Theatre Journal

Does the Broadway musical matter to U.S. American political discourse? If so, how and why? These are central questions Aaron C. Thomas asks in his new book, in which he argues, “The politics of Broadway musicals […] matter a great deal more to U.S. American culture than they might seem to mean, and Broadway musicals are especially important to mainstream politics surrounding sex, gender, and sexuality” (10). Love Is Love Is Love: Broadway Musicals and LGBTQ Politics, 2010–2020 chronologically charts the sometimes direct, sometimes tenuous relationship of Broadway and film musicals to LGBTQ politics over five chapters. Though the book is primarily about the stage musical, Thomas’s compelling insights into the complexities of identity and identification will be of interest scholars of theatre studies and film studies and apply to a range of theatrical forms beyond the musical.

Thomas’s study aims its focus on five musicals that all “revive a film and a previous musical” (25). For a book ostensibly about the stage (if the subtitle is any indication), Thomas devotes quite a lot of time to films and their stage adaptations and contributes to the growing body of scholarship on musical revivals. The interplay between the stage and screen is another primary concern, occasionally at the expense of a deeper analysis of Thomas’s perceptive points about LGBTQ politics. In fact, a longer elucidation and historicization of LGBTQ politics would have been especially useful for students in the book’s introduction.

The explosion of LGBTQ representation in musicals since 2000 means that Thomas had ample opportunity to select case studies from dozens of options; that he chose “five in which no characters explicitly identify as L, G, B, T, or Q” (23) announces that this book proposes to do something different than much contemporary scholarship on identity and identification. This choice echoes earlier musical theatre studies scholarship, particularly Stacy Wolf’s foundational A Problem Like Maria: Gender and Sexuality in the American Musical (2002). In this light, Thomas could be said to take up Wolf’s call that “the challenge is to determine how lesbians appear where none officially exist” (Wolf, 4). He explains that he is “working with . . . the idea that queer audiences and queer performers–what they say about the shows and what they do with the shows–are more important or more interesting than any of a show’s own ideas about queerness” (23). Much space in the book is, however, spent on Thomas’s queer readings of the shows in question rather than on audiences, a notoriously hard subject to tackle—much like queerness itself, spectators resist generalization. Throughout the book’s five chapters, Thomas’s nuanced, salient readings of identity and identification invite readers “to move away from the consideration of identity positions as essential” (123). And, since the musicals in question feature no characters who explicitly identify as LGBTQ (some readers will likely quibble with the inclusion of Hedwig and the Angry Inch and The Color Purple in this book), they too invite readers to conceptualize the process of identification queerly. As numerous musicals with LGBTQ characters were produced in the 2010s, Thomas’s daring choice not to include them subverts usual conversations around queer representation; yet it also raises questions of how and why queer spectators might undertake the process of “projecting our own subject positions onto these characters and interpreting their (fictional) sexualities as a method for making sense of our own” (23) when this strategy of identification is no longer the necessity it once was.

Indeed, several musicals pose conundrums for spectators precisely because their writers purposefully avoided having the characters identify themselves. Thomas capitalizes on this fact, arguing that the lack of a clearly defined identity “does not prevent them from being available for the powerful [End Page 377] work of audience identification” (123). Instead, Thomas proposes that a musical like Hedwig and the Angry Inch, for instance, has much to say about gender, sexuality, and...