GLR November-December 2023

song, Something Cloudy, Something Clear . But the latter points to a serious deficiency in Mordden’s history. Although he sup plies an intelligent overview of the career of Edward Albee in his coda celebrating Albee as the great gay American play wright, his failure to cover the later plays of Williams is part of a larger failure to give Williams his due. P ERHAPS the most remarkable quality of Gays on Broadway is that Mordden’s unparalleled, encyclope dic knowledge of stage history is delivered in such a tart, breezy style, making for delicious reading. Would that some of the essays collected by Kelly Kessler in Gender, Sex, and Sexuality in Musical Theatre —twelve of which were previously published in the scholarly journal Studies in Musical Theatre , with five written expressly for this volume—were as engagingly written and smelled less of the lamp. (For example, the editor promises that one group of essays “negotiates various takes on codified notions of the gender binary” by “rejecting any notion that musical theatre has frozen hegemonic gender norms into sonic and performative amber.” Whew!) Among the collection’s highlights is a deft exposure of Noël Coward’s boldness in presenting in Words and Music (1932) a line of eighteen chorus boys that proved so homoerotically al luring that English theater companies thereafter were at pains to

into the heterosexual fold. Audiences were made so uncom fortable with the representation of gays on stage that even in the 1950s, when Tennessee Williams boldly sought to dramatize the complexities of sexual desire, he was forced to leave his gay characters offstage (Blanche’s young husband in Streetcar , Skipper in Cat , and the mysterious Sebastian Venable in Sud denly, Last Summer ). Stonewall and the Sexual Revolution of the 1960s brought dramatic pleas for understanding and sympathy in plays like The Boys in the Band and The Killing of Sister George , and, in the 1970s and ’80s, in “assertion plays” like Torch Song Trilogy and the musical La Cage aux Folles , in which the central char acter demands respect for his or her sexual difference. The Act I closing number from the latter, “I Am What I Am,” became something of a gay anthem. AIDS dominated gay playwriting in the 1980s and ’90s, investing gay drama with a newfound grav itas. So radical a shift in paradigms had occurred since Mart Crowley’s The Boys in the Band that in the opening decades of the 21st century, gays are not depicted as living in a ghetto but as another part of the social landscape, wrestling with the same problems as heterosexuals. Such a compressed summary betrays the effervescence of Mordden’s book. Gays on Broadway is an insider’s history, filled with telling anecdotes that he must have picked up from

protest the heterosexuality of the male singers-dancers. There’s also an analysis of how music and dance allow adolescents to express sexual desire in Spring Awak ening . And there’s an examination of the extent to which the musical Billy Elliot challenges gender roles not simply by de picting a working-class boy who wants to dance, but by having male adolescent ac tors play the part (rather than an adult fe male, such as Mary Martin or Sandy Duncan as Peter Pan). I particularly enjoyed the arc of essays exploring the excesses of the divas (whether stage characters like Ethel Mer man’s Rose, Angela Lansbury’s Mame, and Elaine Stritch’s Joanne, or over-the

A scene from the original Broadway production (1970) of The Boys in the Band.

top female stage personalities like Carol Channing and Tallulah Bankhead) as commentaries on the social constraints placed on women. I appreciated Elizabeth Wollman’s analysis of the par adox that even as the adult musical of the 1960s and ’70s em ployed nudity and sexual frankness in the attempt to foster both Gay and Women’s Liberation, it relied so heavily on stereotypes and nudity that it devolved into mere exploitation. Likewise, the editor’s own survey of how the visibility of LGBT experi ence in musicals like La Cage aux Folles , Kiss of the Spider Woman , FunHome , and TheProm was undercut by marketing campaigns that downplayed the shows’ queerness. Thus, several of this collection’s essays demonstrate just how high toward heaven the musical has allowed gays to kick. All the greater pity that the collection did not benefit from sharper-eyed copyediting (Merman’s iconic character is referred to as both “Mama Rose” and “Momma Rose”), and by the in clusion of an index, essential in such a large collection of es says designed for a scholarly audience.

conversations with innumerable stage managers, agents, and publicity managers, or acquired from years of reading every Playbill and theater review archived in the Billy Rose Collec tion at the Lincoln Center Library for the Performing Arts. For example, he reports that the sexual ambivalence of Bobby in Sondheim’s Company was actually modeled on actor Anthony Perkins ( Psycho ), one of Sondheim’s close friends and his col laborator in the fashioning of mystery games; that the film ver sion of The Boys in the Band was shot in Tammy Grimes’ duplex; and that it was a comment by actress Marsha Mason (then the wife of play doctor Neil Simon, who’d been asked to attend a rehearsal) that saved a floundering A Chorus Line and made it into a smash hit. I particularly relished anecdotes con cerning the comeuppances administered to homophobic theater critics Clive Barnes and John Simon. Gays on Broadway is such a magisterial accomplishment that I feel ungracious for faulting the absence of any mention of Ed Bullins’ Clara’s Old Man and Tennessee Williams’ swan

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