George Freedley Book Award finalist
Barnard Hewitt Award honorable mention
Musicals, it is often said, burst into song and dance when mere words can no longer convey the emotion. This book argues that musicals burst into song and dance when one body can no longer convey the emotion. Rogers shows how the musical鈥檚 episodes of burlesque and minstrelsy model the kinds of radical relationships that the genre works to create across the different bodies of its performers, spectators, and creators every time the musical bursts into song. These radical relationships鈥攂orne of the musical鈥檚 obsessions with 鈥渂ad鈥 performances of gender and race鈥攁re the root of the genre鈥檚 progressive play with identity, and thus the source of its subcultural power. However, this leads to an ethical dilemma: Are the musical鈥檚 progressive politics thus rooted in its embrace of regressive entertainments like burlesque and minstrelsy?
The Song Is You shows how musicals return again and again to this question, and grapple with a guilt that its joyous pleasures are based on exploiting the laboring bodies of its performers. Rogers argues that the discourse of 鈥渋ntegration鈥濃攚hich claims that songs should advance the plot鈥攈as functioned to deny the radical work that the musical undertakes every time it transitions into song and dance. Looking at musicals from The Black Crook to Hamilton, Rogers confronts the gendered and racial dynamics that have always undergirded the genre and asks how we move forward.
鈥淏radley Rogers takes us on an adventure through American musical theatre to prove that the much-touted concept of integration is a fraud. Discovering new rhythms, new pleasures, and new choreographies in canonical and noncanonical musicals alike, The Song Is You represents revisionist history at its most invigorating.鈥濃擠avid Savran, author, Highbrow/Lowdown: Theater, Jazz, and the Making of the New Middle Class
鈥淩ogers charts a fascinating and important new road through musical theatre theory, connecting the genre鈥檚 roots in minstrelsy, burlesque, and vaudeville with performative impersonations, psychic displacements, and most of all, a repudiation of integration. His argument, both elegant and persuasive, attends to the dynamics of performance and reception within the realms of history, politics, power, gender, race, and the body.鈥濃擲tacy Wolf, author, Beyond Broadway: The Pleasure and Promise of Musical Theatre Across America
2021 Freedley Award Finalist
2021 Barnard Hewitt Award, honorable mention
