Overview

Established and emerging musical theater scholars wrestle with the complexities of the gendered and sexualized musical theater form. Critics and fans alike often mistake theatrical song and dance as simplistic, heteronormative, and traditional. This collection troubles this over-idealized notion of musical theatre, tackling divas, chorus boys, and the Rockettes; hit shows such as Hamilton and Spring Awakening; and lesser-known but groundbreaking gems like Erin Markey's A Ride on The Irish Cream and Kirsten Childs's Bella: An American Tall Tale. The book takes a broad look at musical theater across a range of intersecting lenses including race, nation, form, dance, casting, marketing, pedagogy, industry, stardom, politics, and platform. Undermining the musical form's conservative façade, scholars drive home the fact that gender and desire have long been at the heart of the musical. This exciting and vibrant collection of articles takes sex, sexuality, and gendered complexity out of the musical's liner notes and back above the marquee.

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9781789389548

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Reviews

"'In addition to the articles published as part of Studies in Musical Theatre, Kessler has included five other articles in her book to include recent developments and shows: new pieces on Spanish musical theatre performance and fandom; historicity and musical stories told through black female authorship, gender-flipped; non binary; and trans narratives, and the negotiated marketing and queerness on Broadway”. [...] Kessler did a fabulous job and presented a technically well-founded book that is very readable. The ""Studies in Musical Theater"" [journal] itself is also highly recommended.' -- von Martin Bruny, musicals – Das Musicalmagazin [Translated via Google. Original text in German]"

"'In addition to the articles published as part of Studies in Musical Theatre, Kessler has included five other articles in her book to include recent developments and shows: new pieces on Spanish musical theatre performance and fandom; historicity and musical stories told through black female authorship, gender-flipped; non binary; and trans narratives, and the negotiated marketing and queerness on Broadway”. [...] Kessler did a fabulous job and presented a technically well-founded book that is very readable. The ""Studies in Musical Theater"" [journal] itself is also highly recommended.' -- von Martin Bruny, musicals – Das Musicalmagazin [Translated via Google. Original text in German] 'I particularly enjoyed the arc of essays exploring the excesses of the divas (whether stage characters like Ethel Merman’s Rose, Angela Lansbury’s Mame, and Elaine Stritch’s Joanne, or over-thetop female stage personalities like Carol Channing and Tallulah Bankhead) as commentaries on the social constraints placed on women. I appreciated Elizabeth Wollman’s analysis of the paradox that even as the adult musical of the 1960s and ’70s employed nudity and sexual frankness in the attempt to foster both Gay and Women’s Liberation, it relied so heavily on stereotypes and nudity that it devolved into mere exploitation. Likewise, the editor’s own survey of how the visibility of LGBT experience in musicals like La Cage aux Folles, Kiss of the Spider Woman, Fun Home, and The Prom was undercut by marketing campaigns that downplayed the shows’ queerness. Thus, several of this collection’s essays demonstrate just how high toward heaven the musical has allowed gays to kick. ' -- Raymond-Jean Frontain, The Gay & Lesbian Review/Worldwide"

Author Information

Kelly Kessler is a professor of media and cinema studies in the college of communication at DePaul University and author of the books Destabilizing the Hollywood Musical: Music, Masculinity, and Mayhem (2010) and Broadway in the Box: Television's Lasting Love Affair with the Musical (2020). Kessler’s research explores the porous borders of gender and genre, often focusing on the musical across performance platforms and the mainstreaming of lesbian identity.

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