"Something Better than This": Sweet Charity and the Feminist Utopia of Broadway Musicals

"Something Better than This": Sweet Charity and the Feminist Utopia of Broadway Musicals STACY WOLF The [¢05 conjure up a utopian landscape. a period in which social transformation seemed a cultural reality and a political possibility. - Hilary Radncr( l) Man canno/ live on Utopias alone. But as Oscar Wilde so shrewdly remarked. a map of · (he world thai does not include Utopia is not even worth glancing Qt. I once had a glimpse o/thot map in real time. - Christopher Hitchens (qtd. in Radncr I) There's gotta be something better than this. There's gotta be something berter to do. And when Ifind me something beller to do, I'm gonna get up; I'm gonllQ get out; I'm gonna get up, get (Jut and do it! - CharilY, Nickie, ",nd Helene (Sweet Charity 50) I 960S UTOPIAN DESIRES From the bitter, painful, almost parodic strip of Ethel Merman's spectacular star turn in Gypsy in 1959 to the onstage nudity and frank sexuality of Hair in 1969, the American Broadway musical in the 1960s experienced a seismic transformalion of style, content, and form.' As the United Stales became an increasingly wealthy global power; as il expanded its involvement in the Vielnam War; as it witnessed the rise and then the fall of its hopes for the future in the figures of John F, Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr.; as it struggled to provide African-Americans and women with an equal place in society, the most American of cultural forms was radically altered, too. According to Gerald Mast, "The American musical, a more conseryative and retrospective cultural medium than rock music or cult movies, was also on the move - away Modern Drama, 4T2 (Summer 2004) 309 310 STACY WOLF . from stories and toward self-consciousness, away from variants within a stable form and toward an exploration of its forms and ils past" (320). While the Broadway musical may have undergone significant changes in the 1960s, it is hardly the performance form most frequently associated with progressive social movements. Rather, alternative or experimental performance groups like the Living Theatre and the Black Arts Movement, with articulated political goals for social change, provide ample performance examples of the decade's cultural revolution. The intentions of these groups, as well as the Open Theatre, El Teatro Campesino, and the San Francisco Mime Troupe, all of which formed in the 1960s, were unabashedly utopian. In his famous 1966 essay, "The Revolutionary Theatre," Amiri Baraka exhorts, "The Revolutionary Theatre should force change: it should be change" (1164). In "The Black Arts Movement" (1968), Larry Neal affirms, "For theatre is potentially the most social of all of the arts. It is an integral part of the socializing process" (190). R.G. Davis writes of the San Francisco Mime Troupe's 1965 "guerilla theatre" tactics, "There is a vision in this theatre [...Jto continue presenting moral plays and to confront hypocrisy in the society" (150). As Sally Banes describes the utopian purposefulness of Greenwich Village artists in 1963. "To create community seemed to demand the presence of a body politic, not only in the metaphoric meaning of a consensual community, but literally in the sense of a political body - a person rendered political by physically taking part in the life of the collective enterprise" (Greenwich Village , 39). In contrast to the visionary ideals of avant-garde and political theatres of the I 960s, non-musical Broadway theatre in the same decade apparently suffered a decline. Many artists affiliated with alternative performance movements harshly criticized what they saw as the moral, political, and theatrical demise of Broadway. Richard Schechner, the founder of The Performance Group and editor of the Tulane Drama Review (renamed the Drama Review when Schechner moved to New York University), for example, commented on the significance of the critical and commercial triumph of Edward Albee's Who's Afraid a/Virginia Woolf? which opened on Broadway in 1962, as evidence of Broadway theatre's decadence: "The American theatre, our theatre, is so hungry. so voracious, so corrupt, so morally blind, so perverse, that Virginia Woolf is a success" (qtd. in Bottoms 177). Musical theatre fared no belter, and perhaps was even worse. Just...