Do It Again": Comic Repetition, Participatory Reception and Gendered Identity on Musical

217 Pages·2013·11.16 MB·English

by  Samuel Baltimore

UCLA
UCLA Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Title
"Do It Again": Comic Repetition, Participatory Reception and Gendered Identity on Musical
Comedy's Margins
Permalink
https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4297q61r
Author
Baltimore, Samuel Dworkin
Publication Date
2013

Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation
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University of California
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA
Los Angeles

“Do It Again”: Comic Repetition, Participatory Reception and
Gendered Identity on Musical Comedy’s Margins

A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the
requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy
in Musicology

by

Samuel Dworkin Baltimore

2013

ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION

“Do It Again”: Comic Repetition, Participatory Reception and
Gendered Identity on Musical Comedy’s Margins

by

Samuel Dworkin Baltimore
Doctor of Philosophy in Musicology
University of California, Los Angeles, 2013
Professor Raymond Knapp, Chair

This dissertation examines the ways that various subcultural audiences define themselves through
repeated interaction with musical comedy. By foregrounding the role of the audience in creating
meaning and by minimizing the “show” as a coherent work, I reconnect musicals to their roots in
comedy by way of Mikhail Bakhtin’s theories of carnival and reduced laughter. The audiences I study
are kids, queers, and collectors, an alliterative set of people whose gender identities and expressions
all depart from or fall outside of the normative binary. Focusing on these audiences, whose musical
comedy fandom is widely acknowledged but little studied, I follow Raymond Knapp and Stacy Wolf
to demonstrate that musical comedy provides a forum for identity formation especially for these
problematically gendered audiences.
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The dissertation of Samuel Dworkin Baltimore is approved.

Mitchell Morris

Elisabeth Le Guin

Stacy Wolf

Raymond Knapp, Committee Chair

University of California, Los Angeles
2013
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For my mother, Susan Dworkin Levering,
and my grandmother, Ruth Glauber Dworkin,
who shared and nurtured my love of musicals
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Table of Contents

Chapter one: “Another op’nin, another show”:
Incompleteness and repetition in the modern musical comedy 1

Chapter two: “You’ve got to be Carefully Taught”:
Children and musical comedy, a rehearsal 38

Chapter three: Inventing “Tradition”:
Queer musical comedy sings along 82

Chapter four: “The thin filament that sort of covers the whole thing:”
The intimate narratives of musical comedy collectors 124

Chapter five: “A sailor’s not a sailor”:
Gendering musical comedy audiences 161

Works Cited 197
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Figures

Figure 1: Dorothy in Ozma of Oz and Betsy in Tik-Tok of Oz,
drawn by John R. Neill and colored in by Susan T. Dworkin 50

Figure 2: Polychrome in The Road to Oz and Tik-Tok of Oz,
drawn by John R. Neill and colored in by Susan T. Dworkin 53

Figure 3: Dedication page of Tik-Tok of Oz,
drawn by John R. Neill and colored in by Susan T. Dworkin 58

Figure 4: Caricature of Ben Bagley, drawn by Miles Kreuger 140

Figure 5: Sheet music cover for “I’m Confessin’ (That I Love You)” 176

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Acknowledgements

I would not be here without Rose Rosengard Subotnik, who single-handedly thrust me into a
doctoral program. My topic couldn’t have been what it was without BUGS, or without my uncle,
Greg Dworkin, who got me into Oz and science fiction. My father, Lester Baltimore, first taught me
to question musicals’ ethics, though I’m sure he’s forgotten that by now. I am grateful to Miles
Kreuger for his time, knowledge, and boundless enthusiasm, and to Nina Eidsheim, whose
innovative graduate seminars inspired chapter four. Elisabeth Le Guin worked with me to develop
the thoughts on comedy that led me toward musicals from this angle; both she and Mitchell Morris
helped me hone my teaching and writing skills as their TA and student, and both helped me through
difficult personal times. Stacy Wolf’s work is a revelation, but her generosity and frankness are even
better. The graduate students in the UCLA Department of Musicology are an incredible community
of friends and scholars. Sarah Taylor Ellis, my parallel dissertator and occasional theater companion,
made this a much quicker and more fun process than I dreaded. Barbara Van Nostrand fixed
everything I screwed up. Russell Krupen kept me calm and fed, and formatted my illustrations when
I despaired. Nikki Eschen and Alexandra Apolloni are always my partners in musical comedy crime.
Tootsie Rolls got me through the last few desperate weeks of writing.
Raymond Knapp has been not only an incredible mentor and a tireless editor, but also a
source of empathy and care through the roughest time in my life. He pushed me when I needed a
push, let me be when I needed time and space, and constantly challenged me in Scrabble. I don’t
know how I could have made it this far with any other adviser. Grandma took me to more shows
than I can recall and sang along with most of them. Mom saved every program from every concert
and show I was in until the day she died, October 13th, 2010. The two of them are the reason I care
about this stuff, and I hope I’ve written something they could be proud of.
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Vita

Education
University of California, Los Angeles, 2009, MA in Musicology
Brown University, 2005, BA with honors in Music Theory and Composition

Presentations
“Inventing ‘Tradition’: queer audiences at the Sing-A-Long Sound of Music.”
Popular Culture Association annual conference, March 2013

“Intimate Portraits: the one-woman shows of Elaine Stritch and Bea Arthur as collectors’
items.”
ATHE conference, Performance as/is Civic Engagement: Advocate, Collaborate, Educate,
August 2012

“Songbook: Ella Fitzgerald’s voice as musical text and theatrical pretext.”
The first annual Harvard-Princeton Forum on Musical Theater, April 2011.

“Big Black Women on the Great White Way: the curious role of the gospel diva on Broadway.”
The Interdisciplinary Conference on The Diva at Liverpool Hope University, July 2011.

“Why Do We Fall for the Diva of the Rasp? Vocal Cross-Dressing on (and off) Broadway.”
The Sixth Susan Porter Memorial Symposium at the University of Colorado at Boulder, October
2010.
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