Place for Us: Essay on the Broadway Musical

by D.A. Miller

It used to be a secret that, in its postwar heyday, the Broadway musical recruited a massive underground following of gay men. But though this once silent social fact currently spawns jokes that every sitcom viewer is presumed to be in on, it has not necessarily become better understood.

In Place for Us, D. A. Miller probes what all the jokes laugh the embarrassingly mutual affinity between a "general" cultural form and the despised "minority" that was in fact that form's implicit audience. In a style that is in turn novelistic, memorial, autobiographical, and critical, the author restores to their historical density the main modes of reception that so many gay men developed to answer the musical's the early private communion with original cast albums, the later camping of show tunes in piano bars, the still later reformatting of these same songs at the post-Stonewall disco. In addition, through an extended reading of Gypsy , Miller specifies the nature of the call itself, which he locates in the postwar musical's most basic the contradictory relation between the show and the book, the mimetic tendency of the musical number, the centrality of the female star. If the postwar musical may be called a "gay" genre, Miller demonstrates, this is because its regular but unpublicized work has been to indulge men in the spectacular thrills of a femininity become their own.

Genres: Theatre, Queer, LGBT, History, Essays, Cultural Studies, Theory

160 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1998

Reviews

[Cat · Rating 5 out of 5]

Appropriately enough for the subject matter, this essay is a star turn. D. A. Miller's lusciously stylish language, his wittily allusive prose, dances gracefully between autobiographical musings and interpretive panache. Even as Miller illuminates the false hopes of Broadway optimism and critiques the (hetero)normativizing momentum of musical plots and characters, he also animates the desire and abandon of the golden age musical, the raucous belt of Ethel Merman (whose piscine androgyny he explores) and the melancholy longings of the boy Louise in Gypsy. In Jane Austen, or the Secret of Style, Miller established the ironic reserve and sophisticated revenges of the detached narrative voice as the envied hallmarks of queer self-containment and coded superiority. Broadway's satisfactions and distractions are broader, but it is that investment in performative femininity that Miller reveals as its greatest pleasure. An unexpected twist at the end of this tour de force reading is Miller's disappointment in more recent musicals (La cage aux folles, Falsettosthat deal with homosexuality directly--and thus confiningly--rather than dispersing queer allures throughout the spectacle. It is a pleasure to read with him and think with him. This is a show tune to which I would sing along.

[Kel · Rating 5 out of 5]

The writing is so compelling and beautiful. Didn't know what to expect going into this and was pleasantly surprised. I will say I had a hard time following the sections about the musical Gypsy mostly because I'm not so familiar with it.

[Scott Miller · Rating 1 out of 5]

Reading this book is like wading through peanut butter. No one needs to write that way. Sheesh.

[David Veatch · Rating 2 out of 5]

It has some beautiful passages but it gets lost in its own language.

[Hannah Piette · Rating 5 out of 5]

Cried, laughed, felt it all at once. Masterpiece

[Elizabeth · Rating 4 out of 5]

Miller's incredibly personal recounting of the significance musicals played in the identity formation of a generation of gay men *prior* to the Broadway being coded as gay is incredibly moving as well as significantly revisionist. Miller crafts his "essay" with extraordinary detail to the intricacies of his subject matter, which is evident in his clause-laden sentences, hard-to-navigate paragraphs, and oblique illustration. But not only does the form of its book reflect its function, it also destabilizes the reading experience, forcing the reader to confront the degree to which their own identities (even as readers) are tied up in all types of performance. Finally, Miller's meditation on the affective relationship between a medium (musical or otherwise) and its audience demonstrates the difficulty that any "reception study" must overcome: that is, our relationships to media are ever-shifting, such that their meanings can never be fixed or stable. Thankfully, Miller counters this difficulty by articulating a multiplicity of meanings for his object of study, making his essay both more complex as well as more meaningful.

[Angela · Rating 4 out of 5]

I started this book in October or something? And got halfway through it before I was separated from my roommate's copy until pretty recently. This book is smart and provocative and written in a style that's mind-blowing (and often pretty irritating). But even as a person whose psyche has been shaped in a lot of ways by musicals (sigh), I found this book pretty alienating at times - even aggressively so - because I am not a gay man.

[Iñaki Tofiño · Rating 2 out of 5]

I expected an essay and it turned out to be a mixture of autobiography and personal reflection about the gayness of Broadway musicals.
Some passages are worth underlining and remembering, but the book in general is not too brilliant.
Obviously, it is difficult to map the reception of a given genre in any social group, and playing the personal card is an easy solution, but not my favourite.