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

344 REVIEWS anatomize the professional culture of theatre itself, its habitus and intrinsic "ethos," that Barba (if not always his followers) believes trumps all preceding identifications with nation or ethnicity, while Watson, unusually for an "insider"-scholar, is unsparing in his critique of Barba's autocratic status within his theatrical "micropolis," holding this structure responsible for much of the embaulement of Barba's establishment against productive questioning from post-colonial theorists. The key critical and theoretical essays of Negotiating Cultures, however, seem more limited than illuminated by the terms of the intercultural debate that prompts them. Caught within the familiar and Manichaean antinomies of this controversy, the authors are unable to argue for the kind of common methodological or philosophical ground that might ultimately recoup elements of Barba's cosmopolitan theatrical ethic for a contemporary and ethical cosmopolitical theatre. Where, for example, Watson defends theater anthropology against charges ofcultural appropriation, he debunks the admittedly simplistic, one-way, "theft" model of interculturalist critics by suggesting that it assumes the "passivity" of non-Western "victims," missing the opportunity to press for a more nuanced understanding of the transnational cultural economics of theatre at large - to which Barba's exploration of barter would have much to con- 'tribute - or to theorize the complex nature of agency within a theatrical context. It might be noted that this volume appears to have spent an unfairly long time in the publishing pipeline: few references in the major theoretical essays date after 1996, with the result that their arguments retread much of the ground of the debate from the early 1990S, without the benefit of important recent work such as Rustom Bharucha's theoretically astute Politics of Cultural Practice, or mediating contributions by Una Chaudhuri, Julie Stone Peters, and Joanne Tompkins and Julie Holledge. In sum, however, Negotiating Cultures is a welcome addition to the literature on Eugenio Barba, taking us well beyond the lyrical aphorisms and obfuscatory metaphors that distinguish the "master's" own prolific writing, and offering a richly grounded engagement with the challenges and potentials of intercultural theatrical practice. STACY WOLF. A Problem Like Maria: Gender and Sexuality in the American Musical. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002. Pp. 289, illustrated. $19.95 (Pb); $55.00 (Hb). Reviewed by Robert F. Gross, Hobart and William Smith Col/eges In the last paragraph of A Problem Like Maria, Stacy Wolf describes her book as "a call to take the politics of reception seriously,. as pleasure" (238), and few works of theatre scholarship rival the invigorating mixture of serious inquiry and sheer pleasure to be found in this exhilarating exercise in reading Reviews 345 against the grain. Surveying the complacently hetero-normative terrain of the American musical theatre from the Broadway premiere of South Pacific in 1949 to the movie version of Funny Girl in 1968, Wolf focuses on the work of four of the period's major stars of musical theatre - Mary Martin, Ethel Merman , Julie Andrews, and Barbra Streisand - and claims it for lesbian spectatorship . To appropriate this seemingly inhospitable territory of Cold War conformity for queer delight would be an impossible task for most scholars. In taking it on, Wolf exhibits the pluck, resourcefulness, and cockeyed optimism of the leading ladies she celebrates, and carries the reader along as she discovers the bisexual and tomboy in Martin, the butch in Merman, the femme in Andrews, and the queer Jewish woman in Streisand. The rules governing such resistant reading, if indeed there are any, are certainly not those of positivist historiography. Wolf never claims that any of these performers were lesbians or that any of the characters they played are. Instead, she shows how these figures appear when viewed as the objects of lesbian spectatorship. The goal of her reading is not subordination to historical fact, but celebration of the vigor of lesbian interpretation. She lays out a fascinating array of inferences drawn from lyrics, perfonnances, interviews, fashion spreads, and rumors, sometimes drawing from the flimsiest of evidence, and even from omissions. Her keen eye for details of posture, gesture, and clothing in her stars, her acute ear for their vocal qualities and inflections, and her ability to deftly appropriate these signs into...