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SOMETHING FOR THE BOYS: MUSICAL THEATERAND GAY CULTURE. By John M. Cium. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1999; pp. xi + 317. $26.95.
What is a gay sensibility and how is it validated by musicals of the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s? How has gay liberation affected the creation of musicals as well as their reception? What do musicals tell us about fluidity of gender and identity? These are questions John M. Cium addresses in his ambitious Something for the Boys, a combination of autobiography, history, and cultural criticism that attempts to explore the relationship between musical theatre and gay culture.
Cium begins by claiming his book is an autobiographical performance. He argues that it is a study of musicals and the gay spectator who "finds or invents a gay reading to the spectacle presented to him" (1) and is most successful when he sticks to this approach, particularly when he reads his own life into the works of Stephen Sondheim. Clum's analyses of Merrily We Roll Along and Passion, which continue on the path recently tread by DA. Miller in Place For Us, Patrick Horrigan in Widescreen Dreams, and Stacy Wolf in her essays on Mary Martin, are insightful, detailed, and entertaining. The author also successfully documents his personal responses to the regional, gay musical, a form written by and for gays that has blossomed during the 1990s. As historian, he examines the genre of contemporary gay musicals, a by-product of a post-Stonewall sensibility. This is a new and significant contribution to the field of...