UCLA Electronic Theses and Dissertations
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UCLA UCLA Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title Doing the Time Warp: Queer Temporalities and Musical Theater Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/1k1860wx Author Ellis, Sarah Taylor Publication Date 2013 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA Los Angeles Doing the Time Warp: Queer Temporalities and Musical Theater A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy in Theater and Performance Studies by Sarah Taylor Ellis 2013 ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION Doing the Time Warp: Queer Temporalities and Musical Theater by Sarah Taylor Ellis Doctor of Philosophy in Theater and Performance Studies University of California, Los Angeles, 2013 Professor Sue-Ellen Case, Co-chair Professor Raymond Knapp, Co-chair This dissertation explores queer processes of identification with the genre of musical theater. I examine how song and dance – sites of aesthetic difference within the musical – can warp time and enable marginalized and semi-marginalized fans to imagine different ways of being in the world. Musical numbers can complicate a linear, developmental plot by accelerating and decelerating time, foregrounding repetition and circularity, bringing the past to life and projecting into the future, and physicalizing dreams in a narratively open present. These excesses have the potential to contest naturalized constructions of historical, progressive time, as well as concordant constructions of gender, sexual, and racial identities. While the musical has historically been a rich source of identification for the stereotypical white gay male show queen, this project validates a broad and flexible range of non-normative readings. I employ the ! ii aesthetic principles of musical theater to consider the genre’s politics, which can cut against the grain of dominant ideology to establish identities and communities in difference. The musical, a bastion of mainstream theatrical culture, supports a fan culture of outsiders who dream themselves into being in the liminal timespaces of song and dance. Chapter 1, “A Funny Thing Happened … to the Integrated Musical: Poetics and Politics of Queer Temporality,” lays the theoretical foundations for the dissertation by locating the “queerness” of musical theater in the temporally divergent ruptures of the genre’s musical numbers. Chapter 2, “Let’s Do the Time Warp Again: Performing Time, Genre, and Spectatorship,” identifies an affective link across nonrealist, time-warping genres of science fiction / fantasy and musical theater, as well as their dedicated and overlapping fan cultures; by considering reality to be historical and contingent, these anti-quotidian genres explore the limits of what is objectively present, and physicalize a temporally divergent world in the here and now. Chapter 3, “Ragging Race: Spectral Temporality in the American Musical,” explores a haunting in American popular culture: the under-acknowledged artistic contributions of African- Americans. Finally, Chapter 4, “‘I Just Projected Myself Out of It’: Rehearsing Identities in Youth Musical Theater,” considers the impact of marginalizing the arts in contemporary US public education systems; teenagers who identify with and participate in the arts are imagined as a community of outsiders, defined by alternative sexualities, races, and geeky differences from the popular jock and cheerleader mold. Throughout these chapters, I explore how alienated subjects find moments of coherence and connection in musical theater’s queer imaginaries of song and dance. ! iii The dissertation of Sarah Taylor Ellis is approved. Susan Foster Gary Gardner Sue-Ellen Case, Committee Co-chair Raymond Knapp, Committee Co-chair University of California, Los Angeles 2013 ! iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgements........................................................................................................................ vi Vita................................................................................................................................................. ix Introduction......................................................................................................................................1 Works Cited .......................................................................................................................14 Chapter 1: A Funny Thing Happened … to the Integrated Musical: Poetics and Politics of Queer Temporality...............................................................................................................16 Works Cited .......................................................................................................................61 Chapter 2: Let’s Do the Time Warp Again: Performing Time, Genre, and Spectatorship ...........65 Works Cited .....................................................................................................................107 Chapter 3: Ragging Race: Spectral Temporality in the American Musical ................................111 Works Cited .....................................................................................................................154 Chapter 4: “I Just Projected Myself Out of It”: Rehearsing Identities in Youth Musical Theater ......................................................................................................158 Works Cited .....................................................................................................................196 ! v ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This project would not have been possible without my dedicated interdisciplinary dissertation committee. Sue-Ellen Case continually challenged me to bridge my aesthetic interests into the politics of performance; my scholarship, theater criticism, and music composition is infinitely richer for it. Raymond Knapp brought an infectious enthusiasm for musical analysis to the project, and our afternoon tea meetings with my colleague Sam Baltimore made the dissertation a collaborative and rewarding journey. Susan Foster pushed me to analyze dance from new perspectives, and Gary Gardner nurtured both my scholarly and creative work – even playing “Grandpa” in a family musical I composed. Thank you all for your generous guidance in and out of the classroom. In addition to the professors on my committee, thank you to professors with whom I studied in Theater and Performance Studies (Marcela Fuentes, Michael Hackett, Sonali Pahwa, Shelley Salamensky, and Carol Sorgenfrei) and in Musicology (Robert Fink), which quickly became a second departmental home; an English course in aesthetic theory with Sianne Ngia was also especially formative. Thank you to the professors for whom I worked as a teaching assistant and graduate student researcher: Sue-Ellen Case, Ross Fenimore, Gary Gardner, Michael Hackett, and Chantal Rodriguez. Thank you, as well, to Dan Belzer, Mary Jo DuPrey, Gary Gardner, Jeremy Mann, and the creative side of TFT for welcoming me as a music director and pianist. Your mentorship and support has been invaluable. Thank you to my colleagues in the Theater and Performance Studies, Musicology, World Arts and Cultures, and English departments for your enriching conversations over the last five years. I owe a particular thanks to my fellow musical theater geeks Sam Baltimore and Arreanna ! vi Rostosky. In every job that must be done, there is an element of fun; I loved how our musical adventures were simultaneously research for and a respite from our academic pursuits. Thank you to my colleagues beyond UCLA, whose conference presentations and discussions always enhanced my scholarship. Thank you especially to Stacy Wolf, who was a generous respondent for the first conference paper I ever presented and an enthusiastic editor for my first published article, “Establishing (and Re-establishing) a Sense of Place: Musical Orientation in The Sound of Music.” “‘No Day But Today’: Queer Temporality in Rent,” which forms a core part of Chapter 1, was originally published in Studies in Musical Theatre; my gratitude to journal editors Dominic Symonds and George Burrows for their guidance in publishing and for their permission to expand this paper as part of the dissertation. Thank you to the UCLA Dissertation Year Fellowship, UCLA Graduate Research Mentorship, and UCLA Summer Research Mentorship for helping to fund my research and writing over the past five years. Thank you to the undergraduate professors who laid the foundation for my theatrical research and creative work today. I tumbled down a wondrous rabbit hole when I enrolled in John Clum’s musical theater history course my freshman year at Duke University, and Emanuel Azenberg’s Contemporary Theater in Production course made me newly aware and appreciative of the chosen family I had found in the arts. Few undergraduates are fortunate enough to have such devoted mentors, whose insight and guidance extends far beyond the university setting. Thank you to my colleagues and collaborators outside academia. Thank you to the theater journalists who advocated for my emerging voice in theater criticism: Colin Mitchell, Trevor Thomas, John Topping, Tony Frankel, and Steven Leigh Morris. Thank you to my lyricists, directors, choreographers, producers, stage managers, actors, and creative collaborators on ! vii dozens of plays and musical projects. Among them, a particular thanks to Christopher Albrecht, Andrew Bentz, Hunter Bird, Roxanne Camanyag, Jen Fingal,