Studies in Musical Theatre - Volume 12, Issue 1, 2018

Female impersonator and musical theatre star Julian Eltinge (1881–1941) was as formidable a draw on the musical stages as George M. Cohan in the first decades of the twentieth century. Eltinge headlined a series of musical comedies and revues, including The Fascinating Widow (1911) and Cohan and Harris Minstrels (1908). His musical comedy diva performances were inspired by the Gibson Girl image, and he enacted cross-racial performances in musical revues. As a man-impersonating-a-woman-impersonating-a-diva, he underscored the performativity of gender and race. In this article, I examine a different kind of diva performance through Eltinge’s performance: the ambivalent diva. As a white and – vigorously proclaimed – heterosexual man, Eltinge undermined his own rebelliousness through the eventual divulgence of his masculinity and subsequent repudiation of the cultural identities he performed. Eltinge’s unassailable performance ultimately and forcefully symbolized the political, social and material tensions of the Progressive Era.

Among the most pervasive mythologies of the Broadway diva is her evocation of indomitable agelessness. This article considers two musicals that both affirm and complicate the myth of the invincible Broadway diva by focusing explicitly on the ageing of their female protagonists: 1969’s Coco, a bio-musical about the life of Coco Chanel, starring Katharine Hepburn; and 1970’s Applause, based on All About Eve, starring Lauren Bacall as Margo Channing. Engaging with the cultural contexts of the women’s liberation movement and the Vietnam-era Broadway nostalgia boom, both Coco and Applause appeared as glamorous comeback vehicles for their late-middle-aged, Old Hollywood stars. In the musicals’ frank obsession with age, and with the ageing body of the diva, Coco and Applause both anticipated Sondheim’s Follies (1971), and channelled their creators’ anxieties about the fading cultural status of the Broadway musical (and its Old Hollywood counterparts) in the face of the youthful counterculture.

The Color Purple’s 2015 revival departs from Broadway musical conventions by showcasing not just one singular diva, but by depicting the performative prowess of three different divas – Celie, Sofia and Shug – in relation to one another. The revival stages divaness as a liberatory mode of relations among women. Divas here act as facilitators of female relationships that are otherwise foreclosed by racism and patriarchy. Throughout the revival, expressions of diva virtuosity serve to forge and solidify – rather than isolate the diva from – liberatory female bonds. The production’s promotional materials and theatrical elements – including its conventional musical numbers, its unconventional trinity of diva performers and director John Doyle’s signature character-focused approach to ensemble acting, Brechtian staging and minimalist design – amplify the centrality of diva relations at the heart of story’s womanist aesthetics and upend traditional understandings of the Broadway diva by staging divaness as a mode of womanist relations.

Although current musical theatre scholarship rarely anthologizes or analyses the work of dancer/choreographer/director Katherine Dunham, she is the prototype of a Broadway dance diva. As such, she subverted marginalizing norms to fully realize and exploit a validated self-expressive model of authoritative and authorial power on both the commercial and concert theatre/dance stages. In the process, Dunham up-ended diva-muse and gendered labour paradigms, confronting and superseding restrictive constructs of gender and normative femininity. As a woman of colour, she used her star power to ‘dance’ blended, diasporic narratives of race and multiculturalism, as well as bridge highly subjective and fluid genre demarcations and art/entertainment binaries in the dance and theatre arenas. Such signature hallmarks – identity, control, transgression, personal comment and singular talent – bespeak a formidable and groundbreaking model of dance divadom.

Working from the terms and examples set in musical theatre, opera and ballet, this article expands the definition of Broadway’s diva to include the powerful performances of Broadway’s dancing divas Gwen Verdon, Chita Rivera and Donna McKechnie. Drawing on gender and queer studies in performance, musical theatre studies and dance studies, this article reframes the musical theatre diva in a way that acknowledges the virtuosity of the body as tantamount to that of the voice. By highlighting the dancing diva, I make a case for her as collaborator, translator and artist of her own instead of simply as a muse for male directors, choreographers and composers. Finally, by featuring Verdon, Rivera and McKechnie, I point to the dancing diva’s essential impact on the evolving artistry of musical theatre in the twentieth century by highlighting their contributions to the narrative power of dance and their roles in establishing unique expectations for the triple-threat performer.

Despite her continued presence on American television, the Broadway diva’s theatrical grandiosity has often pushed up against television form and displayed a contentious relationship with stylistic specificities of the box-bound medium. This article posits that the twenty-first-century television industry has shifted in various ways, allowing for a more nuanced symbiotic relationship between the diva and television programming. Old and new divas alike have become staples of network, cable and streaming content, with such iconic figures as Liza Minnelli, Elaine Stritch, Patti LuPone and Audra McDonald appearing and reappearing on TVs and mobile devices across America. Importantly and much more often than in previous eras, these Broadway divas have been able to embrace their true divadom across genres (e.g. live musicals, melodramas and sitcoms). Highlighting a perfect storm of shifts in marketing, genre (gendered genre) and viewing habits, I position millennial television as a natural home for Broadway’s grande dames.

Lin-Manuel Miranda, of Hamilton fame, confounds the traditional definition of the musical theatre diva in both his identity and his methods of modern, digital fan engagement. His personal attributes do not fit the most obvious definitions of divadom: he is cis-male and most scholarship on divas presumes an outsized femininity; he is an author, whereas we think of divas as solely performers; he is not vocally powerful and divas’ voices are commonly overwhelming and strong. However, not in spite of the fact, but rather because Miranda troubles the traditional understanding of the diva, he also inspires passionately devoted fans, one of the most crucial elements defining divadom. He engages these fans with his masterful use of the Internet and social media. Miranda, by finding the perfect expression of his multi-layered identity online, offers an instructive model for understanding how the digital world provides a re-articulation of the notion of Broadway divadom.

Agnes de Mille: Telling Stories in Broadway Dance, Kara Anne Gardner (2017)

New York: Oxford University Press, 231 pp.,

ISBN: 9780199733682, h/bk, $36.96

The Disney Musical on Stage and Screen: Critical Approaches from ‘Snow White’ to ‘Frozen’, George Rodosthenous (ed.) (2017)

London: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 257 pp.,

ISBN: 9781474234160, p/bk, $21.59