Changed for Good: A Feminist History of the Broadway Musical by Stacy Wolf (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Changed for Good: A Feminist History of the Broadway Musical by Stacy Wolf Brett D. Johnson Changed for Good: A Feminist History of the Broadway Musical. By Stacy Wolf. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. pp. xiv + 306. $24.95 paper. Stacy Wolf ’s Changed for Good: A Feminist History of the Broadway Musical is an important addition to the burgeoning field of musical theatre scholarship. In his 2004 Theatre Survey article, “Toward a Historiography of the Popular,” David Savran maintained that, although the field has become “more fashionable of late,” inept scholarship predominates: “What passes for musical-theatre scholarship—with a handful of notable exceptions—oscillates between dreary, encyclopedic catalogs and wildly impressionistic flights of the imagination. Certainly no other theatre form has inspired such a cornucopia of idolatrous and anecdotal narratives that scorn analysis in favor of narcissistic rumination and fantasy” (213). Even more recently, in their introduction to Women in American Musical Theatre (2008), Bud Coleman and Judith A. Sebesta observed that “although a number of works have treated the subject of musical theatre from a fairly traditional, almost ‘positivist’ historical perspective, few have approached it theoretically or using a less ‘traditional’ historical methodology, such as feminism, Marxism, postmodernism, etc.” (3). Such is Wolf ’s intention in Changed for Good. Building upon the work of Raymond Knapp and Scott McMillin, Wolf utilizes an impressive array of theories, from cultural studies, queer studies, ethnoracial studies, and musicology, to analyze and interpret the representation of women in American musicals and to demonstrate women’s centrality to the form, both on- and offstage. Importantly, Wolf acknowledges where her work intersects with other musical theatre scholars and announces her intention to “open a politicized, historicized conversation with Knapp’s and McMillin’s books to interrogate musical theatre’s conventions and how they work from a feminist perspective” (247). Wolf begins her study with an account of “Defying Gravity,” the Act 1 finale of the blockbuster musical Wicked, in which the green-skinned societal outcast Elphaba soars above the heads of her would-be captors and belts an anthem of self-assertion. Wolf ’s description of this spectacular moment, and the ensuing discussion of how the song converses with similar numbers in musical theatre history, frames her study. “Defying Gravity,” Wolf contends, signifies how Wicked is Elphaba and G(a)linda’s show and, likewise, how “musical theatre has always been the terrain of women and girls” (5). “Defying Gravity,” Wolf continues, also exemplifies how Wicked embodies the generic conventions of musical theatre as championed by Rodgers and Hammerstein in the mid-twentieth [End Page 121] century. Wolf asserts that from the 1950s to the 2000s, “virtually all Broadway musicals had to contend with the formidable legacy of Rodgers and Hammer-stein”; consequently, “their conventions have been internalized by musical theatre audiences” (10). However, here and throughout the book, Wolf is interested not in how Wicked and other musicals perpetuate the Rodgers and Hammer-stein hegemony, but rather in how they can signify as queer by “turning away from heterosexual couples and presumptive heterosexual romance and toward women” (18). A particular strength of Wolf ’s study is her methodology, which can serve as a model for others in the field. In the introduction, she states that one purpose of her book is “to demonstrate a methodology for taking apart the total experience to understand how the pieces of a richly multivalent performance make meaning” (5). Wolf thereby examines a constellation of materials that comprise the performance “text,” including the libretto, music, lyrics, casting, staging, spectacle, and performances. That she examines the score as a vital component of each performance text is noteworthy, as most scholarly considerations of musical theatre have approached the genre from either a theatrical or musicological perspective and have rarely synthesized the two. A notable exception is Knapp’s two-volume The American Musical and the Formation/Performance of National Personal Identity (2006), which includes abundant musical analysis. Additionally, Wolf emphasizes how musicals are products of a historical moment, thereby answering Bruce Kirle’s call, in Unfinished Show Business: Broadway Musicals as Works-in-Process (2005), for an analysis of musicals that recognizes their incompleteness by deconstructing...