Toni Braxton, Disney, and Thermodynamics

Jason King

In 1998, nearly every night for a period of six months, R&B superstar Toni Braxton appeared live in the Broadway stage version of the Walt Disney Cor- poration’s Beauty and the Beast. A live-action reconstruction of the 1991 block- buster film feature, Beauty and the Beast debuted on Broadway in 1994 to lukewarm critical reviews and triumphant lines around the block. Disney’s first major venture on the Broadway stage, Beauty and the Beast became a precursor to its more critically welcomed 1998 stage rendition of The Lion King. Beauty also signaled a change on Broadway toward “corporate theatre,” a turn of phrase used by the New York Times’ Frank Rich (1998, sec. 2:1) to describe productions aesthetically overdetermined by their relationship to their sponsoring corpora- tion(s). More ominously even, Beauty and the Beast provided the rationale for Disney’s commercial arrival at the chaotic hub of New York’s Times Square, signaling a rapid and dramatic reconstruction of the quality of urban life in this key New York destination. Stepping into the role of the heroine Belle, Braxton’s appearance on Broadway marked the first time an African American commanded the leading role in a Disney production—animated, onstage, or in any other medium. After selling 15 million records since 1992 (yet filing for bankruptcy in 1997 to regroup from mismanaged funds) (Valdes-Rodriguez 2000:10), Braxton performed her Broad- way stint at a transitional moment in her career. Braxton’s appearance as Belle might seem like a simple marriage of conve- nience. The multinational Disney Corporation benefited from its provisional al- liance with a major celebrity whose visibility (as black and female) worked to counter the claims of racism that have shadowed Disney for decades. The celeb- rity benefited from her provisional alliance with the corporation, managing to exercise her acting chops while earning money to pay her bills and settle her legal affairs—all before her new album hit the charts! Having actually ventured to see her performance, I argue that the relationship between Braxton and Disney is far more complicated than a marriage of con- venience. To accommodate the “demands” of Braxton’s presignified celebrity as a soul singer whose best work had previously been done in the recording studio, Disney made an unusually generous series of aesthetic reconstructions in Beauty and the Beast. Some of these were intended to capitalize on Braxton’s music stardom. Yet most were intended to anticipate and accommodate (rather than

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/105420402320351477 by guest on 27 September 2021 Toni Braxton, Disney, and Thermodynamics 55 suppress or disguise) the “demands” of Braxton’s expressive black femininity as embodied onstage in performance. Braxton’s particular performance of femininity can be summarized with a sin- gle word, which was nearly overused in her publicity materials and star discourse: “sultry.” Almost always feminine in its application, the adjective “sultry” refer- ences temperature change or the application of heat. Indeed, Braxton is most frequently referred to as a “sultry” soul singer (see Segal 2000; Cruz 1998; Pareles 1997; Ebony 1994). The embodied performance of sultriness may well be the key to Braxton’s star image. Most definitions of “sultry” refer to conditions of weather, climate, or atmo- sphere. In meteorological parlance, sultry means “oppressively hot and moist; sweltering.” In common use, sultry is applied to persons who are “characterized by the heat of temper or passion, hot with anger or lust” (Oxford English Dictionary Online). It is a word most often used to describe women—especially lascivious or sensual women who arouse sexual desire. In Hollywood, a sultry actress like Marlene Dietrich or Kathleen Turner can supposedly entrance and entrap men, both onscreen and in the audience. These women make men “hot” with their appearance and with their deep, resonant, and breathy voices. And while “sultry” may be used to denote “spicy or smutty,” the term more frequently connotes a distinctively languid and erotically charged body movement. Literally and figu- ratively, sultry heat is what Braxton brought to the Disney production, and by extension, to the corporation itself. Particularly (but not exclusively) present in Braxton’s vocal performance, heat is the special nonrepresentational agency of her celebrity. Heat transfer was most evident during her performance of “A Change in Me,” a new song that was specially added in the second act to capitalize on her musical roots in gospel and soul. This out-of-place showstopper radically disrupted Beauty and the Beast—a musical many critics had already lambasted for being cold- hearted, robotic, and “soulless.” Braxton therefore became an unexpected and improvisational variable in the controlled, closed system that is the Disney pro- duction. Her performance moved Beauty and the Beast thermodynamically toward disorder, or what scientists might call higher order. The magical Braxton sultriness that Disney went out of its way to incorporate into the show also threatened to radically deconstruct the production, exposing the Disney project as a whole. The provisional alliance between Braxton and Disney illuminates the ambiv- alent relationship between black celebrities and multinational corporations in the era of late capitalism. It suggests ways to critically speculate about the place, performance, and agency of blackness in the ongoing reconstruction of American citizenship and national identity. In the example of Toni Braxton and the Walt Disney Company, we see how corporate America remains haunted by the black soul, by the very heat that it simultaneously—and schizophrenically—represses and craves.

Let It Flow: Corporate Soul and Temperature

The heat is moving through your body Temperature is rising, Can you feel the heat, the heat? —Toni Braxton, “The Heat” (Braxton and Lewis 2000)

Even though she trails commercially behind superstars like Whitney Houston and Mariah Carey, Toni Braxton is one of the most successful female R&B artists in the world. Her rise to success, spanning from 1992 to 2002, is due in large

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/105420402320351477 by guest on 27 September 2021 56 Jason King

Student Essay Contest Winner

Jason King has taught classes on popular culture at New York University in the Department of Art and Public Policy, the Asian/Pacific American Studies Program, Tisch School of the Arts Undergraduate Drama De- partment, and the Gallatin School of Individualized Study. He is a frequent contributor to Vibe magazine, and his publications include essays on such artists as John Leguizamo, Michael and Janet Jackson, Luther Vandross, Ery- kah Badu, Timbaland, Spike Lee, and others. Jason also works as a per- former, playwright, director, songwriter, musician, and vocal arranger.

The MA and PhD programs in Performance Studies at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts cover a full range of performance, from theatre and dance to ritual and popular entertainment. Courses are both intercultural and interdisciplinary, drawing on the arts, humanities, and social sciences. A broad spectrum of performance—including post- modern theatre, political demonstrations and rallies, capoeira, kathakali, Broadway, festivals, and shamanism—is documented using fieldwork, in- terviews, and archival research and is analyzed from a variety of perspec- tives. As a discipline of “inclusion,” performance studies focuses on the traditions of Asia, Africa, and Latin America, as well as those of the many cultures of North America. Areas of concentration include contemporary performance, dance, folk and popular performance, postcolonial theory, feminist and queer theory, and performance theory. Graduates work as university professors, in museums, foundations, nonprofit organizations, in theatre, in publishing, and numerous other professions.

part to her association with the super producer-singer-songwriter Babyface and his LaFace record label, a subsidiary of Arista Records. The stunningly beautiful, diminutive singer—four feet, nine inches—first gained visibility in 1992 with the single “Give U My Heart,” a duet with Baby- face on the soundtrack of the Eddie Murphy film Boomerang (1992, directed by Reginald Hudlin). Braxton’s debut solo single, “Love Shoulda Brought You Home,” (1992) was also featured prominently on the film soundtrack. Released in the same year, Braxton’s eponymous debut album (LaFace 26007) soared to number one on both pop and R&B charts, buoyed by disarmingly radio-friendly tunes like “Another Sad Love Song,” “Seven Whole Days,” “You Mean the World to Me,” and “Breathe Again.” Selling more than seven million copies, the album eventually placed third on the all-time list of best-selling debuts by a female vocalist (behind releases by Houston and Carey). Braxton’s 1996 follow-up album, Secrets (LaFace 26020), sold over 10 million copies worldwide, spawning hit singles like the dance track “You’re Making Me High” as well as the emotionally stirring pop ballad “Un-Break My Heart.” Written by Diane Warren, the latter tune topped the American pop singles chart for 11 consecutive weeks. Besides Babyface, Braxton’s world-class stable of song- writers included R. Kelly, David Foster, Soulshock and Karlin, and wunderkind Rodney Jerkins. The singer received a bevy of NAACP Image Awards and Amer- ican Music Awards, and five Grammys, including Best New Artist in 1993. In 2000, she took home the Grammy for Best R&B Female Performance for “He Wasn’t Man Enough For Me.”

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/105420402320351477 by guest on 27 September 2021 Toni Braxton, Disney, and Thermodynamics 57 One critic deftly characterized Braxton’s star image as: a “homegirl with a hook” (McAlley 1993). To the uninitiated, the hook is Braxton’s idiosyncratic— and possibly “queer”—voice. Braxton’s melted-cobalt contralto remains darker blue in color, huskier in texture, and deeper in density than any other young mainstream female pop or R&B singer in or since the 1990s, maybe with the exception of Tracy Chapman, Lalah Hathaway, Me’Shell Ndege´ocello, and India Arie.1 Braxton’s limited yet melodramatic arsenal of vocal gimmicks includes loud protracted hollers, blue moans, bent notes, choked sobs, blurted whoops, self-conscious melisma, fiery growls, and a silvery falsetto sound. There is an overwhelming melancholy to Braxton’s voice, a tear that suggests a profound loneliness and yearning for wholeness. Part of that yearning is related to the way her voice reaches toward masculinity. Although her contralto is nowhere near as disorienting (on first listen) in terms of the apprehension of gender difference as female singers like Tracy Chapman, Me’Shell Ndege´ocello, or even Sade, Braxton nonetheless produces sound that troubles and disturbs—even if only momentarily—the conventional territorial spaces assigned to vocal masculinity and femininity. Performing at talent shows in her hometown in Maryland, Braxton claims that people in the audience would comment, “Toni can’t sing. She sounds like a man. Her voice is too heavy.” Braxton would reply, “That’s alright. I’ll show them one day” (in Jones IV 1993). In 1996, Stephen Holden, a New York Times critic, celebrated Braxton’s idio- syncratic vocal prowess: “Singing in a husky voice that leaps up in a sobbing yodel then breaks into a guttural growl, Ms. Braxton, who is 28, infuses every song with an emotional intensity that transforms banalities into true confessions” (1996:22). Holden noted that Braxton’s “emotional intensity” transforms banal lyrics into great music. Because of the commercial viability of her music, critics often attempt to pigeonhole Braxton’s creativity simply as an ability to apply her idiosyncratic voice to enhance pop lyrics. Holden seemed unable to recognize Braxton’s vocal intensity outside of its ability to transform banal lyrics into true confession. He treated her voice as essentially a textual resource. While I do not want to relegate the lyrics, banal or otherwise, to being a nonessential element in her vocal performance, Braxton’s greater talent lies in the sublimity of her voice as sound. Holden pointed out that Braxton’s intensity generates a series of confessional truths (“true confessions”). These truths might be conceived as testimonials, per- formances of “testifying.” Braxton’s ability to generate or “infuse” intensity that then produces truth-effects is rooted in her ability to generate heat. This heat is not hers alone. It is also manifest in the bodies of her listeners/spectators. In other words, Braxton’s heat only exists insofar as there are listeners who corporeally respond to it, who feel the fire. Thus Braxton is not merely an R&B balladeer but also a torch singer.2 “Torch” brings to mind terms such as flame, fire, warm, burn, torrid, fiery, spark, torrent, and current. In their application of heat, Braxton’s modified soul performances create an intimacy where the conventional binary of performer and spectator(s) is radically transformed into a single, social whole. The publicity materials and critical discourse surrounding Braxton consistently draw on metaphors of warmth, heat, and rising temperature levels. One journalist discusses Braxton’s voice in terms of its “smoky shadings” (Linden 2000:37); while another refers to the R&B celebrity as “the embodiment of smoldering soul and simmering sensuality” (O’Hare 2000:6). In the summer of 2000, several months after I had begun to conceive this essay, Braxton’s first album since her bankruptcy appeared in record stores (LaFace 26069). The title announced itself, rather plainly, as The Heat. Part of the heat of Braxton’s sound is related to the sense of unrequited yearn-

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/105420402320351477 by guest on 27 September 2021 58 Jason King ing between masculinity and femininity in her voice. The blues melancholy of her sultry sound is its truth effect, a level at which a certain kind of heat, an inti- macy, is present. The sensual desire for the communion of masculinity and femininity produces a third space: the space of possibility where gender difference is re- vealed as a social construction rather than an essential- ized biological fact. This has had consequences. While Braxton’s voice produces the possibility to re-imagine and transform the ways people think about gender dif- ference (especially in the context of race), her visual celebrity has followed a decidedly more predictable route in terms of the re-production of gender roles. Braxton has confronted the rumors of lesbianism that plagued her early career by discarding her “tomboy” look, getting a glamorous makeover, and moving to- ward a more “standard” or predictable ideal of feminine beauty.3 Part of the critical assignment of sultry heat to Brax- ton may also be related to the style of music she most frequently performs: midtempo R&B romantic bal- lads.4 The sensual heat of romantic intimacy is a central feature of soul music. Braxton’s longtime artistic alli- ance with Babyface, the king of romantic R&B song- writing in the 1980s and 1990s, contributes significantly to her sultry appeal.5 Babyface’s ultra-hip lyrics (“Whip Appeal” [1990], “End of the Road” [1992], “Ready or Not” [1989]) paint an impressionistic picture of het- 1. A “sultry” Toni Braxton erosexual romantic union and the passionate politics of in this publicity still for her unrequited yearning (missed opportunities at getting together). At their best, album, The Heat (2000). these lyrics are deceptively sophisticated. The same might be said for their soaring, (Photo courtesy of Arista barbershop-soul melodies. Babyface’s irresistible hook-and-modulation approach Records) to songwriting—an approach that basically defines the first two albums of Brax- ton’s career—is the benchmark of a distinctive style of soul music that critic James Hunter calls “super efficient black pop” (1993:80). Hunter’s definition of the LaFace sound as “super efficient” runs parallel to music critic Nelson George’s characterization of post-disco R&B as “corporate soul” or “retronuevo” (1988; also see Ward 1997:417–50). For George, the pro- duction of contemporary soul music displaces at least two essential elements of the genre: the craft of vocal improvisation and the privileging of the vocal per- sonality. George notes that these displacements are an effect of the genre becom- ing overdetermined by corporate influence.6 Even though he remains celebratory of the LaFace sound, which he deems “state of the art,” Nelson George nonethe- less sees the corporate enfranchisement of soul—where music is mass produced as if on a slick, assembly line—as a fundamentally heartless and cold approach to the production of a traditionally “humanized” genre of music.7 Singers who per- form with an idiosyncratic vocal personality might, on the basis of vocal perfor- mance alone, return an expressive humanity, a sense of warm surprise, to the genre of corporate soul. One flaw in George’s proposition of “corporate soul” is the chasm-like split he draws between soul music and corporate culture, as if the history of soul music was somehow outside of the corporate distribution of the musical product. This split becomes even more problematic when one considers that George’s book, The Death of Rhythm and Blues (1988), is a relatively thorough account of the history of that distribution. However, I am arguing something not far removed

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/105420402320351477 by guest on 27 September 2021 Toni Braxton, Disney, and Thermodynamics 59 from George’s proposition: in most cases the soul musician’s agency is the voice. George’s position of easy anticorporate humanism becomes more complicated if we entertain the notion that warmth connotes artistic improvisation while cold- ness is corporate capitalism’s foreclosure of improvisation.8 The modern corporation is a corpus, a “body,” hierarchically organized with the “thinking” head at the top and the laboring body below (Douglas 1986). The Cartesian split between mind and body is mapped onto the spatial organization of the corporation. Colored folk have traditionally been imagined as the cultural bottom, the Southern “ass” of the world (Africa, Asia, Caribbean) in relation to the rational “mind” of the Euro-North (Europe, America). The multinational corporation not only profits from the labor of bodies that are outsourced, but also from the spirit that animates those bodies. The corporation subjugates and represses that spirit even as it requires that spirit for its own animation. Therefore, the corporation despises and desires its own body and soul. In relation to Arista Records and Disney, Braxton represents outsourced, sur- plus labor: she is called in—“invited”—to perform soul. Of course, the valuable labor she performs as a celebrity is not at all equivalent to the low-wage labor that is performed at the bottom rung of the corporate ladder. Conceivably,Nelson George would consider Braxton the “right” kind of idiosyncratic vocal person- ality to return warmth to the cold efficiency of the corporation. To go a step further, it might be argued that the corporation essentially requires the kind of heat Braxton supplies as a matter of course, even as it must ultimately repress the possibilities such heat might generate. Braxton’s ability to “make hot” is inextricably tied to her musical roots in the Apostolic Church. The energy that informs her vocal instrument is based in the performance traditions specific (but not exclusive) to the Apostolic Church. These traditions include the practice of testifying—part of a vast, long perfor- mance tradition that denominates (although is not exclusive to) African American Christian religious aesthetics. Testifying is a practice/performance of generating—and a product of gener- ated—heat. In his vivid description of testimonials in black churches, Ray Allen notes that singers tend to experience the Holy Spirit as a pleasurable, transcendent release from worldly problems. The process of testifying is often experienced in terms of “light-headedness, and on occasion [it may feel for people] as if their bodies are actually flying or floating away” (1991:163). In cases of extreme tran- scendence, possession and/or out-of-body experiences may result. Allen describes how testifying is experienced as:

a flash of heat or fire, making reference to the biblical verse from the book of Jeremiah (20:9) concerning “fire shut up in my bones.” This heat is not described as uncomfortable, but rather as an energizing force. [...] Singers perceive the Holy Spirit as a source of infinite power and energy; hence the common analogies to fire, electricity, and lightning. (1991:163)

Testifying in this sense might be conceived as the transformative space where a kind of performative autobiography (the inscription of personal experience through performance) meets the politics of spiritual communion. Testifyinggen- erates and is generated by the tactile performance of sensual frenzy. This frenzy might be thought of as the moment of conversion of potential energy into kinetic energy. Amiri Baraka describes frenzy in the following manner:

It is the Frenzy, the soul possession, that the African thought scientifically as a result of historical cultural perception, rationale, and use, the re- combining of the two (the single with the all), the atonement, the Gettin’

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/105420402320351477 by guest on 27 September 2021 60 Jason King Happy, which is the music’s use. A way into consciousness of the whole, transcending the partial understanding of the single self. (1991:104)

Through the performer’s experience, the congregation wants to “feel the fire” even as the performer wants to “feel the fire” through the experience of the con- gregation. This ritual exchange produces a unique situation in which the per- former and the audience cocreate each other in an effort to experience the feeling of wholeness. With the bringing down of the Spirit, the congregation has to get together “on one accord.” As Ray Allen notes:

As the congregation begins to feel the Spirit, they can bounce the power back to the singers, who in turn may generate and transmit an even stronger emotional feeling back to the congregation, and so on. Rather than a linear, dyadic frame where the active lead singer (sender) simply transmits the feeling of the Spirit (information) to the passive congrega- tion (receiver), there appears to be a complex feedback loop operating among all participants during a gospel program. The lead singer may initi- ate the process, but as a performance proceeds, all singers and congrega- tion members act simultaneously as senders and receivers, building the spiritual feeling in each other. (1991:168)

Heat transfer generated from/by testimony moves toward aggregation or wholeness against the prevailing possibility of disaggregation, our feelings of in- alienable separation from each other. James Baldwin notes how electrical heat generated in performance produces conditions in which the performer and spec- tator validate each other reciprocally. The magic of radical performance is the possibility of a sensual mutual affirmation or counternegation of bodies and souls. “In the theatre,” Baldwin says, “a current flowed back and forth between the audience and the actors: flesh and blood corroborating flesh and blood—as we say, testifying” (1976:73).9 The “current” that “flowed back and forth” is, for Baldwin, the electrical trans- ference of Spirit. In turn, Spirit, brought down by testimony, is the generative spark, the spontaneous combustion, that ignites collective intimacy or multi- oneness. Baldwin’s “chain reaction” resembles the chemical reaction between fuel and oxygen that must take place for combustion to occur and create fire. The in- timacy generated in the fervency of testifying, which is the counter-negation or corroboration of flesh and blood or humanity, is the moment of possibility of dis- sident performance. The chain reaction (“flesh and blood corroborating flesh and blood”) produces truth-effects, authenticity. Baldwin is essentially theorizing the notion of a coherency, what might be thought of as an augmented version of in- teractivity or co-presence, an interpenetration, or a kind of together-presence. Soul music—a genre in which performers apply the sacred aesthetics of gospel music to issues and themes related to the secular world—is getting-togetherness, is presence: a oneness that is more than one, a multi-oneness. The notion of presence as getting-togetherness is different than the way pres- ence is usually conceived as the liveness of “being there” or “being in the mo- ment.” Baldwin notes that:

White Americans do not understand the depths out of which such an ironic tenacity comes, but they suspect that the force is sensual, and they are terrified of sensuality and do not any longer understand it. The word “sensual” is not intended to bring to mind quivering dusky maidens or priapic black studs. I am referring to something much simpler and much less fanciful. To be sensual, I think, is to respect and rejoice in the force of life, of life itself, and to be present in all that one does, from the effort of

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/105420402320351477 by guest on 27 September 2021 Toni Braxton, Disney, and Thermodynamics 61 loving to the breaking of bread. It will be a great day for America, inci- dentally, when we begin to eat bread again, instead of the blasphemous and tasteless foam rubber that we have substituted for it. (1963:43)

For Baldwin sensuality is presence. The getting-togetherness, or coherency that emerges most fully in sensual, everyday acts of intimacy, like breaking bread and loving, is also for Baldwin an augmented temporality, a being in and on and past linear time—being “in the moment” as a sensual engagement with the Other. The temporality of coherency—real time, as it were—is distinct from the false time of the corporate clock, suggested by the “foam rubber” substitute. This pursuit of getting togetherness, of aggregation, is most evident in Toni Braxton’s performance in Beauty and the Beast. Midway into the second act Brax- ton performed a rousing pop-soul ballad, “A Change in Me,” added to the show by composer Alan Menken especially for the crossover superstar.10 (Tim Rice wrote the song’s lyrics: Beauty’s original composer, Howard Ashman, died in 1992 from AIDS.) “A Change in Me” describes Belle’s climactic change of heart toward the Beast. But there is no question that the song also serves as a showcase for Braxton’s vocal prowess. On the wintry February evening when I viewed the show, “A Change in Me” radically disrupted the energy flow of the evening. Up until the introduction of the song, I had not, by any stretch of the imagination, been overwhelmed by Braxton’s performance. Like so many singers who venture for the first time on the professional stage, Braxton’s skills at acting seemed middling at best. Even though she was using a body microphone, Braxton’s speaking and singing voice throughout the show was largely inaudible, a result of shallow breath support. My inability to hear her dialogue did not seem to be related to where I was sitting—I was three rows back from the orchestra pit. Once, I moved to the back of the theatre, in the standing-room section, but I still was unable to hear Braxton without straining. Maybe Braxton was trying to downplay her voice in an effort to represent the bookwormish Belle as meek, too shy to speak with fortitude. But breathing problems have plagued Braxton’s singing career from the get-go. On her recordings and in live performances, Braxton’s singing voice tends to be somewhat better supported than her speaking voice. Especially in her lower range, her musical lines are choppy and crumbly, not unlike the consistency of shortbread; her upper register is better supported. Anita Baker, her closest vocal counterpart, has a jazzy voice that pours from her throat like muddied rainwater; Braxton’s vocal flow, on the other hand, is continuously interrupted by jerks of breath failure. In a 1998 interview, Braxton described the differences between performing live on the Broadway stage and in the recording studio. She offers clues concerning her breathing habits (or lack thereof ):

[On Broadway], you have to take this breath to hold a note for an ex- tended period of time. I’m used to holding the mike and being able to pull it away and take a breath whenever I want. On top of it, I’ve had chronic sinus infections and asthma, so I like to breathe wherever it’s ap- propriate so I won’t have an acute asthma attack! But we worked on it, and I got over it. [...] I’ve learned how to belt it out and how to hold notes longer. And I have learned how to sing my lyrics clearer. (in Won- torek 1998:20)

Braxton’s pre–Beauty and the Beast breathing style is haphazard and random (“take a breath whenever I want”). It might even be considered improvisational, except even improvisation requires the artist to structure the flow of breath. I prefer to conceive of Braxton’s unstructured breathing style as a not-quite ap- proach, or a non-approach, or a non-practice of musical phrasing.11 Phrasing in

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/105420402320351477 by guest on 27 September 2021 62 Jason King vocalization is always a function of the practiced discipline of breath control. In gospel and soul, rhythmic and extensive or deep “diaphragmatic” breathing is an essential practice. The practice of breath support, which is an open secret or informal tradition in most black popular musical forms, makes possible the py- rotechnics that register authenticity (mutual corroboration) and/or soulfulness. An axiological relation exists between spiritual inspiration, creativity, and impro- vised expression and the physical process of breathing. I call Braxton a modified soul singer because unlike many classic soul singers, her approach to vocalization is breathy, producing labored, tentative, and fragmented phrasing.12 Braxton’s phrasing suggests she maintains a broken connection to the traditions of flow and improvisation in soul and gospel. Nonetheless, in contexts and environments like the Palace Theater, even Brax- ton’s broken soul traditions produce magical effects. As she approached the chorus of “A Change in Me,” Braxton let loose a vocal wail that seemed to send a shuddering rush through to the back of the audience. During the number, her singing style decidedly transformed from standard Bel Canto musical theatre to the radio-ready, pop-soul sound she has become known for. The audience re- sponded promptly. Until “A Change in Me” the audience sat coldly inert during the musical numbers, only applauding at their close. In contrast, the audience became engaged and reenergized by Braxton’s vocal demonstration in “A Change in Me.” The first high note Braxton hit, stretched in time and space and sup- ported, finally, with the controlled power of breath expulsed from her lungs, produced a collective sensation in the theatre, which was evident in the sponta- neous applause and verbal acknowledgment by the audience—gasps, small shrieks, and various other utterances—during, not after, the song. This move- ment toward call and response suggests that the audience was getting together, on one accord. “A Change in Me” announced the presence of Spirit, a new sensuality that previously had been repressed in the unfolding of the evening. The walls of the Palace Theatre seemed to come down, just as they do in the Church when the Holy Spirit descends. Indeed, the formalized structure of the theatrical event itself seemed to fold in on itself—time seemed to stand still, and a dense, pervading warmth filled the space. It was clear to me, although probably not to most of the audience at the time, that the energetic change in the room was specifically related to the sacred, Afro-Christian tradition of heat transfer that Braxton brought to the stage through her vocal craft. At the end of “A Change in Me” the audience erupted into spontaneous applause, stretching out for nearly half a minute, virtually stopping the show. No other musical number in Beauty showcased Braxton to the same degree, and certainly no other number in the show transferred heat from performer to au- dience, and vice versa, in this particular way. I recall being visibly disappointed by the conclusion of Beauty and the Beast because the “gains” made by the intro- duction of soul into the show became marginalized and repressed. The energy in the room dropped after “A Change in Me.” The tense, steely feeling of cor- porate time returned, the walls reerected themselves, the applause became polite once again. Essentially, the transgression Braxton brought to the stage, simply by virtue of her corporeal labor, was not carried into the rest of the show. Rather, it was contained by conservative impulses within the show itself. Yeteven though the transgressive difference Braxton brought into the show was repressed so quickly, it was not so easily forgotten. The issue of repressed difference that Braxton evidenced in her performance in Beauty and the Beast has to be considered in the context of the total environment into which her performance was formatted. Changes in the production of Broad- way entertainment and cultural changes in the Times Square district that func- tions as the home for the Palace Theatre deserve consideration as we think about Braxton’s performance in terms of heat transfer.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/105420402320351477 by guest on 27 September 2021 Toni Braxton, Disney, and Thermodynamics 63 Corporate Theatre, Improvisation, and Thermodynamics So I want to go to Disneyland where the deceptions are genuine, where I can see constant unreality, steady illusion. —Toni Morrison (1990, 4a:1)

The theatre used to be a place for a joyful moment to happen in a musical, and deep, deep content happened in the play form. The theatre was about walking through that door and knowing that danger is possible, magic is possible, enlightenment is possible, and accident is possible the minute the lights go out. And I think that’s gone for good; those days are over. —Patti LuPone (2000)

In a mournful 1998 article in the New York Times entitled “A Detour in the Theatre That No One Predicted,” Frank Rich blasts the Disney Corporation for what it has done to the Broadway theatre experience.13 Disney’s appearance and success on Broadway in the mid-1990s is a sign that “the theatre is now becoming ‘content’ suitable for synergistic annexation and exploitation by our new enter- tainment conglomerates” (1998:7). The Disneyfication of Broadway signals “the impending corporatization of the American theatre” in which “the ‘interactive’ theatrical experience becomes virtually indistinguishable from theme parks and theme restaurants” (7). According to Rich, this takeover began with Andrew Lloyd Webber’s 1983 production, Cats. Produced by Cameron Mackintosh (who also produced Euro- pop schlock melodramas like Les Miserables and Miss Saigon), Cats is a critically panned British import that remained commercially viable for a record-breaking 16 years (“now and forever!”). By proving that there is “an infinite tourist au- dience for a theatrical attraction,” Cats represents the dawn of “the new world that the American theatre is entering” in which the theatrical experience, aes- thetically speaking, is shot through with corporate pressures and demands (1998:7). Disney’s corporate tentacles drive the improvisational life out of the onstage work. “The real question about a theatre overrun by cartoon characters and scripted by marketers,” Rich forewarns, “is what, over the long haul, will be its quality of life” (7).14 The reconstruction of live theatre into a Baudrillardian simu- lation marks the rise of a postmodern Great White Way. Disney’s reconstruction of the Broadway experience is only one aspect of the much larger social reconstruction of Times Square. Since the early 1990s, the 42nd Street Redevelopment Project has received over $1.7 billion in private in- vestment and $75 million in direct public investment to reconstruct the gritty, lugubrious “Deuce” strip (between 7th and 8th Avenues) into a theatrical and amusement district. While the redevelopment project had its birth in the mid- 1970s, its credibility was bolstered considerably in late 1993 when the Disney Corporation decided to reconstruct the New Amsterdam Theatre, a dormant 1,800-seat theatrical house located right in the heart of the Deuce. By this time, the Times Square Business Improvement District, an alliance of local property owners, had begun to stem the tide of crime in the area by evicting local com- merce organized around sex and pornography. Buoyed by Mayor Rudolph Giuliani’s batter-ram legislation revamping city- wide zoning to restrict adult-oriented businesses near residential areas and in proximity to each other, Disney provided the corporate muscle to force the clo- sure of the porn theatres adjacent to the New Amsterdam. Like so many corporate sheep, big businesses like ESPN, MTV, Sega, Nike, AMC, and Sony, as well as

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2. Located in the heart of Times Square in New York chain theme stores like Madame Tussaud’s Wax Museum have followed Disney’s City, this billboard features lead and set up shop in the revamped entertainment district. The result of the massive images of Toni Development Project is a massive reconstruction of the “image” of Times Square, Braxton’s The Heat album making it desirable for big corporations to come in and reap capital by providing cover. The unexpected rela- a safe, clean family-oriented experience for tourists. tionship between Toni In Times Square Red, Times Square Blue, a brilliant ethno-sociological study of Braxton’s star image and the Deuce, science fiction writer and essayist Samuel Delaney views the recon- the Times Square neighbor- struction of Times Square in terms of the upheaval of institutions that promote hood is evident (2000). cross-class relations in the metropolis (1998). These institutions include sex mov- (Photo by Jason King) ies, massage parlors, gay baths, bars, and “sex lounges,” which were, to those who made use of them, “humane and functional, fulfilling needs that most of our society does not yet know how to acknowledge” (90). Delaney argues that these marginalized institutions made possible a variety of cross-class “encounters whose most important aspect was that mutual pleasure was exchanged.” He asks: “What greater field and force than pleasure can human beings share?” (56). The corporatization of urban space represses the possibility of the cross-class pursuit of pleasure by homogenizing that space toward the needs of tourists (174). Delaney theorizes a politics of encounter within the urban by drawing on and extending Jane Jacobs’s landmark urban theory of the 1960s. Delaney proposes that interpersonal contact is essential in that it generates an “overall pleasurable social fabric” (126). Everyday acts of “vigil and concern” in the supposedly “un- safe” metropolis evolve into “considered and helpful action.” The witnessing of such a metamorphosis imparts to the city resident a “faithful and loving attitude toward one’s neighborhood, one’s city, one’s nation, the world” (126). Through a complex set of mechanics, when contact is buttressed by state-provided human services, the urban environment becomes a safer, relaxed—self-policing—and more pleasurable place to live. Delaney’s is a model of social relations based on

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/105420402320351477 by guest on 27 September 2021 Toni Braxton, Disney, and Thermodynamics 65 improvisation: random, chance encounters provide the mechanism through which the social whole becomes possible. The social becomes an improvised ensemble, based on/in a sustained chaotic order, or synarchy. “Contact includes the good Samaritans at traffic accidents [...] or even the neighbor who, when you’ve forgotten your keys at the office and are locked out of your apartment, invites you in for coffee and lets you use her phone to call a locksmith [...]” (125). Delaney’s theory of social contact points to a multisensory model of social rela- tions, not far removed from Baldwin’s notion of getting-togetherness as sensual engagement with the Other. Like Frank Rich, Delaney sees the corporate redevelopment of Times Square, and its sanitized pleasure, as particularly insidious:

But what I see lurking behind the positive foregrounding of “family val- ues” (along with, in the name of such values, the violent suppression of urban social structures, economic, social, and sexual) is a wholly provincial and absolutely small-town terror of cross-class contact. (153)

For Delaney, the trope of the family is wheeled in to obscure the antidemocratic processes of privatizing public space. Big business is anticontact; consequently, it is antisocial and ultimately dehumanizing in its orientation (173). The theme-parking of America is, as Delaney notes, the superimposition of monocultural smalltown American values on the diversity of urban public life. Suburban shopping malls and theme park amusement sites are successful because “they’re managed environments,” according to Richard Bradley, president of D.C.’s Downtown Business Improvement District. Suburbanites and tourists “want to come down into a public place and feel safe and secure, feel order has been maintained, that there’s a sense of specialness” (in Feldmann 1997:1). Amaz- ingly, Bradley manages to reconcile a “sense of specialness” with the generic sameness of these managed public spaces. In a triumph of deceptive public rela- tions, Disney marked its arrival on Broadway with publicity that heralded the corporation’s commitment to live theatre and the promotion of sociality. CEO Michael Eisner claimed that the renovation of the New Amsterdam Theatre was designed to

mark [Disney’s] expanding commitment to live entertainment. As impor- tant a development as the information superhighway will be, we believe that there is a growing desire for people to interact socially at live events in theatres, sports arenas and theme parks. (in Nelson 1995:71–72)

Eisner’s words obscure the corporation’s obsession with regulation and total social control. One writer notes that:

three years ago, when Disney planners first looked at 42nd Street, their initial impulse was to gate it. They forgot that just across Eighth Avenue is the Port Authority Bus Terminal, a point of entry for 180,000 daily com- muters. “We do have some genetic instincts,” admits a sheepish Peter Rummell, chairman of Walt Disney Imagineering. “But then we realized that half of New Jersey has to travel 42nd Street to get to work.” (Rose 1996:94)

Rummell also discussed the corporation’s reservations about settling down into Times Square. Disney’s alliance with the development organizations and the state was nearly jeopardized by the corporation’s fear of lacking control in the urban planning. “But the question in these urban environments really becomes, Is there

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/105420402320351477 by guest on 27 September 2021 66 Jason King a way you can have enough control?” Rummell notes. “Because we [Disney] are control freaks” (in Rose 1996:94). For Disney, the social is a priority only insofar as it can be controlled and organized. Rummell’s model of social regulation is the exact opposite of the improvisational model of sociality that Delaney suggests as the seed of critical democracy. Disney’s impulse to gate, or provide literal, physical boundaries around what is essentially public space is one means by which the regulation of certain bodies within and without the area can be assured. Under the privatization of public space, people can “get together,” but only within strict, circumscribed limits. In its plan to rezone (not eradicate) New York’s red-light district, the corpo- ration exposes its own fetish for purity in social relations, a fetish also marked by a class elitism that contrasts with Delaney’s delight in interclass contact. Note Eisner’s choice of words in his description of the impact of the Disney aesthetic on public space in America: “If you go to any public building in the U.S.—base- ball stadiums, basketball arenas, fairs—because of Disney, the customer expects a cleaner, safer, more friendly environment” (in Adler and Malone 1995:68). In Dis- ney’s model of social relations, the inherent “danger” of improvisational contact is undercut by the guarantee of monocultural purity.15 From a macroscopic perspective, the Disney aesthetic mirrors the national ob- session with order and control. The forceful policing of imagined moral bound- aries emerges from a moralistic Puritanism that is the founding subtext of the American national identity. “Walt Disney had a personal reputation as a ‘great puritan entrepreneur of culture in the 20th century’ [...the company was] an extreme expression of white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant cultural values” (Lukas 1973 [1972]:108, 109). “As long as Walt Disney was alive, therefore, he tolerated in his company and its products no deviations from his straight-laced notions of what it meant to be American and proper” (Ostman 1996:85). Decades after Disney’s death, the Disney Corporation continues to reaffirm and reconstitute the national Puritan utopia. Disney’s control fever translates into the onstage quality of life in Beauty and the Beast. The Broadway show is a reconstruction of the 1991 blockbuster ani- mated film; the 1991 film, in turn, is a reconstruction of Jean Cocteau’s moody 1946 art film version. Cocteau’s 1946 version is a reworking of the original 1757 fairy tale written by French aristocrat Jeanne-Marie Le Prince de Beaumont.16 Having garnered his experience in theme-park staging, Robert Jess Roth, the appointed director of the live stage version, was given a simple instruction from Eisner: “stage the film” (in Nelson 1995). The razzle-dazzle of Roth’s stage version is partly an attempt to capture onstage the state-of-the-art animation effects achieved in the 1991 film version.

Fans of the 1991 animated feature Beauty and the Beast will be amazed how Disney’s skilled workers have been able to recreate the same effects on stage. Everything is done to bring about the same celluloid feel from the screen, and that’s truly amazing. (Smith 1997:26A)

With a 16 million dollar budget the 1994 stage extravaganza was able to provide special effects, stage illusions, and dazzling, complicated costumes. “When live theatre, the last of the cottage industries, merges with an entertainment con- glomerate the size of Walt Disney Productions,” one critic wrote, “you can expect fireworks” (Blausen 1994:38). In short, the Broadway version of Beauty and the Beast aimed for a pyrotechnical thrill of a more literal, and perhaps less radical sort than the pyrotechnical displays of soul and gospel discussed earlier. In the film, Belle is aided in her distress by a set of precocious inanimate household objects. These comic objects, which include the candlestick (Lumi-

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/105420402320351477 by guest on 27 September 2021 Toni Braxton, Disney, and Thermodynamics 67 ere), the teapot (Mrs. Potts) and her half-cup son (Chip), have been anthropo- morphized as a side effect of the magic spell of the Beast. In the Broadway reconstruction, living actors sport puppetlike prosthetics so that they might re- semble the objects they represent. In the preplanning of the stage reconstruction of Beauty and the Beast, “Disney executives understood that the stage version’s success would depend largely on a convincing presentation of these inanimate objects” (Blausen 1994:38). Ann Hould-Ward, the Tony-winning costume de- signer, spent two years carefully constructing the costumes in the effort to “to capture the look and the spirit of the film, translating its simple shapes in clear line and color into theatrical costumes with depth and texture” (Blausen 1994:38). Although the “humanity” of the actors is preserved—the costumes do not cover their entire faces—Disney’s goal is to turn living actors into performing objects: “Reversing the anthropomorphic process, the musical prides itself on how clev- erly people can be made into objects” (Richards 1994). The levels of reconstruc- tion here are dense: human actors are re-creating animated objects that, in the context of the plot, were once human but have now become (partially) objectified or dehumanized, as it were. In sharp contrast to the film, the Broadway show was lambasted by critics for its lack of spontaneity and heart, its fetish for technology at the expense of feeling and emotion. The onstage world is turned into what Shakespeare, via Hamlet, might have called a sterile promontory. Most of the critics appeared nostalgic for the lost nonrepresentational qualities that were supposedly characteristic of pre- corporate theatre: soul, magic, resonance, heart, flow, warmth, love. David Rich- ards noted that the show has “amazingly little resonance” despite its show-biz grandeur. According to critic Karen Campbell:

While Beauty and the Beast (as well as the newer Disney show The Lion King) may provide lasting memories of opulence and spectacular theatrical magic, that flash and dazzle also can be a bit distancing. It’s almost too much and too removed from reality to make a lasting connection. (1998:B6)

New York Times critic Janet Maslin wrote that the stage version was marked by a loss of magic. The show is busy:

displaying a visual wit that the stage production doesn’t match. The stage backdrops are surprisingly lifeless, and for all the show’s occasional fireworks, they look flat and dull. There’s nothing here to suggest the film’s magical atmosphere, in which anything can burst unexpectedly into life and nimble camera movements create a three dimensional feeling. (1994:A16)

Other critics shared Maslin’s opinion, decrying the loss of soul in the film’s transference to stage. For Brad Smith: “Beauty’s production values are skin deep”; essentially it is “all show with little soul” (1997:26A). Ty Burr of Entertainment Weekly noted: “above all, the movie had soul, in the wary hopes of its bookish Belle, in the peevish self-absorption of its Beast, in the way these two grew, inch by storybook inch, toward mutual love.” For Burr, “the steel girders of The Formula have always been visible under the beguilingly animated skin” of the Disney movie products. Admittedly, the film version of Beauty and the Beast “re- mains as calculated as weather,” but there is nonetheless a “generosity of spirit blowing through the movie that, in retrospect, must have been a corporate fluke” (1997: 1C). Late New York Times critic and playwright Vincent Canby provided perhaps the harshest critique of the stage version. Canby wrote:

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1 Somewhere deep within Walt Disney Productions’ overproduced, 2 ⁄2-hour (including intermission) Beauty and the Beast, now at the Palace theatre, the soul of Disney’s sweet, modest, 84-minute animated film is crying to get out. It never does. It’s wearing concrete boots inside the monster body of the Disney organization’s idea of what a Broadway musical should be: relentlessly bland, busy, upbeat and robotic. (1994:5)

Canby attacked the show’s creators who “appear to regard the stage as simply a primitive form of film that must be disguised with vaguely cinematic effects, like moving the scenery instead of the camera.” Canby despised how the fetishization of technology in corporate theatre impinges upon the liveness of the theatrical experience, turning it into a virtual mausoleum. He claimed:

[T]here’s not a spontaneous moment in Beauty and the Beast, never an in- stant when you know that you’re seeing something that’s alive, particular to this performance on this day at this hour. You might well suspect that if the world ended tomorrow, the show’s internal mechanism would go right on ticking in the void until its batteries ran down. (7)

Like Baldwin in his disgust for “tasteless foam rubber,” corporate time for Canby is essentially false time. Beauty and the Beast is run on “batteries”—a borrowed energy removed from human input. And, as in Nelson George’s assessment of corporate soul as a cold-hearted assembly line, Canby sees the onstage lack of improvisation as contiguous with the show’s lack of heart, its lack of warmth, its celluloid feel. Using thermodynamics as an analogy, the Disney project resembles a closed system determined and designated by a series of controlled variables. Thermo- dynamics is a branch of physics that considers the flow of energy or heat transfer in relation to any given macroscopic system that can be measured, observed, and quantified (Callen 1985). A thermodynamic process involves the movement from one state of equilibrium to another. In the first law of thermodynamics, which is the law of conservation, energy flows but is neither added to nor subtracted from in its totality. The internal energy of a system is always equal to the difference of the heat flow into the system and the actual work done by the system itself. Heat that enters a system causes the overall energy of the system to increase, although equilibrium will be reached if heat escapes from the system. The second law of thermodynamics refers to nonequilibrium systems. In an isolated system that has no interaction with its surroundings, if two separate bodies at different temperatures are mixed, they will form a single, uniform temperature and achieve equilibrium. The result is disorder, chaos: this is a nonreversible process. The concept of entropy is used to mark how close a system is to equi- librium; or, conversely, entropy marks the level of disorder within a system. En- tropy always increases until equilibrium is achieved, and then no more change can occur. The Disney project is not unlike a thermodynamic system. The corporate impulse to gate or fence-off the system is a desire to insulate the system from outside intervention, the possibility of improvisation or surprise (or danger with- out warning). Canby’s feeling that if the world ended Beauty and the Beast would still keep running has to do with the show’s isolation from the outside world, its hermetic seal, what one critic called Disney’s impulse toward “antiseptic, vacuum-packed, made-in-California sameness” (Hulbert 1998:L6). The same critic noted that the live theatre experience craves a “rougher magic” than the Disney formula wants to provide. Samuel Delaney echoes this argument: he sees the influence of corporate pressure on the Broadway scene as leading inevitably

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/105420402320351477 by guest on 27 September 2021 Toni Braxton, Disney, and Thermodynamics 69 to the presentation of “new and bigger and more gorgeous productions referring to less and less of the social and material world around us” (1998:174). Although Disney attempts to maintain its live show in a constant state of equi- librium (where there is virtually nothing “particular” about the show from day to day, as Canby noted) it in fact invites manipulated variables into the show which disturb the equilibrium and throw the system into temporary chaos. The very fact that Beauty and the Beast needs at least some onstage flesh and blood interaction to make it work suggests that mistakes are possible, danger is still possible. In its programmatic planning and control impulses, the corporation must ironically accommodate and incorporate the very elements it would seek to ex- clude—soul, magic, the promise of coherency.17 The Walt Disney Corporation production might be conceived more precisely as a kind of refrigeration system in which massive external work is done to maintain an internal steady, cold temperature (running down the earth’s natural resources through the fetish for technology). Anything hot that enters such a system is soon brought to a colder, equilibrium state. This model provides one way to think about the dilemma of “hot” bodies (pyrotechnical singers, for in- stance) intruding into or being invited into manipulated cold systems (corporate structures that repress the “danger” of improvisation and contact). In these cases, chaos is only temporary; equilibrium always returns. The corporation always reduces the possibility of danger without warning, the shock or instability that these singers (might) represent. But we should also think about the possibility that in such a refrigeration system, some manipulated variables might not only just bring the heat, only to be cooled again; they might kick or jar the door open, or puncture permanent holes in the refrigerator lining. Such radical action would bring permanent in- stability to the total internal environment of the insulated system. The system itself would have to adapt to the temperature of the outside system from which it was isolated in the first place. Toni Braxton, a sultry soul singer, is one such manipulated variable that temporarily disrupts the Disney system.18

The Corporate Makeover If you play James Brown (say, “Money Won’t Change You...But Time Will Take You Out”) in a bank, the total environment is changed. Not only the sardonic comment of the lyrics, but the total emotional placement of the rhythm, instrumentation, and sound. An energy is released in the bank, a summoning of images that take the bank, and everybody in it, on a trip. That is, they visit another place. A place where Black People live. But dig, not only is it a place where Black People live, it is a place, in the spiritual precincts of its emotional telling, where Black People move in almost absolute openness and strength. —LeRoi Jones (1966:186)

In The Devil Finds Work (1976), James Baldwin proposes a theory of movie star agency. Celebrity performances on film exceed the actual content of the films themselves. The celebrity performance cuts and augments the film itself, exposing the subtextual myths and lies upon which the film organizes itself. Describing Bette Davis’s performance in In This, Our Life (1942), Baldwin says that “her performance had the effect, rather, of exposing and shattering the film, so that she played in a kind of vacuum” (70). Black film performers often manage to overcome the extreme limitations imposed upon actors of color in Hollywood moviemaking. These limitations act as a constraining “straitjacket,” yet black actors are nonetheless capable of providing an authenticity that is not present in the film itself. Simply through performance, they change the total environment

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/105420402320351477 by guest on 27 September 2021 70 Jason King of the film world. Baldwin’s proposition that the sensual authenticity of perfor- mance “shatters” the film is worth reading in relation to the LeRoi Jones epigraph that opens this section. Both writers want to provide a theory of black perfor- mance out of context: Black performance as the manipulated variable in an in- sulated environment.19 In other words, what happens when black performance practices find themselves located in contexts that would, under normal circum- stances, seek to exclude those same practices? The alliance between Toni Braxton and the Disney Corporation was provi- sional: it lasted formally for the six months of her contractual obligation. Although no figures seem to be available, Disney might have been able to hire the singer for a relatively reduced cost, especially in the context of her financial woes. Be- sides the pocket change, Braxton benefited through the legitimization process that comes with a film or recording star’s highly public appearance on the New York stage. (Her attempts to star in the major motion picture Why Do Fools Fall in Love? [1988; directed by Gregory Nava] were thwarted. After a bit part in the 2001 film Kingdom Come [directed by Doug McHenry], the singer is currently in the process of trying to jump-start a feature film career). It could be argued that in 1998, Braxton needed Disney much more than Disney needed Braxton. I disagree. While I doubt that too many others saw this six-month alliance as theoretically meaningful, it may have been a symbiotic, and surreal, relationship—something like a reverse Faustian bargain. Braxton tem- porarily sold her “soul” to Disney; and Disney benefited by temporarily mar- keting her “soul” to boost its own corporate credibility. For six months, Braxton became Disney’s “hot property.” The Walt Disney Corporation has suffered a colossal amount of criticism from the margins in regard to the racial (and sexual) politics of its artistic projects (see Fernandez 1995; Higginbotham 1994; Rothstein 1997; Smoodin 1994). The 1946 animated feature Song of the South (directed by Harve Foster and Wilfred Jackson) has never been rereleased due to its shockingly offensive content. And yet, more recently, Disney has been launching a veritable ode to multiculturalism in its annual animated features. Aladdin (1992, directed by Ron Clements and John Musker), Pocahontas (1995, directed by Mike Gabriel and Eric Goldberg), Mulan (1998, directed by Tony Bancroft and Barry Cook), Tarzan (1999, directed by Chris Buck and Kevin Lima), and The Emperor’s New Groove (2000, directed by Mark Dindal) all feature ethnic content. Each film has come under attack from ethnic organizations for racial insensitivity (Rothstein 1997; also see Fernandez 1995). Probably Disney’s version of multiculturalism runs no deeper than what Peter McClaren calls “corporate multiculturalism,” a token gesture to diversity floating along a river of liberal monoculturalist assumptions (1994). The original stage version of the Beauty and the Beast featured actors of color only in small chorus parts. The stage version of The Lion King, on the other hand, featured plenty of black actors and expounded significantly upon the animated film’s African scrim by hiring master puppeteer and artistic cosmopolite Julie Taymor. The original cast of Disney’s Aida (2000, directed by Robert Falls) featured Caribbean Amer- ican Heather Headley in the title role. But the show’s facile plot of miscegenation as transgression and its broadly exoticized setting in ancient Egypt can hardly be considered radical in content. The multicultural chic of Disney might be seen as a kind of return of the repressed or, at very least, bad karma: that which was excluded returns, with a difference. Critics of the soul-free content of corporate theatre rarely stop to pose a deeper series of questions about capitalism, namely: How does corporate influence wear away, over time, (the integrity of ) dissident performance traditions? And, how do these dissident performance traditions, over time, wear away corporate omnipo- tence? During the six months that Braxton performed in Beauty and the Beast,

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/105420402320351477 by guest on 27 September 2021 Toni Braxton, Disney, and Thermodynamics 71 while The Lion King was also running, my friends in the theatre commiserated over the impoverished state of black theatre and I would argue, tongue-in-cheek, that Disney had not one, but two black musicals playing successfully on Broadway. Through both shows, at different times, Disney relied on images of blackness on the Great White Way to earn itself the seal of approval for “diversity authenticity.” This self-conscious display of “diversity” occurred simultaneously with Disney’s participation in monoculturalization of Times Square. The schizophrenia of this authenticizing strategy is the predictable outcome of commodity corporate capi- talism in practice. In the effort to usher Braxton into Beauty and the Beast, Disney went wild making alterations in the already-running show. The multinational corporation first reconstructed its marketing strategy to capitalize on Braxton’s presignified celebrity as a sultry R&B beauty. On handbills and New York City billboards, the revised advertising campaign featured a medium close-up photograph of Braxton shot from just below the neck line: she wears a white V-neck T-shirt. Her hands rest gently, crossed above her head. Looking bewitchingly into the camera, the singer sports a long brown weave (or hair piece, hard to tell from the photo) tucked behind her ears, diamond earrings, a truckload of makeup, plus a black baseball cap sporting the white words “Beauty” (plate 4). The caption at the bottom of the ad, in red lettering, reads “Braxton and the Beast.” Next to the caption, in very small print, almost not noticeable, is the abstract logo for the show, which appears on all the paraphernalia, a profile outline of the Beast holding a rose. Even at a closer look, it is not clear whether the ad is a promotion for Toni Braxton the celebrity or for Beauty and the Beast. On the back of the postcard version of the ad, Braxton’s name is noticeably larger, set in a bolder font than the title of the show. (A less informed consumer might in fact think that the show is actually titled Braxton and the Beast.) The substitution of “Braxton” for “Beauty” in the phrase “Braxton and the Beast” suggests two things. First, that Braxton is beautiful, a suggestion that is further reinforced by the word on the cap that she wears. Second, if you come to the show you will be seeing the celebrity playing herself, not a role. Disney, the corporate giant always striving for sameness and purity, is essentially admitting outright in their ad: “Black is Beautiful.” The implications of Disney’s marketing of black female beauty could be subsumed by the larger implications behind the marketing of Braxton’s celebrity, although of course her celebrity is never outside of these questions of black female beauty. The Disney expectation is that Braxton will bring her mellifluous beauty (and we can assume they’re talking about visual beauty since the ad is so focused on her visage) to a title character who is already named Beauty (so there is a synergy to the marketing choice). The question of whether she will (be allowed to) bring her sultry sound, which also falls under the rubric of the beautiful, into the theatre is postponed. The ad is oriented toward the promise of the visual. Disney’s reconstruction of Beauty and the Beast for Braxton did not stop with the revised marketing strategies. Ann Hould Ward was brought back to make slight costume alterations for the singer. Some of the key dresses were lowered and tucked to accentuate Braxton’s curvaceous body line: “they’ve done little plungey things,” the singer reported (in Wontorek 1998:20). Most notably, key scenes were rewritten to accommodate Braxton’s racial difference.20 Suddenly, Belle takes on the spunky, sassy attitude that is imagined to be the hallmark of young, hip, black, inner-city femininity. (Yes,this is the same “black girl attitude” so many critics have recognized in Braxton’s hit songs, and it even surfaces in the head-rolling title of her debut single “Love Shoulda Brought You Home Last Night”.) In describing the show’s alterations for Braxton, one writer says:

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/105420402320351477 by guest on 27 September 2021 Toni Braxton, Disney, and Thermodynamics 73 But no one expected Belle to get sassy on us. For example, in one of the show’s comic high points, a scene in which the brusque Beast forces his reluctant houseguest to come down to dinner in an ungentlemanly way, Braxton’s Belle has a new response: She extends her arm—palm out, fin- gers splayed—and snaps her neck. For the first time, in true ’90s homegirl fashion, Belle tells the Beast to “talk to the hand.” (Wontorek 1998:18)21

These changes in the show demonstrate a kind of exoticizing of black urban style as difference. They show, even if inadvertently, Disney’s awareness of the impor- tance of racial difference in the casting of Toni Braxton—even as they represent a repressive foreclosure of all but the most stereotypical representations of black female moods, ideas, experiences, and gestures. If Beauty and the Beast starring Toni Braxton became something of a black musical by virtue of its star, it ran counter to the Broadway tradition of presenting musicals and plays where racial difference is not explicitly determined at the level of content. In shows like No Strings (1962), which broke ground by casting Af- rican American actor Diahann Carroll opposite white leading man Richard Kiley, and the controversial 1994 revival of Carousel, which featured black actors like Audra Ann McDonald and Shirley Verrett in lead roles traditionally reserved for whites, race was treated in factual and insignificant terms by way of discourses around nontraditional casting. When an actor of color is hired to replace a white celebrity, she is often cast “colorblind.” In these situations, regardless of issues of setting, time, or place, nothing in the script or presentation is altered to accom- modate the accompanying issues that the actor’s visible racial background might bring to the stage. In the original stage version of Beauty and the Beast, Susan Egan, who is white, played Belle. In the movie, the animated character is white, with Susan Egan singing the role. Describing the role in the Broadway show, John Lahr noted that: “Disney’s Belle has spunk; and Susan Egan, who has a fine voice and a sweet, strong nature, is a perfect embodiment of the American ideal of decent self-sufficiency” (1994:102). Brad Smith echoes Lahr’s comments: “Belle looks and acts like a cross between Snow White and Mary Poppins, the Disney ideal of unctuous femininity” (1997:26A). Now, Toni Braxton may be many things to many people, but she is far—really far—from the mythic ideal of purity suggested by the term “all-American.” In fact, her Broadway performance comes just two years after a series of scandalous, near-nude pictures in the urban music magazine Vibe. Braxton doubles back on all-American pride by linking nationalist assumptions of purity to her own au- todidactic discourse of role modeling. The singer told one journalist that Belle is “a wonderful role model for women of all ages and nationalities” (in O’Haire 1998). After her 1998 performance in Beauty and the Beast, Braxton was awarded the Congress for Racial Equality’s medal for black achievement in the media arts. The award legitimated the reconstruction of Braxton’s image from scandal- monger to model black celebrity. At the same time, Beauty starring Toni Braxton runs counter to the practice of Broadway musicals such as Golden Boy (1964) and even Bring in ‘da Noise, Bring in ‘da Funk (1996) in which black actors populate the stage and racism, beyond race itself, becomes the explicit social content. There is, obviously, no mention of racism in Beauty and the Beast. Instead, with Braxton in the show, the produc- 3. This photograph was fea- tion might seem to emerge out of a different theatrical tradition in which isolated tured on Broadway hand- black characters in mostly white-cast musicals bring vernacular musical traditions bills and billboards as part to the stage and “stop the show.” Random examples of this performance tradition of Disney’s marketing cam- include Delores Hall as Jewel in The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas (1978), Carol paign capitalizing on Toni Woods as Mrs. Crosby in The Goodbye Girl (1993) and Lillias White playing Jonesy Braxton’s celebrity status in the revival of How to Succeed in Business (1995). The list of black actors who (1994). (Photo by Lynn have historically been “allowed” or given “freedom” to come in and stop the Goldsmith)

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/105420402320351477 by guest on 27 September 2021 74 Jason King show, to bring the walls down, and then are shuttled off to the wings, is extensive. The major difference between Toni Braxton and these black actresses is that Braxton played the lead role in a mostly white cast musical whereas the other actress were clearly in subordinate or supporting roles. Belle was obviously not written with Braxton in mind but was altered instead to accommodate her pres- ence as a sultry black soul singer. Braxton’s difference in the show is her celebrity black(female)ness: but this only accentuates and guarantees the dynamic of difference, which is already the focus of the script. Beauty and the Beast is always already about difference. Belle is a cosmopolite set apart from all the local villagers in her “poor provincial town” by virtue of her superior intellect (she’s a bookworm), her overall impressionable sensibility, and also because of her beauty. In the opening song, the townsfolk agree: “Belle,” they sing, “Now, it’s no wonder that her name means ‘Beauty.’ / Her looks have got no parallel / But behind that fair fac¸ade / I’m afraid she’s rather odd / Very diff’rent from the rest of us / She’s nothing like the rest of us / Yes, diff’rent from the rest of us is Belle” (Ashman 1991). Belle herself wants “much more than this provincial life”; and of course, by the script’s end, she gets it. The question of difference in the Disney script also has to do with the way it structures relations of elitism and egalitarianism, the very same tensions that or- ganize the politics of celebrity (see Marshall 1997). In a brilliant Marxian analysis of the animated film version of Beauty and the Beast, Kirby Farrell places the script in the context of the L.A. riots, which occurred in 1993 during the film’s initial theatrical release. Farrell pays close attention to the master-servant relations of the Beast and his inanimate objects. These relations are Disney inventions, for they do not appear in any previous versions of the tale: he sees the portrayal of the mob in the film as a sure sign of “princely values triumphing in the post- industrial world too” (1993:312). The Disney version of Beauty and the Beast is at heart a narrative of stardom. Farrell clarifies how “Belle achieves her preemi- nence by rejecting community for a fantasy of individual omnipotence” (317). Her journey of upward mobility is not merely reducible to her search for love and security, as some critics have suggested, especially since the script turns love into “a function of class competition.” Instead, her journey is a willful separation from a proletarian lifestyle into a life of bourgeois superiority. “To appreciate Belle’s rejection of her working neighbors,” Farrell tells us, “we have to keep in mind that in the end she will dominate society as the supreme woman in the kingdom. As Americans say, she wants to make it” (313). For Farrell, the Disney script is allegorical. Belle’s inventor father is a small-time capitalist; Gaston is “an arrogant Mussolini-like leader”; and the town villagers, who eventually hunt for the Beast, “degenerate into a vicious mob.” These arche- typal impulses in the reconstructed Disney script are designed to make us forget that all along “Belle has been striving for superiority. When at last she becomes a princess, the premier woman in the land, it seems her natural reward” (314). By the end of the script, the “magic of aristocratic love sublimates the economic re- alities of the machine and the village” (314). Farrell’s cunning overreading of the Disney script disturbs the way critics uphold the “magical” film version of Beauty and the Beast as inherently more “innocent” than the soulless stage incarnation.22 I side with Farrell. The Disney film is always already non-innocent, if only by vir- tue of its pro-corporate, pro-capitalist allegorical subtext. One of Braxton’s functions in the stage play was, through her difference, to expose and shatter its assumptions. Her celebrity presence illuminated the dark, hidden subtext. Describing her neophyte status, she claimed:

I’m not an actor. That part of it was hard, and I didn’t want to be like any of the other Belles. I wanted to reinvent her. [...] I mean, I’ve only seen

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That Toni Braxton was very Toni Braxton onstage, more Braxton than Belle, confirms for us that this is a tale about celebrity, about elitism, about the workings of capital. If Braxton is essentially playing herself, then all the questions of dif- ference that inform her star discourse—from her desire for soul music in an Apostolic household to the rumors of her lesbianism to the details of her bank- ruptcy—are operating in her onstage performance. It is not as if she could leave those elements of her star persona in the dressing room. Even though it is the character Belle who is treated with difference, we also understand that it is really Braxton who is different, who is other than.23 Changes in Beauty and the Beast’s musical score were made to accommodate (rather than to stifle) Braxton’s “queer” voice. The keys to Belle’s song were lowered drastically to fit the singer’s range. Braxton:

I’m a contralto. I’m no soprano. Now Belle’s voice sounds really rich. I’m trying to make my tone a little brighter and cheerier, but you can’t help the way you sing. [...] This is a wonderful thing that I’m doing, but my first love is my work as an R&B pop singer.24 (in Wontorek 1998:20)

During Braxton’s run, “A Change in Me” was mobilized as part of the market- ing campaign for the show. For the first time, radio ads for Beauty and the Beast were aired on black radio stations. Of course, on the radio—unlike in the street signage—marketers could capitalize more effectively on the auricular promise of Braxton’s celebrity. The successful longtime New York R&B/urban music for- mat station, 107.5 FM WBLS, ran an ad in which the singer was heard belting out the long chest-sustained notes of “A Change in Me” underneath a male voice-over announcing her debut on Broadway. From the way the spot was con- structed, the less informed consumer might think Beauty and the Beast was a wall- to-wall soul musical! Thematically, “A Change in Me” not only served Belle’s character in relation to her narrative journey within the script; it also served Braxton’s celebrity. Brax- ton herself made the link between her character journey and her metanarrative journey:

[The song is] about the struggle Belle’s going through with the Beast. She was this kid being led, but she wanted more than the life she’d been lead- ing and the life she has now. She’s read books about it [...]. For me, watching TV and listening to records—I always wanted more. I’m just a girl from Maryland who got an opportunity to make records and be an entertainer. But I want more than just that. I wanna be more than just a record.

The interviewer asked Braxton if the song has resonance for her, to which she replied: “Oh yeah. Please! It’s the Toni Braxton story!” (in Wontorek 1998:21). The song is also about the change in Toni, her Oprah-style makeover of Self, especially because her Broadway stint came at that transitional moment between her pre-bankruptcy celebrity and her post-bankruptcy celebrity. Braxton’s unique- ness was announced and secured by Menken’s newly composed showstopper. “I feel like a caterpillar becoming a butterfly. I know that sounds weird, but I really feel like I’ve grown up, matured. I am woman” (in Wontorek 1998:21). “A Change

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/105420402320351477 by guest on 27 September 2021 76 Jason King in Me” was finally really about Toni’s Broadway gig, which was the vehicle for her reemergence as a celebrity, her rising from the ashes. In a show that functions to reify social differences in class, race, and gender, and where advanced technology usurps the magic traditionally brought to stage by human beings, Braxton performed—if only for the three-minute duration of “A Change in Me”—an approach to corporeal labor—the transference of heat. Braxton’s three-minute number can be seen as a radical act that produced surplus, multi-oneness, and the transgressive surprise of possibility in the context of scarcity, disaggregation, and containment. Braxton did not and could not by herself produce social and political change by exposing the truth of racism and difference or by making sure the audience “got” the message as they left their seats. Nonetheless, her thermodynamic performance, in the context of the Disney and Broadway corporate environment, illuminated the tension between trans- gression and containment that is fundamental to the American character. This power to illuminate is the magic of black performance that corporations may exploit, but cannot entirely control. At a time when multinational corporations seem to rule the world, the danger of black performance enacts the possibility of makeover, change, and even revolution.

Notes 1. Other voices that in some way resemble Braxton’s include Phyllis Hyman, Nancy Wilson, Cassandra Wilson, Sade, and Oleta Adams. Each singer is at least a generation older than Braxton. 2. In 1996, Richard Harrington wrote: “Now as then, Braxton’s specialty is the contemporary torch song, in which familiar lyrics about love lost and paradise regained are underscored by supple R&B currents” (1996:G7). 3. Early in her career, Braxton was besieged by rumors of lesbianism which orbited around her straightened, short-cropped “pageboy” haircut that was, then, a relatively unusual and somewhat masculine aesthetic choice, particularly for black women. A gradual image re- construction occurred from the release of Braxton’s debut 1992 album to her 1995 project: Gone was the pageboy haircut, replaced by a series of expensive long wigs and weaves. She also underwent breast augmentation surgery. (The surgery was verified retroactively when one of her breast implants imploded in late 2000, causing a minor media stir.) Besides her look and her contralto voice, the possibility of Braxton’s queer sexuality is made complete by her forceful delivery of Babyface’s lyrics, which for some “conveyed combativeness” (Holden 1996:22). Lyrics move increasingly toward more traditional pop themes of female dependency shot through with sexual explicitness (“Find Me a Man” [1996], “There’s No Me Without You” [1996]). The lyrics indexed a conventional male-to-female power ratio that contradicts the way this ratio is already disturbed in the queer politics of her voice. 4. Uptempo dance numbers like “You’re Making Me High” (1996) and “Gimme Some” (2000) are more infrequent. Many of her hit ballads, however, like “Un-break My Heart” (1996) and “Spanish Guitar” (2000) are reconstructed as chart-topping high-NRG dance tracks by house music producers like Hex Hector. 5. Although she remains on LaFace records to date, Braxton worked far less frequently with Babyface after her 1998 bankruptcy lawsuit. 6. Nelson George likens the early (pre-1989) LaFace sound to McDonald’s: a generic, cor- porate franchise that produces fast, nonnutritious food especially for “disenfranchised” cus- tomers of color. “Funneling the teeny, tinny vocals of these “singers” [Paula Abdul, Pebbles, the Boys, and Karyn White] through perky if lockstep rhythms, a battery of keyboards, and hooks as mechanized as a McDonald’s french fry slicer,” he says, “L.A. and Babyface concoct franchised hits for the disenfranchised.” From George’s perspective, Babyface only produces great work when “the [vocal] artist’s personality is paramount” ([1989] 1993:185). 7. I am reminded here of a second postscript to The Gospel Sound in which author Anthony Heilbut contextualizes most of the major contemporary gospel performers of the last 20 years by placing them in the larger gospel tradition as a whole. Of the Winans he notes: “The Winans continue to sound like the Temptations, and record for Quincy Jones, their albums polished to an icy sheen” (1975 [1997], 337, emphasis added).

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8. Here I am after the link between sentimental temperature and corporate reconstruction. This link constitutes the changing social definitions of what is possible in relation to cor- porate good, which anticipated the demise of the Cold War in late-Reaganism. Penny Marshall’s 1988 fish-out-of-water film Big plays upon these changing definitions: Tom Hanks’s character, who is a little boy mysteriously trapped in a man’s body, returns a sense of warmth, or brings the heat, back to the toy company where he works through his natural inclinations toward spontaneity and improvisation in all public and private affairs. Robert Loggia’s CEO character, a sort of Clive Davis type—a “warm” humanist big boss who has gone beyond demographics and market analyses—makes Hanks’s rise to vice president possible. Also, see the more self-important film Erin Brockovich (2000; directed by Steven Soderbergh) in which Julia Roberts’s portrayal of the title character serves a similar function to Hanks’s character. 9. Baldwin saw little difference between the church and the theatre, both spaces of deception and illusion, but also sites which provide a blueprint for the vision of radical social wholeness. 10. Menken, who has composed most of the successful Disney animated films since the late 1980s, is known to dig old rhythm and blues: the workshop of his obscure, long forgotten musical Battle of the Giants (1979) featured a cast of fantastic gospel and R&B singers. What’s more, his energetic scores to Little Shop of Horrors (1982) and Hercules (1997), among others, are chock full of Broadway gospel numbers. The Disney Corporation’s success in returning to classic musicals in the late 1980s has always been based on its longtime reliance on Menken (although they have now partially moved on to other composers like Stephen Schwartz and Elton John). Menken brings Disney soul music by indexicality. (Disney, of course, has been well aware of the excess of Menken’s musical contributions.) They’ve marketed several hugely successful pop singles from its films with R&B singers including “A Whole New World” by Peabo Bryson and Regina Belle (1992) and even “Beauty and the Beast” by Celine Dion and Peabo Bryson (1992). 11. The idea of a non-practice is probably related to Paul Gilroy’s reworking of Benjamin’s concept of de-skilling in relation to contemporary R&B and hip-hop (1998). 12. “Breathiness of the voice is caused by a failure of the vocalist’s muscles to resist the flow of air and be excited. It may also be caused by a lack of breath support to the vocal cords” (Dixon 1992:61). Toni Braxton’s jazzy 1997 studio recording/remake of the civil rights tune “Brown Baby” (penned by Oscar Brown Jr., and popularized by Nina Simone in 1961) appears on the 1994 charity album For Our Children Too (Rhino 72463). Braxton’s non- approach to phrasing chops sentences in half, fragmenting the otherwise stirring protest lyric. The moody instrumental backdrop, arranged by David Foster, takes the tempo rubato, from start to finish, refusing to assume a consistent rhythm. The rubato effect approaches an arhythmia that might have worked magnificently in more avantgarde musical contexts. Here, it only adds to the interruption of flow, the cancellation of Spirit, already guaranteed by Braxton’s start-and-stop phrasing. 13. For more on the Disney entrance/invasion/excursion into Times Square, see Bressi (1996) and Nelson (1995). 14. In his diatribe against Disney, Frank Rich obscures his own complicated relationship to the corporation that comes by virtue of his hotly contested omnipotent position as chief theatre critic of the New York Times throughout the 1980s and early 1990s. We learn that Disney executives give credit for the company’s arrival on Broadway to Frank Rich, who, in a broadcast on the radio station of the New York Times, remarked that the best Broadway score he’d heard lately had been written for the movies—the Alan Menken and Howard Ashman tunes for Beauty and the Beast. Always on the lookout for “synergy”—the Disney mantra, along with “profits,” of course—the company began exploring the possibility of turning a hit film into a Broadway show. (Gold 1997:15)

15. Eisner himself makes an attempt to define the Disney aesthetic: Eisner on the Disney sen- sibility: “It’s not wholesomeness, but maybe there’s some wholesomeness involved. It’s not cleanliness, but maybe there’s some cleanliness involved” (in Bemrose 1995:50). 16. In the 1946 film version, director Jean Cocteau massively reconstructs the tale by making “numerous additions, deletions and transpositions” and especially by adding the character of Avenant, a male suitor who operates as a foil to the Beast. Played by the same actor, Avenant and the Beast “exchange masks, reuniting internal and external beauty and ugliness and resolving the double tension of their two dichotomies” (Pauly 1989:84). The hit Disney

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film version of 1992 borrows from both the original and Cocteau’s film version and recon- structs the story in such a way that it emerges as a faithful Disney product. In particular, the character of Avenant becomes the outrageously handsome, conceited Gaston (see also Hearne 1989). 17. It is worth noting here that one of Mr. Walt Disney’s favorite singing groups was Clara Ward and the Ward Singers, perhaps the most famous black women’s gospel singing group of all time. In their biography of the group, Willa Ward-Royster and Toni Rose recall how Disney frequently invited the Ward Singers to perform gospel music at his theme park (1997). 18. The recent performances of Reverend Billy at the Disney Store in Times Square follow in a dissident tradition (see Lane 2002). 19. Baldwin’s analysis of Bette Davis cannot be divorced from his theory of black performance. He imagines Bette Davis as black—an ugly beauty—or, as he says, “she moved just like a nigger” (1976:8). 20. Braxton is joined in the show by Meshach Taylor, a black actor famous for his comic sidekick roles in the television show Designing Women and the film Mannequin (1987; directed by Michael Gottlieb). Taylor plays Lumiere, the animated candlestick. In both the film and the original stage version, the candlestick is the embodiment of Maurice Chevalier, a sweet- talking French chanteur. Taylor, however, like Braxton, also brings his celebrity to the stage, hybridizing the role. Clarissa Cruz notes that “also new to the cast: Designing Women’s Meshach Taylor as an entertainingly smarmy Lumiere, the dancing candlestick, who seems to have arrived in France by way of Jamaica” (1998:68). 21. Clarissa Cruz summarized the changes: “Beneath a sweetly bookish facade, the Braxtonized Belle is surprisingly feisty and full-voiced. Poured into body-hugging forest-frock confec- tions, she’s a saucy, sexed-up Disney girl with ’tude” (1998:68). 22. “In the theatre, the presence of the flesh-and-blood actors and one’s awareness of the so- phisticated technology of the stage constantly sabotage the innocence of the tale” (Canby 1994:25; emphasis added). 23. Toni Braxton’s celebrity difference was most fully realized when she required extensive security protection from an obsessive stalker who threatened her during her run at the theatre ( Jet 1998). 24. The author of this article further claimed that Braxton was “shaking things up over at the Palace. That’s evident early on in the show, with the 31-year-old Braxton’s silky R&B tones providing a distinct contrast to the airy soprano-ness of past Belles” (Wontorek 1998:20).

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