When Broadway Was the Runway: Theater, Fashion, and American Culture (review)

Abstract

{ 160 } BOOK REV IEwS At the end of her book, Leon leaves us with a very fine piece of dissident advice: “Don’t touch Molière is a warning that theater directors and historians alike should not heed” (143). This is a book by a theatre historian who clearly has considerable sympathy for theatre practitioners as distinct from those “present-day venerators of Molière” who still govern much of what is written about Molière. The Revolution abolished both the Académie and the ComédieFran çaise, but they were soon back,functioning at their worst as the crypt within which high culture is entombed. (And that story could be a sequel to this book, which I would like to see Leon write.) Mutable, ever changing, unstable, even incoherent, combining high and low, academic and popular, low and vulgar farce with refined comedy, all of these at once, Molière, as Leon suggests, belongs to all of us, not exclusively to Ces Messieurs de l’Académie. Exhuming Molière, getting him out of the stultifying mausoleum of high culture, remains one of the great joys of working with and playing Molière. —MICHAEl SPINGlER Clark University \ When Broadway Was the Runway: Theater, Fashion, and American Culture. By Marlis Schweitzer. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009. 344 pp. $39.95 cloth. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the interrelatedness of fashion and entertainment is ubiquitous.Whether through product placements in movies, performer spokespersons, or the plethora of magazines, television programs, and Web sites dedicated to the close scrutiny of celebrity fashion, we are inundated with examples of how the entertainment industry is intimately connected to and informed by consumer culture. In When Broadway Was the Runway, theatre historian Marlis Schweitzer traces the emergence of this phenomenon a century earlier by examining the collaborative, and sometimes competitive, relationship between the theatre and other consumer institutions such as department stores as well as “the more intimate interactions among theatre critics, managers , advertisers, designers, performers, and audiences that influenced the circulation and shaped the meaning of theatrical commodities” (10). Through exhaustive research and engaging prose, Schweitzer exposes the role that commercial Broadway theatre played in modern American consumer culture and addresses { 161 } BOOK REV IEwS the experiences of female performers,designers,and consumers negotiating not only their relationship with fashion but also with modern womanhood. Schweitzer artfully interweaves the careful analysis of specific examples, such as a vinegar valentine criticizing matinee girls for their love of fashion, with the contextualizations needed to situate the particular in the larger social and cultural landscape. From the“competing discourses on the relationship between art and commerce” to “the standardization and rationalization of labor processes” and from “the effect of foreign commodities on American industry ” to “the growing influence of the female consumer,” Schweitzer deftly explains changes in professional theatre and gender norms (14). Following in the footsteps of historians such as Dorothy Chansky, Nan Enstad, and Kathy Peiss, Schweitzer shows how concerns over the feminization of cultural institutions fueled the devaluation of female tastes and interests, such as the matinee girl’s proclivity toward large hats and frothy romances. She then turns her attention to the symbiotic relationship between the department store and the theatre.Tracking late-nineteenth-century business partnerships on the Ladies’ Mile and the development of separate although still interconnected shopping and entertainment districts (Fifth Avenue and Fortysecond Street, respectively), Schweitzer addresses the gendering of consumption in New York City, showing how spectacles of consumer fantasy in both arenas took place against the backdrop of labor unrest. Creative staging and display techniques were used to divert attention away from social strife, offering instead “a new social imaginary that privileged individual choice and expression over collective social advancement” (80). While the department store employed theatrically influenced show windows to dramatize their merchandise, Broadway’s commercial theatres relied upon actresses as the primary vehicle for fashion display and as objects of desire. Due to the popularity of theatrical realism , actresses had to sport designer fashions rather than imitations. Actresses such as Ethel Barrymore, Jane Cowl, and Maxine Elliott rose to the occasion, becoming style icons whose opening nights drew society women, dressmakers...