Hard Times: The Adult Musical in 1970S New York City by Elizabeth L. Wollman (review)

In Hard Times, Elizabeth Wollman examines a subgenre of the American musical with an informed and careful eye, combining attention to detail with a broader focus on context. She is not squeamish in her writing, but rather takes these musicals on their own merit, making in the process a significant contribution to our understanding of this often footnoted though seldom discussed genre of the American musical.

In her brief, thoughtful introduction, the author credits Jonathan Ward with coining the phrase “adult musicals” (4). She defines the term as musicals characterized by “full-frontal nudity, simulated sexual activity, sexually suggestive or explicit dialogue or musical numbers, or plotlines containing what contemporary ratings boards would label as strong sexual content” (2). She concludes by observing that “cultures choose to remember” (8), which implies that we have a sense of agency not only about what we choose to remember, but how it gets remembered. Wollman has selected the topic of the adult musical in this particular time period to help us better understand it within a wider cultural, historical, and artistic frame of reference. By pulling it out from the shadows, she helps us to add a piece to the puzzle of how we went from the so-called Golden Age of the Musical to the contemporary musical of today.

The book is divided into four general topics, beginning with the first chapter, which provides the reader with an overview of antecedents to the adult musical, starting from the burlesque traditions in the nineteenth century and the nudity in the tableaux vivant of the Ziegfeld Follies. She describes at length We’d Rather Switch, the first adult musical in New York City. With that as background and context, she then discusses what is familiar to most readers, Hair and Oh! Calcutta!, each of which provided the middle-class Broadway audience of their day with just enough revolution to excite, but not disturb, and with a voyeuristic titillation based on white male sexual fantasy that teased without giving offense.

Chapters 2 and 3 focus on her second general topic: the development of the gay musical. As with the opening chapter, the author provides context by discussing the significance and importance to gay theatre of the Caffe Cino and the play The Boys in the Band. With the work of composer-writer Al Carmines and the Judson Poet’s Theater, she presents The Faggot as “the first commercial musical in New York City devoted entirely to contemporary gay issues” (52–53). Her discussion of The Faggot, as well as Let My People Come and Lovers, suggests a serious attempt by theatre artists to engage in adult themes around sexuality. These musicals did not so much air formerly taboo topics to “revolutionize” the theatre, but rather adapted musical theatre conventions to adult themes to open audiences to potentially shocking topics in ways that were entertaining and artistically valid.

Her third topic—the feminist musical—occupies her most disturbing chapters. They are disturbing because the raisons d’être for these musicals and the patronizing response of many of their contemporary fellow artists continue to resonate strongly in much of our theatre today. Again, she contextualizes her subject by dissecting the conservative, paternal, and dismissive way in which the female characters in the musical Hair are portrayed. For all of its liberatory approach to music, politics, language, and drugs, the musical excludes women from these opportunities. Wollman succinctly summarizes this period by noting the fact that “so few overtly feminist musicals were commercially produced at the time relates as much to the cultural anxiety about gender and power as it does to the American musical’s traditional social conservatism” (90). Her descriptions of feminist musicals—Mod Donna: A Space-Age Musical Soap, The Club, and I’m Getting My Act Together and Taking It on the Road—detail how each show was put together, the gendered responses offered by many of their critics, and the...