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[0:00] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Welcome to The Drama Book Show! I’m Mark-Eugene Garcia, the author, director, and co-host of the show. Today, we’re discussing the complicated relationship between women as audiences and fans of musical theater and an industry historically shaped largely by male artists and producers.

[0:25] Paige Allen: I’m Paige Allen, a writer, researcher, and storyteller whose work focuses on women, gender, and sexuality studies.

[0:41] Stacy Wolf: I’m Stacy Wolf, a professor of Theater and American Studies at Princeton University and the author of several books exploring musical theater, gender, and performance.

[0:56] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Together, they bring a thoughtful examination of how feminist perspectives can deepen our understanding of the stories we see on stage. Joining them in conversation is Jill Dolan, professor in English and professor of theater at Princeton University and author of *The Feminist Spectator as Critic* and *Utopia in Performance, Finding Hope at the Theater*. Here are Paige Allen, Stacy Wolf, and Jill Dolan live at the Drama Bookshop.

[1:47] Jill Dolan: Thank you for that warm and lively welcome. David, thank you so much for having us here. Mark, thank you for all you're doing to organize this event. Thank you to everyone at Drama Books. We're really just delighted to be here. I have to tell you that this is such a beautifully written, concise book, as you can see. It's this lovely square shape, but it's full of very practical and smart and I think really inspired advice for how to engage critically from a feminist perspective. It also includes four very strong readings of four very different musicals, *The Music Man*, *Evita*, *Fun Home*, and *SIX*. Imagine, if you will, all of these four musicals together in the same book. It also offers really important, I think, and illustrative arguments about the importance of looking at musicals in a sociopolitical moment and always in conversation with the culture which musicals themselves are in conversation with.

Finally, I just want to say I really appreciate that Paige and Stacy underlined the multiplicity of feminist approaches to musical theater. In other words, there is no right way of taking a feminist approach, but only more and more complex ways of viewing musical theater or other theater as a feminist. It's always about asking excellent questions that don't have right or wrong answers. They offer in the book really just a plethora of wonderful questions that we can pose to all musicals, whether they're old or reinvented or new. Our plan for the evening is that Stacy and Paige will read a portion from the book, and then I have a few questions for them, and then we'll open it up to questions from all of you. So, Stacy and Paige.

[3:46] Paige Allen: All right, we're going to do a little two-hander back and forth of a portion from the introduction.

[3:58] Stacy Wolf: But the book is not written as a play.

[4:00] Paige Allen: No.

[4:01] Stacy Wolf: Or in dialogue.

[4:02] Paige Allen: Or in dialogue.

[4:03] Stacy Wolf: There's a singular voice.

[4:05] Paige Allen: We tried, anyway.

[4:08] Stacy Wolf: Great. Why analyze musicals from a feminist perspective? How does one do it? And why is such an approach important? To answer these questions, let's first consider why are musicals important? Musicals, as we know, are an enormously popular form of entertainment. They're found on major professional stages on Broadway, the West End, and across the globe, in regional playhouses, in community theaters, and school auditoriums. In the 2023-24 Broadway season, more than 12 million tickets were sold to shows. An impressive number, but these sales represent just a fraction of those who experienced musicals that year. Like all art forms, musicals engage with and reflect the societies that make them. Our culture continues to advantage men over women and over non-binary and genderqueer people, politically, economically, and socially.

As a result, musical theater, in general, has historically perpetuated and continues to perpetuate sexism. Female creative teams have historically been and remain dominated by white men. Moreover, the remarkable accomplishments of women have been underappreciated and underrepresented in musical theater history. Gendered power dynamics not only determine who can make musicals, but also what stories those musicals tell. To succeed as a commercial product, a musical must attract a massive audience, please that audience, and continue its run long enough to sell a lot of tickets. This isn't easy. In fact, 80% of musicals on Broadway fail financially. While artists' intentions can be politically progressive, financial pressure often results in musicals that avoid challenging audiences and instead aim for mainstream appeal.

A feminist approach to musical theater, in essence, asks questions of any musical. What is gender doing here? What does gender signify? What do we discover about the characters, narratives, and political work of a show by attending to gender? In this book, we model a collection of feminist methods, tools to interrogate and interpret gendered representations in musicals. Performances of gender on stage allow us to think about, imagine, and embody performances of gender elsewhere. As prolific composer Janine Tesori said in 2015 when she won her first Tony Award for *Fun Home*, for girls, you have to see it to be it. A feminist analysis is a framework for interpretation and for life, opening conversations beyond the theater.

[7:00] Jill Dolan: Lovely, thank you so much. I love the kind of multi-vocality of you two reading the portion of the book together, but I thought maybe we could start by talking about collaboration. Obviously, musicals are a very collaborative form, but either one of you could have written this book by yourself. Why collaborate?

[7:11] Stacy Wolf: Yeah, I'll start. Paige is my student, which a lot of you here know, and a few years ago, I was asked to contribute to a new musical theater textbook, and it was organized by decades, and the decade on the 2010s was meant to be about women-led teams of musicals focusing on *Waitress*. It seemed like a fun and interesting project, and I really liked the editor, Mary Jo Lodge, and I liked how she was thinking about the book, but I didn't really want to write it by myself. In my heart of hearts, I'm a theater person, I'm a collaborator, and I was trying to think about who would be a good collaborator who I could learn from, and Paige immediately came to mind as someone with expertise in feminist approaches, and we wrote this article together that we really enjoyed, and then this book came about because I saw this series, and I knew some people who were writing for this little approaches, these little handbooks, and I saw these in the bookstore in the National Theater in London, and I could not believe that none of them were feminist approaches.

I wrote to the editor and said, can I do this, and he said, you have to write a proposal. Fair enough, fair enough, and then I asked Paige if she would want to do it, and yeah, it was really a pleasure to work together, although I think we realized that it took us many times longer than it might have. We realized that we probably could have written the whole book in a very intense writing retreat, but instead it took us two years, but we finished it, yeah, did you want to say more about that?

[9:57] Paige Allen: Yeah, I could talk a little bit about the writing process. As we were talking about the voice of the book, we did really strive to, while part of the strength of our collaboration is that we're coming from different generations and different perspectives on feminism, Stacy bringing years and years of musical theater scholarship, and I was in the midst of my master's on women's gender and sexuality studies when we started writing together. We really strove that the finished product has a sort of universal, cohesive voice, and how we did that was, for the most part, we divvied up the chapters where one of us would take a first pass, do the initial research, and write the chapter, and then hand it off to the other person who would then edit it, and continue back and forth to create the kind of cohesive thing.

I think the exception to that is the introduction, which perhaps was the hardest beast to wrangle of the book, because there's so much we wanted to cover, and we made a whole list of everything we could possibly say about musical theater and feminism and musical theater, and overwrote it and then cut back, and each kind of took sections, and so that one was really patchworked together more than the other chapters, which I think went back and forth more. We did have an entire chapter that we threw away, because the book was too long. The book is 25,000 words, which is pretty short, so we do have a chapter now that's waiting for another home somewhere.

[10:38] Stacy Wolf: Yeah. Hopefully, the next project, it'll live there somewhere.

[10:41] Jill Dolan: I think one of the things that makes the book feel so immediate is that often in the writing, you actually address a "you," the reader who's reading the book. Can you say a little bit about who you imagine that "you" to be?

[10:51] Paige Allen: Yeah. I imagine the "you" to be Paige when she was a student, and some of my former students, and I think those of us who teach musical theater are always dealing with multiple genres, multiple forms, multiple perspectives, and so it's definitely written for students, undergraduate students, who may or may not have an intense interest in musical theater. Some of it's pretty, I don't want to say basic, but introductory in terms of how musicals work, and definitely those who have a feminist, an interest in feminism and feminist studies, and just normal people who are fans of musicals or who are curious and interested in taking up a feminist perspective, and I think that's why we're really happy that it's in this series that all approach musicals from a different methodological or critical or theoretical perspective.

[11:45] Stacy Wolf: Yeah, I think we hope that this book is a teaching tool and can be used in introductory to musical theater classes. When I took your class, it was my first time approaching a musical from a critical perspective. We do that with short stories and novels and plays, but musicals are not often given that weight or they're treated as not serious enough to have that kind of analysis and critical work in kind of the standard education that we're given, so this is part of a, we hope it's used to teach musicals, and we also hope that it has a readable, approachable tone where if you're not someone who's read a lot of academic work, you can also pick up this book and enjoy it and get it. I think we tried not to use a lot of jargon, we tried to really define our terms, and I think that comes from a belief that I think all of us up here have.

[12:47] Paige Allen: That the kind of the work that is done in kind of an academic article or textbook about musical theatre is on the same spectrum as when you walk out of a musical and you turn to the person next to you and you say, what did you think? And you talk about that over a drink after the show. That is also feminist criticism or can be and asking questions of what did that mean? What did you think of that? How did that make you feel? That is the beginning of any feminist approach to musical theatre. So hopefully it feels accessible and anyone who's interested in art or musicals could use these approaches to analyze what they see.

[13:25] Jill Dolan: Here. I think it's actually a really useful tool for spectators and people who go to the theatre and want to enhance their understanding and their engagement with the piece. I want to pick up the page on something you said about musical theatre not being taken seriously, the scholarship perhaps not being taken seriously. How do you both respond to those accusations? One, that musical theatre is silly and not serious and who cares? And two, given the work that you do in the book, that feminism is irrelevant if not dead and who cares about feminism? Both of your keywords are under attack and how do you respond?

[14:08] Paige Allen: When it comes to musical theatre, musical theatre is a commercial art form. We start the book by saying millions, billions of people experience musical theatre in a given year, especially if you expand to include movie musicals. It is a widely consumed art form. Obviously, the price of a ticket to a Broadway show is a barrier to entry, but the kind of cultural capital that musicals have, it's part of pop culture, especially the American musical has been a part of US culture since it was birthed as a form. And I think the stories we tell and the stories we consume affect us and the messages that are contained in those stories, even when we think all we're doing is watching something for fun, are shaping how we see gender power in the same way that I think there's this similar movement alongside musical theatre studies of analyzing TV as something that's worth delving into critically.

Film has had a similar trajectory that it's not just high art, whatever we want to call that, that deserves our attention because often it's the popular art forms that are touching more people's lives, perhaps. So I think that's why musicals matter because we care about what we're seeing and how it affects us and what we take away from it. And then when it comes to the question of feminism, I think we're in a, I think, what are we in? We're in a time. We are in a time and I think, I don't know if I think anyone who would look at the news or be aware of things that are going on, like, yeah, gender is everywhere and gender politics are everywhere and what it means to be a woman is everywhere from the TikTok videos that we watch to the policies that are being passed.

And so to me, feminism is needed now as much as any time in its history. But what you alluded to, Jill, is that we're in a very interesting time where the very definition of feminism is quite slippery. It's always been a kind of multivalent movement and there always have been different approaches to it. But we've moved from this period where feminism was once a dirty word, a radical thing. You were out in the streets burning bras and hating men if you were a feminist to now people across the political spectrum, across opinions and political stances have called themselves feminists and what that means to each of those people can look very different and what women's rights means to those people can look very different.

Who counts as a woman under the banner of feminism is a questioned thing. And so that is both very exciting for scholarship because we love questions and we love different opinions and it's also the very kind of term upon which we stand is contested.

[17:04] Stacy Wolf: Yeah, I think that was one reason why we wanted to write about sex because sex may or may not be a feminist musical. Who really knows? And we include scholars on both sides of the camp of yes, it's quite feminist and no, it's not. The other thing I think just to underline what Paige said about shifting terrain is that I think Jill and I have both been teaching long enough that we have seen our students, we've seen the roller coaster of acceptance of feminism and in fact when I was publishing Changed for Good and the subtitle is A Feminist History of the Broadway Musical, at that moment I was debating with my editor if we should cut the word feminist from the title and he said absolutely not.

This book is feminist, it is staying in there and then within a couple of years I was so happy that I wasn't anxious but I think in my students right now, just a few years after you've graduated, coming with a feminist perspective is a given. It's just an assumption that every single thing that we look at, every single thing that we listen to, every single thing that we read, the students are coming in with a heightened awareness of thinking about identity politics, gender, race, sexuality, class, embodiment and so on and it's not anything at this moment, this year, this semester, it's not anything that's causing anxiety or defensiveness at least in my classes.

[18:47] Jill Dolan: Speaking of sex, one of the categories that Stacey and Paige parse in the book is what they call ambivalent feminisms and sex is more or less discussed under that category. Would you say a little bit about how you see that category and how you see sex under its terms and also what you would do with sex if you were trying to read it perhaps resistantly from a different kind of feminist perspective?

[19:10] Paige Allen: Yeah, sex is such a fascinating musical because it's part of this moment in musical theatre where embracing girl power or women's empowerment is part of the marketing of many different shows that are happening on Broadway right now. Six is just one of them. I think Ann Juliet kind of does this, the whole point is it's Juliet's perspective, she doesn't die in the end and each of these shows has very different takes on this issue but things like Legally Blonde, Lysistrata Jones, Once Upon a One More Time, these shows that the point is it's women doing it. Even Death Becomes Her I think is part of this moment right now where leading with the girl power is part of the marketing of the show and we put Fun Home and Six into conversation because Fun Home's marketing was quite different than Six's and often Fun Home's marketing actually downplays its feminist, queer, dark themes and instead is just, it's a family just like yours, come on, because they want to get people in the door and it's a different kind of musical and that's what they needed.

So all to say that's just kind of the context and what happens in these kind of ambivalent feminisms or different theorists have theorized, I talk about post-feminism, we talk about post-feminism and popular feminism in the book and basically I think we all can recognize this if you go to a department store and it says hashtag smash the patriarchy on a t-shirt that you can buy. There's this kind of marketable, popular, easily engaged with form of feminism that's happening right now and again it's because kind of feminism is in the zeitgeist. Corporations posting for International Women's Day and the question becomes how deep does that go? Is that just lip service? Is that just about selling a product or virtue signaling?

And when we look at these musicals what do they actually do on stage and the stories that they actually tell? And that to bring us back to Six, I think as Stacey said, scholars are feminist scholars who are all approaching it from a feminist perspective which with the approaches that we talk about in the book have very different takes on what Six is. Some scholars say this is all fluff, it's ultimately it's this competition between women, it's this trying to be if they really wanted to move beyond Henry VIII and this kind of categorization of them as wives it could have looked like an imagining of their lives and actually staging who they were as women rather than this competition for who suffered the most because that's kind of the premise of the show and the kind of sexualization and pop starification of these women is just playing into tropes or stereotypes of women is like one perspective on Six.

Another perspective on Six is that kind of friendly TikTokification of Broadway gets people in the door and lets them think about feminism maybe for the first time because it has women on stage saying we want to write our own stories, we want to move past how the history books have shaped us before and for a 12-year-old girl that might be the first time she's hearing that articulated in that way and one of the approaches we talk about too in the book is page versus stage. The difference between what's written on the page in a musical and how it's performed and how different performances and different directors and different design choices and different costumes can lead to different interpretations.

Six in its original kind of costuming they had these kind of baggy casual clothes on a little bit more androgynous certainly not the kind of tight crop top, cute skirt, sexy outfits that they have now. One could have a feminist take on what that means and why that changed and in the performance the song we talk about in the book is All You Want to Do which is a kind of song about sexual abuse and grooming that is under the guise of this pop song and when I saw Six, the particular performer I saw in the show I saw, I found it the smartest and most effective song in the show because by the end all of the women were touching her and she was clearly having this breakdown but needed to keep performing being okay and by the end had gone from this kind of this is okay and I'm sexually empowered by playing into what these men want me to be to having this kind of breakdown in the song but some other scholars see that as completely not working and making light of kind of this history and this woman's story and so that's just a kind of example of how feminist scholars can approach things with different the same kind of questions and the same values even and intentions and come away with very different interpretations of a piece.

[24:04] Stacy Wolf: Do you have anything you want to say?

[24:08] Jill Dolan: Yeah, that was great. Yes, yes and I think what you hear Paige expressing and what we try to do in the book is not judge the shows that we write about or really any show as thumbs up or thumbs down, good feminists, bad feminists, feminists yes, feminists no, and really every chapter, our reading of Music Man and of Evita and of Fun Home and of Sex are conflicted and we are we do a lot of on the one hand this and on the other hand this because the purpose of the book is really methodological and to give readers tools and ways to think about musicals and I think using the tools that we suggest including page to stage which is one of our favorites we hope that readers will make use of them to think about shows and we want to model and I think this is also how we're really speaking to students we want to model that is okay to not just have your argument and that's what it is that it's okay to say wow this is complicated it's performance it can go in different ways depending on how you look at it and there are actually with I would say with all of our all of our approaches are also internally contradictory there a contradiction is built into everything that we're working on here in the best possible way we hope the page to stage example is an interesting one because this is the site of much of the feminist resistance that page.

[25:35] Jill Dolan: Located in the book and yet lurking over the specter of all of this is another delimiting factor for musicals, which is the licensors. Stacy and Paige have this wonderful example in the book of a production of *Music Man*, in which it was a director named Morgan Green, I believe, who changed the Wells Fargo wagon logo to an Amazon logo in her production and was stopped by the licensors. So would you talk a bit about how the licensors have a great deal of power in terms of, again, delimiting what a feminist approach might mean?

[26:11] Stacy Wolf: Yeah, just a few other examples from that production, which when Jesse Green reviewed it in the *Times* and said, everyone should do musicals like this because this is the reason that classic musicals should live. And not only did she make the Wells Fargo wagon Amazon, but the entire cast was people of color. And I believe that both Marianne and Harold Hill were black and she cut the song, "My White Night," because it seemed entirely inappropriate. And the combination of taking the show out of its historical context and actually cutting a song, that's really tough to do without anyone's permission. I think they temporarily shut it down and then she put the song back in and I think allowed the actor to sing it with the appropriate irony and distance.

And it sounds actually like a fantastic production. But it also raises this question of reproducibility, revivals, why do these old shows when they're so offensive and what can you do with them? And licensors are the enemies and the friends of all of that.

[27:17] Stacy Wolf: Yeah, but I think there's a lot that can be done without changing anything. I think like Daniel Fish's production of *Oklahoma*, which got a lot of attention, not a word of that script was changed. And people walked away with very different takes on it. And some people said Rodgers and Hammerstein would be rolling in their graves. But other people said, great, that's why we have different versions of things. And other people said, no, this is all in the text. It's all there. Nothing has been changed. So that's the kind of beauty of musical theater as an art form is that it's not like a novel where we have the words on the page. And obviously, there are a million different interpretations of it, but we have a stable text.

When it comes to the theater, it's very unstable what we're even analyzing as feminist thinkers or writers because scripts don't even get written down until after production and being in the room that one night and what one actor does versus the understudy might perform a line entirely differently. And what you saw on the news that day might affect how you see something on stage. And I think that even when there is the licensing, even if it is confined, there's a lot that a feminist director or feminist creative team can do that's still without changing a word of what's written.

[28:40] Stacy Wolf: I have one more question, and then we'll open it up to questions from you all. But in your further work on these questions, are there musicals that you think would really benefit from a feminist reinterpretation? And are there musicals that you think are just hopeless from a feminist perspective and should never be approached that way?

[29:02] Paige Allen: One thing that we realized as we were writing the book, because I myself am a performer and a writer and all the things that make things. I'm mostly the things that makes words and makes young people smarter. I hope that those are the things that I make, although I'm a pretty good baker also. But I think one of the things that we talked about a lot when we were working on the book and that we realized is that it's much easier to be a critic than it is to be an artist. It's much easier to take a musical apart and analyze what's going on for good or for bad. It's much, much harder to figure out how to push against or push forward, especially within the law. And the law is strict for licensing of musicals.

So I don't really know how to answer that question. I feel like any show that gets mentioned, my initial response is always, oh, yes, we can salvage that or fix it or make it better. And then once I start actually thinking, okay, how exactly would we do that? It becomes tough. This semester, I co-taught a class with my colleague Solon Snyder-Sway about musical theater revivals and revisals. And for the students' final projects, they had to propose a revisal or revival. And interestingly, all six groups presented queer revisions of musicals, whichever show they were doing, every single one. Some of them were more persuasive than others. But it was interesting to me, that's when they wanted to revise something and they wanted to do something different.

They wanted to dismantle heterosexuality and heteronormativity. Were there, I'm not sure how feminist their ideas turned out to be, but it was really interesting to both of us that independently, that was what they identified as a key problem. And also, every single production that they did was completely cross-race casting, cross-gender casting, cross every kind of casting to just disrupt the kind of the normativity and the hegemony of musicals. What do you think, Paige?

[31:20] Paige Allen: Yeah, I think it's an interesting question, and I have two main points on it. As Stacey said before, our project is not to say, here are the musicals that are good and should be done, and here are the musicals that are bad and should be kept in the bin of history. Because it's much more, that's not actually what feminist scholarship is. Feminist scholarship is saying, what is gender doing here? What happens when we do it this way? What happens if this is the casting? Why did that make me feel this way? Asking questions rather than actually cutting off dialogue by saying it's yes or no.

[32:02] Paige Allen: I think the question is interesting because the theater is such an interesting space because professional musical theater is so expensive. It is an art form that takes a lot of money to make on a professional Broadway, even off-Broadway level stage. And as we said when we read the introduction, 80% of Broadway musicals fail financially. And so that makes for a very resource-scarce mindset when we're thinking about what musicals make it to Broadway. And so I think the question of should this musical ever be done again, I find it hard to say no, never. Yes, there are cases where I'm sure I would say I'm completely uninterested in seeing a production of that. I don't think that it could be salvaged.

But I think the question is actually, I think it becomes more interesting too when we think about why are we doing this again on this Broadway stage, putting so much time and resource and attention to this project, instead of funding new voices or original stories or a revival of a different, maybe lesser-known musical that was done off-Broadway in the 70s or 80s and then forgotten. And so I think I have more opinions about not whether it should be done ever, period. I think any experiment is probably worth doing. But I think I have more opinions about, oh gosh, we're doing that one again and we're putting all this time and effort and resource and money and attention and publicity into this show.

I think the bar becomes higher when we're thinking about the kind of limited resources and stages of Broadway and the West End, which is what we mainly look at in our book. And I think that's something that kind of producers and creatives grapple with, is what gets elevated to that level.

[34:05] Stacy Wolf: Yeah. And I think that's why I would love for this book to be read by high school teachers, because I feel like where the change can happen is saying, all right, we're going to do a production of *Oklahoma*. We're not going to do Daniel Fish's production. We're going to do whatever we think *Oklahoma* is on the page. And I have all these incredibly talented women and this show that's really conservative in so many ways. So how might I use these feminist approaches to try to think about how to do this musical differently with my students? And I think that's where so many other things can happen because of the financial situation on Broadway and the reluctance, understandably, for producers to take risks.

[34:50] Jill Dolan: So I'm going to repeat the question for our podcast listeners, which was a really good question about how much does author's intent matter in something like, for instance, *Evita*? And can you point out the deficits in a show without fixing the critique that you're trying to advance?

[35:02] Stacy Wolf: Yeah, I'll start with that. One of the other things about licensors is licensors are working with estates and estates are hugely varying in their flexibility and willingness to see other kinds of productions happen. The Andrew Lloyd Webber's estate is very open and there's a new *Cats* and a new *Evita* and we write about another production of *Evita* that was quite radical and different. So a lot of it depends on what the estates are willing to do and how much they want their show to be done again and what kinds of ideas directors have. I think, for example, the Sondheim estate has become increasingly open. The fact that Marianne Elliott could do this gender swap version of *Company* and who knows what other things will come of that.

I think the question that you're raising is exactly the question that my students were talking about all semester with every single musical we studied in my other class, which was about gender and sexuality and musical theater. And we had a really long conversation about *Rad Time* and a show that I love, we love, my students loved it, but they said, okay, so the two black characters in this show are murdered. Are we appreciative of *Rad Time* because it illustrates what was going on in the country at that time and continues to go on to this day? Or are we critical of *Rad Time* because it kills off the two main characters in the show who are black? And we didn't have an answer for that. The answer was yes, yes, both of these things.

But I do feel like from a feminist perspective, that's exactly the question. And in some ways, that's the question with Ibsen's *Doll's House*. Is *Doll's House* amazing because it shows what the situation was for Nora in the 19th century? Or is *Doll's House* hugely troubling and problematic because she's trapped, although she does walk out at the end? Maybe *Hedda Gabler* is probably a better example of Ibsen for that one.

[37:17] Paige Allen: Yeah, everything you said, Stacey. And to return to *Evita*, *Evita* was such a rich show to write about because Ava's such an interesting character. And each production and version of Ava has had a different take on who she is. And the show is about gender and power. That is scripted. It's always going to be about that. And yeah, and how a woman uses her sexuality and her image to gain political power and social power. We talk about Sammy Canald's production of *Evita*, which was staged at New York City Center and then at ART. And her kind of approach as a woman directing the show, the kind of first major production of the show that was directed by a woman, really positioning you from Ava's perspective. So when Juan Perón is giving his speech when we first meet him, rather than him as a woman,

[38:52] Jill Dolan: And that's the beauty of musical theatre, I think, is that when there are these hairy and complex questions in a musical, each version of it is an interpretation and a take on those questions. We'll see what Jamie Lloyd does when his production comes to Broadway from the West End in the Fall of Evita. Other questions? Deb, please.

[39:34] Deb: Yeah, the question was about the figure of the diva in musical theatre and how she offers kind of promise and potential or potentially limitations in musical theatre. I could start maybe? Yeah, Ava's a great example. I think that the diva is one of the things we talk about in the book is how, this keeps coming to page versus stage, but how a strong woman performer can make a role that is actually pretty weak on the page seem much stronger than she is. And having an incredible singer, actor and dancer take up space on stage, belts her face off or dance incredibly captures us and changes how we respond to that character. And so I think that the promise is that the diva does take up that space and demands attention and becomes larger even than the role as written.

I think the limitation is there are obviously kind of stereotypes of what the diva is allowed to do. There are racialized versions of the diva, the kind of black woman belter who can only occupy a certain kind of role on stage, the Latina Spitfire who gets to dance and sing great but doesn't get much depth. And there's the kind of limitations of being haunted by divas of the past, which we talk about a little bit of each woman who comes into a role. If Patti LuPone's version of Evita is canonical, even Madonna's version of Evita, that's a diva, a pop star coming into this role and doing it, that each kind of woman who steps into that role has to figure out who she is in conversation with the women who've been in that role in the past.

[41:27] Paige Allen: Yeah, yeah, yeah, definitely. Yes, to everything you said. And the other way that the diva is haunted is the actor's identity, the performer's identity. So not only will every actor who tries to play Eva Peron be haunted by the ghost of Patti LuPone, who just, we love our divas, let's just say, we love our divas. So not only does every actor have to negotiate the ghost of Patti LuPone, but also Patti LuPone is herself in any role she ever plays. So when she plays Joanne in Company, she is Patti LuPone as Joanne in Company, a role that's ghosted by Elaine Stritch. So there's all of these levels and layers. And I think Audra McDonald playing Gypsy and what she, I think, in a lot of the critical commentary was up against was this racialized, the racialized image of the diva, her own ghosts and hauntings, and all of the divas who had played that role in the past, which was a heavy burden for her.

And I think, I thought her performance was astonishing. And unlike any that have ever been seen, but as soon as someone takes a diva role, like Mama Rose and does it differently, there's going to be some critical anxiety about that.

[42:51] Jill Dolan: I think we have time for one more question. Yes, Eliana.

[42:52] Eliana: I really enjoyed what you guys talked about with triple historicity in the book. It was a framework that was totally new for me and I found really helpful. And so I'd love just to hear you guys talk about it a little bit more. And if there are any shows that you find, whether or not you talk about in the book, that you find particularly impactful to think about with that framework or that adds a layer of complexity or just in theater struck you in the moment, I would love to hear about that.

[43:27] Jill Dolan: Want to repeat that?

[43:28] Paige Allen: Yes. The question was about, thank you for that question, about triple historicity, which is one of the feminist methods that we talk about in the book and to say more about it. And yeah, to say more about it. Do you want to start?

[43:42] Stacy Wolf: Sure. Yeah.

[43:43] Paige Allen: Yeah. So essentially to describe and define triple historicity, it's this concept that we did not come up with.

[43:51] Stacy Wolf: Freddie Rocham.

[43:52] Paige Allen: You want to say that?

[43:53] Stacy Wolf: Yes. Freddie Rocham, who's a theater scholar, came up with this idea some years ago.

[43:58] Jill Dolan: Yeah. And I think like a lot of the ideas in the book, it's one of these concepts that if you are a theater person, once you hear it, it makes absolute sense. There's nothing. It just explains something that you always knew about theater.

[44:14] Paige Allen: Do you want to define it?

[44:15] Stacy Wolf: Yes. Paige is going to define it now.

[44:17] Paige Allen: Okay. Yes. Thank you for that. So basically the theory is that any musical is existing within three different, three or four times at the same time. It's the period in which the piece takes place, the period in which it was first performed and the period when you're seeing it now. You can add other times if notable revivals happen, movie musicals are adding different layers of the historicity. I think I want you to talk about Chicago.

[44:49] Stacy Wolf: Yeah. I want you to talk about Chicago.

[44:52] Paige Allen: Okay. Yeah. So one of the examples, and I think to answer in some ways to respond to your question, Eliana, I feel like every show is interesting to think about. Even say a show like Company, which was one of the first musicals that takes place when it was written in 1970, even though future productions may or may not take place in 1970, or A Chorus Line, which took place in 1975, which is when it was first produced and later revivals struggled with that. Does it always take place in the mid-1970s? I'm not sure. So the example of Chicago was that it set in the 1920s. It was written in the late 90s when it failed on Broadway. It did not do well. It was a pretty lavish production, I think. Maybe don't hold me to that exactly. It was a lavish production. Thank you, David. And what?

[45:49] Jill Dolan: 1970s.

[45:50] Paige Allen: 70s. Yeah. So my gosh, the revival was in the 90s. Yes. So it opened in the 1970s and was not well-received, theater historians later said, because for the moment, it was after Watergate, terrible financial situation in New York City. People did not want to see a musical about women murdering their abusive boyfriends or husbands or other sort of people and the media frenzy around them, and it did not do well. So that was the tension between when it was set and when it opened. So at that moment, there's just two moments because it hasn't come back later. When it was revived at City Center Encores! in 1998. Yes, 1998. I'm not good with exact dates. At the end of the 90s, it was a very different historical moment.

We had seen many more violent women in representation. We were much more cynical about the media, about performance in everyday life. There were also huge stylistic changes in musical theater from the 70s through the 90s. And so this kind of review format vaudeville sketch show in a way was accepted and it's still running, cycling through all the stars of forever. So and if we would go see Chicago tonight, we would be absorbing it through right now, late 90s, 70s, and 20s, all in the 20th century, all at the same time. So we could think about how any of those moments are rubbing up against each other.

[47:27] Stacy Wolf: Yeah, another show I'll mention just because we talked about it a little bit earlier is Ragtime, just because it's been on my mind. And Ragtime is set at this kind of turn of the century, the 19th century into the 20th century. The novel upon which the musical is based was written in 1975. So it has a kind of, that's also a ghost moment haunting it, right? Because the source is coming from that. And then it first premiered in 1998 at the turn of the century. So anytime anyone on stage is talking about a new century coming, you're feeling the 20th century coming, and you're feeling the 21st century coming at the same time. And now, having seen Ragtime currently at Lincoln Center, I think it has a whole different kind of political moment that it's speaking to, the kind of, the history that we are in now in 2025-2026 is a different moment than 1998.

Our kind of, I think, disillusionment with the kind of American project makes us interpret the songs about what America is and finding America, even though the show itself is also disillusioned. The whole point is, it's about kind of the hope and impossibility of the American dream through these three centuries. And so I think I'm finding it a really interesting piece to think about right now, because it has this late 19th century, 1975, when the novel was written, its original production in the late 90s. And then now, and add in a really important revival that happened that kind of changed the way it was staged in 2008, which is also a different moment in kind of America.

[49:24] Jill Dolan: I think this gives you a little bit of a sense of the richness of this text and the method that Paige and Stacey advance in the book. I want to thank again Drama Bookshop for hosting us this evening. Thank all of you for being here. And please join me in thanking Paige and Stacey for sharing their work. Thank you so much for being here.

[49:50] David Rigano: And we are back. Thanks for listening to this episode of the Drama Book Show. Our thanks to Paige Allen, Stacey Wolf, and Jill Dolan for sharing their insights into feminism, representation, and the ways we can change with musical theatre through new critical perspectives. Feminist Approaches in Musical Theatre offers a thoughtful exploration of how gender, authorship, and audience interpretation shape the musicals we know and love. Coming up next on the Drama Book Show, we'll explore the influence of Latine artists on the American musical theatre canon with author Stefan Sittig and his book, Latinidad in Musical Theatre. Together we'll look at how Latine music, dance, choreography, and storytelling have shaped musical theatre over the last century, from early performers and creators to groundbreaking works like West Side Story, In the Heights, and Hamilton.

So remember, follow us on Instagram at Drama Book Show Podcast. Follow us on Eventbrite at Drama Book Shop. And remember, all the books we talk about can be found here at the Book Shop, and so can we. And we will see you at the Book Shop.