Copyright by Michelle Gail Dvoskin 2010 The Dissertation Committee for Michelle Gail Dvoskin Certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation: “Listen to the Stories, Hear it in the Songs”: Musical Theatre as Queer Historiography Committee: Charlotte Canning, Supervisor Stacy Wolf, Co-Supervisor Jill Dolan Michael Kackman Mary Kearney Deborah Paredez “Listen to the Stories, Hear it in the Songs”: Musical Theatre as Queer Historiography by Michelle Gail Dvoskin, B.A.; M.A. Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Texas at Austin May 2010 Dedication To Ellen, for everything. Acknowledgements My first thanks belong to my extraordinary supervisor Stacy Wolf, both for her rigorous, thoughtful, and enthusiastic engagement with my work and for providing such an amazing example of the kind of scholar, writer, mentor, and teacher I hope to become. I am also grateful to my committee members, Charlotte Canning, Jill Dolan, Michael Kackman, Mary Kearney, and Deborah Paredez, all of whom have taught me so much and whose support and feedback have been vital, not just to the development of this project, but to my overall growth as a scholar. I owe a debt of gratitude to all of the faculty and students in the Performance as Public Practice program, past and present, for a range of support over my time here that helped make this project possible. Special thanks to Chase Bringardner, Clare Croft, Zachary Dorsey, Christin Essin, Sarah Myers, and Susanne Shawyer for sharing their experiences and for being living proof that the dissertation can be not only survived, but triumphed over! I am honored to have completed this process with an array of smart, funny, and generally wonderful co- defenders: Claire Canavan, Rebecca Hewitt, Shelley Manis, and Tamara Smith. Kelly Howe and I started this program together, went ABD together, and defended on the same day, and I count myself lucky to have had her as my constant cohort. Other friends and colleagues who offered v intellectual and moral support include April Gentry-Sutterfield, Patrick McKelvey, Erica Nagel, Star Rabinowitz, Claire Sigman, Mary Katherine Stickel, and Meg Sullivan. Angie Ahlgren regularly provided a much-needed voice of reason and perspective. Eleanor Owicki helped me problem-solve when I needed it, and was an enthusiastic cheerleader when I needed that more. She was also a member of my fabulous proofreading team, along with Sandy Goldman, Brian Taulbee, and Emily Wolf. I am very thankful for their generous assistance. Thanks are also due to my family, including my grandfather, Al Gershowitz, my grandmother, Pearl Dvoskin, Stan and Maggie Dvoskin, the extended Glatman clan, and Jan and Gary Guttman, for lots of positive thinking, words of encouragement, and conversations about musical theatre. My sister Heather Dvoskin Stormont turned out to be a musical theatre geek too, and I‘m so glad we have that in common; I‘m also very grateful for her friendship and encouragement throughout this process. I have to thank three people I can always count on for love, help, and support, and whose belief in me kept me going through the difficult moments. My mother, Sue Dvoskin, has always encouraged my love of theatre and my love of learning; she attended every performance of every show I did until I moved away, and since then has listened to me talk about my productions and scholarship with equal dedication. Natalie Bedard‘s intelligence and willingness to discuss my ideas helped me through many a bout of writer‘s block. Finally, there aren‘t enough words for all the thanks I owe my partner, Ellen Glatman. She read every word of this dissertation, listened to me as I talked through every idea, every draft, every conference paper, and offered insights and encouragement in equal measure. This dissertation would not have been possible without her emotional and material support, and I will be forever grateful. vi “Listen to the Stories, Hear it in the Songs”: Musical Theatre as Queer Historiography Publication No._____________ Michelle Gail Dvoskin, Ph.D. The University of Texas at Austin, 2010 Co-Supervisors: Charlotte Canning and Stacy Wolf This dissertation takes musical theatre seriously as a historiographic practice, and considers six musicals that take the past as their subject matter in order to interrogate how these works craft their historical narratives. While there have been studies of historical drama and performance, musicals have generally been left out of that conversation, despite (or perhaps because of) their immense popularity. This project argues that not only can musicals “do” history, they offer an excellent genre for theorizing what I call “queer historiography.” While sexuality remains one category of analysis, I use “queer” to signify opposition, not simply to heterosexuality, but to heteronormativity, and normativity more broadly. Musicals‟ queer historiography, then, is a way of engaging past events that challenges normativity in form as well as content; a way of productively challenging not only what we think we know about the past, but how we come to know it. Each chapter uses a different theoretical lens to guide close readings of a pair of thematically linked musicals. The first chapter considers 1776 (1969) and Assassins (1991, vii 2004) as challenges to official narratives of United States history. My primary lens in this chapter is form, as I analyze how musicals‟ structures influence their queer historiographic potential. Chapter 2 examines two musicals that offer histories of U.S. popular culture, Gypsy (1959) and Hairspray (2002), considering how the placement of divas at the center of each show enables a historiography that is feminist as well as queer, challenging ideas about gender and sexuality while making women central to the histories they represent. In the third chapter I look to two musicals, Falsettos (1992) and Elegies: A Song Cycle (2003), which present histories of trauma while featuring overtly gay, lesbian, and queer characters. I use these two texts to theorize how musicals might not simply present history as it “really” was, but also as it might have been, thereby offering what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick terms a “reparative reading” of history. In examining each of my six case studies, I analyze specific performances as well as written texts whenever possible. viii Table of Contents Introduction: Musicals, Queerness, History ………………………………………..1 Chapter 1: Queering Political Histories in 1776 and Assassins ……………………29 Chapter 2: Divas and History in Gypsy and Hairspray …………………………….98 Chapter 3: Reimagining Traumatic Histories in Falsettos and Elegies ……………160 Conclusion ………………………………………………………………………….221 Works Cited ………………………………………………………………………...231 Vita …………………………………………………………………………………244 ix Introduction: Musicals, Queerness, History During my senior year of high school, the National Tour of Les Miserables played at the National Theatre in Washington, D.C. As a lifelong musical theatre fan, it isn‘t surprising that I made the forty-five minute trip from my suburban town to D.C. to see the show. What is surprising is the context in which I saw it: on a field trip taken by my Advanced Placement European History class. The daylong trip was to include a visit to an art museum in the morning, followed by the performance. We all knew, however, that the musical was the real point of the outing, a fact highlighted when our teacher‘s failure to get advance tickets for the art exhibit he wanted us to see left us wandering two other museums instead – neither of which had much to do with European history. I recall a certain degree of skepticism among students and parents about the educational value of the trip, at least in the context of our class. Certainly the students – myself included – generally saw the excursion as a great trick Mr. C had played on the school, a fun getaway for the 90% of the class currently suffering from acute senioritis. Yet looking back on that trip, two things stand out to me alongside the suspicion. First, our teacher was somehow able to convince everyone that we should go see Les Miserables, that it had something to offer us in the context of European history. Second, and perhaps more importantly, that trip may well be the only thing I clearly remember from that class. While facts and figures from our textbook have drifted out of my memory, the experience of sitting in the balcony of the National Theatre, surrounded by 1 my classmates, peering through borrowed opera glasses as French students built revolutionary barricades and sang about their lofty ideals, has stayed with me to this day. I suspect the same is true for many of my classmates. For all my seventeen-year-old skepticism, my history teacher wasn‘t playing a trick after all: musicals do have something to offer us when it comes to history. In ―Listen to the Stories, Hear it in the Songs”: Musical Theatre as Queer Historiography, I begin with the assumption that historical musicals, like any other type of historiography, produce and communicate an interpretation of past events. I look at six musicals that overtly take the past as their subject matter in order to interrogate how they, as performance, and specifically as musical theatre, craft their historical narratives. While there have been studies of performance as historiographic practice, musicals have been left out of that conversation. My interest in taking musicals seriously as a way of doing history stands in opposition to standard arguments about musical theatre that tend to posit it as a performance, not of history, but of nostalgia. Nostalgia, ―a longing for a home that no longer exists or has never existed,‖ is generally considered ―something of a bad word, an affectionate insult at best .