A Problem Like Maria: Gender and Sexuality in the American Musical, and: Lydia Thompson: Queen of Burlesque (review)

Not for me even the "educated guess." Not unless one admits it's just a guess, anyhow.

(Gänzl 2002:x)

In the end, The Sound of Music is a lesbian musical fantasyland.

(Wolf 2002:233)

Both A Problem Like Maria and Lydia Thompson: Queen of Burlesque are explicitly driven by the love of the authors for their subjects. Unfortunately, while going into great detail in describing, explaining, and justifying their admiration, the authors somehow fail to look clearly at the objects of their affections; the writing offers much material for the analysis of the writers, but it presents little in the way of analysis of performance materials. Still, in making a case for herself as a lesbian fan of classical Broadway musicals, in A Problem Like Maria, Stacy Wolf provokes the possibility of a new way of thinking about the undercurrents of transgression: the possible performance of resistance by the heroines of the musicals' heteronormative imperatives. And Gänzl paints a picture of the stars of the 19th century-not so reliably, perhaps, that it might survive as the groundwork for some other academic research, but certainly good for its gossip and its imaginatively engaged rendering of the burlesque milieu. Both authors explicitly present their resistance to performing critical analysis, and consequently both books appear resistant to the performance of critical analysis by the reader.

Indeed, after making it clear that his biography of Lydia Thompson is "a very personal project and one very dear to my heart" (x), Kurt Gänzl immediately and decisively dismisses the academic enterprise as he understands it. The books in the "Forgotten Stars of the Musical Theatre" series, including his own, Gänzl declares as the series' editor, "are not intended to be university theses. You will not find them dotted with a dozen footnotes per page and hung with vast appendices of sources" (x). He continues:

I am sure that is a perfectly legitimate way of writing biography, but it's a way that's never appealed to me and, because I am being allowed to "do it my way" in this series, the paraphernalia of the thesis, of the learned pamphlet, has here been kept to a minimum.

(x)

His project is to present "the facts" of his subject's life:"The decoration, the theorizing, the generalities, and an exaggerated search for (shudder) significance will all be missing" (x).

Lacking even the most rudimentary academic apparatus-footnotes, bibliography, historical signposts, theoretical contexts-and with its rather breathless scene-setting, its personalized renderings of the star's life as well as her career, and Gänzl's personal mixture of affection and affectation, an unsuspecting reader might assume that Gänzl can tell us about Lydia Thompson in such surprising detail because he was there. He adores his subject, he repeatedly tells us, and he wants us to love her with the same fervor. But given the pose he strikes in the series introduction, it is perhaps inevitable that the rhetorical flourishes, the gossipy intimacies by which the author so insistently calls attention to himself make the book appear less a labor of love than a rather frantic, arm-waving attempt by the author to be seen and loved himself.

What struck me, as I attempted to respond to Gänzl's imprecations by positioning myself as a kind of "dear reader," is that Lydia Thompson: Queen of Burlesque is simultaneously old-fashioned and totally of the current moment in performance studies scholarship. On the one hand, the book reads like a parody of a George Bernard Shaw preface, albeit without the social analysis or close-one might say respectful-attention...