A Problem Like Maria: Gender and Sexuality in the American Musical (review)

The musical theatre is becoming an increasingly exciting scholarly field. While other areas of American popular culture (film, television, fashion, and advertising, to name a few) have been the subjects of intense analysis for nearly three decades, the musical theatre has largely escaped the notice of cultural studies scholars. A partial explanation for this oversight is indicated in David Savran's discussion of the liminal space of "middlebrow" culture—too naïve for those interested in high-art forms, such as opera, and too "bourgeois" for those interested in mass media and the working class. In short, there has a been a stigma attached to the musical theatre, a kind of embarrassment on the part of those intellectuals who enjoy it, a reluctance to admit engaging in the guilty pleasure of singing along to The Sound of Music in the car or crying at the end of Fiddler on the Roof when, as an intellectual, one really should be frequenting more avant-garde or experimental theatrical venues. Scholars of the musical theatre are just now coming out of the proverbial closet and insisting that the field be taken seriously.

The closet metaphor seems particularly apt as the initial attempts to open up the field are emerging from the world of queer studies. One of the most important recent works on the topic is D.A. Miller's lovely essay Place For Us (Harvard UP, 1998) that analyzes the relationship between gay men and the musical, taking as its starting point the very stigma that has prevented cultural critics from taking the musical seriously. Stacy Wolf's new book, A Problem Like Maria, likewise begins with an autobiographical confession about the importance of musicals to the construction of her own lesbian identity.

A more extensive analytical treatment of the musical than Miller's, A Problem Like Maria offers one of the first discussions of the musical theatre that is grounded in cultural theory and scholarly methods, sets new standards for rigorous readings of musicals, and provides a framework and context for this emerging field. The book explores the role of women in the musicals of the 1950s and 60s by focusing on the public personae and performances of the major female stars of the postwar era: Mary Martin, Ethel Merman, Julie Andrews, and Barbra Streisand. Wolf views these stars through a feminist, lesbian lens in order to understand why, in a deeply antifeminist era, the Broadway musical celebrated strong women characters who flouted traditional gender expectations. While Wolf does discuss specific plays and characters, her interest is more in the performance of these women as women and as sexual beings—both on and off stage—than in the formal, literary, or musical aspects of the roles they played.

Each of the four is fascinating in her own right, and until now none of them has received the kind of scholarly attention they all deserve. Wolf's analysis of Martin's performance in Peter Pan, for example, is especially perceptive. She compares Martin's cross-dressing to that of the nineteenth-century actresses Sarah Bernhardt and Charlotte Cushman, both of whom played Hamlet, but points out that while no one ever doubted that Hamlet was a man (even when played by a woman), Peter Pan's gender and sexuality are much more complicated. Peter Pan forces the audience to see double—to see a boy and a woman simultaneously—and this kind of seeing gives rise to lesbian interpretations that Wolf handles with admirable skill. Likewise, while Ethel Merman was unquestionably heterosexual, Wolf shows how the particularities of her performance style—gesture, posture, singing voice—make her an unusual type for 1950s popular culture, which in Hollywood movies, television, and radio valorized a much more passive brand of femininity. Wolf's analysis of Merman's role in Gypsy is particularly...