| Issue 38 2003 Stage Door Jennies By BRETT FARMER
[1] FARMER: The affinities between gay male cultures and the Broadway
musical are so widely acknowledged that, in popular [2] WOLF: There are a number of characteristics of the mid-20th-century
Broadway musical that invite lesbian investments. First, unlike
much of the non-musical theatre of the 1940s to mid-1960s, the Broadway
musical featured women as stars. Women performers like Mary Martin
and Ethel Merman were a primary draw for audiences, and they could
almost guarantee a certain [3] WOLF: In addition to their prominence on the musical theatre stage, women in musicals perform with vocal power and physical athleticism, completely contradicting the prevalent 1950s stereotype of the woman as silent or as passive. Whether feisty like Maria in The Sound of Music, or ferocious like Momma Rose in Gypsy, women in musicals are active. They sing most of the songs; they do most of the dances; they speak the most lines. They take up stage space in assertive, aggressive ways. [4] WOLF: Because of the "ideologies of compulsory heterosexuality and companionate marriages" that you note, the presumption of musical theatre's happy heterosexuality tends not to be challenged. But if we look closely at how musicals are structured, they invite very different, potentially queer readings. For example, the narrative of boy-meets-girl (but they hate each other and so are destined for each other), boy-gets-girl (because they are thrown together or somehow can't resist each other), boy-loses-girl (because one of them makes some mistake), boy-gets-girl again (and the community sings together in a happy huge finale) does dominate musical theatre of the mid-century. On the other hand, the closure of this narrative is severely undermined by the musical's conventional two-act structure. The first act—which develops the characters' antipathy for each other, allows the female and male principals to define and express their characters (through what are called "I am" or "I want" songs), and demonstrates homosocial bonding within the singly gendered choruses—is much longer and more song-filled than the second act, which resolves the romance through reprises and, often, less interesting musical numbers. For lesbian spectators, it becomes quite easy to read against the grain of this heterosexual closure, since the woman has been singing solo (or with other women) for much of the show. [5] WOLF: I find that the musical's appeal to lesbian spectators
operates differently than it does for gay men. Gay male scholars
of the musical, such as Alexander Doty, Richard Dyer, John Clum,
Mark Steyn, and Ethan Mordden, often note the form's campiness or
its flamboyance. They tend to emphasize the over-the-top, self-consciously
performative aspect of the female lead, the Broadway diva. I owe
great debt to these scholars who have developed ways of reading
musicals from a queer perspective, but [6] WOLF: The musical's attraction for lesbian spectators is not ironic but rather is based on a positive, if non-mimetic, representation of femininity. At times the musical calls up spectatorial identifications with performers or characters, which depends on their visual and aural power; at times, the musical invokes a pleasurable spectatorship contingent on the musical's visceral qualities: its ability to cause a spectator to tap her toes or hum along. [7] WOLF: I would also want to add, as I do in my book, that I
understand "lesbian" as a spectatorial location and a spectatorial
practice and not an immutable identity. Certainly many women who
identify as lesbian have developed skills of reading "lesbianly,"
both consciously and unconsciously. Part of my project is to foreground
the histories and conventions of musicals and of lesbian spectatorship
to give any willing and willful [8] WOLF: Finally, my reading of musicals from a lesbian perspective is thoroughly grounded in feminism, which is in part why I don't only see female couples or sexual attraction between women to be the sole signifier of lesbianism in a musical. [9] FARMER: Well, as someone who has seen the film version of The Sound of Music hundreds of times—and I do mean hundreds—I can confirm that the aim of promoting a radically different reader-response to the text is more than ably secured by your book...but we'll have more to say about that later, no doubt. Here I'm interested in pursuing further your deployment of feminism as critical and hermeneutic approach to the musical; both because, as you state, it is vital to your lesbian engagement and decoding of the form, and because it signals an important rethinking of the sexual politics of the Broadway musical and its status in feminist discourse. [10] FARMER: Traditionally, feminism and the musical haven't exactly been, to borrow a phrase from show tune language itself, "bosom buddies, friends, sisters, and pals." Indeed, you characterize their relationship as, if not overtly antithetical, fraught with ambivalent tensions. At the outset, you state that your book is concerned with the apparent dilemma of being both a feminist and "an ardent fan of musicals," and admit, in duly confessional tones, to many years of leading a secret or double life: "reading and discussing feminist theory and doing political activism by day and learning tap routines and singing...in skimpy costumes by night" (vii). How do you reconcile these contradictions in your work—and, possibly, even, life—and develop a properly feminist approach to the musical; one that is as attentive to the genre's "sources of pleasure and power for feminist and lesbian spectators," as to its "conservative representations of women and heterosexual couples" (xiii)? [11] WOLF: I think the contradictions that you note and my negotiation of a "properly feminist approach" (doesn't that sound like a lyric from Mary Poppins?) locate my book very definitely at the end of the 20th century, in terms of the intellectual histories of feminism and of cultural studies in the academy. [12] WOLF: As someone who went to graduate school during the late-1980s/early-1990s, the era of ‘the feminisms' (e.g., Liberal, Cultural, Materialist, or Socialist, Separatist, and so on), I learned, along with my classmates, the practice of analyzing and critiquing a text's cultural and ideological work. Politically, we learned to recognize and reject out of hand misogynist, racist, and homophobic texts. [13] WOLF: Since the 1990s, feminist critical strategies have been productively appropriated by scholars in virtually all fields (and not only by self-identified feminists); they are taught and used in many areas and internalized by many students, even in the face of frequently blatant misogyny in the media and in politics. That is to say, readings of culture that you and I would likely identify as feminist have become more pervasive, even as fewer scholars and students name those perspectives as feminist. The challenge for those of us committed to feminist studies is to continue to hone our analytical skills in the face of ever-more contradictory representations and uses, especially in popular culture. I think this requires a willingness to explore representations complexly. [14] WOLF: In addition, my project is influenced by cultural studies (which I almost hate to name as such because I am aware of all of the political and methodological compromises of cultural studies as it is practiced in the U.S.), in that it takes seriously the uses of culture by a traditionally disenfranchised group: lesbian spectators. [15] WOLF: We are in a time in the academy with much tolerance (perhaps too much) for what Eve Sedgwick once called the "kinda resistant/kinda hegemonic" model of analysis and interpretation. But, as Sedgwick noted, culture really works this way: we interact in contradictory ways with culture all the time. We take what appeals to us and overlook what offends us. We identify, disidentify, identify across identity locations, and of course, as the scholars of the Frankfurt School knew, against our own best interests. (The question then becomes: What's at stake in identifying against our own best interests?) That's the appeal of the pleasure of representations. I think in this way that my work fits squarely within cultural studies and other work that explores the contradictory ideological projects of representations. [16] WOLF: From the perspective of musical theatre studies, the intervention of feminist analysis produces what I see as excellent and important frictions and tensions. Musical theatre has for so long been seen as only commercial, as only entertainment, as having no political or ideological meaning, that to infuse the musical with feminist politics gives it entirely new meanings. [17] WOLF: I also think your question points back to musical themselves and how they work. We can and should study ‘representations,' or images, which tend to be read mimetically and rely on identifications of (a)likeness. But we also need to account for other, non-mimetic ‘sources of pleasure,' which enlarge the mode of interpretation to account for the aural and kinesthetic elements of the musical. Perhaps if no one sang or danced in these shows, they could more easily be contained as misogynist. [18] FARMER: Which motivates my next question: to what extent is your feminist reclamation of the musical, as of the lesbian readings it indexes, premised on a prioritization of the performance—or, more to the point, the female star performance—over and against other aspects of the musical such as score and book? I ask because some would contend that the predominantly male authorship of the latter all but imbues the musical with a structural tendency to phallocentrism. [19] FARMER: Just the other day, for example, I was reading an
interview with Gretchen Cryer, the lyricist behind such avowedly
feminist musicals as I'm Getting My Act Together and Taking It
on the Road (1978) and The American Girls Revue (2001),
where she laments the male creative monopoly of the Broadway musical
for imposing a masculinist frame that marginalizes "authentic" female
voices and concerns. According to Cryer, classic female [20] FARMER: Such an argument depends, however, on an unquestioned assumption of the musical's (male) production teams as the primary, even exclusive, ‘authorial' source of the form and, thus, the principal measure of its legibility. By contrast, your approach—as, indeed, that of most popular receptions—is to focus reading of the musical around its iconic female stars, considering how their spectacular presence and performance contribute centrally to the meanings and pleasures of the musical as text. As you write, the "performer is the most remembered" aspect of musicals, "the woman in the role is central to reception." (33) [21] FARMER: How can we make critical sense of what might be termed the performative authorship of the female star? In particular, how does it interact with other elements of the musical's creative economy? Is it the case that the female star enacts at the level of performance a resistant challenge to, if not outright disorganization of, the masculinist and/or heteronormalizing dimensions of the score and book? Or is the case more complex than this? [22] WOLF: I would say that my "feminist reclamation of the musical" is premised on balancing the performance of the star with the other elements of performance. Because theatre history so privileges what remains—scripts, reviews, director's notes, designers‚ drawings, photographs, and so on—my focus on performance may seem like an unusual prioritizing of the performer over the other aspects of theatre. [23] WOLF: That said, the critical model that I employ and to which you refer is based on an audience's experience of a performance, where the performer makes or breaks the performance. Part of my project is to challenge the dominant histories of theatre that privilege drama, or the written text, above all else (although more recent theatre histories do attend to the specific dimensions of performance). In musical theatre studies, composers and lyricists garner the most critical attention, and directors and choreographers also receive consideration for a musical's composition. [24] WOLF: Of course, all collaborators play a part in the total performance event. (As does the audience, as a recent interview in The New York Times with Lonny Price, the director of Urban Cowboy, which closed on Broadway after 60 performances, reveals. He stressed that a New York audience "just didn't want to enter the world of the show" for two hours, while audiences in Coconut Grove, Florida, delighted in it.) It's impossible for audiences, critics, and scholars to pinpoint which choices precisely, or whose ideas precisely, or whose labor precisely create the performance. [25] WOLF: I think that scholars of musical theatre have not emphasized the effects of performers because their work is so fleeting and because it's especially difficult to differentiate among performance choices made by writers/composers, directors, and actors (that is, the work of designers is easier to identify, although even design is also created collaboratively). Cast albums and publicity photos and reviews gesture towards but ultimately cannot capture the specific elements of movement and expression that compel an audience. Those of us interested in performers need to expand our vocabulary to describe and analyze what exactly a performer does, and why, in theatre terms, "it works." I really like your phrase, "the performative authorship of the female star" and hope to be able to continue to contribute to a critical analytical vocabulary of performance. [26] WOLF: The various elements of performance—script, music, orchestration, lyrics, choreography, blocking, acting, set, lighting, and costume design—work in tension and collusion in any performance. Musicals tend to be more complicated than non-musical plays because more artists are involved in their creation. In addition, in the 1950s, the conventions of the "integrated musical"—the seamless blending of music, speech, and dance—were so well known and valued that critics (and then scholars) paid more attention to form and structure than to the contributions of performers. [27] WOLF: The performer is in some ways the most powerful and
least dependable element of the musical's "creative economy." Her
body and physicality and voice call up certain unstable associations;
her performance might vary; she might resist the most obvious reading
of the character; she might shift her characterization over the
course of a long run of a play. The new revival of Gypsy
with Bernadette Peters is a great example of the [28] WOLF: Finally, I don't believe that a musical is "masculinist" because it was created by men. To the degree that the gender of composers, lyricists, and librettists affects their work (which I believe it does, but not necessarily in predictable or identifiable ways), so does their race, sexuality, class, musical training, and so on. I think it's interesting to consider how all elements of identity and experience affect the artist's work, but that it's ultimately more important to look at the character and what she does and says and sings, and to explore the ideological work of the musical in terms of its characters and narrative. As I say in my book, in spite of the fact that many musicals end with a presumptively happy heterosexual union, the dominance of the first act and the number of songs in which the heroine expresses her independence often undermine that heteronormative conclusion. [29] WOLF: I would not say that, across the board, all musicals are feminist, or even that all musicals could emphasize a feminist interpretation. But I think that the multiple modes of performance in a musical allow for a range of resistances that might not be available to non-musical plays. [30] FARMER: So let's talk a bit more specifically about the stars you discuss in your book and how what you just characterized as their "multiple modes of performance" provide a fertile space for lesbian investment and interpretation. You focus centrally on four female stars: Mary Martin, Ethel Merman, Julie Andrews, and Barbra Streisand. Though each is very different in terms of persona and performance style, these four women pretty much dominated—and, thus, arguably helped to define—the Broadway musical throughout its so-called ‘golden age' of the 40s, 50s, and 60s. Not only did they appear in many of the era's most popular and enduring classics, but, taken together, these stars signal a veritable compendium of the central genres and styles of Broadway female performance: from ingénue soprano and lyrical soubrette to powerhouse belter and brassy comic. [31] FARMER: Mirroring the resistant protocols of queer reception, you approach these stars as obtaining a marked capacity for lesbian signification. Each of them, you suggest, signals at the level of performance variations of what Chris Straayer famously terms "the hypothetical lesbian heroine:" the figure or character that may not be explicitly coded as lesbian but whose textual presence nevertheless provides for lesbian readings and pleasures. How might such a process be engaged in relation to a star such as Mary Martin or Ethel Merman, say? [32] WOLF: I am a huge admirer of Chris's work and have found her articulation of that "hypothetical lesbian heroine" to be incredibly useful in moving us away from a simple identification of a lesbian-in-representation as only a woman desiring sexually or coupled with another woman. Straayer understands the complexity of spectatorial identifications, and how all kinds of gestures, movements, and characterizations can call up lesbian attachments.
[34] WOLF: Martin performed the tomboy, both in her offstage life—as
configured in her amusingly effusive autobiography, interviews in
magazines, and exposés of her domestic life—and on stage,
in her choice of roles and her portrayal of women who do gender
and sexuality differently. For example, offstage, she never embodied
the role of the housewife that was so prevalent in the 1940s and
1950s. She hated to cook and decorate; her second husband, the
barely-closeted, gay Richard Halliday, did these tasks well, and
also selected her clothes and eventually managed her career. Onstage,
the roles [35] WOLF: In the context of typical female comportment in the 1950s, Martin carried herself with what looks like boyishness, in videotapes of performances and interviews and in publicity photos. She tended to walk with her weight forward and her head extended; she landed solidly. Her singing voice, while absolutely a woman's voice, had a marked break between her chest and head voice, and I argue that this apparent vocal break emphasizes the doubleness of her performances, how she was both masculine and feminine.
[37] WOLF: Merman, on the other hand, was very definitely masculine in style and affect. After working as a stenographer, she was married several times and, according to interviews and her five autobiographies (!!), ran her life, career, and household just fine on her own. She had the reputation of being very demanding of attention, of forcing writers and directors to cut numbers of performers she thought might threaten her primacy. [38] WOLF: Her famous voice, with its peculiar vibrato and unmatchable
belt, invokes a thrill in a listener. She could and did sing everything
in her powerful chest voice. Merman's body was [39] WOLF: The fact that many people believed (wrongly) that Merman was Jewish contributes to my sense of her unusual femininity. Because of traditional, historical, stereotypical associations of Jewishness with gender inversion, Merman's apparent Jewishness emphasized her masculinity even more. [40] WOLF: I look to each woman's performance of femininity, which was unconventional in mid-20th-century U.S., and which brought her great fame and fortune. Each woman, as a Broadway star, was extremely active in her performances, as we've already talked about, in her ability to shape her performances on stage. [41] WOLF: So there are several elements that make these women attractive to a lesbian spectator: her apparent power in her life and career, her unconventional, uncontainable performance of femininity, as well as the particular form in which each woman excelled—the Broadway musical. Finally, though, I don't want to suggest that only elements of masculinity contribute to the appeal of a star to lesbian spectators. It's more significant, I think, that these women refused a typical performance of femininity at the time. [42] FARMER: If, as you're suggesting, lesbian attachments to these stars issue from a perceived refusal or disorganization of conventional modes of feminine gender, how do we account for the lesbian appeal of a performer such as Julie Andrews? While the Andrews star image undoubtedly contains elements that may be read as gender dissonant—like Martin, for example, she famously played the tomboyish Maria in the film version of The Sound of Music, and enjoyed a late-career revival through her portrayal, both on screen and on stage, of the cross-dressing Victor/Victoria—it would seem to be more centrally anchored than either Martin or Merman in a traditional tropology of white, middle class femininity. Indeed, in its early Broadway incarnation, the Andrews persona was formatively associated with that most conservative of femininity narratives: the Cinderella story. [43] WOLF: Yes, absolutely, Andrews garnered a reputation as a
princess, both because of her portrayal of Cinderella in Rodgers
and Hammerstein's 1957 televised version, and also because of her
star persona—whiteness, bright eyes, clear skin, perfect [44] WOLF: Her star persona is quirky. She embodies a Cinderella type and maintains a Cinderella image to this day, and yet I always see a double edge in her performance: there is a kind of innocence, a childishness coupled with an ironically raised eyebrow. I think it's fascinating that she now plays a grandmother type who at once disciplines and contains young girls and also helps them to transgress and be independent on their way to womanhood. She married her childhood sweetheart, set designer Tony Walton, then divorced and married Blake Edwards, director of the Pink Panther movies (among many others) who just does not seem straight to me. Like Mary Martin's, Andrews's marriage looks queer. [45] WOLF: In terms of her performance style, like the other women in my book, she is a charismatic and gifted performer, who has many fans and admirers. She has/had an incredibly strong voice with a freakishly large range. She is an adequate but slightly gawky dancer. So I think that part of her appeal is the juxtaposition of smooth, calm competence with zany awkwardness with extraordinary talent. [46] WOLF: When Andrews played Cinderella early in her career,
she revealed a certain irony towards the role. Her Cinderella was
much more self-confident than Lesley Ann Warren's portrayal, which
was recorded in 1964 and replayed for many years on TV. All of
the ‘Cinderellas' that Andrews went on to play—Eliza in My
Fair Lady, Guenevere in Camelot, Maria in The Sound
of [47] WOLF: I think that Andrews is an important performer to think about because she is indeed feminine and yet she foregrounds femininity as performance. (I'm thinking here, too, in a completely different performance context, of the work of Lois Weaver, another absolutely self-conscious femme.) [48] FARMER: I certainly agree that Andrews is a much more interesting performer than generally credited who nuances her roles with a style that, as you suggest, tends frequently toward the ironic. It's revealing in this context to recall that Andrews first rose to fame on Broadway playing the part of Polly in The Boy Friend, a popular pastiche of twenties-style musical comedy, where she literally stole the show with a performance that, as Brooks Atkinson effused in his review for The New York Times, both "burlesque[d] the insipidity of the part," while keeping it "genuine...and almost moving." [49] FARMER: It's Andrews's extraordinary ability to play roles
on the edge, as it were, that, to my mind, doubles the tragedy of
her still controversial loss of the part of Eliza Doolittle to Audrey
Hepburn in the film version of My Fair Lady. As achingly
gorgeous as Hepburn is in the film, her performance of Eliza is
of a vastly different order to that of Andrews on stage—at
least to the extent that the latter can be known through the two
cast albums and the piecemeal television recordings that remain—and
it fundamentally alters the sexual politics of the whole text.
There's a determined grit and feistiness and, again, a touch of
irony to Andrews's Eliza that simply isn't there in the Hepburn
version which is largely winsome and fragile to the point of skewing
the overall semiotic register of the piece toward pathos. Indeed,
whenever I watch the film version of My Fair Lady, I'm left
at the end with a desperate sense of melancholy at the prospect
of poor Eliza who seems destined to a future of wedded servitude
literally at the feet of Professor Higgins. Andrews's Eliza, by
contrast, gives as good [50] FARMER: This capacity for imbuing a role with aberrant resonances through sheer performative dynamism is explored most fully in your chapter-length reading of The Sound of Music. A perennial popular, The Sound of Music is widely represented—and just as widely ridiculed—for what is perceived as its nostalgic sentimentalism and simple celebration of reactionary family values: kinder, küche, kirche. In your hands, however, the musical assumes a very different cast. Cued by the competing performances of Mary Martin on stage and Andrews on film, you suggest that The Sound of Music is in fact a text that "invokes lesbian desire, compels lesbian identifications, induces lesbian readings, and works as a contemporary signifier of lesbian identity." (204) Tell us more... [51] WOLF: I love how you describe the difference between Hepburn's and Andrews's Eliza—yes, yes. Critics also noted Andrews's ability to play Cinderella (on TV) with an edge, another remarkable performance feat. [52] WOLF: As a theatre practitioner as well as a scholar, I am fascinated by the tensions among the performance texts—the libretto and the score; the history of the performance and its attendant associations and expectations—The Sound of Music as kinder, küche, kirche; and the possibilities of pushing on the text via performance choices. I think for the American musical to function as more than nostalgia, we need to find ways to preserve what's pleasurable about the music and the dance, and press on the conservative and limiting representations. Some productions, like Mendes's Cabaret, Bernadette Peters's performance as Momma Rose in Gypsy (so I've heard and will see next month), South Pacific at the National Theatre in London a few years ago, try to shift what the musical means. But then, we have to ask, when is a production of The Sound of Music no longer really The Sound of Music at all? This challenge is an issue from a queer perspective but also from a feminist perspective and from the perspective of a progressive, critical educator. [53] WOLF: As for The Sound of Music, it's interesting
because this is one musical that I find lesbian; that is, any production
I have seen anywhere strikes me as very queer. I love those stories
about ‘typical American housewives' who are obsessed with The
Sound of Music (I just read a funny piece in the travel section
about The Sound of Music tour in Austria), and I wonder what
that is about. I know there are so many appealing points of entry
for spectators and fans of that play or movie—the music, the
children (especially in those sailor outfits), the cold-hearted
man who softens, the pseudo-political message, and of course Martin
or Andrews as Maria. Still, the women in this musical seem queer
to me. Maria is a feisty and energetic character who changes the
[54] WOLF: My desire to attach The Sound of Music to a lesbian identity participates in a larger project to develop an image of a lesbian show queen/princess. Celebrities like Lea DeLaria and Rosie O'Donnell count here, too. [55] FARMER: The other performer addressed in your book is a show
princess of a different kind: the revisionist J.A.P. persona of
Barbra Streisand. Focusing primarily on her star-making turn as
Fanny Brice in both the stage and film versions of Funny Girl,
you claim that Streisand "knits together queerness and Jewishness
to create a ‘woman' who, in body, gesture, voice, and character,
is indeed a ‘funny' girl" (176). Motivated by the arguments of
critics like Janet Jakobsen and Daniel Itzkovitz that queerness
and Jewishness operate as homologous sites of categorical disruption—in
that, inter alia, both occupy liminal spaces across traditional
binarisms, challenge essentialist concepts of identity, and problematize
orthodox discourses of corporeality—you [56] FARMER: This reading helps foreground an issue that surfaces at various points throughout your book and that has been taken up elsewhere in recent cultural and performance studies: the racial politics of the musical. There is a certain argument rehearsed in the work of writers like Michael Rogin, Arthur Knight, and Christina Klein that the musical is subtended by a fantasy of white normativity where ethnic difference is integrated—and thus erased—into a racially unmarked—read ‘white'—American identity. It's an argument that has been developed in particular relation to the influential role of Jews and other immigrants in the development and popularization of the Broadway musical. In the terms of the modern racialized American imaginary, Jews were, if not quite coded as absolute racial others, certainly coded as not quite white and it is suggested that, historically, the musical stage offered an important cultural space for the production and performance of Jewish assimilation into a unified white body politic. Does the overt performance of Jewish difference in the Streisand image represent a radical rupture in this history of white assimilation through the musical, and how might this in turn inform lesbian investments? [57] WOLF: Your question again points to the tension between production and performance, and it also requires an examination of specific moments in the history of the musical. Rogin's reading of The Jazz Singer, for example, is terrifically persuasive, and I also hugely admire Andrea Most's work on Oklahoma! and South Pacific, where she argues that Rodgers and Hammerstein negotiated not only their Jewish identities but also their liberal politics in their shows. It's significant, in the history of the musical as well as the history of Jewish assimilation in the U.S., that Jolson performed in The Jazz Singer in the early-20th century and that Rodgers and Hammerstein's Oklahoma! opened in 1943 and South Pacific in 1947. By 1964, when Funny Girl was produced, the U.S. was several decades post WWII, post the Holocaust, post McCarthy. That's not to say that Jewish artists were not struggling with anti-Semitism, but that the temper of the culture had shifted somewhat in those twenty years. [58] WOLF: Considering the number of Jewish composers, lyricists, librettists, producers, and directors working on Broadway musicals in the mid-20th century, there were very few representations of Jews. By 1964, there had only been a few Broadway musicals that featured Jewish characters, most notably Jerry Herman's Milk and Honey in 1961. Streisand on Broadway (and then in the film) not only embodied a female principal in a musical who was explicitly and unapologetically Jewish (and who succeeds in no small part because of her Jewishness) but Streisand's own performance marked itself over and over as Jewish. The fact that Streisand and Funny Girl invoke such distinct reactions from spectators—love her or hate her—demonstrates the persistence of anti-Semitism. [59] WOLF: As you suggest, the creation of the Fanny Brice story
on Broadway ‘outs' as Jewish a generation of artists who worked
out their ambivalence about Jewishness through various substitutions
and deflections of character, of narrative, and of musical style.
Certainly her presence as a Jewish female body and voice on the
Broadway stage disrupts a pattern of displacement that works in
earlier mid-century musicals like South Pacific and My
Fair Lady. Gypsy is interesting because the real Rose
Hovick was indeed Jewish (and a lesbian) but Arthur Laurents made
her into a Christian character. Momma Rose reads so very Jewish
(and, too, Merman, who everyone thought was Jewish but wasn't),
but Laurents's making her explicitly not so allows her gender to
dominate and ethnicity to seem [60] WOLF: Much of the critical scholarship on Jewishness has focused on Jewish men and Jewish masculinity. Sedgwick, Jakobsen, Itzkovitz, Gilman, Ockman, and Pellegrini have contributed in important ways to discussions of Jewish femininity, as does Riv-Ellen Prell, in her wonderful work on the Jewish American Princess. Rogin's argument about the musical's Jewishness is predicated on the struggles of the creators, who were of course all men. When Styne and Merrill wrote Fanny Brice into a musical, and she became embodied in the form of Barbra Streisand, new meanings emerged. Streisand's powerful and charismatic presence made Jewishness a desirable performance. [61] WOLF: Streisand's femininity also complicates how her performance intervenes in the history of Jewish assimilation through the musical. None of the men in Funny Girl are marked as Jewish (although Sydney Chaplin played Nick Arnstein on Broadway), so their emasculation by Fanny/Barbra does not echo the stereotypical inappropriate power discrepancies of Jewish families in the 20th century. [62] WOLF: Streisand is bizarre and excessive in terms of what
a star is supposed to be; she cannot be contained by music or text;
[63] FARMER: Given the steady decline of Broadway's cultural currency throughout the late twentieth century, commentaries on gay male fandoms of the musical often assume a eulogizing tenor, claiming the ‘show queen' has become a moribund figure whose only possible move, as D.A. Miller writes, is "to sink ever more deeply into nostalgia, the dank nether world where the waning of a cult...commonly sends its diminished members" (136). Within such a context, what can we make of the current and future status of the musical as a vehicle for the dreams and desires of lesbian spectators? Is the ‘show dyke' doomed to expire at precisely the point when your work has finally given her critical incarnation? [64] WOLF: Not at all! Some gay men, as Miller and John Clum have pointed out, have had investments in the musical particularly linked to a pre-Stonewall gay male identity and community. I think that the ‘show dyke' is just coming into being. Stars like Rosie O'Donnell and Lea DeLaria contribute to her existence, and also in some ways, the grrrl power movement, which allows a more explicit homosociality among women. The show dyke is not a figure of nostalgia, in part because she has not been linked to a specific, historical community. She is (still) a somewhat solitary image, although singalong Sound of Musics may change that status.
[66] WOLF: Your question also points to what is traditionally seen as the death of the musical after the mid-1960s. The narrative goes that the generation of Rodgers and Hammerstein were getting older; that rock music made Broadway show music popularly obsolete; that the costs of producing a Broadway musical got increasingly exorbitant; that British creators like Andrew Lloyd Weber, who relies on spectacle more than characterologically-rich music and lyrics, began to dominate the scene; that AIDS then decimated the artistic community. All of these facts are true, but the lesbian critical and performative possibilities of musicals of the later 1960s through today are still open for examination. WORKS CITED The Boy Friend. Music and Lyrics by Sandy Wilson. Book by Sandy Wilson. Dir. Vida Hope and Cy Feuer. With Julie Andrews and John Hewer. Royale Theatre, New York. Opened 30 September, 1954. Camelot. Music by Frederick Loewe. Lyrics by Alan Jay Lerner. Book by Alan Jay Lerner. Dir. Moss Hart. With Julie Andrews and Richard Burton. Majestic Theatre, New York. Opened 3 December, 1960. Cinderella. Music by Richard Rodgers. Lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II. Teleplay by Oscar Hammerstein II. Dir. Ralph Nelson. With Julie Andrews and Jon Cypher. CBS. Broadcast 31 March, 1957. Clum, John M. Something for the Boys: Musical Theater and gay Culture. New York: St Martin's Press, 1999. Doty, Alexander. Making Things Perfectly Queer: Interpreting Mass Culture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993. Funny Girl. Music by Jules Styne. Lyrics by Bob Merrill. Book by Isobel Lennart. Dir. Garson Kannin. With Barbra Streisand and Sydney Chaplin. Winter Garden Theatre, New York. Opened 26 March, 1964. Funny Girl. Dir. William Wyler. With Barbra Streisand and Omar Sharif. Columbia, 1968. Gilman, Sander. The Jew's Body. New York: Routledge, 1991. Gypsy. Music by Jules Styne. Lyrics by Stephen Sondheim. Book by Arthur Laurents. Dir. Jerome Robbins. With Ethel Merman. Broadway Theatre, New York. Opened 21 May, 1959. Gypsy. (Broadway Revival) Music by Jules Styne. Lyrics by Stephen Sondheim. Book by Arthur Laurents. Dir. Sam Mendes. With Bernadette Peters. Shubert Theatre, New York. Opened 1 May, 2003. Hello, Dolly! Music and Lyrics by Jerry Herman. Book by Michael Stewart. Dir. Gower Champion. With Carol Channing. St James Theatre, New York. Opened 16 January, 1964. Itzkovitz, Daniel. "Secret Temples." Jews and Other Differences: The New Jewish Cultural Studies. Eds Jonathan Boyarin and Daniel Boyarin. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997. Jakobsen, Janet R. "Queer Is? Queer Does? Normativity and the Problem of Resistance." GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 4 (1998): 511-36. Kasha, Al and Joel Hirschborn. Notes on Broadway: Conversations with the Great Songwriters. Chicago: Contemporary Books, 1985. Klein, Christina. Cold War Orientalism: Asia in the Middlebrow Imagination, 1945-1961. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003. Knight, Arthur. Dis-integrating the Musical: Black Performance and American Musical Film. Durham: Duke University Press, 2002. Mame. Music and Lyrics by Jerry Herman. Book by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee. Dir. Gene Saks. With Angela Lansbury. Winter Garden Theatre, New York. 24 May, 1966. Mary Poppins. Dir. Robert Stevenson. With Julie Andrews and Dick Van Dyke. Disney, 1964. Milk and Honey. Music and Lyrics by Jerry Herman. Book by Don Appell. Dir. Albert Marre. With Mimi Benzell and Molly Picon. Martin Beck Theatre, New York. 10 October, 1961. Most, Andrea. "'Big Chief Izzy Horowitz': Theatricality and Jewish identity in the Wild West." American Jewish History 87.4 (1999): 313-341. Most, Andrea. "You've Got to Be Carefully Taught: The Politics of Race in Rodgers and Hammerstein's South Pacific." Theatre Journal 52.3 (2000): 307-337 My Fair Lady. Music by Frederick Loewe. Lyrics by Alan Jay Lerner. Book by Alan Jay Lerner. Dir. Moss Hart. With Julie Andrews and Rex Harrison. Mark Hellinger Theatre, New York. Opened 15 March, 1956. My Fair Lady. Dir. George Cukor. With Audrey Hepburn and Rex Harrison. Warner Bros., 1964. Oklahoma! Music by Richard Rodgers. Book and Lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II. Dir. Rouben Mamoulian. With Alfred Drake and Joan Roberts. St. James Theatre, New York. Opened 31 March, 1943. Pellegrini, Ann. Performance Anxieties: Staging Psychoanalysis, Staging Race. New York: Routledge, 1997. Peter Pan. Music by Mark Charlap. Lyrics by Carolyn Leigh. Book by James M. Barrie. Dir. Jerome Robbins. Winter Garden Theatre, New York. Opened 20 October, 1954. Prell, Riv-Ellen. Fighting to Become American: Jews, Gender, and the Anxiety of Assimilation. Boston: Beacon Press, 1999. Rogin, Michael. Blackface, White Noise: Jewish Immigrants in the Hollywood Melting Pot. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996. The Sound Of Music. Music by Richard Rodgers. Lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II. Book by Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse. Dir. Vincent J. Donehue. With Mary Martin and Theodore Bikel. Lunt-Fontanne Theatre, New York. Opened 16 November, 1959. The Sound Of Music. Dir. Robert Wise. With Julie Andrews and Christopher Plummer. Twentieth Century Fox, 1965. South Pacific. Music by Richard Rodgers. Lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II. Book by Oscar Hammerstein II and Joshua Logan. Dir. Joshua Logan. With Mary Martin and Ezio Pinza. Majestic Theatre, New York. Opened 7 April, 1949. Miller, D.A. Place for Us: Essay on the Broadway Musical. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Epistemology of the Closet. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990. Steyn, Mark. Broadway Babies Say Goodnight: Musicals Then and Now. New York: Routledge, 1999. Straayer, Chris. "The Hypothetical Lesbian Heroine in Narrative Feature Film." Out in Culture: Gay, Lesbian and Queer essays on Popular Culture. Eds. Corey K. Creekmur and Alexander Doty. Durham: Duke University Press, 1995. Victor/Victoria. Dir. Blake Edwards. With Julie Andrews, Robert Preston, and James Garner. MGM, 1982. Victor/Victoria. Music by Henry Mancini. Lyrics by Leslie Bricusse. Book by Blake Edwards. Dir. Blake Edwards. With Julie Andrews. Marquis Theatre, New York. Opened 25 October, 1995. Wolf, Stacy. A Problem Like Maria: Gender and Sexuality in the American Musical. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002. Contributor's note BRETT FARMER is a member of Genders' Editorial Board and Senior Lecturer in the Department of English with Cultural Studies at the University of Melbourne. STACY WOLF is Associate Professor of Theatre and Dance at the University of Texas at Austin, and the editor of Theatre Topics, a journal of pedagogy and praxis, affiliated with the Association for Theatre in Higher Education. |
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