Reframing the Musical

Race, Culture and Identity

Sarah K. Whitfield, Sarah K. Whitfield

• Publisher: Methuen Drama
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781350316621
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medios de comunicación y artes escénicas
• Subtopic: Historia y crítica teatrales

This critical and inclusive edited collection offers an overview of the musical in relation to issues of race, culture and identity. Bringing together contributions from cultural, American and theatre studies for the first time, the chapters offer fresh perspectives on musical theatre history, calling for a radical and inclusive new approach. By questioning ideas about what the musical is about and who it for, this groundbreaking book retells the story of the musical, prioritising previously neglected voices to reshape our understanding of the form. Timely and engaging, this is required reading for undergraduate and postgraduate students of musical theatre. It offers an intersectional approach which will also be invaluable for theatre practitioners.

Part I

Reframing Identity/Identities

1

‘Superman/Sidekick’: White Storytellers and Black Lives in The Fortress of Solitude (2014)

Donatella Galella

At the top of the musical The Fortress of Solitude, the audience hears a black soul singer croon on a shaky record. The record skips. Mingus Rude later plays the record in full for his best friend Dylan Ebdus, as the number ‘Superman/Sidekick’ comes to life on stage. The musical follows Dylan in 1970s Brooklyn, an outer-borough of New York City, where his white family is one of the few living on Dean Street and where he befriends Mingus. Abandoned by their mothers, the white boy and black boy bond over the soulful music of Mingus’ father and over their magic ring that enables them to fly. But racial difference and inequality separate them. While Dylan gains entrance to an elite high school and becomes a music critic dedicated to African American artists, Mingus ends up in prison with his dreams of becoming a famous visual artist shattered.

But in ‘Superman/Sidekick’, Dylan and Mingus share a moment of interracial harmony. Mingus’ father Barrett Rude, Jr., the lead of the musical group The Subtle Distinctions, intones on the record, ‘I could be Superman … If only I could fly’ (Friedman, 2015).¹ He dons a red and blue robe evoking Superman’s cape, echoed in Mingus and Dylan’s red and blue striped clothes. By the end of the song, the tempo quickens as he becomes empowered, dropping the modal of ‘could’ and prepar-ing to learn to fly. His voice soars in the long-held, triumphant note as if he were flying. Mingus uses this song as a jumping-off point, to imagine what if he, too, could fly and write his graffiti art on otherwise impossibly high walls. In an inversion of the trope of the white boy playing the protagonist to the black best friend, Mingus says that Dylan could be his sidekick. By replaying this Motown-inspired song, changing the lyrics to embrace superpowers, and layering it with Mingus and Dylan singing of flying, ‘Superman/Sidekick’ in The Fortress of Solitude models how songs and superheroes can enable alternate ways of listening, telling stories, and flying above structural racism. But the dramatization of black–white intimacies comes at a price. In the actual framing of the musical, Dylan plays the narrator, while Mingus plays the sidekick.

In order to critique racism and to imagine spaces without racism, The Fortress of Solitude relies upon white authorization. The main character, Dylan, is white, and so are almost all of the artistic creators behind the musical: director Daniel Aukin, librettist Itamar Moses, composer-lyricist Michael Friedman, and the original novelist Jonathan Lethem. And yet, what remains of the musical is an original cast recording from Ghostlight Records that privileges blackness. This chapter traces the power dynamics of storytelling when white artists and characters recount black lives and music. After laying out the background of the musical adaptation and key terms from critical race theory, the chapter uses close readings of songs, literary scholarship, interviews with Friedman, and historical context to conduct its analysis. By starting with a black singer’s voice, The Fortress of Solitude and this very introduction suggest how to shift the centre to blackness. The musical does more than merely include black Americans. It reveals blackness as the necessary core. The Fortress of Solitude importantly pinpoints mixed race spaces, amplifies black characters, and stages the differing impacts of structural white supremacy on Dylan versus Mingus. By making Dylan the narrator, Aukin, Moses, and Friedman illuminate how the white protagonist fashions histories, appropriates blackness, and disavows complicity in racial hierarchy. The book centres on Dylan, yet the score centres on black voices and interracial spaces. Friedman incorporates black musical genres, including Motown, disco, gospel, soul, funk, R&B, and hip hop. Even so, white artists crafted these songs, and the storyline draws meta-theatrical attention to the creation of not only Dylan’s story, but also of this musical. Deliberately underscoring racial and aesthetic tensions, The Fortress of Solitude highlights the unequal socio-political life chances for white and black Americans and imagines interracial friendship through music and a magic ring.

But for that to be possible, the musical must rest upon whiteness. By pointing out the white frame itself, or reframing the frame, this musical shows clearly how white is also a race and how whiteness mediates storytelling. The Fortress of Solitude ultimately insists upon the responsibility of those with racial privilege to do anti-racist work, from the art they make to the scholarship they write.

Origin Stories: Making the Musical and Making Race

The origin story of The Fortress of Solitude musical begins with author Jonathan Lethem. In 2003, this award-winning white Jewish American popular fiction writer published a novel of the same title (a reference to the Superman comics universe). A semi-autobiographical coming-of-age story with fantastic elements, The Fortress of Solitude defies easy categorization. Drawn to Lethem’s novel, director Daniel Aukin reached out to composer-lyricist Michael Friedman on whether adapting the novel into a musical seemed viable. Given the significance of music to the story, they imagined that The Fortress of Solitude could sing. Aukin had off-Broadway directing experience, while Friedman is perhaps best known for his work with The Civilians, a New York-based group that makes theatre out of its creative investigations into subjects like climate change, as well as his scores to Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson (2006) and Love’s Labour’s Lost (2013). For the book, they recruited Itamar Moses, a playwright and screenwriter whose most recent musical work has been another adaptation, The Band’s Visit (2017).

In the transition from page to stage, the theatre artists wielded the possibilities and dealt with the limitations of live musicals. They materialized the songs of The Subtle Distinctions, sampled existing songs like ‘Play that Funky Music’, and lifted lines from Lethem’s novel. But they also had to condense this 500-page work into a couple of hours on stage. The musical streamlined black–white dynamics, whereas the novel also includes old Puerto Rican men and Chinese students in the community. In addition, the novel could let the characters literally fly, whereas the stage, as feminist theatre theorist Jill Dolan has noted, ‘elides this flight of hopeful fantasy because the actors’ bodies are inevitably visible and earth-bound’ (Dolan, 2015, p. 300). In 2014, The Fortress of Solitude premiered at the Dallas Theatre Center in Texas and then transferred to the Public Theater in New York City, an institution that has a history of supporting Friedman’s works, as well as progressive musicals from Fun Home (2014) to Hair (1967), another text that examines blackness, as Sarah Browne discusses in Chapter 10 of this volume.

To understand how race and power operate in The Fortress of Solitude, it is crucial to understand these concepts as explained by critical race theorists. In Racial Formation in the United States (1994), a foundational text for the sociology of race, Michael Omi and Howard Winant locate how race has changed since the civil rights movement, from the 1960s onwards, seeing it as historically based rather than natural and stagnant. They conceive race as a social construct with no basis in biology, yet with measured, patterned effects in how different racialized groups are valued. Racialization names the process of making race. Race becomes racism when people sort others into hierarchical categories, not only on an individual basis but on a systemic one. In other words, racism is not just when someone yells a racial epithet; it is also when people with resources and influence keep that power for people like themselves. In the context of the twenty-first century United States, the system remains white supremacy. People with white skin have white privilege; they receive benefits such as better education, cleaner environments, and more jobs with fewer qualifications. Civil rights attorney and scholar Michelle Alexander has documented in The New Jim Crow how black Americans experience discrimination at every level of the justice system, from being disproportionately arrested and charged with more serious crimes all the way through jury convictions and job applications that ask if you have ever committed a felony (Alexander, 2012). Academics across disciplines from critical whiteness studies to black feminism have illuminated how race and racism continue to shape lives and institutions, even as most white Americans deny the existence of racial inequalities (Pew Research Center, 2016). These scholars bring to light how whiteness forms a race often thought of as invisible or neutral, and how race must be considered as intersecting with other axes of identity, such as gender. Musical theatre becomes a potent place for investigating racial dynamics because of the interactions of different racialized bodies and the stories that they express through song and movement in front of an audience processing racialized meanings (Galella, 2015).

For this chapter, three ideas from critical race theory and performance studies are particularly helpful in grasping racial dynamics in The Fortress of Solitude. First, American Studies scholar George Lipsitz has dubbed the ways that whites, as a group, shore up their privileges the ‘possessive investment in whiteness’, as if privileges were property with increasing value distributed to whites and denied to people of colour (1998, p. viii). To comprehend how white people commodify people of colour – that is, make them safe and consumable – radical black feminist bell hooks suggests the term ‘eating the other’ (1992). Dominant white culture treats marginalized cultures like spices added to an existing dish. White people retain their privilege as arbiters of taste, enjoying the thrill of interacting with others, while avoiding the negative consequences of racism on actual people of colour. Finally, black performance studies scholar Daphne Brooks invented the term ‘Afro-alienation acts’, which ‘[call] attention to the hypervisibility and cultural constructions of blackness’ instead of taking blackness as an inevitable, generalized given (2006, p. 5). Putting these notions together, this chapter looks to how Dylan invests in whiteness and eats the other, but also how The Fortress of Solitude highlights and criticizes white dominance through its performances of Afro-alienation acts. Even though racism structures life and art, this chapter shows how The Fortress of Solitude offers glimpses of interracial possibility.

Racialized Spaces and Sounds

In addition to the interracial intimacies staged in the number ‘Superman/ Sidekick’, The Fortress of Solitude imagines the block, the physical space of Dean Street, as a place for mixed race community. In the 1970s, the predominantly working-class of colour neighbourhood of Gowanus in northwest Brooklyn included Latinx people, black people, and white people. To set the stage for this memory musical and his friendship with Mingus, in the opening number Dylan recalls his mother, her vision, and their neighbours. She celebrates the block where everyone sings a different song, ‘But if they all sing together then it can’t be wrong.’ As Dylan introduces each character, they introduce new music. They sing of who they will be when they grow up, who they will remember, and of not forgetting who they are and where they belong. Although the themes of time and memory link the songs, they do not specify character and circumstance. Through these snippets of songs, Friedman conjures how people listen to and sing along to songs. Pop songs become associated with moments in people’s personal lives, so that when they are replayed they bring up those memories, though the lyrical content may not be directly related to the situation at hand. The songs layer, coming in and out, and they do not harmonize exactly; to do so would suggest a sameness of experiences across racial gaps. Friedman adds, ‘I think the democracy of the opening number is extremely important to me, which is that the opening number has no protagonist and Dylan maybe is our guide to it, but he doesn’t sing […] it’s not counterpoint, like they don’t all fit together. They actually just collide’ (Friedman, 2017). The composer-lyricist proffers the street as a utopian space where each person sings side by side and holds onto their differences. But, by the end of the number, Dylan’s mother abandons the family. Perhaps her conception of interracial togetherness is not so easily realizable.

In her valorization of music as the key to togetherness, Dylan’s mom specifically champions records by black American artists. When Mingus shares his father’s music with Dylan, beginning with The Subtle Distinctions’ ‘Superman’, the boys develop an intense adolescent friendship. In turn, Dylan shares with Mingus a ring from his mother. Named for legends Bob Dylan and Charles Mingus, they have a special musical connection. Just like their namesakes, Dylan draws inspiration from black artists, and Mingus sings within black musical traditions. Their interracial intimacy over music, superhero comic books, and the ring endow them with superpowers, or at least what feels to them like flying, as the ensemble repeats ‘sing a song of two boys flying’ in the number ‘Take Me to the Bridge’. In these magical moments, the boys soar above the institutional racism that tries to separate them and ground them. On stage, silhouettes show them flying, while the physical actors stand on stage and lean forward with their arms extended. Choreographed by African American dancer-choreographer Camille A. Brown, the stage picture demonstrates the impossibility of really taking flight and the difficulty of dismantling systemic white supremacy, yet stirs an anti-racist imagination.

In the score to Fortress of Solitude, black voices are the heart of the musical. Friedman composed the songs for The Subtle Distinctions, citing his work as a ‘jukebox musical with a jukebox that never existed’ (quoted in Churnin, 2014). Specific popular black American musical styles, which change over time as Dylan and Mingus grow up, inspired this score. In ‘Bothered Blue’, for example, Friedman echoes the social justice songs of 1970s Motown like Marvin Gaye’s ‘What’s Going On’. Although the lyrics begin by lamenting the loss of a lover, the colours take on racial dimensions. Barrett Rude, Jr. riffs that white is the colour ‘Of a world that seems to have no place for me’. His song names how whiteness shapes the world and appears to provide no room for people of colour, and no means for them to obtain racial justice.

Unlike the novel, which uses only third-person omniscient narration and Dylan’s first-person narration, the musical lends voices to black characters to speak for themselves. In ‘Gentrification, Authenticity and White Middle-Class Identity in Jonathan Lethem’s The Fortress of Solitude’, Matt Godbey argues: ‘Told from Dylan’s perspective, though, the novel can only allude to the black perspective and perhaps its strongest statement about race is Mingus’s relegation to the periphery of narrative about the gentrification’ (2008, p. 147). Meanwhile, in the 11 o’clock number of the musical, the climax that showcases a forceful (often solo) performance, Mingus claims ownership of his own narrative: ‘This is the story of what really happened to Mingus Rude’. With each iteration, he emphasizes that he will speak his truth on the operations of the prison-industrial complex, the racial and economic mechanisms for keeping disproportionately black and Latino people in cages. He employs the passive voice, ‘what really happened to’, indicating the forces foisted upon black people. Using hip hop, Friedman gives Mingus a new musical idiom to express himself that is different from the rest of the score, as the narrative moves into the 1980s. After Mingus shoots his grandfather in self-defence, he becomes an inmate and returns to prison repeatedly for minor offences. Mingus describes the violence within prisons and his survival techniques: lifting weights, selling his artistic skills, and learning to appear invisible. In the refrain, he sings of running, though he cannot escape, and of flying, though he cannot see the sky. Mingus follows his father in aspiring to soar l...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I Reframing Identity/Identities
• Part II Challenging Historiographies
• Part III Musical Structures: Identity and Social Change
• Index