• Love Is Love Is Love: Broadway Musicals and LGBTQ Politics, 2010–2020 by Aaron C. Thomas
• Ryan Donovan

Does the Broadway musical matter to U.S. American political discourse? If so, how and why? These are central questions Aaron C. Thomas asks in his new book, in which he argues, “The politics of Broadway musicals […] matter a great deal more to U.S. American culture than they might seem to mean, and Broadway musicals are especially important to mainstream politics surrounding sex, gender, and sexuality” (10). Love Is Love Is Love: Broadway Musicals and LGBTQ Politics, 2010–2020 chronologically charts the sometimes direct, sometimes tenuous relationship of Broadway and film musicals to LGBTQ politics over five chapters. Though the book is primarily about the stage musical, Thomas’s compelling insights into the complexities of identity and identification will be of interest scholars of theatre studies and film studies and apply to a range of theatrical forms beyond the musical.

Thomas’s study aims its focus on five musicals that all “revive a film and a previous musical” (25). For a book ostensibly about the stage (if the subtitle is any indication), Thomas devotes quite a lot of time to films and their stage adaptations and contributes to the growing body of scholarship on musical revivals. The interplay between the stage and screen is another primary concern, occasionally at the expense of a deeper analysis of Thomas’s perceptive points about LGBTQ politics. In fact, a longer elucidation and historicization of LGBTQ politics would have been especially useful for students in the book’s introduction.

The explosion of LGBTQ representation in musicals since 2000 means that Thomas had ample opportunity to select case studies from dozens of options; that he chose “five in which no characters explicitly identify as L, G, B, T, or Q” (23) announces that this book proposes to do something different than much contemporary scholarship on identity and identification. This choice echoes earlier musical theatre studies scholarship, particularly Stacy Wolf’s foundational A Problem Like Maria: Gender and Sexuality in the American Musical (2002). In this light, Thomas could be said to take up Wolf’s call that “the challenge is to determine how lesbians appear where none officially exist” (Wolf, 4). He explains that he is “working with . . . the idea that queer audiences and queer performers–what they say about the shows and what they do with the shows–are more important or more interesting than any of a show’s own ideas about queerness” (23). Much space in the book is, however, spent on Thomas’s queer readings of the shows in question rather than on audiences, a notoriously hard subject to tackle—much like queerness itself, spectators resist generalization. Throughout the book’s five chapters, Thomas’s nuanced, salient readings of identity and identification invite readers “to move away from the consideration of identity positions as essential” (123). And, since the musicals in question feature no characters who explicitly identify as LGBTQ (some readers will likely quibble with the inclusion of Hedwig and the Angry Inch and The Color Purple in this book), they too invite readers to conceptualize the process of identification queerly. As numerous musicals with LGBTQ characters were produced in the 2010s, Thomas’s daring choice not to include them subverts usual conversations around queer representation; yet it also raises questions of how and why queer spectators might undertake the process of “projecting our own subject positions onto these characters and interpreting their (fictional) sexualities as a method for making sense of our own” (23) when this strategy of identification is no longer the necessity it once was.

Indeed, several musicals pose conundrums for spectators precisely because their writers purposefully avoided having the characters identify themselves. Thomas capitalizes on this fact, arguing that the lack of a clearly defined identity “does not prevent them from being available for the powerful [End Page 377] work of audience identification” (123). Instead, Thomas proposes that a musical like Hedwig and the Angry Inch, for instance, has much to say about gender, sexuality, and...

• 《爱就是爱就是爱：百老汇音乐剧和 LGBTQ 政治，2010-2020》作者：Aaron C. Thomas
• 瑞安·多诺万

百老汇音乐剧对美国政治话语重要吗？如果是这样，如何以及为什么？这些是亚伦·托马斯 (Aaron C. Thomas) 在他的新书中提出的核心问题，他在书中指出，“百老汇音乐剧的政治[……]对美国文化的影响比它们看起来的要大得多，而百老汇音乐剧尤其重要围绕性、社会性别和性取向的主流政治”（10）。《爱就是爱就是爱：百老汇音乐剧和 LGBTQ 政治，2010-2020》按时间顺序分五个章节，描绘了百老汇和电影音乐剧与 LGBTQ 政治之间时而直接、时而脆弱的关系。虽然这本书主要是关于舞台音乐剧的，但托马斯对身份和认同的复杂性的令人信服的见解将引起戏剧研究和电影研究学者的兴趣，并适用于音乐剧以外的一系列戏剧形式。

托马斯的研究重点是五部音乐剧，它们都“复兴了电影和之前的音乐剧”(25)。对于一本表面上关于舞台的书（如果副标题有任何暗示的话），托马斯投入了大量时间研究电影及其舞台改编，并为不断增长的音乐复兴学术做出了贡献。舞台和银幕之间的相互作用是另一个主要问题，有时会影响对托马斯对 LGBTQ 政治观点的更深入分析。事实上，在本书的引言中，对 LGBTQ 政治进行更长时间的阐释和历史化对学生特别有用。

自 2000 年以来，音乐剧中 LGBTQ 群体的激增意味着托马斯有充足的机会从数十个选项中选择案例研究；他选择了“其中没有明确标识为 L、G、B、T 或 Q 的五个字符”(23)，这表明本书打算做一些与当代有关身份和认同的学术研究不同的事情。这一选择呼应了早期的音乐剧研究奖学金，特别是史黛西·沃尔夫（Stacy Wolf）的基础著作《玛丽亚这样的问题：美国音乐剧中的性别与性》（2002）。从这个角度来看，托马斯可以说接受了沃尔夫的呼吁，即“挑战在于确定女同性恋者在没有正式存在的地方如何出现”（沃尔夫，4）。他解释说，他正在“与. 。。酷儿观众和酷儿表演者——他们对节目的看法以及他们在节目中所做的事情——比节目本身关于酷儿的任何想法都更重要或更有趣”（23）。然而，书中的大部分篇幅都花在托马斯对相关节目的酷儿解读上，而不是观众身上，这是一个众所周知的难以解决的话题——就像酷儿本身一样，观众抵制概括。在本书的五章中，托马斯对身份和认同的细致入微、突出的解读邀请读者“摆脱对身份地位的重要考虑”（123）。而且，由于所讨论的音乐剧中没有明确标识为 LGBTQ 的角色（一些读者可能会对本书中包含《海德薇与愤怒的一英寸》和《紫色》感到怀疑），因此它们也邀请读者以奇怪的方式概念化身份认同的过程。 。由于 2010 年代制作了许多含有 LGBTQ 角色的音乐剧，托马斯大胆选择不包含这些角色，这颠覆了围绕酷儿代表的通常对话；然而，它也提出了这样的问题：当这种认同策略出现时，酷儿观众如何以及为何会进行“将我们自己的主体立场投射到这些角色上，并将他们（虚构的）性行为解释为理解我们自己的性行为的一种方法”的过程（23）不再像以前那样有必要。

事实上，有几部音乐剧给观众带来了难题，正是因为编剧故意避免让角色表明自己的身份。托马斯利用这一事实，认为缺乏明确定义的身份“并不妨碍他们从事强大的[结束第377页]受众识别工作”（123）。相反，托马斯提出，像《海德薇和愤怒的一英寸》这样的音乐剧有很多关于性别、性取向和……的内容。