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Broadway Bodies offers a new telling of Broadway history, exploring how ability, sexuality, and size intersect with gender, race, and ethnicity in casting and performance. Author Ryan Donovan unpacks Broadway's inclusion of various forms of embodied difference while exposing its simultaneous ambivalence toward non-conforming bodies.
List of contents
- Part I: Broadway Bodies
- Introduction: The Broadway Body
- 1. "I Saw What They Were Hiring": Casting and Recasting A Chorus Line
- Part II: Size
- 2. Dreamgirls, Size, and the Body Politics of Padding
- 3. "Must Be Heavyset": Casting Fat Women in Broadway Musicals
- Part III: Sexuality
- 4. La Cage aux Folles and Playing Gay
- 5. "Keeping It Gay" on The Great White Way
- Part IV: Ability
- 6. Deaf West's Awakening of Broadway
- 7. Musicals, Physical Difference, and Disability
- Epilogue: Recasting Broadway
- Bibliography
- Index
About the author
Ryan Donovan is Assistant Professor of Theater Studies at Duke University. He is author of Queer Approaches in Musical Theatre and co-editor of The Routledge Companion to Musical Theatre.
Summary
Broadway has body issues.
What is a Broadway Body? Broadway has long preserved the ideology of the "Broadway Body": the hyper-fit, exceptionally able, triple-threat performer who represents how Broadway musicals favor certain kinds of bodies. Casting is always a political act, situated within a power structure that gives preference to the Broadway Body.
In Broadway Bodies, author Ryan Donovan explores how ability, sexuality, and size intersect with gender, race, and ethnicity in casting and performance. To understand these intersectional relationships, he poses a series of questions: Why did A Chorus Line, a show that sought to individuate dancers, inevitably make dancers indistinguishable? How does the use of fat suits in musicals like Dreamgirls and Hairspray stigmatize fatness? What were the political implications of casting two straight actors as the gay couple in La Cage aux Folles in 1983? How did deaf actors change the sound of musicals in Deaf West's Broadway revivals? Whose bodies does Broadway cast and whose does it cast aside?
In answering these questions, Broadway Bodies tells a history of Broadway's inclusion of various forms of embodied difference while revealing its simultaneous ambivalence toward non-conforming bodies.
Additional text
Donovan's book is thorough, yet approachable and highly readable; it will prove useful for academics but also legible for a broader audience of theater lovers. Broadway Bodies explores critical moments in the history of theatre that were expansive in how they approached bodily difference. Likewise, Donovan has altered the history of scholarship on theatre, helping to make it more accepting and capacious in its understandings and theorizations of bodies and embodiment.
