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"Something Better than This": Sweet Charity and the Feminist Utopia of Broadway Musicals

2004; University of Toronto Press; Volume: 47; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.3138/md.47.2.309

1712-5286

Stacy Wolf,

American Political and Social Dynamics

From the bitter, painful, almost parodic strip of Ethel Merman's spectacular star turn in Gypsy in 1959 to the onstage nudity and frank sexuality of Hair in 1969, the American Broadway musical in the 1960s experienced a seismic transformation of style, content, and form. As the United States became an increasingly wealthy global power; as it expanded its involvement in the Vietnam War; as it witnessed the rise and then the fall of its hopes for the future in the figures of John F, Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr.; as it struggled to provide African-Americans and women with an equal place in society, the most American of cultural forms was radically altered, too. According to Gerald Mast, "The American musical, a more conservative and retrospective cultural medium than rock music or cult movies, was also on the move — away . from stories and toward self-consciousness, away from variants within a stable form and toward an exploration of its forms and its past"