simon, Norman) 430 Sedgwick, Eve 167 See What I Wanna See (LaChiusa) 97, 101–2 Seeger, Pete 450 Seller, Jeffrey 379 Setoodeh, Ramin 163–70; see also Hayes, Sean; homosexuality; Promises, Promises; “Straight Jacket” (Newsweek article) 163–70 Seurat, Georges 107; see also Dimanche après-midi sur l’île de la Grande Jatte, Un; Sunday in the Park with George Seven-Year Itch, The (film) 388 1776 (Edwards, Stone) 193, 313–14, 316 Sexton, Anne 270 Seymour, Lee 216 Shaiman, Marc 338; see also Catch Me If You Can; Charlie and the Chocolate Factory; Hairspray; Prop 8: The Musical; Smash; South Park: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut Shakespeare’s Cabaret (Mulcahy) 190 Shakur, Tupac 220 Shapiro, Anna D. 414 She Loves Me (Bock, Harnick) 193 Shearing, John 136–7 Shears, Jake 121, 122, 124, 125, 126; see also Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City; Garden, John; Whitty, Jeff Shechter, Hofesh 246–8, 251, 254 Shell, Ray 90 Sher, Bartlett 61, 246–50, 254 Sherwood, Holly 41 Shevelove, Burt 59; see also Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, A; No, No, Nanette Shevett, Gershon “Gary,” 132–3 Shirky, Clay 340 Show Boat (Kern, Hammerstein) 2, 24, 58–9, 61, 186, 189, 191, 216, 219, 238 Shuffle Along (Blake, Sissle) 60, 65 Shuffle Along, or, the Making of the Musical Sensation of 1921 and All That Followed (Blake, Sissle, Wolfe) 19, 64–5, 216, 374 Siccardi, Drew 135 Side by Side by Sondheim (Sondheim, Bernstein, Rodgers, Rodgers, Styne) 190 Signorile, Michelangelo 178 Simon, Carly 36 Simon, Neil 121, 165–6; see also Little Me; Promises, Promises Simon, Paul 121, 123, 124, 126, 156, 174, 265; see also Bernstein, Leonard; Capeman, The; Mass; Schwartz, Stephen Sinfield, Alan 175 Singin’ in the Rain (Comden, Brown, Freed) 366 singing styles, musicals 69–76

Sins o the Flesh (performance troupe): Rocky Horror Picture Show, The, reenactments 275–6 Sissle, Noble 65; see also Blake, Eubie; Shuffle Along Sister Act (Menken, Slater) 411 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue (Bernstein, Lerner) 317 Slowgirl (Pierce) 305 Small, Christopher 9 Smash (television series) 324, 340–1, 371, 385, 386–9, 393; Bombshell (fictional musical) 385, 386; “Let Me Be Your Star” (Shaiman, Wittman) 386–9 Smith, Richard 177 Smith, Stacy 143 Smokey Joe’s Café (Leiber, Stoller) 190–1 Smoots, Jonathan 404 Snapchat 451 Snow Child (Stitt, Banghart) 123, 413–14 Snow, Jane 130 Snow, Jason Michael 339; see also Russian Broadway Shut Down social media see Facebook; Instagram; Twitter; Tumblr; YouTube Soft Power (Tesori, Hwang) 413–14 Some Like It Hot (film) 388 Some Lovers (Bacharach, Sater) 123 Something Rotten (Kirkpatrick, Kirkpatrick, O’Farrell) 19, 130, 194 Somlyo, Roy 241 Sommer, Brett 112 Sondheim on Sondheim (Sondheim, Lapine) 190 Sondheim, Stephen 3, 23, 75, 98, 107, 108, 109, 110, 125, 126, 233, 268, 309, 314–15, 348, 349, 364, 398, 424, 429; see also Anyone Can Whistle; Assassins; Bernstein, Leonard; Company; Follies; Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, A; Gypsy; Into the Woods; Lapine, James; Laurents, Arthur; Little Night Music, A; Merrily We Roll Along; Pacific Overtures; Passion; Putting It Together; Robbins, Jerome; Side by Side by Sondheim; Sondheim on Sondheim; Styne, Jule; Sunday in the Park with George; Sweeney Todd; Weidman, John; West Side Story; Wheeler, Hugh Song and Dance (Lloyd Webber, Black) 37 Soo, Phillipa 258 Sophisticated Ladies (Ellington, Strayhorn, McKayle) 190 Sorge, Reinhard 285 Sorkin, Aaron 164, 340 Sorrell, Neil: History of Singing, A (with Potter) 69 Soto-Morettini, Donna 90 Sound Associates 138 sound design 78–97 Sound of Broadway Music, The (Suskin) 106 Sound of Music, The (Rodgers, Hammerstein) 79, 149, 193, 261, 335, 336, 340–2, 346, 379, 384; live broadcast 340–2, 384; sing along, film version 336 source-oriented reinforcement (SOR) 81–2, 83

482

Index Sousa, Pamela 53, 54 South Pacific (Rodgers, Hammerstein) 13, 24, 61, 85, 183, 216, 222, 439 South Park: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut (film) 336, 338 Souther, John David 391 Spamalot (Idle, Du Prez, Innes) 8, 10, 336 Spanger, Amy 356 “Spark of Creation, The” (Children of Eden) 44, 298–9 Spider Man: Turn off the Dark (Bono, Edge, Taymor, Aguirre-Sacasa, Berger) 71, 84, 85, 94 Spiner, Brent 300 Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture ( Jenkins, Ford, Green) 337 Spring Awakening (Sheik, Sater) 7, 43, 71, 94, 336, 430; see also Deaf West Theatre St. Louis Blues (film) 199 St. Louis Woman (Arlen, Mercer) 199 Stahl, Megan 304 Starlight Express (Lloyd Webber, Stilgoe) 22, 37, 71, 87, 89–90, 91, 93, 428, 431 Starobin, Michael 107–10, 108, 109, 110, 117; see also Assassins; Falsettos; 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, The; orchestrations, Sunday in the Park with George 107–10, 108, 109, 110 Stein, Joseph 154, 226, 296; see also Baker’s Wife, The; Bock, Jerry; Fiddler on the Roof; Harnick, Sheldon; Rags; Schwartz, Stephen; Strouse, Charles Stein, Mark: Direct from Death Row the Scottsboro Boys 303 Steinem, Gloria 157 Steiner, Rick 420 Stephenson, Albert 309 Stern, David I. 300; see also Geppetto; My Son Pinocchio: Geppetto’s Musical Tale; Schwartz, Stephen Sternfeld, Jessica 43, 63, 71–2, 110–11, 135 Stewart, Michael 196; see also Hello, Dolly!; see also Hello, Dolly!; Herman, Jerry Stiehl, Pamyla 236, 237 Stigwood, Robert 88 Stilgoe, Richard 87, 90–1, 93; see also Lloyd Webber, Andrew; Phantom of the Opera, The; Starlight Express Stitt, Georgia 123, 144, 414; see also Banghart, Bob; Snow Child Stockton, Elizabeth 276 Stone, Matt 268; see also Book of Mormon, The; Lopez, Robert; Parker, Trey; South Park: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut Stone, Peter 313, 314, 319; see also Edwards, Sherman; 1776; Titanic “Straight Jacket” (Setoodeh) 163–70 Stratton, Richard 410 Strayhorn, Billy 217; see also Ellington, Duke; Sophisticated Ladies Street Corner Symphony (Caffrey) 190

Street Scene (Weill, Hughes) 428 Strike Up the Band (Gershwin, Gershwin, Kaufman, Ryskind) 284 Strindberg, August 285, 286; Dream Play, A 285 Stritch, Elaine 75 Stroman, Susan 236–42, 302, 303, 308–9, 433; see also Contact; Scottsboro Boys, The; Weidman, John Strouse, Charles 296, 301, 309, 419; see also Annie; Bye Bye Birdie; Dance a Little Closer; Golden Boy; Lerner, Alan Jay; Rags; Schwartz, Stephen, Stein, Joseph Styne, Jule 69, 136; see also Funny Girl; Gentlemen Prefer Blondes; Gypsy; Laurents, Arthur; Peter Pan; Sondheim, Stephen Sullivan, Arthur 114 Sullivan, Ed 50 Summer: The Donna Summer Musical (Domingo, Cary, McAnuss, Summer, Moroder, Jabara) 37 Summers, Claude J. 173–4 Sunday in the Park with George (Sondheim, Lapine) 75, 107–10, 108, 109, 110, 117, 125; Starobin, Michael, orchestrations 107–10 Sunset Boulevard (Lloyd Webber, Hampton, Black) 72, 94 superfans 324, 355–62; Calimag, Abe 356–7, 360; Carlson, Vivian 357, 360; Jurson, Amanda 357, 358, 359; Meko, Mike 357, 359, 360, 361; Wordley, Jo-Ann 356, 358–9, 359, 360 Suskin, Steven 106 Swan Lake (Bourne, Tchaikovsky) 237–8 Sweeney Todd (Sondheim, Wheeler) 23–4, 62, 94, 102, 345, 419, 429, 434 Sweet Charity (Coleman, Fields) 50–1, 53, 149 Sweet Smell of Success (Hamlisch, Carnelia, Guare) 156 Swift, Taylor 386 Swing! (Kelly) 190–1, 237, 240 Swing, The (Fragonard painting) 239 Swinging on a Star (Burke, Leeds) 190 synthesizers 106–15 Take That 120 Takei, George 382; see also Allegiance Tancharoen, Maurissa 278, 279, 369, 375; see also Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog; Whedon, Jed; Whedon, Joss; Whedon, Zack Tappin’ Thru Life (Hines) 411 Tarzan (Collins, Hwang) 448 Taylor, Charles 269 Taylor, James 152–3, 156; see also Working Taymor, Julie 446, 449; Lion King, The: Pride Rock on Broadway 445–6 Tazewell, Paul 260 Team StarKid 374–82; see also Fischer, Justin; Holy Musical B@man! (Lang, Lang, Gage, Lamps) 376; Me and My Dick (Lang, Lang, Criss, Holmes) 376; Twisted: The Untold Story of a Royal Vizier (Lang, Lang, Holmes, McMahon, Gale) 374, 377–9;

483

Index Very Potter Musical, A (Lang, Lang, Holden, Criss, Holmes) 376; Very Potter Senior Year, A (Lang, Lang, Holden, Holmes) 376; Very Potter Sequel, A (Lang, Lang, Criss, Holden) 376 Tebelak, John-Michael 41; see also Godspell; Schwartz, Stephen television: Ally McBeal (series) 367; American Idol (series) 123, 351, 387; Arrested Development (series) 340; “Bitter Suite” (Xena: Warrior Princess episode) 365–6; Bob Newhart Show, The (series) 18; Bochco, Steven 385; Boys from Boise The (1944 musical) 335; Breaking Bad (series) 340; Buffy the Vampire Slayer (series) 280, 335, 364–71, 375, 385; commercials (Pippin) 48, 51–6; Community (series) 371; Cop Rock (series) 367, 371, 385; Crazy Ex-Girlfriend (series) 371; Dawson’s Creek (series) 385; Dick Van Dyke Show, The (series) 385; Diff’rent Strokes (series) 209; Doogie Howser, M.D. (series) 375; Ed Sullivan Show, The (variety series) 50, 52; Eli Stone (series) 371; Family Guy (series) 18; Firefly (series) 280, 335, 375; Flash, The (series) 371; Frasier (series) 164; Fringe (series) 371; Galavant (series) 371; Glee (series) 277, 326, 371, 376, 379, 385, 393; Grease Live! (live broadcast) 335; Grey’s Anatomy (series) 335, 371; Guild, The (web series) 280; How I Met Your Mother (series) 164; Hull High (series) 385; I Love Lucy (series) 385; Liza with a Z (special) 51, 53; Mary Tyler Moore Show, The (series) 18; Miami Vice (series) 385; musicals, live 324, 335, 340–1, 384–5; My So-Called Life (series) 45; Nashville (series) 324, 385–6, 389–93, 390; “Once More, With Feeling” (Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode) 364–71, 375; Oz (series) 371; Partridge Family, The (series) 385; Passions (soap opera) 371; Peter Pan Live! (live broadcast) 340–2; Psych (series) 371; Rise (series) 371; Saturday Night Live (series) 316; Scrubs (series) 335, 371; Seinfeld (series) 18; Sesame Street (series) 188, 206; Simpsons, The (series) 367; Smash (series) 324, 340–1, 371, 385, 393; Sopranos, The (series) 340; Sound of Music Live!, The (live broadcast) 335, 340–2; Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip (series) 340; That ‘70s Show (series) 371; Voice, The (series) 123; West Wing, The (series) 382; Will & Grace (series) 163, 165–6; Wire, The (series) 340; X Factor UK, The (series) 120; Xena: Warrior Princess (series) 365–6 Terkel, Studs 34, 152–5, 296; see also Schwartz, Stephen; Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do 34, 152–6, 296 Tesori, Jeanine 104, 150, 414, 433; see also Bechdel, Alison; Caroline, or Change; Fun Home; Kron, Lisa; Soft Power; Thoroughly Modern Millie; Violet Tharp, Twyla 243 Thatcher, Margaret 72 Theatre Aurality (Kendrick) 94 Theatre Development Fund (TDF) 360

Theatrical Liberalism: Jews and Popular Entertainment in America (Most) 229 They Shall Not Die (Wexley) 303 They’re Playing Our Song (Hamlisch, Sager) 33 35mm (Oliver) 123 This Is the Army (Berlin) 173 Thomas, Jenny 191 Thompson, David 302, 303, 304, 308–9; see also Ebb, Fred; Kander, John; Scottsboro Boys, The Thompson, Derek 164 Thoms, Tracie 348 Thoroughly Modern Millie (Tesori, Scanlan) 73, 410, 425 Thou Shalt Not (Connick) 123 Three Post Cards (Carnelia, Lucas) 156 Threepenny Opera, The [Die Dreigroschenoper] (Brecht, Weill) 409, 427, 434 Timbers, Alex 316; see also Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson; Friedman, Peter; Here Lies Love; Peter and the Starcatcher Time (magazine) 60, 222 Time’s Up movement 143 TimeOut London 356, 359, 361 Titanic (Yeston, Stone) 314, 317, 319, 430 [title of show] (Bell, Bowen) 5, 17, 18–23, 24, 37 Toerien, Pieter 450 Tōjūrō, Sakata 167, 169 Tokarz, Katherine 356 Tony Awards 7, 8, 50, 51, 52, 53, 59, 64, 78, 114, 121, 132, 150, 160, 163, 164, 168, 190, 198, 203, 216, 217, 221, 222, 235, 236, 237, 238, 241, 242, 243, 249, 256, 314, 316, 318, 327, 330, 331, 366, 410, 411, 412, 419, 424, 447 Topo, El (film) 275 Torch Song Trilogy (Fierstein) 175–6, 179 Toronto Star 168 Towards an Aesthetic of Reception ( Jauss) 7 Trask, Stephen 173; see also Hedwig and the Angry Inch; Mitchell, John Cameron Travis, Ken 83 Travolta, John 351 Triangle Club (Princeton) 173 Tribe Called Quest, A 114 Tricks ( Jory, Blatt, Burstein) 410, 413 Trites, Roberta Seelinger 40 Troob, Danny 423 Tuck Everlasting (Miller, Tysen) 122 Tudor, Antony 248 Tumblr 338, 347, 376, 379, 380, 382 Tumblr – The Musical (AVbyte) 380 Tunick, Jonathan 108, 111 Ture, Kwame 207; see also Hamilton, Charles Twain, Mark 418, 420, 422, 424; Huckleberry Finn 418, 420 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, The (Finn, Sheinkin) 18, 37, 107 Twine, Linda 423 Twisted: The Untold Story of a Royal Vizier (Team StarKid) 374, 377–9

484

Index Twitter 1, 10, 11, 143, 144, 323, 324, 325–33, 337, 338, 340, 347, 376, 379, 380, 382; Miranda, Lin-Manuel on 325–33 Tylman, Janusz 400, 402 Tysen, Nathan 122; see also Miller, Chris; Tuck Everlasting Uggams, Leslie 191 Uhry, Alfred 314; see also Brown, Jason Robert; Parade Unfinished Show Business: Broadway Musicals as Works-In-Progress (Kirle) 250 Updike, John 269 Urban, Joseph 130 Urinetown: The Musical (Hollmann, Kotis) 18, 21, 24 Usher 300 Vallée, Rudy 80 Valli, Frankie 64 Van den Bulck Jan 355 Variety (magazine) 52–3, 318, 319, 339, 410, 447, 449 Verdon, Gwen 49, 50–1, 52, 55; see also Abbott, George; Can-Can; Damn Yankees; Fosse, Bob; Kidd, Michael; New Girl in Town; Pajama Game, The; Redhead; Robbins, Jerome; Sweet Charity Vereen, Ben 48–9, 52, 53, 54; see also Pippin Verge, The (Glaspell) 285 Very Potter Musical, A (Team StarKid) 376 Very Potter Senior Year, A (Team StarKid) 376 Very Potter Sequel, A (Team StarKid) 376 Very Warm for May (Kern, Hammerstein) 286 video gaming 324 Viertel, Jack 121–2, 422 Vietnam War 27, 29, 54, 59, 111, 112, 198, 317 Vimeo 280, 337, 339, 340, 375 Violet (Tesori, Crawley) 37 Visit, The (Kander, Ebb, McNally) 37, 302, 304–5, 306 Visit, The [Der Besuch der alten Dame] (Dürrenmatt) 304–5 Vogel, Paula 226; see also Indecent Wagner, Robin 132 Waitress (Bareilles) 9, 85, 121–22, 122, 124, 126, 141, 150, 425; What’s Inside: Songs from Waitress (concept album) 121 Waits, Tom 432 Walken, Christopher 341 Walker, Alice 63 Walker, Chet 49 Walker, Don 106 Walker, Fredi 348 Wall Street Journal 145, 199, 242 Wallace, Marisha 194 Waller, Fats 190; see also Ain’t Misbehavin’ Wallner, Marty 403 Walters, Margaret 157 Ward, Douglas Turner 200

Warhol, Andy 177 Warren, Lesley Ann 385 Washington Post 260 Washington, Ned 300; see also Harline, Leigh; Pinocchio (film) Wasson, Sam 49 Watergate 29, 59, 317 Waters, John 175; see also Hairspray Watts, Daniel J. 339 We Will Rock You (Queen, Elton) 431 Wecker, Konstantin 433 Weidman, John 236, 239, 241–2, 314; see also Assassins; Contact; Pacific Overtures; Sondheim, Stephen; Stroman, Susan Weil, Cynthia 64; see also Mann, Barry Weill, Kurt 106, 409; see also Brecht, Bertolt; Lady in the Dark; Street Scene; Threepenny Opera, The Weinert-Kendt, Rob 120 Weinstein, Harvey 120, 143; see also #MeToo movement Welch, Elizabeth 191 Wendland, Mark 288 West Side Story (Bernstein, Sondheim, Laurents, Robbins) 7, 49, 149, 216, 217, 222, 346, 366, 380–1, 432, 434 West, Adam 18 West, John Walton 339 Wexley, John 303 “What’d I Miss” (Hamilton) 256, 259 What’s Inside: Songs from Waitress (Bareilles) 121 Whedon, Jed 278, 279, 369, 375; see also Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog; Tancharoen, Maurissa; Whedon, Joss; Whedon, Zack Whedon, Joss 278–80, 324, 364–71, 375; see also Buffy the Vampire Slayer; Day, Felicia; Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog; Fillion, Firefly; Nathan; Harris, Neil Patrick; Tancharoen, Maurissa; Whedon, Jed; Whedon, Zack Whedon, Zack 278, 279, 369, 375, Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog; Tancharoen, Maurissa; Whedon, Jed; Whedon, Joss Wheeldon, Christopher 251–4 Wheeler, Hugh 24; see also Little Night Music, A; Sondheim, Stephen; Sweeney Todd Where the Cross Was Made (O’Neill) 285 White Horse Inn, The [Im weißen Rößl] (Benatzky, Charell) 427–8 White, John Paul 392 Whitty, Jeff 122, 206, 219; see also Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City; Avenue Q; Bring It On: The Musical; Garden, John; Green, Amanda; Kitt, Tom; Miranda, Lin-Manuel; Shears, Jake Who’s Tommy, The (Townshend) 410, 425 WHOLOCK THE MUSICAL (AVbyte) 381 Whoopee! (Donaldson, Kahn) 59 Wicke, Peter 71 Wicked (Schwartz, Holzman) 2, 9, 12, 13, 39, 40, 44–6, 71, 72, 94, 110, 114, 141, 146, 169, 278,

485

Index 294, 347, 356–7, 359, 360, 370, 377, 378, 431, 448; see also Baum, L. Frank; Maguire, Gregory; Wizard of Oz, The Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West (Maguire) 44 Wickstrom, Maurya 446–7 Wild Party, The (LaChiusa) 97 Wilder, Billy 165 Wilder, Thornton: Matchmaker, The 196; Merchant of Yonkers, The 196 Wildhorn, Frank 410, 433; see also Civil Wars, The; Cuden, Steve; Dracula, the Musical; Jekyll & Hyde Will & Grace (television series) 163, 165–6 Will Rogers Follies, The (Coleman, Comden, Green) 37 Williams, Joy 392 Williams, Linda 336–7, 340; “Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess,” 337 Williams, Tennessee 287 Willis, Susan 448 Wilson, August 287 Wilson, Robert 432 Winant, Howard 207; see also Omi, Michael Winer, Linda 124, 248 Winfrey, Oprah 449–50 Wise, Savannah 356 Wittenbrink, Franz 432 Wizard of Oz, The (film) 45, 336, 377, 387 Wolber, Dani 130 Wolf, Stacy 2, 45, 135, 146, 149, 168, 316, 347; Changed for Good: A Feminist History of the Broadway Musical 135; Problem Like Maria, A: Gender and Sexuality in the American Musical 2 Wolfe, Tom 29 Wolff, Tamsen 371 Woll, Allen 2, 200; Black Musical Theater from Coontown to Dreamgirls 2 Wollman, Elizabeth 36, 42, 122, 177–8, 446, 448 Woman in White, The (Lloyd Webber, Jones) 94, 194 Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (Yazbek, Lane) 194

Wonderful Wizard of Oz, The (Baum) 44, 278, 377 Wood, Audrey 307 Woods, James 18 Woolf, Virginia 286 Working (Schwartz, Faso, Taylor, Carnelia, Grant, Rodgers, Birkenhead) 34, 142, 152–61, 294, 295, 296, 301; “Fathers and Sons” (Schwartz) 153, 154, 294, 296; “Just a Housewife” (Carnelia) 34, 142, 152, 153, 154, 156–60; “Neat to Be a Newsboy” (Schwartz) 34, 294, 296 Working Girl (Lauper, Hyman) 123 Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do (Terkel) 34, 152–6, 296 World of Musical Comedy (Green) 197 World War II 35, 40, 53, 60, 61, 65, 148, 149, 157, 173, 191, 230, 232, 397, 419 Writers Guild of America (WGA) 278, 279, 369 Writing and Madness (Felman) 283, 284 Xanadu (Farrar, Lynne, Beane) 146 Xena: Warrior Princess (television series) 365–6; “Bitter Suite” episode 365–6 X-Men (film) 164 Yates, Deborah 239 Yeston, Maury 314; see also Nine; Stone, Peter; Titanic Yorkey, Brian 283, 289, 290; see also Freaky Friday; If/Then; Kitt, Tom; Next to Normal “Yorktown (The World Turned Upside Down)” (Hamilton) 115, 116, 117, 221, 256, 258 YouTube 7, 13, 73, 279, 280, 324, 326, 327, 337–40, 347, 351, 374–6 Zadan, Craig 166 Zaks, Jerry 230 Zauf ke, Thomas 433 Zieg feld Follies 130 Ziemba, Karen 239

486