Gays on Broadway
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- USD 19.99
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- USD 19.99
Descripción editorial
A fascinating look at the gay and lesbian influence on the American stage by an internationally-recognized authority on the topic
From the genteel female impersonators of the 1910s to the raucous drag queens of La Cage Aux Folles, from the men of The Normal Heart to the women of Fun Home, and from Eva Le Gallienne and Tallulah Bankhead to Tennessee Williams and Nathan Lane, Gays On Broadway deftly chronicles the plays and people that brought gay culture to Broadway.
Writing with his customary verve and wit, author Ethan Mordden follows the steady liberation of gay themes on the American stage. The story begins in the early twentieth century, when gay characters were virtually banned from productions. The 1920s saw a flurry of plays closed on moral grounds as well as the Wales Padlock Act, which forbade representation of ?sex degeneracy?. While authorities made consistent attempts to shutter the movement, the public remained curious, and after a few decades of war making, a truce broke out when The Boys In the Band became a national smash hit. From this point on, gay theatre proved simply too popular to abolish.
With this change, theatre was graced with a host of unforgettable characters - from thrill killers to historical figures to drag performers, as well as professional gays (such as the defiantly effeminate window dresser in Kiss of the Spider Woman), closeted gays, and those run-of-the-mill citizens who don't reside entirely within the colorful nonconformist identity (such as the two male lovers in the dinner-theatre comedy Norman, Is That You?).
Spoken plays and musicals, playwrights, directors, and actors all played their part in popularizing the gay movement through art. Gays on Broadway is an essential chronological review of the long journey to bring the culture of gay men and women onto the American stage.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Theater critic Mordden (Pick a Pocket or Two) gallops through a century of gay American theater in this uneven history. Surveying 1910 to 2010, Mordden spotlights the "plays and the people" that brought queer culture to the American stage, including productions with gay characters, those written by gay creatives, or those "whose sense of parody or outright camp... are at least gay-adjacent." Mordden traces historical themes, including an uptick in sympathetic portrayals of gay men leaving their wives in the 1960s, and the "problem plays" of the '90s and aughts in which gayness served as a "social controversy that the principals discuss." Mordden is most successful with close analysis, as in his consideration of the 1968 The Boys in the Band ("wildly funny... and a tiny bit unbelievable, yet so reflective of what gay life was like in New York in 1968 that the show is almost a documentary"). But his semi-stream-of-consciousness style and catty tone too often distract—he describes Truman Capote as possessing the "attitude of a malicious petit four" and pedantically corrects popular pronunciations of Madame Butterfly—and while Stonewall is referenced, the history is largely isolated from broader trends in culture and media. Queer theater fans will be piqued, though Mordden's style is a love-it or leave-it proposition.