The Song Is You

Musicals, it is often said, burst into song and dance when mere words can no longer convey the emotion. This book argues that musicals burst into song and dance when one body can no longer convey the emotion. Rogers shows how the musical's obsession with burlesque and minstrelsy model the kinds of radical relationships that the genre works to create across the different bodies of its performers, spectators, and creators-every time the musical bursts into song. The musical's preoccupation with these bad" performances of gender and race is the root of its progressive play with identity, and thus the source of its subcultural power. However, this leads to an ethical dilemma: Is the musical's progressive destabilization of identity thus rooted in its embrace of regressive entertainments like burlesque and minstrelsy? The Song Is You shows how musicals return again and again to this question, and grapple with a guilt that its joyously utopian pleasures are based on exploiting the laboring bodies of its performers. Rogers argues that the discourse of "integration" functioned to deny the radical work that the musical undertook every time it burst into song and dance. As "integration" loses its hold, we are forced to confront the gendered and racial dynamics that have always undergirded the genre. Can removing insensitive material and replacing it with "authentic" content change the underlying dynamic of projection and exploitation? Can through-sung musicals, by avoiding the moment of bursting into song and dance, also avoid this troubling dynamic? Can musicals critique themselves, providing their trademark joys while also reimagining their politics? This book reimagines the history of musical theatre, from The Black Crook (1866) to Soft Power (2019). Along the way, it provides new ways of understanding shows ranging from My Fair Lady, Oklahoma!, Show Boat, South Pacific, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum to The Grass Harp, Bells Are Ringing, Two Gentlemen of Verona, and the Princess Theatre Shows"--