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

By her own account, Stacy Wolf wrote A Problem Like Maria to try to make sense of her own passionate attachment to mid-twentieth-century Broadway musicals. Given the widespread understanding of these productions as affirming a dominant American culture that was often racist, sexist, and homophobic, she wonders how she and so many other women she knows could "adore musicals, even as they consider themselves feminists and/or identify as lesbian" (vii).

Wolf concludes that many Broadway musicals of this period were internally contradictory in that they simultaneously promoted conservative values and offered representations of women as strong, empowered, and able to escape containment in normative heterosexuality. This contradiction leaves space for spectators to construct alternative readings of characters and narratives, readings that Wolf seeks to theorize. That is, Wolf's project is to reconstruct the queer readings that are readily available to anyone who chooses to analyze these texts from a feminist and lesbian perspective. She focuses on four stars—Mary Martin, Ethel Merman, Julie Andrews, and Barbra Streisand—who were widely popular with mainstream audiences and who became lesbian icons as well, teasing out the ways their complex performances enabled them to appeal powerfully to differently situated spectators.

The author has set herself an ambitious and difficult task. She acknowledges that her evidence is less than ideal; since she never saw any of these performers live, she must reconstruct their performances from the traces they have left in original cast recordings, television specials, photographs, contemporary reviews, and the publicity discourses that created these stars' public images. Further, she has no ethnographic evidence from viewers who did see the shows live from which she might construct a profile of how actual spectators read these texts. Wolf's solution to these limitations is imaginative and provocative. She invents a theoretical "lesbian" viewing position, the quotation marks signifying her recognition that such a viewing position is open to anyone who chooses to read the musicals in this way. From this perspective she rereads each of these four stars and some of their signature performances, illuminating exactly how certain performances might "signify lesbian" to some viewers. She takes as a premise Diana Fuss's argument that there is no "natural" way to read a text and thus that conventional "straight" readings of these musicals and their star performers are no more legitimate than the "lesbian" readings she offers (25).

To help make her case Wolf draws extensively from work in film studies and queer studies, fields in which there are well-established theories of spectatorship, stardom, and lesbian representation. She is a lively and well-informed guide through these extensive literatures, which she uses persuasively in her readings of the four stars.¹ She also provides extensive historical context for her readings, helpfully outlining the changing social and cultural history of the postwar period and the history and structure of the American musical. Wolf argues that one crucial characteristic of midcentury musicals is their representation of women as strong and active figures whose physical and vocal power and considerable personal agency were unusual in 1950s popular culture. Each of the four stars is then analyzed for the ways that her specific performances and the publicity discourses that surrounded them lend themselves to "lesbian" readings.

Wolf first argues that Mary Martin's tomboyish roles—most notably as Nellie Forbush in South Pacific and as Peter Pan—embodied a joyous gender unconventionality that a "lesbian" reader can interpret and identify with as queer. Further, Wolf analyzes the ways that much publicity about Martin contained hints that she herself was lesbian or bisexual and that her marriage to her manager, Richard Halliday, was a "passing" marriage that benefited and protected both of them. These discourses reinforce the possibility of a queer reading of Martin's characters.

Wolf then turns to Ethel Merman, the great belter whose vocal power, "strong, undeniably masculine style," and stereotypical working-class characteristics make available a reading of her...