Greasepaint Puritan: Boston to 42nd Street in the Queer Backstage Novels of Bradford Ropes

Greasepaint Puritan details the life and work of Bradford Ropes, author of the bawdy 1932 novel 42nd Street, on which the classic film and its stage adaptation are based. Inspired by Ropes’s own experiences as a performer, 42nd Street “reads less like a novel than like a documentary about the lives of New York’s theatre people and, above all, about the practicalities, the personalities, and the sexual politics that go into the making of a show,” according to Richard Brody in The New Yorker. Why did Ropes’s body of work—which included a trilogy of backstage novels—and consequently his biographical footsteps, disappear into obscurity? Descended from Mayflower Pilgrims, Ropes rebelled against the “Proper Bostonian” life, in a career that touched upon the Jazz Age, American vaudeville, and theater censorship. Greasepaint Puritan follows Ropes’s successful career as both a performer and the author of the backstage novels 42nd Street, Stage Mother, and Go Into Your Dance. Populated by scheming stage mothers, precocious stage children, grandiose bit players, and tart-tongued chorines, these novels centered on the lives and relationships of gay men on Broadway during the Jazz Age and Prohibition era. Rigorously researched, Greasepaint Puritan chronicles Ropes’s career as a successful screenwriter in 1930s and ’40s Hollywood, where he continued to be a part of a dynamic gay subculture within the movie industry before returning to obscurity in the 1950s. His legacy lives on in the Hollywood and Broadway incarnations of 42nd Street—but Greasepaint Puritan restores the “forgotten melody” of the man who first envisioned its colorful characters.

Table of Contents:
List of Figures Acknowledgments INTRODUCTION The Enduring Myth of 42nd Street and the “Forgotten Melody” of Bradford Ropes INTERLUDE The Stories of Ropes’s Backstage Trilogy ONE Peering Back at “Proper Boston” TWO Drag Reveals and “Strange Interludes”: Billy Bradford’s Dances on Broadway THREE “This is Not a Book to Give to a Maiden Aunt”: The Influence of Backstage Novels and “Pansy Craze” Novels FOUR “Light-Hearted and Damned”: Anti-Gay Discrimination and Camp Defiance in Ropes’s Backstage Novels FIVE “Your Blood Responds More Eagerly to the Lure of the Theatre”: The Backstage Trilogy, the Puritan Ethos, and the Myth of “The Show Must Go On” SIX Bringing Back Bradford Ropes Notes Bibliography Index

About the Author :
Maya Cantu is a dramaturg, interdisciplinary scholar, and historian who teaches on the Drama Faculty of Bennington College. She is also the author of American Cinderellas on the Broadway Musical Stage: Imagining the Working Girl from “Irene” to “Gypsy”.

Review :
"A well-researched and thorough illumination of a writer who deserves to be better known. For fans, performers, and creators of musical theater." "Maya Cantu's meticulously researched biography, Greasepaint Puritan: Boston to 42nd Street in the Queer Backstage Novels of Bradford Ropes, reveals the extent to which Ropes based his backstage novels on his own Broadway experiences. Through a sensitive reading of the novels, Cantu shows how Ropes imagined a "queer resistance" to the theater's inherent homophobia through the figure of the chorus boy: the ubiquitous (and typically gay) Broadway performer who responds to his stigma in the business with a sharp tongue and a "camp" sensibility."