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, gendered complexity out of the musical’s liner notes and back above the marquee.
Edited by:
Kelly Kessler
Imprint: Intellect Books
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Edition: New edition
Dimensions:
Height: 244mm,
Width: 170mm,
Spine: 21mm
Weight: 762g
ISBN: 9781789386196
ISBN 10: 1789386195
Pages: 350
Publication Date: 11 March 2023
Audience:
Professional and scholarly
,
Undergraduate
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active
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
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.
Reviews for Gender, Sex, and Sexuality in Musical Theatre: He/She/They Could Have Danced All Night
"'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]"
