Studies in Musical Theatre - Volume 12, Issue 3, 2018

This article demonstrates the queer potential and pleasure produced by the character Fiyero in Stephen Schwartz and Winnie Holzman’s Wicked (2003). I mobilize two primary frameworks to examine Fiyero’s queerness; the first half of the article views Fiyero in the context of queer theories of temporality and utopia, while the second half is interested in the deep cultural history of gay men’s relationships with Broadway musicals. This analysis produces both theoretical and historical implications of Fiyero’s character as I explore how his representation disrupts heteronormative rituals and aspects of the social order, as well as how he produces a valuable figure for the communities of gay men that have historically developed around musical theatre. The queer possibility of Wicked’s women has been examined extensively in past scholarship – particularly through the insights of Stacy Wolf – and this article expands upon this previous work to account for the role of Fiyero in the musical and the queer possibilities he produces.

Sting, aka Gordon Sumner (b. 1951 in Wallsend, close to Newcastle upon Tyne), is a famous songwriter and performer who grew up in a Catholic environment. Although he does not identify as Catholic anymore, the religious images and notions he grew up with appear rather frequently in his work. This article explores examples of religious imagery in his album The Last Ship (2013), and in the musical of the same name based on the album. To date, the musical has been produced from two very different books: a US version by John Logan and Brian Yorkey (2014), and a UK one by Lorne Campbell (2018). The US version includes many religious notions, and in particular, includes a priest as one of its central figures. The UK version has little to no religion in it. The article suggests that each of these versions reflects a certain historical moment in the life of Wallsend, from where, supposedly, the ‘last ship’ was launched.

In 2007, the distinguished musical theatre scholar Bruce Kirle died unexpectedly in Manhattan. As a tribute to his contribution to this field of scholarship, the Music-Theatre-Dance Focus Group of the Association for Theatre in Higher Education (ATHE) renamed its competitive scholarly debut panel for him. This is now the tenth season in which three prize-winning entries to the competition have been presented both as conference papers (at the 2018 ATHE Conference in Boston) and as articles in Studies in Musical Theatre. Barbara Wallace Grossman, respondent to the papers at the ATHE conference, provides a brief introduction.

This article explores how musical theatre pedagogy might begin to dismantle modes of practice that perpetuate exclusion and a dualistic, gendered perspective. I draw on my experience of directing postgraduate musical theatre students at Mountview in a production of Pippin (1972). Casting a trans man as Pippin – in many respects an archetypal male hero role – set in motion a process of queering and subverting norms. However, casting is only one element of creating an inclusive practice: in this work, I developed a hybrid approach that honoured students’ identities and experiences and took a critical, political view of the material being presented. My approach brings together Elin Diamond’s feminist theoretical framing of Brecht with queer concepts including heteronormativity and chrononormativity, which are then applied to David Barnett’s practical explanation of a Brechtian process. I argue that feminist and queer approaches can work together to meaningfully critique hegemonic forces influencing musical theatre training and production processes.

Since their origins in 1925, the Radio City Rockettes have been a self-proclaimed sisterhood that has long been viewed as wholesome family entertainment. Although dancers for the Rockettes have had to submit to stringent guidelines of physicality, personality and uniformity, most alumnae are quick to wax poetic on their years in the line. This article investigates the meaning and the making of such sisterhood by looking at how a ‘community of practice’ is created through the structure of the company and the shared labour involved in precision dance. Their group dynamic and joint performance goals, along with the stable workplace and practices of Radio City Music Hall, shaped how the Rockettes’ identity was formed and propagated, in a way that differed from other more sexualized dance companies, which existed in the same era.

By comparing John Waters’ 1988 film Hairspray with its adaptations narratologically, previous studies of the film have treated the process of adaptation as a zero-sum game that diminishes the political stakes with each iteration. With this article, I suggest that generic tools such as mise-en-scène and choreography have the capacity to transform discourses instead of merely supplanting them. To better understand the discursive spaces opened up by the trans-medial adaptation process, I read the opening scene of Waters’ film and its three subsequent adaptations as a discourse of the city, following Annette Insdorf’s assertion that a narrative’s first moments reflect significant thematic and aesthetic moves on the part of its creators.