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[0:39] David Armstrong: Welcome to another episode of Broadway Nation, the podcast that tells the remarkable story of how immigrant, Jewish, queer, and black artists invented the Broadway musical and how they changed America in the process. I'm David Armstrong, and I'm very happy to be bringing you this episode today. No, I have not dropped off the face of the earth, but for a variety of reasons, it has been a while since I was able to release a new episode of this podcast.

[1:09] David Armstrong: First and foremost, I've been moving, and that has completely disrupted my ability to record, as I don't yet have a fully functioning studio set up. So I'm back in the closet, at least in terms of podcasting. On top of that, I'm back teaching spring quarter at the University of Washington School of Drama, and later this week, I'm thrilled to announce that I will begin recording the audiobook version of my book, Broadway Nation. So I'm hoping that you will bear with me if the release of new episodes continues to be a bit spotty over the next several weeks. Without further ado, I'm very pleased to share with you this recent conversation I had with authors Paige Allen and Stacy Wolf about their fascinating new book, Feminist Approaches to Musical Theater.

Paige Allen is a writer, researcher, and storyteller who holds a master's degree in women's, gender, and sexuality studies from Oxford University, and a B.A. in English from Princeton University. Stacy Wolf is professor of theater and American studies at Princeton University and is the author of the acclaimed books Changed for Good: A Feminist History of the Broadway Musical and A Problem Like Maria: Gender and Sexuality in the American Musical. And longtime listeners will remember Stacy from episodes 44 and 45 of Broadway Nation, in which we talked about her book Beyond Broadway: The Pleasure and Promise of Musical Theater Across America. Here we go. Welcome Paige Allen and Stacy Wolf.

[2:42] Paige Allen: Thank you, David. We're so glad to be here.

[2:45] Stacy Wolf: Absolutely. I'm excited to talk about this.

[2:48] David Armstrong: I think we should start with the question you open your book with. I think the perfect way to kick off this discussion is why analyze musicals from a feminist perspective?

[3:06] Paige Allen: Yeah, I'm happy to jump in to start us off. I mean, that's the core question, right? Why write this book? Why do this work? There's, I guess, two kind of aspects of it. Why musicals? And why feminism? And then why both of them together? And when it comes to why analyzing musicals, they're a huge part of popular culture. The stories that we tell across media forums matter, and musicals are one form that reaches millions and billions of people every year. And what those musicals are saying matters. It shapes the people who see them. It shapes how we think about the world around us and the stories that we see. Feminism is something that Stacey and I are both very passionate about, and we think it matters.

But if you just kind of take a look at the news, I think a lot of people will recognize that issues of gender inequality still kind of remain top of mind in our political and cultural lives. In this country, men and genderqueer people are especially still treated as less than in various systemic ways. And so kind of combining them together, they're both kind of this very commercial and consumed art form, and this topic that kind of does shape the lives we live and the political power that we have combined together. And within musical theater specifically, like many spaces, it is a gendered space that has for many years been dominated by kind of male voices and stories that kind of front men's perspectives.

We kind of ask, looking at this world where there's still a dearth of women writers and complex women characters, we need to kind of think about what these stories are saying. And one thing that I think we might take so much for granted that we don't even think to say it is that the book is not a thumbs up, thumbs down, these musicals are feminist and these musicals are not. We're not doing the Bechdel test of musicals, although we definitely, we could do that, but really the book is about tools that can be used to analyze any musical from a feminist perspective. So in that way, the book is primarily a methods book. We hope that perspective readers won't think, oh, well, this is just going to be about these two saying yes, no, feminist or not feminist, but that's really not what we're doing here.

And we'll get into some of those methods and tools in a couple of minutes, but it's a very tiny little book, actually. It's tiny. It's this big. But partly I think that is because it is a here's how you can do it kind of book as opposed to a definitive here we've done it all on every musical that ever existed.

[5:36] Stacy Wolf: Absolutely. And how was it that the two of you came to collaborate on this book? What's the genesis behind this book?

[5:42] Paige Allen: Yeah, well, Paige was my student a while ago now already, but an excellent student, also a wonderful performer and a leader in the theater community at Princeton. After I finished writing Beyond Broadway and published that book, I decided for this next slash last section of my career, I mostly wanted to collaborate. And that might be because in my heart of hearts, I'm a theater person. And so I like being around other people and collaborating. And I also thought I was in a position, I was lucky enough to be in a position in my career where I could help junior scholars and maybe people who don't have a lot of publications get more publications and get more experience in the publishing world. I was invited to write an article about Waitress and musicals from the 2010s for a wonderful musical theater history book edited by Mary Jo Lodge.

And I immediately thought of Paige, how much I enjoyed having her as a student. And by then she had had her master's degree from Oxford and was out in the world and doing a lot of writing of her own. And I thought she would be a good collaborator. And we wrote this article together and we found that we had really congenial working styles. We just worked well together. We were just a good team, even better than I might have expected. We just got on very well.

[7:57] Stacy Wolf: And then I had heard about this series, the series of Approaches in Musical Theater, and there are some wonderful other books in the series. And I was surprised that I hadn't seen one about feminism. So I got in touch with the series editors and the editor of the press, Dom, and we started talking if there could be a feminist approaches book. And again, I thought Paige would be a great collaborator. I think especially because we're of different generations. Her area of specialization is also feminist theory, queer theory, feminist approaches to many more genres of literature that I have studied. But I thought it would be great for there to be two different perspectives. And she said yes. And we started working on the book, which, like all projects, took longer than we expected.

I think we wrote about five books and ended up having to cut four of them. But that's also, I mean, I think you have a good collaboration if you can agree that you're going to overwrite this and then you're going to cut this. And if you're not too precious. And our working styles were, again, I feel like we worked really well together. And I think we both hope that this is just the first book of other projects that we hope to write together.

[8:03] Paige Allen: Well, I totally agree, Stacey. And I hope this is just the beginning when it comes to kind of actually the work of collaborating, like Stacey was saying, both work well together kind of style-wise. And we really hope to kind of find this unified tone throughout the piece where it feels like both of our opinions certainly got in there, but it sounds kind of like one voice consistently, which that's a result of, you know, one of us would draft a section and then hand it to the other one for edits and then edits would get made in a slightly different voice and gradually it kind of all then ended up sounding cohesive, we hope.

[8:33] Stacy Wolf: Based on my own experience, you probably can't remember who wrote what at this point.

[8:36] Paige Allen: For some parts.

[8:39] Stacy Wolf: I mean, I think for the introduction especially, I can't remember who wrote what. No. Because we spent so much time on that and we rewrote it so many times and we started with a massive list of all the things we possibly should and could include in the introduction. I think what the other chapters were a little bit more which one of us took the lead because the one who took the lead had done a lot more reading, research, spending time with the show, and then the second person who got it had a lot of familiarity with the show, but was primarily focusing on the writing, the argument, the clarity of the argument, I would say, for the revisions. But we hope that it sounds like one voice. That's the goal.

[9:15] Paige Allen: It does indeed. Not that I know either one of you all that well, but I've read other books by Stacey and I couldn't tell. It didn't seem to be tilted in one direction or the other from what I could tell. It seemed it was very unified in that way. You mentioned that it's part of a series. What is the intent of that series?

[9:33] Stacy Wolf: Yeah, the series, the tagline is short introductory books on significant theories, concepts, form, and elements of musical theater. Ryan Donovan wrote one about queer approaches to musical theater. Eric Glover has one which is either about African-American theater or race in musical theater. There's one, I believe, about Asian-American theater and they all are these little, very small books. They're sold, for one, at the National Theater Bookshop in London. Very cool to see them all lined up there. Yeah, so some are more historical, some are more methodological, and they're just these little short books that are meant for laypeople, undergraduate students, and I think also for teaching and for scholars as well to just be able to bite off a small nugget of one aspect of musical theater.

[10:30] David Armstrong: And you state in that introduction, which you just talked about spending so much time on, you say that the very meaning of feminism can be slippery to tie down, given the movement's complex history. Talk a little bit about those challenges and how did you tie it down or attempt to tie it down?

[10:39] Paige Allen: Yeah, as we attempted to think about what we needed to address in the introduction, definitely we have this very brief history of feminism, which is like the shortest version. The briefest history of feminism ever. Yes, we're just so difficult. What's very exciting, I think, about being a feminist scholar or someone who engages with feminist ideas or feminism as a movement is that the kind of exciting and difficult challenge of where we are right now in feminism is the movement never had a kind of one stable definition, but now more than ever kind of the varying different opinions of what feminist means and what it means to kind of be a feminist is so diverse and varying. I mean, there was a time when publicly identifying as a feminist was something that was seen as radical or that feminism was a dirty word or that, oh, I can't believe you would say that.

Now people all over the political spectrum use the term feminism when describing themselves or describing their work. Boris Johnson has called himself a feminist. I think there's a lot of, you know, if you look at like women in Congress, I think they all have very different ideas of what it means to be a kind of woman leader and what women's rights should look like and what a woman's purpose in the world should be. And I think when it comes to analyzing musical theater, what's exciting about that is, as Stacey said, we're not the two of us, the arbiters of yes, this is feminist. Yes, this isn't. It's more here are the kinds of questions and the kinds of things that you should be looking at when you're asking a musical, what is gender doing here?

Different feminist scholars are going to have different takes on whether a certain piece is feminist or not. And that's what kind of the last kind of chapter ends up being for us as a look at some modern musicals that are engaging with feminism intentionally. Specifically, we look at Six, but we also talk about, you know, we reference some other musicals that kind of have this girl power branding and this marketing of that part of what sells it is that it's this story of female empowerment in some way. But different scholars have different takes on kind of how deep that goes, what kind of actual work those musicals are doing. So it's both exciting because there's a lot of conversation, but it is also challenging because frequently you're kind of in the weeds of what it even means to do the work.

[13:06] Stacy Wolf: In my lifetime as a scholar and a professor, I've seen feminism come in and out of fashion several times. And I actually remember when I was publishing Changed for Good, the subtitle of which is A Feminist History of the Broadway Musical, that was a little bit of an anxious moment for feminism. And I debated with my editor, Norm Hershey,

[13:28] Stacy Wolf: At Oxford, if we should take feminism out of the title, and he said, absolutely not. That's what this book is. And now I'm very happy he insisted. I feel like we're in a moment now, and I think Paige refers to it well, where I would say most or all of my students are unquestioningly feminists. Everyone. It's just a part of what it is to have a critical perspective on the world. So, I think for good and for bad, as we write in the book, feminism does a lot of political work and maybe some not so political work. And of course, you're both coming at this from the academic world, and a lot of my listeners will not be familiar necessarily with that academic world. Can you describe a little bit as you describe it in the book, this lively, vibrant and changing field of feminist musical theater scholarship? Again, many of my listeners will be surprised that there is a feminist musical theater scholarship. So, just give us a little sense of what does that mean in the world of academia at this point?

[14:25] Paige Allen: Sure, sure. Yeah. Well, the field of musical theater studies or critical musical theater studies is still a very new field. It grew up in the early 2000s. And I would say probably the first really important books in the field of critical musical theater studies or musical theater studies would be Raymond Knapp's two books, The American Musical and The Formation of National Identity and The American Musical and The Performance of Personal Identity. And I believe those were 2005, 2006, a two-volume study. What was important about Ray's book, and there were other books that came out around the same time, Andrea Most's book, Making Americans Jews and the Broadway Musical, Scott MacMillan's A Musical is Drama, Bruce Curl's book Unfinished Show Business, and my first book, A Problem Like Maria, those books used the tools of a variety of other disciplines.

And these are all academic books. So, they're not necessarily, they would be for a fairly determined lay person. Now, I feel like they're more accessible than they were then. And all of us try to write extremely accessibly, but they are books that have a lot of footnotes and a lot of references and a lot of quoting of other people. So, for sure, they're academic books. But we were using tools of literary studies, film studies, television studies, cultural studies, philosophy, critical musicology, and applying all of those tools to the study of musical theater. The way that this was different were the previous books, and there were always many books about musical theater that were primarily biographies, hagiographies.

And even your recent book, David, which is such an important contribution to musical theater history, is primarily an uncovering of all of these histories that we never knew about. But your goal in the book is not to take apart and deconstruct the musicals that you're writing about. Your goal in the book is to say, people, you know so little about the history of musical theater. I'm going to tell you all of this stuff that you never knew about all of these amazing blacks, Jews, queers, and women. In that way, it's a super important reconstruction effort. For those of us who are working in what we would call musical theater studies or critical musical theater studies, I'm not necessarily uncovering anything unfamiliar.

I'm just coming at it from a different perspective and analyzing the political work, the ideological work, and from my perspective, the work that especially focuses on gender. After the 2000s, there have been many, many more books. I would say recently, two of my favorite books are Masi Asari's book, Blues Mamas and Broadway Belters, and Ryan Donovan's book, Broadway Bodies, A Critical History of Conformity. So you can hear how studies have gotten more specific, more intersectional in their approach. Other important books, I think, in this field in general, Liz Wolman's books. Her first book was about rock musicals, but she's written about adult musicals in New York in the 1970s, and Jessica Sternfeld's book on mega musicals.

So these are all books within the general field of musical theater studies, which continues to grow and continues to be a tiny little academic subfield, and like I said earlier, a relatively new field. So our book fits into that larger, very small portion of musical theater scholarship. And a lot of people who I've named have been on your show and have very much been in conversation with you about their work.

[17:49] David Armstrong: Absolutely. Let's now get more specific about your book, in which you employ six feminist methods to analyze the musicals that you investigate in the book. So again, this is talking to an audience that will be largely unfamiliar with this. Can you talk about a bit of each of those six methods that you use, those six feminist methods?

[18:11] Paige Allen: Yeah, I can start us off with that one. I'm excited that we're going to get to go through all of them because even though, you know, six feminist methods for critical approaching, musical theater critically can sound very intimidating, but really kind of we hope these are tools that anyone who watches a musical can kind of grab these tools from their tool belt if they want to think a little bit more deeply about what they're seeing. And while scholars like Stacy and me on kind of entering my career more, I've spent a career kind of reading other works on these things and doing this research. We also kind of want this book to be something that anyone can pick up. It's good if you've seen the musicals or at least kind of are familiar with the musicals because there's a lot of referencing things that happens in them.

The musical theater scholarship is done in the conversation over a drink after the show when you ask your friend, what did you think? As much as, you know, that's on a spectrum with us writing this book, you know? The end of the analysis of that, but absolutely it's the same kind of analysis that we all do. So that's why I think it'll be interesting to talk about this.

[20:55] Paige Allen: So analyze the representation of gender. This is kind of the baseline asking kind of what is going on with gender in the musical that you're seeing? What are the musicals thought on gender? Does it say anything explicitly about what it means to be a man or a woman? There's a lot of songs in musical theater that are explicitly about what womanhood means. You know, I enjoy being a girl or all of these songs that have like womanhood in the titles. So think about that explicitly. But then thinking more deeply, who are the happy women? Who are the sad women? Why are they happy? Why are they sad? What do they want? Where are their drives coming from? Who is in power and why? Is that a problem? Does gender seem to factor into, you know, who's in power and what the conflict is?

And thinking about gender expansively and how it intersects with other identities and as something we talk about, you know, intersectionality, we'll talk about when we get there. But marriage and love are certainly things where gender is at play and common themes in the musicals that we're looking at. So is marriage presented as a good thing, as the only thing that one should want? And what does that say about the characters on stage? Basically just asking critical questions about what is gender doing in this show? How does gender affect the characters that you see on stage, the plot that they go through, and then your perspective on the characters that you're seeing?

[22:20] Stacy Wolf: Fantastic. Let's jump ahead to Reading Against the Grain. How do we do that?

[22:26] Paige Allen: Yeah, I can go again for Reading Against the Grain. So Reading Against the Grain is looking at the subtext of a piece that you're looking at. There's what the show is saying and what the show might want you to think. And then Reading Against the Grain is thinking kind of more critically about it or potentially against what is literally kind of happening on stage. I mean, one of my favorite examples of this is how Stacey kind of reads Against the Grain in Wicked, which is ostensibly about these two best friends who are both in love with this man, Fiyero. But Stacey's reading of it looks at how kind of structurally it's more about the relationship between the two women. And Stacey offers kind of a queer reading of Wicked that looks at how they sing the duets with each other at the beginning and at the end.

And it's the relationship that's changing between the two of them that's ultimately powering the kind of conflict and plot of the musical in the way that other musicals are often not happening between a man and a woman. I mean, the example I was thinking of before you talked about Wicked was in Changed for Good. I write about female duets in musicals and how they create a kind of a queer bond between the women that upends the heterosexual narrative. So one of the examples I give is A Boy Like That from West Side Story and how the song comes very near the end of the show and it stresses the bond between Maria and Anita. And in some ways, it takes the focus away from the dominant Romeo and Juliet heterosexual love story of the show and really focuses it on these two women.

And obviously, that's not what the musical is about. The musical is about the love between Maria and Tony and the struggle between the gangs. But there are ways that the musical, in some ways, performs against itself. And I think from a feminist perspective, it's delightful to get pleasure and new interpretations by reading it in a different way, if you can find the evidence to back yourself up, which is what we're always trying to do. And I suspect that ties very closely into your next method of analysis, which is differentiate page versus stage.

[24:33] Stacy Wolf: Yes, it does. One of the things that I like about our methods is that pretty much any working artist, any feminist artist, director, performer, designer will be using these methods all the time. They might not categorize them as we've done. They might not call them feminist approaches, but they are doing it. For example, a few years ago, Melissa Errico published an article in the New York Times about how she can rationalize playing these ingenue characters who are dumb and abused and mistreated in all kinds of ways. And in this piece, she talks about all of the ways that she, as an actor, pushes against the text to find strength in these characters and to find agency in these characters that does not compromise what the character is about or what she's doing, but that gives her a new kind of strength.

I love that piece because she's using this method that we talk about, differentiating page versus stage. So this would be something that anyone who has read a libretto and also seen a show sees this in action all the time. So this is the difference between what's in the script and in the score on the page, and then what happens in performance. So one of the things that happens really frequently in musical theater is that a character on the page, and maybe even in a lot of scenes in the show, in the spoken scenes, a woman might seem to be weak or abused or stupid or a lot of other things. But then when she sings or she dances, she takes up a certain space. She gives a charismatic performance and her performance upends or contradicts what's on the page.

So a great example of this is the character of Sally Bowles in Cabaret. In the musical, Sally is intentionally a not very talented cabaret singer. Her only desire is to be with Cliff and to have fun. And throughout the musical, he criticizes her because she refuses to pay attention to the political changes happening around her. She does have some agency when she has an abortion and refuses to leave Germany with him. But the show really sees her as someone who's not very bright, who is living in a dreamland, and is also deluded about her own lack of talent. But then near the end of the show, she sings the title song, and audiences probably by that point do not care.

[26:57] Paige Allen: What do you think about this character's purpose in the show or whether she's a weak or strong character? Because the actor is so strong that that's what we're left with, the feeling that this character is vibrant and takes up a lot of space. And there are so many examples of this in musical theater, where a character on the page looks weak, but then in the performance itself is strong. Often, directors will look for these opportunities, opportunities for the stage to contradict the page and give the character more agency.

[27:29] Stacy Wolf: The only thing I will respond to that with is, as a director for many, many years, I think often what people are reacting to is the way it has been played, as opposed to what's actually on the page. She's then interpreting it to be strong. It's just everybody before her played weak aspects.

[27:48] Paige Allen: Makes sense.

[27:49] Stacy Wolf: Because it doesn't require rewriting to reinterpret it in that way, if that makes sense. And very often, obviously not in every case.

[27:56] Paige Allen: Yes, it does make sense. And I think that's a great point. Maybe we should fine-tune the page versus stage to interpretations, past interpretations versus new interpretations. But that reminds me of another really important scholar whose work I think, well, his book is The Haunted Stage, Marvin Carlson. And I would say his work haunts all of these conversations because he writes about how past performances of a play or the past performances of a particular actor or the performances that have taken place in a certain theater space haunt current and future productions.

[28:30] Stacy Wolf: So I think what you're saying, David, makes so much sense that someone who's played Eliza in My Fair Lady this certain way, year after year after year after year, when someone comes along and plays it differently, that seems to be a radical interpretation when that was on the page all the time.

[28:47] David Armstrong: That's exactly what I'm saying. Yeah, exactly. It's almost like stage versus page in a way. But yeah, I think that makes sense. Now we get to one of your tools that has a big academic word in it, which would explain triple historiography.

[29:00] Paige Allen: Yes, triple.

[29:01] Stacy Wolf: Triple historiography.

[29:02] Paige Allen: Well, this is another example. And I don't know, maybe, I mean, I do feel like the book is written very clearly and accessibly. But there are a few kind of jargony words that are there really as shortcuts to ideas that are at once big and also completely common sense. And I feel like you explain those words every time you use them.

[29:24] Stacy Wolf: Oh, good.

[29:25] Paige Allen: So that people have access to it. Giving you a little bit of a hard time on it. But I do think you do a great job having it both ways, which is obviously, I assume, your goal there.

[29:36] Stacy Wolf: It's definitely our goal. And I think we use these terms because we think these terms are useful and we hope that readers will use them. So triple historiography just refers to the idea that all performance takes place in three times at once. And this was an idea that was introduced by Freddie Rochem, who is a theater scholar. He doesn't write about musicals, but he introduced this idea, which I think is pretty common sense to us, which is that a show, he writes about plays, but we'll just talk about musicals, is taking place at three times at once. So it's taking place in where the musical is set. And for many, many years, that was a long time ago. And then more and more musicals are set in the present.

Then the second time is when the musical was created and when the first production took place, because there are always dynamics. If a musical succeeds, especially, it has to be commercial. It has to speak to its audience at a certain time. And that would happen when the musical opens. So many of the musicals we know, and David, your work goes so far to contradict this. The only musicals we know were ones that were hits. That's why your work is so important, David. You introduce us to so many shows that were not hits, but that were super, super important. And then the third period of time is now, whatever the now is today, because however, whatever's going on on this very day will shape how we interpret a show.

If there are important revivals along the way, then there will be other moments. It would be quadruple historiography or many, many more times. But these three basic times, when the show was set, when it was first written, and now, it's always a dynamic that affects how we interpret musical theater.

[31:14] Paige Allen: So just to explain that, even to beat a dead horse maybe, is that if we're watching Hello, Dolly!, we're experiencing that character, those characters in 1890, whatever year that story takes place. We're experiencing it in 1964, when the show was written and first produced, and we're experiencing it today in this performance that we're seeing in the current moment.

[31:38] Stacy Wolf: Yes, definitely. And Hello, Dolly! is a hugely interesting example, going back to our earlier example because Hello, Dolly! is always haunted by Carol Channing. Her performance in that role, or I guess for some people, having seen Barbra Streisand in the movie, that character is always haunted by these unforgettable performances of the women who created those characters.

[31:59] Paige Allen: Yeah, the example that I was going to give was Chicago, which takes place in the 1920s, opened in 1975, and it was a flop in 1975. Then it was revived by City Center Encores in 1996, and it's still running today. So triple historiography is useful because then we can think about, well, why did the show fail in 1975 and succeed today? And there are many examples of shows that failed the first time and then succeeded or exceeded and then failed. Critics have said that it failed in the mid-1970s because it was shortly after Watergate, and Americans didn't want to see a musical that was so dark and cynical and satirical about celebrity in the media. But then by the late 90s, there, first of all, had been many different kinds of musicals, so the form of Chicago was not so challenging.

And there were many more different performance styles, and we were in a different time. By the late 1990s, there was more acceptance and pleasure in seeing women who were strong and violent, and probably more sanguine attitudes towards corruption and a media-saturated culture. So by thinking, okay, this musical takes place in the 20s, in 1975, and also in the late 90s, and today, if you go and see it now, just gives us a more expansive way to think about when a musical is set and what history and culture have to do with how we interpret it.

[33:23] David Armstrong: Fantastic. And effective dissonance. Explain that one more.

[33:28] Stacy Wolf: Yes. Yeah. So this is another kind of jargony word, but I don't think we could come up with a better one to explain what we're talking about, which is conflicting emotions. Well, I guess that's a better word. That's a simpler word. But I think we are talking about a very common feeling among feminist musical theater scholars and fans, which is when you love and hate a show at the same time. This happens all the time. It happens every single week in my seminars. Every week in my seminars. I hate this show so much. I love this show so much. I hate this show. The representations of women are hateful and despicable. The show is misogynist. This show is racist. But I love this music, or I love this show, or I love this production.

That happens all the time. Just a couple of very small examples, but we could spend the rest of our lives talking about musicals that make us feel good and bad at once. For example, Les Mis. I think the music of Les Mis is so beautiful. The staging of the first production was so gripping and gorgeous. I love that it's about revolution and goodness, but I hate that the women do nothing in the show but pine over the men and that the three women in the show only exist in relation to the men. Common in musical theater. The other example that we talked about briefly, I think we talked, did we talk about Hamilton in the book?

[35:01] Paige Allen: Yes. Where I came up with this term affective dissonance was actually in writing I was doing about Hamilton and trying to think about how can I love this show so much, see it multiple times and be so amazed by it, but also be absolutely offended and furious by the representation of the women characters who are so demeaned and diminished in the context of the musical. So the dissonance, the affect part of it refers to feeling and the dissonance part of it is the things that don't go together that are dissonant. Affective dissonance is feeling moved and connected to a show and also feeling kind of icky and angry about it. So it's a familiar feeling for us. One more, this is the last of your tools, which is navigate intersectionality.

[35:31] Stacy Wolf: Yeah, so intersectionality is another term that kind of came out of the academic world but is kind of increasingly part of our kind of general cultural buzzwords. Intersectionality was first theorized in 1977, I believe, by the Colmahee River Collective writing about Black feminism and then Kimberly Crenshaw in the late 80s, early 90s kind of takes this up and is writing more about the intersection between being a woman and a Black person and a Black woman. And so that's what intersectionality is about. It's about how one identity intersects with other identity and creates a particular experience in the world that we live in because of this intersection of multiple identities. Since kind of Crenshaw was writing, intersectionality is now used to describe intersections of various different identities and it's something that a good feminist scholarship is kind of asking those critical questions.

I think a great kind of example of intersectionality on stage or one that we kind of just mentioned as an example is in Miss Saigon. There's gender dynamics at play and there's also racialized dynamics at play and Kim as an Asian woman falls kind of directly into stereotypes of this kind of weak, exoticized Asian woman that kind of dates back for years. That's another kind of, I would say, an effective dissonance show for me. I'm very moved by a lot of the music from that show but have kind of deep issues with its apologies and portrayal of various things. But then we've had kind of incredible powerhouse performers play Kim and, you know, captivate the hearts of audiences, even though I think on paper she's extremely problematic, so that they're at the intersection of all our different methods coming to play.

But it's basically asking how do various identities, including but not limited to gender, race, body size, ability, religion, and so forth, all kind of like come into play and create kind of specific experiences and representations of experience on stage.

[37:26] David Armstrong: Fantastic. There's three main chapters in your book. In those chapters you analyze primarily four musicals, The Music Man, Evita, Fun Home, and Six. But, of course, in the process you're able to include observations on a number of other shows as you're talking about the various issues. What I'm curious in is how out of the hundreds of possibilities of musicals that exist, how did you settle on those four shows to include? And that's where we'll pick up the conversation on the next episode of Broadway Nation, when Paige and Stacey return to tell us more about their new book, Feminist Approaches to Musical Theater.

[38:04] ♪ Musical number: "I’m a Girl" — performed by the cast of "Bye Bye Birdie" ♪

[38:38] David Armstrong: If you love this podcast and would like to delve even deeper into the world of Broadway musicals, then I invite you to become a patron of Broadway Nation. For as little as seven dollars a month, you can receive access to a treasure trove of exclusive features, including new, specially produced episodes that are available only to patrons. And this includes a five-part series on the Broadway musicals that received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. And all patrons receive shout-outs and acknowledgements in recognition of your vital support. To join, go to broadwaynationpodcast.supercast.tech. That's all one word, broadwaynationpodcast.supercast.tech, or simply click the link in the show notes to this episode. Broadway Nation is written and produced by me, David Armstrong. Special thanks to Pals Mox for his help with editing this episode, and to the entire team at the Broadway Podcast Network.

[39:32] ♪ Musical number: "I’m Strictly a Female" — performed by the cast of "Bye Bye Birdie" ♪