Place for Us : Essay on the Broadway Musical
Editorial Reviews
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Everybody "knows" that gay men love show tunes; as D.A. Miller writes in one self-mockingly academic passage of Place for Us, the original cast albums "were used, scholars now believe, in a puberty rite that, though it was conducted by single individuals in secrecy and shame, was nonetheless so widely diffused as to remain, for several generations, as practically normative for gay men and it was almost unknown for straight ones." Miller's elaborate pondering of the intersection of homosexuality and Broadway shifts between critical exegesis of shows like Gypsy and autobiographical reflections written in a curiously distancing (and, at times, generalizing) third-person voice. Although some will be put off by the academic tone, there are treasures to be found sprinkled throughout these pages, such as the black-and-white reproductions of Michael Perelman's Broadway-inspired oil paintings. Or Miller's description of an ironic piano-bar singer, "like a third-rate magician who, thinking to take advantage of his inferior talent for illusionism, devises a novelty act in which he gives away the familiar tricks of his betters ... out to betray the habitual prestidigitation of the whole enormous population of gay composers, lyricists, librettists, choreographers, and others" who coyly cloaked their sexuality in misdirection and innuendo. --Ron Hogan
Review
Neil Bartlett, author of the musical Night after Night and Artistic Director of the Lyric Theatre Hammersmith : D. A. Miller has looked long and hard into the glorious, dangerous, and falsely flattering mirror that is the Broadway musical. This self-portrait of a man who measures out his life in show tunes is obsessively well-informed, thrillingly provocative, and deeply felt; this is one queen who sure knows how to deliver her tune. Magnificent.
Barbara Johnson, author of The Feminist Difference : Through this autobiographical-analytical meditation on what is specifically 'gay' about the Broadway musical and the pleasures of not explicitly knowing it, D. A. Miller has written the words to an exquisite Proustian musical sung by post-Stonewall man to his own juvenile self. Miller doesn't just 'know the words': in this brilliant and moving evocation of 'the unconsoled relations to want,' it could be said that the words know him.
Michael Warner, author of Letters of the Republic : Place for Us shows that a gay male investment in musicals, whether closeted or disclosed in a piano bar, is solicited and phobically concealed by musicals themselves. The analysis, exceptional for its sensitivity to both the form of the musical and the culture of its reception, culminates in a reading of Gypsy that is a tour de force if ever there was one. But there's more: the essay's own form and style are endlessly surprising, combining rigor with personal reflection in a way reminiscent of Barthes by Barthes or Minima Moralia. Miller has written a book that is movingly personal without ever being merely so. It is a model of cultural analysis, a witty and beautiful masterpiece of queer criticism.
Place for Us : Essay on the Broadway Musical
Place for Us : Essay on the Broadway Musical,D. A. Miller,Harvard University Press,0674669908,1948-,Dramatic Music,Gay Studies,Gay men and musicals,Gay/Lesbian Nonfiction,General,History and criticism,Homosexuality,Miller, D. A.,,Music,Musicals,Social Science,Theater - Broadway & Musical Revue,United States,Miller, D. A,Performing Arts / Broadway & Musical Revue
Place for Us : Essay on the Broadway Musical
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