Conference Agenda

What does Hillary Clinton, a hate crime, a fancy McDonald’s, and The King and I all have in common? They are central facets of the 2018 musical-within-a-play, Soft Power, by Playwright David Henry Hwang and composer Jeanine Tesori. Soft Power, in the words of its creative team, poses the question of what a show, akin to The King and I, would look like if it was written from the perspective of China, which stepped up to the global stage when the United States fell from grace following the 2016 Presidential Election. In doing so, the creative team relies on the exoticization of the West through musical, textual, and choreographic subversions of typical musical theatre tropes to express a message of resilience and overcoming.

Exoticization has long been a problem in the representation of non-dominant cultures in the musical theatre genre. Raymond Knapp (2005; 2006) and Warren Hoffman (2020) have discussed the ways in which the American musical has historically relied on exoticism, and more specifically orientalism, to portray the East-West binary. Dorine Kondo (1997) discusses subversive readings of orientalism in M. Butterfly by Soft Power’s playwright, David Henry Hwang, and Donatella Galella (2019) and Arnab Anerji (2019) have examined how elements of exoticism were used in Soft Power, though their analyses avoid discussions of the musical score. In this paper, I illuminate the ways in which the United States is exoticized primarily through the analysis of the musical score and libretto, though discussions of costuming, scenic design, and choreography are included.

I argue that the same techniques historically used in musical theater to exoticize Eastern cultures are reapplied to the depiction of the United States, subverting the Western audience’s expectation of representation, and ultimately acting as a political statement on US culture. Through genre analysis, I deconstruct musical numbers that utilize conflicting generic style markers, choreography that avoids traditional expectations, and textual references that problematize the portrayal of the United States.

At the end of their 2018 opera An American Soldier, Huang Ruo and David Henry Hwang stage a chorus of soldiers singing “E Pluribus Unum,” the United States national motto, in a somber a cappella moment. The opera reproduces the 2011 court-martial of an American soldier charged with the racial abuse, hazing, and death of Chinese American private Danny Chen. However, the text of the chorus presents a stark patriotic contrast to the events of the trial the audience has witnessed. A year later, inspired by another high-profile court case, Anthony Davis and Richard Wesley premiered The Central Park Five (2019), recounting the now infamous 1989 incident in which five Black and brown male teenagers were arrested, coerced into giving false confessions, and convicted for the assault and rape of a white female jogger. In an Act I reference to Parliament Funkadelic, the Five celebrate their lack of inhibitions in the anthem “We are the Freaks.” These patriotic and cultural anthems are a method by which An American Soldier and The Central Park Five comment on the media coverage of each respective trial.

In this presentation, I analyze “E Pluribus Unum” and “We are the Freaks” for both their musical reconstruction of temporality and resulting political commentary. I draw on scholarship on the aesthetics and temporality of judgment in documentary theater (Arjomand 2011; Nussbaum 1981), and the role of anthems in Black diasporic cultures (Redmond 2013) to explore these musical moments. In their operatic settings years after the trials, the anthems respond to media perceptions and reactionary coverage in an alternative temporal space crucial to their respective opera’s sociopolitical critique. I contextualize the newspaper clippings and congressional acts referenced in the operas to illustrate how anthems amplify the opinions of press institutions or the public. However, these anthems are also moments where the operas deviate from their representations of the real court cases, allowing the works to move beyond representing aggrieved individuals to rallying entire communities. Channeling cultural memories, An American Soldier and The Central Park Five thus illustrate the affordances of the opera in the documentary genre.

In the 1990s, American society was gripped by parallel moral panics over sex crimes and the AIDS crisis. Widely publicized sex crimes, particularly those against minors, led to public policies focusing on “stranger danger.” Meanwhile, the LGBTQ community faced renewed stigma as a result of the ongoing HIV/AIDS epidemic. Gay men, in particular, were often characterized as predators to be feared. These concerns were set against the backdrop of tough-on-crime political rhetoric that had been fueling a mass incarceration epidemic in the United States since the Reagan administration. During this period, entertainment media responded accordingly by promoting storylines focused on crime, policing, and incarceration.

In this paper, I show how creatives on Broadway developed new musicals in the 1990s where sex crimes are central to the plot. In the span of just five years, director Hal Prince mounted two productions in which an incarcerated leading male protagonist is accused of a sex crime with a minor: Kander and Ebb’s Kiss of the Spider Woman (1993) and Jason Robert Brown’s Parade (1998). In both musicals, key aspects of identity isolate these male protagonists from society and make them scapegoats for their alleged crimes—Molina’s homosexuality in Kiss of the Spider Woman and Leo Frank’s Jewish heritage in Parade. Notably, these male protagonists, both played by white actor Brent Carver, are made “other” by their religion and sexuality, and do not survive to the end of the musical.

Drawing on archival research at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, including the collected papers of both Harold Prince and Fred Ebb, this paper argues that both the moral panic over queer sexuality and mass incarceration set the stage for musical theater in the 1990s. As such, I expand on the research of James Leve, John Clum, Ethan Mordden, and others by bringing a new framing to these two musicals. Viewing these shows in light of the American cultural concerns over sex crime enhances our understanding of their reception and situates them within a broader trend of incarceration musicals at the end of the twentieth century.