Unfinished Show Business: Broadway Musicals as Works-in-Process

Theater in the Americas

by Bruce Kirle

In this fresh approach to musical theatre history, Bruce Kirle challenges the commonly understood trajectory of the genre. Drawing on the notion that the world of the author stays fixed while the world of the audience is ever-changing, Kirle suggests that musicals are open, fluid products of the particular cultural moment in which they are performed. Incomplete as printed texts and scores, musicals take on unpredictable lives of their own in the complex transformation from page to stage.

Using lenses borrowed from performance studies, cultural studies, queer studies, and ethnoracial studies, Unfinished Show Business: Broadway Musicals as Works-in-Process argues that musicals are as interesting for the provocative issues they raise about shifting attitudes toward American identity as for their show-stopping song-and-dance numbers and conveniently happy endings. Kirle illustrates how performers such as Ed Wynn, Fanny Brice, and the Marx Brothers used their charismatic personalities and quirkiness to provide insights into the struggle of marginalized ethnoracial groups to assimilate. Using examples from favorites including Oklahoma!, Fiddler on the Roof, A Chorus Line, and Les Misérables, Kirle demonstrates Broadway’s ability to bridge seemingly insoluble tensions in society, from economic and political anxiety surrounding World War II to generational conflict and youth counterculture to corporate America and the “me” generation. Enlivened by a gallery of some of Broadway’s most memorable moments—and some amusing, obscure ones as well—this study will appeal to students, scholars, and lifelong musical theatre enthusiasts.

Genres: Theatre

252 pages, Paperback

First published October 20, 2005

Reviews

[MH · Rating 2 out of 5]

Kirle's book reads like a doctoral dissertation, both in terms of structure (five chapters, loosely engaged with the central idea that the text of a musical is an open one, and different audiences read these texts differently, depending on their historical era - which is true of every kind of theater, not just musicals, of course) and in terms of style. There is a 'survey of the literature' feeling to the work, as each new idea, historical or theoretical, is accompanied by a quote ('Michel Foucault defines ...'), few of which are really engaged with. I found myself shaking my head a lot at Kirle's opinions, such as when he calls Sweeney Todd "Christlike" (122) or when, describing the response to a production of Fiddler on the Roof at a predominantly Black high school he writes "militant African Americans resented that a ghetto school could demonstrate excellence" (150) - I suspect that any resentment came more from cultural erasure than from anger over the high quality of the show (his writing about Black subjects in general is problematic - he eyerolls the phrase "politically correct" an awful lot to minimize modern racial concerns). His final chapter, analyzing the queerness of three post-Stonewall musicals, is strong, and there are some nice anecdotes here and there, but I can't imagine this is Bruce Kirle's best work.

[Aaron Thomas · Rating 2 out of 5]

Kirle's book has a provocative premise. Musical theatre texts – even more than other playscripts – are open texts, works in process that are always able to be altered and frequently are altered in production, by particular stars, by auteur directors, etc, so that they mean otherwise than originally intended. As I say, this is a fun argument, but Kirle's book doesn't really take up this argument. Instead we spend an entire chapter on Jewish comedians donning blackface that seems to excuse this in some way. And an entire other chapter that reads Oklahoma! for us. In the final chapter, Kirle produces readings of Company, Coco, and Applause, explaining the nuances of the queer characters at the center of each show and also on its periphery. All good and well. But what does this have to do with Broadway musicals as works-in-process? Not much, I'm afraid. Kirle neither tells us why this theoretical approach is important nor does he really use the approach to help us understand something new about the musicals under discussion.

[Bob Kosovsky · Rating 4 out of 5]

The title and introduction of the book led me to think that it would be more about music and the collaborative nature of music theater. (I was hoping for more specific discussion of music, but there is none.) Instead it is a masterful discussion of the concept of "open" musical theatre - that ambiguous characters or aspects of a work can allow for creative interpretations. As a means of understanding recent works, Kirle presents a brief non-chronological history of music theatre focusing in particular on the contributions of Jewish and gay performers and the nature of vaudeville and how these influence subsequent works where the book becomes the paramount element of a musical.

Being a composer, I hope Kirle will follow up with a book focusing on the collaborative interaction of music and other elements of music theatre.