Studies in Musical Theatre - Volume 15, Issue 1, 2021

Missing uses a historical reimagining of the murder of JonBenét Ramsey as a launchpad to examine what it is like for a woman of colour to be inundated in a sexist and racist media and cultural spin-cycle. The script tells the story of a young Black girl, Nancy, coming of age and absorbing these cultural messages. In Act 1, Nancy, a child beauty pageant contestant, learns about the death of her friend, JonBenét. Nancy is simultaneously drawn in, obsessed and repulsed by the media storm that follows. In Act 2, indelibly shaped by this childhood event and inspired by her role model Diane Sawyer (pageant winner turned news anchor), Nancy has grown up to be a reporter. She now finds herself peddling similarly problematic stories for ratings and clickbait. Nancy struggles increasingly with both the erasure of identities like her own and the salacious eagerness through which the media (now her job) capitalizes on violence against women in general. The title Missing stems from ‘missing white woman syndrome’ a phrase coined by PBS journalist Gwen Ifill and subsequently adopted by social scientists to refer to the immensely uneven media coverage favouring victims who are upper/middle-class white girls/women in contrast to the coverage and framing of victims of colour. A key goal of the play is to underscore and then question the dominant media representations of women whose stories garner mainstream attention. Whose stories get told? How are they framed? Who, in turn, are marginalized and ignored? How can artists engage representational inequity without inadvertently piling more attention on the already visible? Musicals can and should tackle questions of systemic inequity and inclusion; doing so requires more than positioning protagonists of colour in a theatrical world that fails to acknowledge the systemic realities of our actual one. Missing, a collaborative project in process, tackles these questions.

Review of: Children, Childhood, and Musical Theater, Donelle Ruwe and James Leve (eds) (2020)

New York: Routledge, 264 pp.,

ISBN 978-1-47247-533-6, h/bk, $128.00