Broadway Bodies: A Critical History of Conformity

Broadway has body issues. What is a Broadway Body? Broadway has long preserved the ideology of the "Broadway Body": the hyper-fit, exceptionally able, triple-threat performer who represents how Broadway musicals favor certain kinds of bodies. Casting is always a political act, situated within a power structure that gives preference to the Broadway Body. In Broadway Bodies, author Ryan Donovan explores how ability, sexuality, and size intersect with gender, race, and ethnicity in casting and performance. To understand these intersectional relationships, he poses a series of questions: Why did A Chorus Line, a show that sought to individuate dancers, inevitably make dancers indistinguishable? How does the use of fat suits in musicals like Dreamgirls and Hairspray stigmatize fatness? What were the political implications of casting two straight actors as the gay couple in La Cage aux Folles in 1983? How did deaf actors change the sound of musicals in Deaf West's Broadway revivals? Whose bodies does Broadway cast and whose does it cast aside? In answering these questions, Broadway Bodies tells a history of Broadway's inclusion of various forms of embodied difference while revealing its simultaneous ambivalence toward non-conforming bodies.

Table of Contents:
Part I: Broadway Bodies Introduction: The Broadway Body 1. "I Saw What They Were Hiring": Casting and Recasting A Chorus Line Part II: Size 2. Dreamgirls, Size, and the Body Politics of Padding 3. "Must Be Heavyset": Casting Fat Women in Broadway Musicals Part III: Sexuality 4. La Cage aux Folles and Playing Gay 5. "Keeping It Gay" on The Great White Way Part IV: Ability 6. Deaf West's Awakening of Broadway 7. Musicals, Physical Difference, and Disability Epilogue: Recasting Broadway Bibliography Index

About the Author :
Ryan Donovan is Assistant Professor of Theater Studies at Duke University. He is author of Queer Approaches in Musical Theatre and co-editor of The Routledge Companion to Musical Theatre.

Review :
Skillfully written in sharp, crystalline prose, the book comprises three case studies, each taking a deep dive into a musical whose casting demonstrates a particular type of body bias, then explicating that bias in a follow up chapter via other relevant shows. Ryan Donovan's fascinating and groundbreaking book explores what Broadway musical theatre hides in plain sight: bodies on stage and the politics of casting some bodies and not others. Through impeccable historical research, probing interviews, incisive performance analysis, and vivid firsthand experience, Donovan offers a new history of Broadway musicals that shines a light on the industry's troubling and often shocking casting practices. This essential-reading volume unearths how size, ability, and sexuality delimit the 'Broadway body' and mask casting's misogyny, racism, ableism, and fat phobia. Ryan Donovan's book immediately shifts the conversation on how we talk about musical theatre. Broadway Bodies is deeply knowledgeable, politically astute, and highly readable. I loved the book's clarity and purpose—this is a must-read for theatre and performance scholars and for anyone who cares about American theatre. Broadway Bodies is a wake-up call for anyone interested in equity. It requires that we ponder what it is about ourselves that we really want our American musical theatre to reflect. Broadway Bodies, while eminently readable, is dense with sociopolitical context, historical research, and data surrounding casting practices. For those who study bodies in representation, specifically in the context of performance, this volume is a welcome contribution and is certain to serve as an anchor in this growing field. Donovan's well-analyzed arguments on unresolved problems of access and his profound understanding of the form lead the way. This treatise has much to offer and raises the prospect of a similar examination of nonmusical theater forms. Donovan's book is thorough, yet approachable and highly readable; it will prove useful for academics but also legible for a broader audience of theater lovers. Broadway Bodies explores critical moments in the history of theatre that were expansive in how they approached bodily difference. Likewise, Donovan has altered the history of scholarship on theatre, helping to make it more accepting and capacious in its understandings and theorizations of bodies and embodiment. This is an essential book for anyone interested in musicals. Donovan's book is accessible, readable, and deeply invested in representational politics.