Toni Braxton, Disney, and Thermodynamics

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 corporation(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 alliance with a major celebrity whose visibility (as black and female) worked to counter the claims of racism that have shadowed Disney for decades. The celebrity 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 The Drama Review 46, 3 (T175), Fall 2002. Copyright ᭧ 2002 New York University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology 54 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 single 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 production. 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.

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