ABOUT THIS BOOK

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.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Kelly Kessler is professor of media and cinema studies at the College of Communication at De Paul University in Chicago. She has published widely
on television, film, and musical theater and is the author of Broadway in the Box: Television’s Lasting Love Affair with the Musical.

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, Das Musicalmagazin

TABLE OF CONTENTS

List of Figures
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Belting Away at Binaries – Kelly Kessler

PART 1: EXPLORING AND EXPLODING THE GENDER BINARY ON THE MUSICAL STAGE
1. The Radio City Rockettes and the Making of a Sisterhood – Adrienne Gibbons Oehlers
2. Billy Elliot the Musical: Visual Representations of Working-Class Masculinity and the All-Singing, All-Dancing Bo[d]y – George Rodosthenous
3. Hamilton’s Women – Stacy Wolf
4. Rewriting the American West: Black Feminist (Re)Vision in Bella: An American Tall Tale – Jordan Ealey
5. A-List Drag Queens, Accidental Drag Kings and Illegible Gender Rebels: (Mis)Representations of Trans Experience in Contemporary Musicals – Janet Werther

PART 2: EMBODYING AND EXPLOITING SEX AND SEXUALITY ON AND OFF BROADWAY
6. Chorus Boys: Words, Music and Queerness (c.1900–36) – David Haldane Lawrence
7. Emancipation or Exploitation? Gender Liberation and Adult Musicals in 1970s New York – Elizabeth L. Wollman
8. A Substitute for Love: The Performance of Sex in Spring Awakening – Bryan M. Vandevender
9. If You Were Gay, That’d Be Okay: Marketing LGBTQ+ Musicals from La Cage to The Prom – Ryan Donovan

PART 3: DIVAS DON’T CARE ABOUT NOBODY’S RULES
10. Embracing Excess: The Queer Feminist Power of Musical Theatre Diva Roles – Michelle Dvoskin
11. Stepping Out of Line: (Re)Claiming the Diva for the Dancers of Broadway – Dustyn Martincich
12. Diva Relations in The Color Purple, the 2015 Broadway Revival – Deborah Paredez
13. How Can the Small Screen Contain Her? Television, Genre and the Twenty-First-Century Broadway Diva Onslaught – Kelly Kessler

PART 4: ONSTAGE, OFFSTAGE AND ONLINE: GENDER AND SEXUALITY IN PERSONAL AND PROFESSIONAL MUSICAL PRACTICE
14. The Queerness of Copla: Musical Hope for the Spanish LGBTQ – Alejandro Postigo
15. Queering Brechtian Feminism: Breaking Down Gender Binaries in Musical Theatre Pedagogical Performance Practices – Sherrill Gow
16. For Progress or Profit: The Possibilities and Limitations of Playing with Gender in Twenty-First-Century Musical Theatre – Stephanie Lim
17. The Right to See and Not Be Seen: South Korean Musicals and Young Feminist Activism – Jiyoon Jung

Notes on Contributors