This transcript was automatically generated and might contain errors.

[0:30] ♪ Musical number: "Don't Tell Anyone" — performed by Unknown performer ♪

[1:09] 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 this is the second part of my recent conversation with authors Paige Allen and Stacy Wolf regarding their recent book, Feminist Approaches in Musical Theater. If you missed part one, you may want to catch up with that before listening to this episode. Broadway Nation is made possible in part through the generous support of our patron club members, including longtime patron Yvonne Court. If you would like to help support the work of this podcast, there'll be information at the end of the episode about how you, too, can become a patron.

Now, here we go. 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?

[2:25] Paige Allen: Yeah. Well, we're certainly not choosing these shows to be kind of like the four bastions of feminist musical theater, as you'll kind of find out as soon as you kind of think about any of them. But one of our big goals of this book, and that we hope comes across, is that a feminist method can be applied to any musical. And so we wanted to choose four musicals from different times of musical theater history and that were different kinds of forms of the musical. So with The Music Man, we have kind of coming out of the golden age of musicals. It is an integrated book musical where it's kind of the core form of what musicals were, kind of in their heyday or in the golden age. And then in Evita, we have the spectacle of the 80s mega musical, which kind of it's a rock opera.

The sound has changed. It's sung through rather than having these book scenes and clear songs. And then moving into the present day, Fun Home is a very unique musical when it comes to its form. It's a one-act musical, which is very kind of rare to see on Broadway stages. It feels more like a memory play because it's this kind of excavating of this woman's past with her family and it's not told in a linear fashion. And then Six is also a one-act musical, and it's more of a concert than anything. It's this sort of, you know, concept musical sort of concert performance of the wives of Henry VIII who each get their own song and then kind of like come together at the end. And each of these musicals has kind of varying representations of women, varying relationships to gender and feminism as a movement. But it was kind of interesting to look at all of these and say, OK, let's take a feminist approach to all these different kinds of works.

[4:07] David Armstrong: Let's touch briefly on each of those chapters and each of those shows and use a couple of examples as we go along of how you've used those tools to approach these particular shows. We obviously can't do all of them. Let's start where you start with The Music Man. One of the things you talk about here is the triple historicity of Mary and the Librarian. Thinking about The Music Man from a three-time perspective, so the musical takes place in the 1910s. It makes sense in that moment. So we were focusing on the character of Marian and thinking about Marian through these different historical lenses and how she would be interpreted in these different historical moments. In the 1910s, when the show takes place, it would make sense that she would be considered strange in a small town in Iowa because she's a working woman.

She's an intellectual. She might be seen as a new woman of the progressive era. And in the town, she's an object of gossip. Her mother tells her in the very first scene that no one in the town would ever care about her opinion about anything because she's unmarried and she doesn't have children. So that's kind of the first historical reading of her when the show is set. Then the second historical moment would be the 1950s. So this musical opened in 1957 during the Cold War. It was a conservative era in terms of gender and women were expected to be housewives and mothers. In the context of the 50s, Marian's romantic desire for her husband, which is her through line in the show, her objective through the entire show, that would align with the values of that time.

So in this way, she's a typical ingenue of the 1950s. So then from the third historical moment, which would be today, I think many of us look at her as a character who's absolutely pathetic. It's pathetic that this smart woman would just want a white knight to come and rescue her. Also kind of pathetic and a little bit heartbreaking that she quickly changes her mind about Harold Hill as soon as he boosts the confidence of her little brother, Winthrop, even as he's stealing all this money from everyone in the town. And then not only does she change her mind about him, but she falls in love with him. She decides that he's a good person and she actively protects him. Then when she realizes that she is in love with him, she's entirely passive.

She understands that he's a traveling salesman and he will leave. That's just how it goes with her. So even though she admits that she's in love with him, she knows she can't tie him down. Interestingly, like many other musicals of the 1950s, she ultimately does change him and she gets him to stay, which might be good because she is stronger than he is and she gets her way. Or it might be bad because they get married and it's a completely conventional, conservative, heterosexual ending that celebrates the community, as do many musicals of the 40s and 50s.

[7:00] Stacy Wolf: Very interesting. This is another case where I think there is an alternate way to play it, which I would suggest is there in the text as well. But you're absolutely right. It's very clear why you approached it from that perspective, because that's what we're seeing for the most part. So how do you think it could be played? I think you're absolutely right. What would you say if you were directing it? What would you do?

[7:19] Paige Allen: I mean, I think that she, number one, is the smartest person on the stage. And first of all, you play it as she's the smartest person in the story. And she wants a very specific kind of man. She doesn't want just a white knight. She wants a plain man, an honest man who will appreciate Shakespeare and Beethoven. And she's got a whole list of things that he needs to check off before she's going to settle for a man. And I can go on from there. But I do think that ultimately what she wants, I think, is she represents beauty and music and art and literature. And that's why they hate her in town is because she's looking for all these things. She's the guardian of those things and the keeper of them.

She literally owns all the books in the library. He left all the books to her. That's her force. And the dynamic of the show is life force. Harold Hill, in spite of all his challenges, in spite of all his negative aspects, brings life to the community. And part of the way he brings it is through music and literature and art. So the town is freed at the end of the story by art and literature and music. And the union of those two people represents that and how they are now the centerpiece of the town.

[8:29] Stacy Wolf: Yes, absolutely. I think we might say that you have just performed an excellent reading against the grain of this show. I think you are saying this is in the text, but I feel like it's in your interpretation of the text, which is a feminist against the grain interpretation, noticing all of these things, which are the same things that we write about her strength, her intelligence, and that she has a broader vision of the social good. She sees the good that he's bringing to the town. Welcome to the world of being a feminist scholar, David.

[9:02] David Armstrong: And I appreciate that. And it's partly why I was engaged so much by this book, because it's exactly what you said. It's a tool to bring this kind of interpretation, which might differ between the two of you or between you and anybody else who reads the book in terms of what that interpretation ultimately is. But yeah, yeah, empower you to do it for sure. And I think what's interesting to me, because you were and I guess still are a practitioner for so many years, is that I think from your perspective, the interpretation that you do, I think actually is something you've naturalized in yourself. And you're not even I mean, and I don't mean this in like a weird, psychologizing way. I just mean that, you know, I think artists do so much interpretation that they might not be so aware of it because they just read it.

And this is how it looks to them. And this is how you're going to direct the show. And this is how you're going to cast a show. And this is what you're going to do. And I think those of us who are academics and I'm not saying it's better or worse. I think because we sit outside of practice, we are more not more attuned. But I think we understand the practice of interpretation differently. I think what you're doing and what we're doing is very much the same thing. You're reading the text and we're reading the text and you're calling it this is what the text is. We're saying this is an interpretation of what the text is. But every engagement with the script or performance is an interpretation.

[10:19] Stacy Wolf: Absolutely. I don't mean that in a weird way. I didn't take it in a weird way. I think it absolutely is exactly describing the difference. In some ways, it's the difference between the practitioner and the critic. Because the critic is about what I got of the show and the practitioner about what's in the show. It's more from the interpreting the author's point of view at some point. What is the author trying to say here? And how do I, as now a director or an actor or a designer, reinforce that may be contradicted. But somehow it's a response to what is literally on the page in some way, as opposed to what did I get from it from the audience's perspective or from a critical perspective. Does that make sense?

[11:05] David Armstrong: Yeah.

[11:06] Stacy Wolf: Both of which are entirely valid.

[11:08] David Armstrong: Yes. Let's move on to Evita and see where that takes us.

[11:37] ♪ Musical number: "Buenos Aires" — performed by Unknown performer ♪

[12:01] Paige Allen: The character of Eva Perón, as written in this case by Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber, provided you with really interesting challenges and opportunities for feminist analysis. And talk about historicity, because there you're talking about a real-life person who exists literally in a real time. And then this character that's been derived from that historical person. So she's clearly a powerful female character, unlike the lead in most of those other mega-musicals, the lead women in those musicals. She actually is at the center of the story and she is the driving force behind it. But she's also, like many mega-musicals, sort of an archetype more than she is a fully developed person. And very open to interpretation in performance. Talk about how that either hindered or helped your analysis, or how did you grapple with that, with this sort of, in some ways more elusive character, because of that approach that the writers have taken to it.

[13:01] Stacy Wolf: Yeah, you've identified so many things that made me very excited to work on Evita, because of this kind of character of Eva who is, I find her extremely complex, which again is rare for this time in musical theater history. We were looking at kind of criticism from the time and the critics couldn't decide either. Some were like, oh, she's the manifestation of evil. Or, oh, I just don't understand what she wants. Like, what does she want? I can't read what she wants. And it's very, I'm like, I think she's telling you what she wants. But that's also my experience with it. But what I think was really exciting from a feminist perspective is, David, you mentioned kind of that in some ways she is these tropes of what a woman is.

And what I find interesting is kind of how she is many of those tropes together. And a question that I think is not answered by the text, clearly, is how aware she is of playing into those tropes and how much it's an intentional performance. The narrator of Evita says she's this cross between a fantasy of the bedroom and a saint. It's very aware that she's kind of at times playing this virginal, good, saint, Eva, Santa Evita. And then at other times she's using sexuality as power. That's one of the things that ruffles the feathers of the men in this world.

[14:26] Stacy Wolf: That Argentine men call the sexual shots. Someone has altered the rules is the lyrics and that she's right messing with the order because she's using her kind of she's got it. She's figured out the game and she's playing it in a way that upsets the men. Now of course she's still confined in a sense because she so often has to use that power and what she does when she's at the top are kind of questions. Class is very interesting to think about in this show because she starts from nothing and is never quite accepted by the upper classes because she has this low class background but she also kind of fashions herself as the star and I think the question of Paige versus stage here of how different versions of Evita have played her differently I think is a really interesting one and I think each time I've seen a production of Evita I've walked away with a different take on who this character is what she really wants where her power comes from how self-aware she is of doing it.

The Sammy Canald production that we talk about is so important to me because it was directed by a woman, the first kind of major production directed by a woman. I think it shows without changing anything from the text there are scenes that are staged where instead of we're in the audience watching Juan Perón give a speech and then we go backstage, the whole speech is done where it's his back to the back wall and we're with Ava backstage watching it. We're seeing it from her perspective, it's interested in who she is and Sammy does this really fascinating thing where she casts a younger actress to play Evita in the beginning of the show up through Buenos Aires and then when Evita grows up and is sort of forced to grow up through this kind of intense experience of being in the city for the first time and having men take advantage of her is how Sammy staged it is that she kind of comes to know these rules of sexuality through experience.

That's when she's replaced by this older actress and the rest of the performance is sort of haunted by this younger version of herself and I think Sammy has spoken about that her being a child, like literally a minor in those early scenes is really important to her interpretation of Evita versus the Jamie Lloyd production of Evita which I had the joy of seeing in London. From the start, Ava is a player, she knows how to get what she wants through sex, she's twerking on stage in front of Magaldi, it doesn't matter that she's a child, she knows what she wants and how to get it. Those are different takes on a character I think both can be looked at as quote-unquote powerful female leads and that's why kind of the question of feminism is so interesting is because like what is her power, where does it come from, how do different actors do things differently.

Rachel Zegler's performance is all about kind of that facade cracking to me and her starting out as this kind of huge larger than life pop star of a figure, that's how Jamie Lloyd stages it and then when do we see behind that mask and she doesn't even really know who she is underneath it all. Fascinating, I wish I'd seen Sammy Canald's production, I didn't get a chance to see that and one of the things that again with Page versus Stage is this show is generally staged by the directors in very non-realistic metaphorical sort of staging, sort of symbolic staging I guess is the best word of that.

[18:00] David Armstrong: Absolutely and I think the differing interpretations of Shay too are so that is also just such a each director has a very different take on who that narrator is and what his relationship to Evita is and do they actually know each other in real life, is he a figment of her imagination, is he a political enemy? That also gives this kind of in the questions of kind of gender dynamics on stage, the relationship between them I find so different with each production because what power Shay has is different in each production.

[18:31] Stacy Wolf: Yeah, who is he and what does he mean and is he even there? Let's now look at your third chapter where you put Fun Home and Six together in conversation with you and I guess with each other as well. Why did you group those two shows together in one chapter?

[18:49] David Armstrong: Don't go away, we'll be back with more Broadway Nation right after this quick break. Hi, this is David Armstrong and if you're enjoying this episode I strongly suspect that you will want to read my new book Broadway Nation: How Immigrant, Jewish, Queer, and Black Artists Invented the Broadway Musical, on sale now wherever books are sold. And I'm very happy to report that the early reviews have been terrific. The esteemed author Jeffrey Block says that Broadway Nation is a fascinating, comprehensive, and timely gem of a book that more than lives up to its promise of delivering no less than five books in one. Kudos to David Armstrong! And Tony Award-winning lyricist David Zippel says that David Armstrong's insightful history of the evolution of the Broadway Musical and its creators is captivating and comprehensive as well as indispensable.

The book is of course available on Amazon, but I recommend that you go to the publisher's website bloomsbury.com where you will currently receive a 10% discount. Again, like the podcast that inspired it, the book is titled Broadway Nation: How Immigrant, Jewish, Queer, and Black Artists Invented the Broadway Musical. Now back to the show.

[20:05] Stacy Wolf: I think we can all agree I'm the 10 amongst these threes.

[20:13] ♪ Musical number: "All You Want to Do" — performed by the cast of Six ♪

[20:46] Stacy Wolf: Well, they're both these kind of interesting shorter contemporary musicals and the kind of frame of the chapter is looking at kind of how 21st century feminism, which we talked about a little bit earlier in our conversation, has kind of informed these shows. Stacy and I knew we kind of had to talk about Fun Home in this book, it's just such an important chapter in feminist musical theater history given that it was written by women, it's about a lesbian woman which is, you know, extremely rare to see on Broadway stages, to see a lesbian period, but to see her fully fleshed out and be the main character. This was kind of the first to do that, though we do mention that The Color Purple also kind of foregrounds a queer woman's experience but that's kind of played into and out of in different versions of that story.

Six came not that long after Fun Home but they both have such a different kind of way of selling themselves as musicals. When we kind of looked at some of the marketing around it, like Fun Home's big thing was like a family just like yours and was like really trying to get people into the theater without selling this is a queer story about suicide and a difficult relationship between a man and his daughter. Like that's a lot to put in a marketing tagline and so probably start to downplay those.

[22:04] David Armstrong: Yeah, but it's interesting that like so many of the marketing downplayed even that like queerness was in the show and for some people might have been a surprise when they sat down and realized they were seeing a show which is, you know, could be a good thing, could maybe bring some people in who didn't otherwise kind of want to be in the theater but also as a question of kind of like what does it need to do in order to sell itself I guess versus Six has from the start kind of really leaned into its sort of girl power identity. Six is very interesting from an intersectional and page versus stage question because Six more than most Broadway musicals I think has had a lot of different people of different races and different body types in roles on that stage and that's one of the it seems priorities of the casting of that show is to just have kind of a very diverse array of women on stage.

The band is entirely women, that's something that also the show kind of leans into and wants to be the case but when you actually kind of watch Six, I've found myself kind of cold and felt that like this show has kind of sold itself on being this big feminist retelling but is it really successful in doing that? It still kind of ends up being this catfight competition between them even though they kind of say JK it wasn't that anyway at the end and how are we meant to kind of take that? Are they playing into kind of tropes and these like pop stars that they're intentionally kind of quoting? How self-aware is that? And so it was interesting to kind of put these in conversation and one was pre and post Me Too thinking about how Broadway stages and marketing and audiences have kind of shifted or not in their kind of treatment of women. So that's kind of like broadly why we wanted to talk about them and in like both of them have very kind of interesting takes on women and are kind of women-led pieces.

[24:02] Stacy Wolf: I'd also suggest that they're from different generations as well, the writers to assert.

[24:09] David Armstrong: Oh yeah, yes, yes.

[24:13] Stacy Wolf: That approach is sort of perhaps represented by that.

[24:15] David Armstrong: You're not alone in your questioning about Fun Home. Grace Barnes, I was very critical of Six from a feminist perspective and you quote her in your book.

[24:23] Stacy Wolf: Yes, we do. She's written so beautifully and forcefully about Six.

[24:28] David Armstrong: Yeah, yeah. How did that inform your approach on it?

[24:34] Stacy Wolf: We quote Grace and we quote kind of another scholar who has a more positive view of what the feminist force of Six is doing and I think what's interesting about our book is we definitely offer our readings of these shows. We don't kind of shy away from having our own kind of opinions and takes but ultimately kind of toward the end of each analysis we pose a lot of questions and throughout the book we pose a lot of questions. That is because this being a methods book, we're doing these case studies to show you how this kind of work looks in action and to encourage you to do it yourself. So with Six, it was interesting to kind of put up these different takes on Six to show both of these scholars are engaging with feminist thought and are coming away with very different takes on what this show is doing.

And then thinking to my own kind of, I feel like I would say I'd had an effectively distant experience with Six where there was times when I was like bouncing in my seat and loving it but I was like, huh, is this really doing what I want it to do versus I write about the one number that we talked about, like my specific experience seeing the one number because it felt so specific to how this particular actor was performing All You Want to Do. It felt so effective to me that felt like the biggest feminist moment for me in the show but I could totally understand if another actor played it differently you would have been like, what? What was that number like? Why didn't that land? That was crazy.

Engaging with other feminist scholars, we didn't want it to be such a quote heavy book where all we're doing is like quoting from other people but we did want to kind of one show the community that we're a part of, show the thinkers that we're engaging with who are doing this work and say look, there are people who are doing this work and are coming away with different takes on these shows.

[26:09] David Armstrong: Well, in a way it sort of reinforces what your book is about which is you can use these tools to interpret these shows in different ways or to analyze these shows in different ways. You demonstrate that with the different perspectives that you quote.

[26:19] Stacy Wolf: Yes, that's what we were trying to do. Yes, it can be feminist in one way and not feminist in another. It's important to like often something is mixed, you know, it can be a win in one way and not in another.

[26:31] David Armstrong: I want to make sure we give enough time to Fun Home. I was intrigued by your focus on the character of Helen, the mother, because she often is not included in discussions of Fun Home. So I was interested that you focused on her and you talked about Cron and Tesori making a feminist intervention in regard to the writing of Helen. Explain that to us.

[26:48] Stacy Wolf: Yeah, so interestingly while I was at Princeton I had the joy of playing Helen in a production of Fun Home. So to our kind of point about, you know, practitioners doing interpretation as part of their work as an actor, I thought a lot about like Helen and her purpose in the story and was very close with her music so was seeing kind of the way different motifs were coming out for her and when she was heard and not and thought a lot about her song. So Helen, you know, had been a character that was kind of near to my heart and I wanted to kind of write about and that's also something kind of broadly when we talk about Fun Home, we wanted to write about Allison of course but also we talk about Bruce as Bruce is not a woman but you don't have to just talk about women when you're doing feminist scholarship.

The question of what gender is doing and how gender dynamics and heteronormativity impact characters on stage is one that impacts people of all genders and so Bruce is certainly part of our kind of feminist analysis of this musical and what it means to be a man for him is so fraught. So then looking at Helen, she's kind of in this history of suffering wives or women who are mistreated by their husbands and are kind of just silently there or maybe have, you know, one moment when they can kind of move past it. Carrie Persil specifically did some work on Helen in her book and we also got kind of the quotes from Cron and Tesori. I found initially through her book and then looked into more but Lisa Cron and Tesori, we're really interested in not having her feel just like this silent suffering woman in the corner who doesn't have a voice and doesn't get to say what she thinks.

I think she's so important to that show because she doesn't get to kind of break free and have this moment where she goes and lives her whole life. She instead kind of gets to tell her daughter her story, her perspective, the way it was for her and hope that her daughter can do something better and kind of empower her.

[29:51] David Armstrong: Yeah. Now that this book is out in the world of both academia and general readership, what's been the response? Have you been surprised by any reactions from readers or students or people that are now using this book? And what does that feel like, I guess, also?

[30:08] Stacy Wolf: Well, I think, David, you've had this experience yourself that you write a book and then a while later it comes out and you have no idea what's happening to it and if anyone is reading it. And so we've been heartened to hear from some people who've read it, both academics and non-academics. One of my colleagues at Princeton is using some of it in a feminism and popular culture class that she's teaching. I actually used the introduction in my gender musical seminar this semester and that seemed to go okay. The students could apply these tools. I was impressed, not surprised, but impressed. And I have heard from a few people who aren't academics who picked it up and said, huh, this is interesting.

This is useful for me. So we've been heartened that people have read it and have found it useful. It's not a bestseller yet, sadly. We're going to have to wait. We're going to have to wait for the Netflix here. That's why you're here today, because this will put it on the New York Times bestseller list. For sure, for sure. But we have been gratified that it's been well received and that it seems to be useful for the people who've read it.

[31:17] Paige Allen: Yes, this is my first book, which I'm thrilled about. It was a long time in process. So when we finally marked it done on our end, well, and then of course it's like reading proofs and it's such a process to get a book to publication. And then for various reasons, it came out technically, but we didn't have an event for another two months after. So it was out, but I was like, is it out? Because it's not like you're suddenly going to see it on the subway. But once I kind of had it physically in my hands and my friends asking about it at their bookstore to ask them to order it in so that they could have a copy. We love that. If you go and have a local bookstore who can order it in for you. That was when I started to feel like, oh my gosh, this is real.

This is a lot of work that went into this. If you can believe it or not, I was then like, okay, the next one, because Stacey and I have ideas that didn't make it into this book that both of us are hoping to explore in our next book. But that's exciting because I'm now kind of ready to be at the beginning of a process where it's all still so in flux again, but happy to see people reading it. And I just floored that we're doing things like being on your podcast, David, that just, it makes me so excited to get to talk about it and to remind myself it's real and it does exist.

[32:38] David Armstrong: It's been a delight to talk to you. Thank you so much, Paige Allen and Stacy Wolfe, for joining me today to talk about your new book, Feminist Approaches in Musical Theater.

[32:48] Paige Allen: Thank you so much, David.