Title Broadway bodies : a critical history of conformity / Ryan Donovan

Published Oxford : Oxford University Press, [2023]

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Description 1 online resource Contents Cover Page -- Half Title -- Title Page -- Copyright -- Dedication -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Companion Website -- Introduction: The Broadway Body -- 1. "I Saw What They Were Hiring": Casting and Recasting A Chorus Line -- 2. Dreamgirls, Size, and the Body Politics of Padding -- 3. "Must Be Heavyset": Casting Fat Women in Broadway Musicals -- 4. La Cage aux Folles and Playing Gay -- 5. "Keeping It Gay" on The Great White Way -- 6. Deaf West's Awakening of Broadway -- 7. Musicals, Physical Difference, and Disability -- Epilogue: Recasting Broadway -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index Summary 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 Broadway has body issues. Broadway Bodies: A Critical History of Conformity contends that Broadway has historically treated, and continues to treat, its fictional characters with more care than the actors hoping to get cast in these roles. Casting is the site of power relations that most clearly reveals Broadway's limited tolerance of difference. These relations converge in the ideology of the "Broadway Body": the hyper-fit, hyper-able, triple-threat performer who represents the ultimate commodification of the body for the Broadway economy. Casting is always a political act, situated within a power structure favoring certain kinds of bodies. On Broadway, that body has increasingly been the Broadway Body. Broadway Bodies centers how ability, sexuality, and size intersect with gender, race, and ethnicity in both casting and performance. Some questions explored in the book include: How does the use of fat suits in a musicals like Dreamgirls and Hairspray actually stigmatize fatness? What were the political implications of casting two white heterosexual actors as the gay couple in La Cage aux Folles in 1983? How do Deaf actors change the sound of musicals in Deaf West's Broadway revivals? How do musicals use the aesthetics of physical difference as a metaphor for disability? Broadway Bodies tells a history of Broadway's inclusion of various forms of difference while shining a light on its simultaneous ambivalence toward non-conforming bodies. Broadway is a battleground for body politics Subject Musicals -- Casting. Musicals -- Auditions. Physical-appearance-based bias. Musicals -- Political aspects Musicals -- New York (State) -- New York -- 20th century -- History and criticism Musicals -- New York (State) -- New York -- 21st century -- History and criticism Musicals -- Casting Musicals Musicals -- Auditions Physical-appearance-based bias SUBJECT Broadway (New York, N.Y.) -- History -- 20th century Broadway (New York, N.Y.) -- History -- 21st century Subject New York (State) -- New York New York (State) -- New York -- Broadway Genre/Form Electronic books Criticism, interpretation, etc. History Form Electronic book ISBN 0197551092 9780197551097 9780197551110 0197551114 9780197551103 0197551106

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