UCLA Electronic Theses and Dissertations
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UCLA UCLA Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title "Do It Again": Comic Repetition, Participatory Reception and Gendered Identity on Musical Comedy's Margins Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4297q61r Author Baltimore, Samuel Dworkin Publication Date 2013 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA Los Angeles “Do It Again”: Comic Repetition, Participatory Reception and Gendered Identity on Musical Comedy’s Margins A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy in Musicology by Samuel Dworkin Baltimore 2013 ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION “Do It Again”: Comic Repetition, Participatory Reception and Gendered Identity on Musical Comedy’s Margins by Samuel Dworkin Baltimore Doctor of Philosophy in Musicology University of California, Los Angeles, 2013 Professor Raymond Knapp, Chair This dissertation examines the ways that various subcultural audiences define themselves through repeated interaction with musical comedy. By foregrounding the role of the audience in creating meaning and by minimizing the “show” as a coherent work, I reconnect musicals to their roots in comedy by way of Mikhail Bakhtin’s theories of carnival and reduced laughter. The audiences I study are kids, queers, and collectors, an alliterative set of people whose gender identities and expressions all depart from or fall outside of the normative binary. Focusing on these audiences, whose musical comedy fandom is widely acknowledged but little studied, I follow Raymond Knapp and Stacy Wolf to demonstrate that musical comedy provides a forum for identity formation especially for these problematically gendered audiences. ii The dissertation of Samuel Dworkin Baltimore is approved. Mitchell Morris Elisabeth Le Guin Stacy Wolf Raymond Knapp, Committee Chair University of California, Los Angeles 2013 iii For my mother, Susan Dworkin Levering, and my grandmother, Ruth Glauber Dworkin, who shared and nurtured my love of musicals iv Table of Contents Chapter one: “Another op’nin, another show”: Incompleteness and repetition in the modern musical comedy 1 Chapter two: “You’ve got to be Carefully Taught”: Children and musical comedy, a rehearsal 38 Chapter three: Inventing “Tradition”: Queer musical comedy sings along 82 Chapter four: “The thin filament that sort of covers the whole thing:” The intimate narratives of musical comedy collectors 124 Chapter five: “A sailor’s not a sailor”: Gendering musical comedy audiences 161 Works Cited 197 v Figures Figure 1: Dorothy in Ozma of Oz and Betsy in Tik-Tok of Oz, drawn by John R. Neill and colored in by Susan T. Dworkin 50 Figure 2: Polychrome in The Road to Oz and Tik-Tok of Oz, drawn by John R. Neill and colored in by Susan T. Dworkin 53 Figure 3: Dedication page of Tik-Tok of Oz, drawn by John R. Neill and colored in by Susan T. Dworkin 58 Figure 4: Caricature of Ben Bagley, drawn by Miles Kreuger 140 Figure 5: Sheet music cover for “I’m Confessin’ (That I Love You)” 176 vi Acknowledgements I would not be here without Rose Rosengard Subotnik, who single-handedly thrust me into a doctoral program. My topic couldn’t have been what it was without BUGS, or without my uncle, Greg Dworkin, who got me into Oz and science fiction. My father, Lester Baltimore, first taught me to question musicals’ ethics, though I’m sure he’s forgotten that by now. I am grateful to Miles Kreuger for his time, knowledge, and boundless enthusiasm, and to Nina Eidsheim, whose innovative graduate seminars inspired chapter four. Elisabeth Le Guin worked with me to develop the thoughts on comedy that led me toward musicals from this angle; both she and Mitchell Morris helped me hone my teaching and writing skills as their TA and student, and both helped me through difficult personal times. Stacy Wolf’s work is a revelation, but her generosity and frankness are even better. The graduate students in the UCLA Department of Musicology are an incredible community of friends and scholars. Sarah Taylor Ellis, my parallel dissertator and occasional theater companion, made this a much quicker and more fun process than I dreaded. Barbara Van Nostrand fixed everything I screwed up. Russell Krupen kept me calm and fed, and formatted my illustrations when I despaired. Nikki Eschen and Alexandra Apolloni are always my partners in musical comedy crime. Tootsie Rolls got me through the last few desperate weeks of writing. Raymond Knapp has been not only an incredible mentor and a tireless editor, but also a source of empathy and care through the roughest time in my life. He pushed me when I needed a push, let me be when I needed time and space, and constantly challenged me in Scrabble. I don’t know how I could have made it this far with any other adviser. Grandma took me to more shows than I can recall and sang along with most of them. Mom saved every program from every concert and show I was in until the day she died, October 13th, 2010. The two of them are the reason I care about this stuff, and I hope I’ve written something they could be proud of. vii Vita Education University of California, Los Angeles, 2009, MA in Musicology Brown University, 2005, BA with honors in Music Theory and Composition Presentations “Inventing ‘Tradition’: queer audiences at the Sing-A-Long Sound of Music.” Popular Culture Association annual conference, March 2013 “Intimate Portraits: the one-woman shows of Elaine Stritch and Bea Arthur as collectors’ items.” ATHE conference, Performance as/is Civic Engagement: Advocate, Collaborate, Educate, August 2012 “Songbook: Ella Fitzgerald’s voice as musical text and theatrical pretext.” The first annual Harvard-Princeton Forum on Musical Theater, April 2011. “Big Black Women on the Great White Way: the curious role of the gospel diva on Broadway.” The Interdisciplinary Conference on The Diva at Liverpool Hope University, July 2011. “Why Do We Fall for the Diva of the Rasp? Vocal Cross-Dressing on (and off) Broadway.” The Sixth Susan Porter Memorial Symposium at the University of Colorado at Boulder, October 2010. viii Chapter One “Another op’nin’, another show”: incompleteness and repetition in the modern musical comedy Beginning the Beguine The introduction of your dissertation is where you prove yourself. You list all of the books that you’ve read, the famous authors you’ve consulted. Theories are repeated and elaborated upon; wordy quotations are teased apart to reveal their relevance. At the end of the introduction, there is an announcement of what is to come, handy summaries of the subsequent chapters for the reader who is looking for the bit that relates to hir own interests.1 The introduction of a musical comedy is a lot more fun. Sometimes it’s an overture, sampling the songs that are coming up later. Sometimes there isn’t an overture, and the audience has to jump straight into an opening number that (usually) establishes the setting, characters, and/or musical style of the entire show. At the end of this introduction, you can clap; during it, you can hum along. At either time, depending on the performers and the number, you can laugh. Dissertation introductions don’t usually allow for those kinds of engagement. This introduction attempts to balance the competing imperatives of academic writing and musical comedy. Readers probably won’t hum along with my sentences—though there will be ample lyric quotation for those who have a song to sing, o—but I hope that you will participate in them by 1 “Hir” is a gender-neutral possessive pronoun, as well as a gender-neutral object pronoun. It is an amalgamation of “him” and “her,” and replaces both those pronouns, as well as his/her(s). The gender-neutral subject pronoun that I use is “ze,” which replaces he/she. 1 thinking, as academics do, and by laughing, as musical comedy audiences do. If you feel the urge to clap, be my guest. Nobody needs to know.2 This is a story about music, about comedy, and about some of the people who use musical comedy as part of their self-definition. It’s not a story about an irrepressible would-be nun who falls for a retired naval captain. Nor is it about a handful of witty Jewish men from New York who, for several decades, hammered out a pretty durable collection of tunes on their upright pianos. This isn’t even a story about a singer whose penetrating voice made her synonymous with Broadway for most of those same decades. All of these characters will make appearances from time to time, maybe have one show-stopping number to sing, but the real protagonists of my story aren’t characters in musicals, or writers of musicals, or performers of musicals. This is a story about audiences. Audiences are tricky creatures to pin down. Like musical comedies, they are made of a whole lot of different bits that don’t always fit together quite right. My story looks closely at some of those bits, and not so closely at others, but hopefully, like good stories and musicals should, it does something for you even if you aren’t smack in the center of my audience. If you watch or listen to musical comedies, or if you read academic books, you are probably somewhere in my cast of characters, even if you only enter in the final act. So, you know the characters now. The setting isn’t quite Broadway, and it isn’t entirely Hollywood, though they both creep in frequently. It’s middle school auditoria and gay bars, public parks and concert halls. It’s at home with the DVD player, on an exercise bike at the gym, on TV 2 “I have a song to sing, o,” is from Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Yeomen of the Guard; or, The Merryman and his Maid (1888), and “Nobody Needs to Know” is from Jason Robert Brown’s The Last Five Years (2001).