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  • Changed for Good: A Feminist History of the Broadway Musical by Stacy Wolf
  • Naomi Graber
Changed for Good: A Feminist History of the Broadway Musical. By Stacy Wolf. pp. xii+306 (Oxford University Press, New York and Oxford, 2011, $24.95. ISBN 978-0-19-537824-5.)

When reading the American musical, it might seem a daunting task to turn away from the [End Page 367] ‘boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl back’ plot that dominates the genre. However, this is the challenge that Stacy Wolf takes up in this book. Rather, she draws attention to another story often lurking beneath the musical’s veneer of heterosexual romance: girl meets girl, girl befriends girl, girls learn something from one another, and in doing so, are ‘changed for good’. By focusing on girl–girl interactions among both characters on stage and fans off stage, Wolf presents an intriguing look at this aspect of musical theatre and its devotees.

Drawing on the work of Susan McClary, Wolf takes the idea of ‘conventions’ that ‘tell the audience what a number means in a specific place in the show’ (p. 4) as her point of departure to produce feminist/queer readings of Broadway musicals from the 1950s to the present. She understands these two terms as intimately connected, defining queer as that which ‘acquires meaning from its oppositional relation to the norm’, encompassing ‘intense female homosocialites, friendships, intimacies, and kinships that are performed in a given musical’ (p. 18). She examines the female duet in the 1950s; the figure of the single girl in the 1960s; the ensemble number in the 1970s, the overwhelming scenography of the 1980s; and the I am/I want and eleven-o’-clock numbers in the 1990s. The final two chapters depart from this structure. The penultimate one presents a reading of the two female protagonists of Stephen Schwartz’s Wicked (2003), Elphaba and Galinda, as a queer couple according to the conventions enumerated earlier in the book, and the final chapter explores internet communities of ‘girl’ fans—defined as young women, aged 12 to 20—and their relationships with Wicked and its continuing parade of performers in the two lead roles.

In some ways, Changed for Good is a sequel to Wolf ’s previous book, A Problem like Maria: Gender and Sexuality in the Broadway Musical (Ann Arbor, 2002), which explores queer readings of musical theatre divas. That may account for the somewhat odd choice to begin in the 1950s and go through to the present, given that A Problem like Maria focuses largely on the 1930s through to the 1960s, and covers similar ground. Even so, given that Wolf acknowledges that the conventions of modern musical theatre trace their roots back to the Rodgers and Hammerstein musicals of the 1940s, this would seem to call for an analysis of that pair’s approaches to gender and female relationships, of which there are many examples. Other musicals of the 1940s such as Kurt Weill, Moss Hart, and Ira Gershwin’s Lady in the Dark (1941) and Irving Berlin’s Annie Get your Gun (1946) also laid the foundations for the frame work—both in terms of drama and of gender roles—of Broadway musicals, yet these shows are largely absent from Wolf ’s analyses as well.

Wolf ’s use of the idea of conventions to illuminate aspects of certain shows produces some interesting readings. Her observation that the series of duets between Elphaba and Galinda in Wicked constructs the pair as a queer couple (p. 198), when read in the context of the heterosexual tropes established set by Rodgers and Hammerstein, reveals the historical place of the later show within the larger narrative of integration that dominates the history of the American musical. However, the idea of conventions also forces Wolf into unconvincing interpretations. She reads the fact that Charity (of Cy Coleman and Dorothy Fields’s Sweet Charity, 1966) ends the play alone as the musical’s way of punishing her for wanting to give up swinging singledom for a heterosexual romance (p. 64). In the light of the inability of Charity’s fiancé, Oscar, to accept her numerous past lovers and...

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