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{ 125 } BOOK REV IEwS putting visible reality on stage, but by undermining it with a yearning to discover through performance a humanity that . . . could not be realized” in the alienating venue of naturalist theatre or, for that matter, in any life (174). Through a close examination of Wilde’s textual revisions of his plays,viewed in the context of the author’s private life as well as contemporary political complexities , along with an overarching view of the influence and significance of the changing concepts of gender identity, Powell provides in Acting Wilde: Vic­ torian Sexuality, Theatre, and Oscar Wilde an important contribution not only to the body of Wilde scholarship but also to the ever-expanding studies of gender identity and performativity as a means to self-identity. —KAREN C. BlANSFIElD Dramaturg, Deep Dish Theater Chapel Hill, NC http://www.deepdishtheater.org/ \ Highbrow/Lowdown: Theater, Jazz, and the Making of the New Middle Class. By David Savran. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2009. viii + 326 pp. $35.00 cloth. In an essay tracing major changes in twentieth-century American theatre, Paul DiMaggio observes that film killed the theatrical“road,”simultaneously capturing most of its audiences and creating a vast new public for dramatic entertainment .“Without competition from commercial producers,”he notes,“those who would elevate theater to art inherited the stage by default”(“Cultural Boundaries and Structural Change: The Extension of the High Culture Model to Theater, Opera, and the Dance, 1900–1940,” in Cultivating Differences: Symbolic Bound­ aries and the Making of Inequality, ed. Michele Lamont and Marcel Fournier [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992], 29). Those practitioners, critics, and audiences keen on such “elevation” are the heart of David Savran’s stunningly smart new book. At first blush, this project might seem straightforward enough. The genteel reader of the nineteenth century morphs into the serious modernist of the twentieth; the Little Theatre births a taste for experimental work and the need for it to be difficult enough to require university study on both sides of the footlights; modern dramatic literature claims its rightful place among other serious art work, and Eugene O’Neill’s quick succession Pulitzer Prizes seal the deal. But wait. The biggest theatre phenomenon to germinate in the 1920s was { 126 } BOOK REV IEwS the so-called integrated musical, and no theatre historian—whatever his or her aesthetic preferences—could deny that musicals were then and are now the major live theatre draw. How can these two arcs be reconciled? Savran’s answer is jazz, but jazz, just like live theatre, was a contested sphere in the 1920s, and one of the major achievements of Highbrow/Lowdown is its refusal to simplify complicated rubrics. “Jazz,” writes Savran,“given its many manifestations, guises, contexts, and performance venues . . . represented the most significant form of cross-mediated performance in the 1920s: a form that undermined the autonomy of dance and concert music, cabaret, social dancing, vaudeville, revue, and narrative theater. It was, in short, less a discrete style than a musical and social energy linking all these performance practices” (16). Jazz as music had, to be sure, certain formal properties, which Savran outlines, and as music it was associated with African Americans, although its influences were also Latin American. So ubiquitous were jazz’s “many manifestations” that “all the debates in the 1920s about American modernism (musical or otherwise) seemed to pivot around jazz”and a preoccupation “with questions about the character of national tradition” (69). Broadly speaking, these questions were whether American meant “negroid,” whether a machine ethic now damned the masses to being cogs on an assembly line, and whether there was any way to maintain a difference between high and low arts. Savran’s answers to all the above questions are “yes and no.” While white America may have preferred the“sweet”(white) jazz of Irving Berlin, Paul Whiteman , and George Gershwin to the “hot” jazz created by blacks for blacks, Savran notes the impossibility of ascertaining “racial provenance” (28). Gershwin’s Tip Toes and Lady, Be Good (the latter featuring“Fascinating Rhythm”) are one syncopated step away from being vaudeville revues, but Gershwin’s “classical” bona fides had been assured with the composition...

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