"divas, darlings, and dames:
women in broadway musicals of the 1960s"

The image of the Single Girl—sassy, sexual, and employed—was a staple of 1960s popular culture. Broadway musicals of the mid-1960s also presented singing and dancing versions of this character type, including "Nancy" in Oliver!, "Aldonza" in Man of La Mancha, "Sally Bowles" in Cabaret, and the title characters in Mame, Hello, Dolly!, and Sweet Charity. In this multimedia talk with photographs, recorded music, and theatre, television, and film clips, professor Stacy Wolf discusses how the performance of femininity on Broadway conversed with U.S. culture in the mid-1960s.

ABOUT STACY WOLf, PROFESSOR OF THEATER AT PRINCETON UNIVERSITY

Stacy Wolf is one of America’s foremost scholars on musical theatre. She is Professor of Theatre at Princeton, Director of Fellowships, and current Acting Chair at the Lewis Center for the Arts. She is the author of Changed for Good: A Feminist History of the Broadway Musical (Oxford University Press, 2011), A Problem Like Maria: Gender and Sexuality in the American Musical (University of Michigan Press, 2002), and the co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of the American Musical (with Raymond Knapp and Mitchell Morris, 2011). She has published articles on theatre spectatorship, performance pedagogy, and musical theatre in many journals, including Theatre Journal, Modern Drama, and Camera Obscura and a former editor of Theatre Topics: A Journal of Pedagogy and Praxis. She also oversees the Lewis Center’s Music Theater Lab and has experience as a director and dramaturg.

Publications include “Keeping Company with Sondheim’s Women” (The Oxford Handbook of Sondheim Studies, 2014); “The 2003-2004 Season and Broadway Musical Theatre as a Political Conversant” (Patriotic Dissent: Staging Political Protest since 9/11, 2012); "Wicked Divas, Musical Theater, and Internet Girl Fans” (Camera Obscura, 2007); and “In Defense of Pleasure: Musical Theatre History in the Liberal Arts (A Manifesto)” (Theatre Topics, 2007). Her essay, "'We'll Always Be Bosom Buddies': Female Duets and the Queering of Broadway Musical Theatre" in GLQ (Gay and Lesbian Quarterly) (2006), won the year’s award for Best Essay in Theatre Studies from the Association for Theatre in Higher Education.

Wolf's manuscript-in-progress, Beyond Broadway: Four Seasons of Amateur Musical Theatre in the U.S., explores the persistence of musical theatre across the country in amateur venues like summer camps, high schools, community theatres, and afterschool programs. Her chapter on Disney musicals in elementary schools is forthcoming in The Disney Musical: Stage, Screen, and Beyond.