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Changed for Good: A Feminist History of the Broadway Musical

2012; Oxford University Press; Volume: 99; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1093/jahist/jas017

1945-2314

Marlis Schweitzer,

Music History and Culture

Stacy Wolf’s Changed for Good is a carefully researched, elegantly written, and methodologically innovative feminist analysis of Broadway musicals from the 1950s to the early twenty-first century. Where Wolf’s previous monograph, A Problem like Maria: Gender and Sexuality in the American Musical (2002), focused specifically on the careers and performances of four celebrated Broadway stars from the 1950s and early 1960s, Changed for Good emphasizes how musicals have contributed to, and in some cases even provoked, discussions about the role of women in American society over a sixty-year period. As Wolf explains, Changed for Good looks at and listens to the different ways that women actors and female characters interact with all aspects of the performance, from singing together in duets to dancing alone center stage, from participating in a community’s formation to becoming a cog in the theatrical machinery. (p. 6) Each chapter examines a small cluster of musicals from a single decade that together reflect major changes in the social, political, and cultural representation of women. Rather than discuss all aspects of the performance in every chapter, Wolf wisely builds her chapters around the analysis of a single musical convention. So, for example, in the first chapter, “The 1950s: ‘Marry the Man Today,’” Wolf looks at three different examples of female duets from Guys and Dolls (1950), Wonderful Town (1953), and West Side Story (1957) to suggest that the aural and visual effects created by two women singing together onstage may have undermined the otherwise dominant heterosexual/sexist ideology that characterized most musicals of the period. Later, in “The 1980s: ‘The Phantom of the Opera Is There inside My Mind,’” Wolf brilliantly demonstrates how the emphasis on huge scenic effects in megamusicals such as Les Miserables (1985) and Phantom of the Opera (1986) literally and figuratively diminished the female body onstage, a scenographic effect that she sees as another example of the 1980s backlash against the advances of 1970s feminism.