The Great White Way: Race and the Broadway Musical by Warren Hoffman (review)

In a musical theatre–themed episode in the sixth season of the reality show Ru Paul’s Drag Race, drag superstar and hostess Ru Paul quips: “The Great White Way: Why it gotta be white?” Ru Paul asks an appropriate, if unoriginal question; in 2014, an articulation of the American musical’s whiteness seems almost redundant, or at the very least unremarkable. Author Warren Hoffman preempts this very critique in the introduction to his book The Great White Way: Race and the Broadway Musical, admitting that “[t]o read the musical for its normative whiteness might seem either an obvious choice or a nonissue” (11), although he continues on to cite the absence of any other sustained scholarly look at Broadway’s whiteness as rationale enough for his own detailed study. Throughout the book Hoffman’s writing is clear, and he balances pointed critiques of the musicals he investigates with his love for them, which leads him to be successful at catching and holding his reader’s attention on an important subject that, in less skilled hands, could have been entirely unrevealing.

Hoffman acknowledges the significant contributions to the form and content of musical theatre by African Americans, Jews, and other racial and ethnic minorities, but he maintains throughout that the American musical has been primarily created by, for, and about white people. Over six chapters (plus “Overture” and “Exit Music” sections) that together cover the period from 1927 to 2012, he explores his central argument: “Plainly put, the history of the American musical is the history of white identity in the United States” (3). To support this thesis, Hoffman first reviews the dramaturgy of the musical theatre itself, describing the way that it tends to obscure and upstage its own ideological content with spectacle, song, and dance. He also clarifies that race can be said to be a component of any musical, although most critics and audiences note race as vital to the musical only when a character explicitly says (or sings) so. Thus Showboat, South Pacific, and West Side Story are often marked as major artworks on the subject of race, whereas Oklahoma!, The Music Man, and Hello, Dolly! are often mistaken as having nothing to do with it. In the American musical, Hoffman asserts, whiteness is able to hide in plain sight, and white identity is “shaped, protected, and upheld by this art form” (ibid.).

Hoffman covers much of the American musical’s history in his book via cleverly selected case studies in chapters that examine, for example, “Performing Race in Showboat,” “Forging Whiteness in Oklahoma! and Annie Get Your Gun,” and “The Racial Politics of West Side Story and The Music Man.” He combines close readings of the book, music, and lyrics of each musical with an exploration of source material, production history, and the shows’ critical and popular reception. Later chapters address phenomena like color-blind and interracial casting, all-black casts, and the current trend of creating revivals with heavily revised content, such as Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Flower Drum Song, which when it opened in 2002 featured a new libretto by David Henry Hwang. To buoy his claims, Hoffman excerpts in short though productive fashion the ideas from key players in the interdisciplinary fields of critical race theory and whiteness studies, such as Richard Dyer, Barbara Fields, David Roediger, and George Lipsitz.

One strength of The Great White Way is Hoffman’s ability to make even the most familiar of musicals seem unfamiliar to readers by providing new meanings and resonances for dialogue and lyrics and revealing other visions of what these classic shows might have been. In one chapter, he describes in rich detail East Side Story as an early version of West Side Story that pitted Catholics against Jews. Research into lyricist Edward Kleban’s archives also propels Hoffman to do compelling and wonderfully disorienting work in his chapter titled “A Chorus Line: The Benetton of Broadway Musicals.” By examining two numbers cut...