Something For The Boys: Musical Theater And Gay Culture

Something For The Boys: Musical Theater And Gay Culture

Product Description A look at how the world of musical theater and gay culture intertwine, from the attraction of Ethel Merman to the homophobia of Rogers and Hammerstein From Library Journal In this entertaining book, Clum (drama and English, Duke Univ.) answers the age-old question, Why do so many gay men love musicals? He links musical theater to gay culture through an analysis of music, lyrics, and plot (or lack thereof) as well as the personal lives of composers (from Noel Coward and Cole Porter to Stephen Sondheim and other contemporary artists) and divas (like Judy Garland and Ethel Merman, whom he links to the history of drag performance and heroine worship). Mixing personal anecdote with scholarly analysis, Clum takes his readers into a world where, despite homophobia and plots that seemed basically heterosexual, life could be fabulous. Also included are lively endnotes and a lengthy, annotated discography of cast recordings. Highly recommended for academic and public libraries, particularly those with theater or gay studies collections. -Lisa N. Johnston, Sweet Briar Coll. Lib., VA Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc. From Kirkus Reviews Why do gay men so love musical theater? Clum purports to answer this question but instead offers only petty commentary and obvious observations to support queer readings of his Broadway passions. Its lights down, curtains up, and the divas dead. Clum (Acting Gay: Male Homosexuality in Modern Drama, 1994, not reviewed) presents himself as an academic Auntie Mame guiding the reader through the delights of queer Broadway. Peering into the sex lives of Noel Coward, Cole Porter, and Lorenz Hart, dissecting the ambivalences of Stephen Sondheim, attacking the social conservatism of Rodgers and Hammerstein, Clum trots out musical after musical to delineate its queer edge, yet no momentum develops from this strategy. Although Broadway divas from Ethel Merman to Carol Channing, from Bernadette Peters to Betty Buckley, are lauded and lionized, they are never analyzed. The question that remains, then, after finishing his tour of the fleshpots, is exactly the one we began with: Why do gay men so love musical theater? Unwrapping the semantic layering of the diva would have been a valuable beginning to such a project, but Clum praises her many incarnations rather than probing deeply into her significance. Unfortunately, Clum so revels in celebrating the obvious queer sensibility of these musicals that he often fails to take into account more profound levels of meaning and cultural significance, as when his necrophilic male gaze savors in the King of Siams beautiful dead body, shunting aside the postcolonialist horrors of the plot in favor of the giddy pleasures of a shirtless Yul Brynner. Rather than producing the Broadway musical equivalent of Wayne Koestenbaums The Queens Throat, which analyzed the nexus of queer culture and opera, Clum has failed to make any contribution to analyses of the Broadway musical or queer culture, except to bask in their collective fabulousness. (12 b&w illus.) -- Copyright 1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.