Conference Agenda

“Not all fats are created equal.” This marketing language, taken here from an advertisement for peanut butter energy bars, posits a distinction between “good” and “bad” fats—a distinction too often applied not to foods but to human beings, mapping body type onto a moral spectrum. In Hairspray the musical, a 2002 adaptation of the eponymous 1988 John Waters film, we hear how decisions about musical style underscore a tension between body politics and racial politics during the US civil rights movement.

In this paper I argue that the musical opposition between lead characters Tracy Turnblad and her mother Edna helps us examine complex intersections between morality and fatness, race, and queerness. Hairspray centers Tracy, a fat teenager whose dream of dancing on a Baltimore television show expands to make her a passionate advocate for racial equality. Tracy appears to be a “bad” fat: within the media norms of the 1960s, her outspoken politics and boisterous visibility challenge social expectations of fat people. Because her size conflicts with images of ideal whiteness, composer Marc Shaiman aligns Tracy’s inherent anarchism with black popular musical idioms in songs such as “I Can Hear the Bells” and “Good Morning, Baltimore” by imitating melodic, harmonic, and stylistic gestures found in songs by Dionne Warwick and Motown artists. Edna, by contrast, enacts what the musical considers “good” behavior from a fat person. She consistently puts others’ needs above her own, she “hasn’t left the house since 1951,” and her music, in opposition to Tracy’s, leaves out black musical idioms in favor of Cole Porter-style Broadway tunes. Typically cast as a man in drag, Edna’s body costuming also acts as a kind of shield, one aligned with the camp aesthetics discussed by Ray Knapp and Moe Meyer as connected to queer embodiment. While performative queerness is often understood as empowering, the comic potential of drag allows us to dismiss Edna’s personhood. Tracy’s disguise, though, is not visual but aural and her adoption of what Matthew Morrison would call “blacksound" opens up liberatory avenues of expression for a fat person moving through the world.

Recent studies of race in the classic Broadway musical have drawn attention to the genre’s compromised attempts at liberal inclusiveness (Bush Jones 2004, Decker 2013, Knapp 2014), its production of ethnic whiteness by means of racial exclusions (Hoffman 2014, Decker 2021), and its expression of racial anxieties in the context of post-WWII social and political change (Oja 2009). In keeping with the renewed interest in issues of race, genre, and representation, this paper examines the racial politics of the “Witch’s rap,” a show-stopping section of the opening tableau of Sondheim/Lapine’s Into the Woods (1987). I argue that although this number complicates unilateral racial and political alignments through its characterization and dramatic technique, it mimics patterns of appropriation and black erasure characteristic of the genre. In the rap, the Witch narrates a primal experience of sexual and economic exploitation to account for her psychological abjection and her initially menacing stance toward the society of the woods. In these ways her situation resonates with that of the black urban subject of rap—an association reinforced by the Witch’s symbolic blackness (in the original production, she is costumed in black). However in Act I, Scene 4, the “real” Witch is unveiled, in a sudden theatrical coup, as a beautiful white woman—thus refiguring her number as a kind of blackface performance, disguised as fairy-tale transformation.

Sondheim’s own comments on the Witch’s rap—which have received much attention due to Sondheim’s influence on Lin-Manuel Miranda—explicitly acknowledge the influence of ‘80s rap. And the relative predominance of female rappers in the mid 1980s may explain in part why rap entered into his conception of the Witch. But Sondheim also names a precedent in the speech-songs of The Music Man, which are themselves rooted, he claims (in Look, I Made a Hat), in vaudeville. This alternate genealogy reinscribes the Witch’s rap within a historically white tradition (he does not have black vaudeville in mind)—one rich, moreover, in residual blackface tropes. I evaluate the Witch’s rap alongside other appropriations of black musical style in Sondheim (e.g. blues in “Poor Baby”), drawing attention to supreme value he accorded to craft and artifice, rather than “authenticity,” in the representation of ethnic others. I further underline the central importance of Gershwin/Heyward’s Porgy and Bess in shaping Sondheim’s philosophy of racial representation.

Although Bernadette Peters is widely regarded as the “original” realizer of the Witch’s role, it was initially cast for Phylicia Rashad, and the show’s casting history suggests that black actresses have often been preferred (including the 2023 revival where she was played by Montego Glover). This tendency, which aligns with the growing prevalence of multiracial casting (Decker 2019), potentially complicates the question of cultural appropriation that has hovered so awkwardly around the Broadway musical as a genre. Because Into the Woods plots interactions between different sorts of beings—fantastical princes, everyday people, giants, animals, a mystery man, children, a witch, etc.—it accommodates diversified, multiracial casting with remarkably little friction. If the show in its original incarnation inherited many of the whitened and whitening legacies of the genre, its treatment of the Witch as musically and phenotypically black foretold the gradual undoing of the genre’s monolithic whiteness.

L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900) reads as a pastoral fairy tale, with the sojourn of the protagonists in the Emerald City serving as a brief urban interlude. The 1939 MGM film version reinforces this impression, with its art deco Emerald City set incongruously amidst the rolling plains of a bucolic countryside. Two musical adaptations of the story, however, The Wizard of Oz (1902) and the The Wiz (1974), repurpose Baum’s story to foreground city themes, personages, and places. They dramatize, I argue, American ambivalence about cities, and, in doing so, draw attention to voices that have figured less prominently in scholarly discourse about urban modernity.

The 1902 musical The Wizard of Oz originated as a collaboration between Baum and composer Paul Tietjens. But a host of other contributors emended, revised, and interpolated material. Musically, the production was stocked with an array of ethnic and topical songs typifying vaudeville’s urban sensibilities. Simultaneously, the narrative was transformed by the addition of new characters, many of them archetypes of working-class people who dispense lines that display an urbane and affectionate familiarity with the argot of modern city living. A different vision of the city is represented in The Wiz, a 1974 musical with an all-Black cast that was the work of composer Charlie Smalls and writer William F. Brown. The narrative beats of the musical hew closely to the Baum original, but the music employs a fusion of funk and soul styles ineluctably associated with an urban African-American milieu, a connection cemented by the contemporaneous phenomenon of blaxploitation films. The 1978 film version of The Wiz amplified the urban orientation of the narrative by setting the action in a fantastically degraded New York City. By examining the ways in which these two musicals urbanize Baum’s Oz, I uncover and contrast early twentieth-century working class conceptions of the city as a place for individual self-invention and the later convictions of Black Americans, who, when confronted with the malaise of urban decay, saw the roots of identity in the traditions of family and ethnic community.