MAR 4 at 2PM | PIGOTT THEATER | FREE & OPEN TO THE PUBLIC
The 2016 Carl Weber Lecture features Stacy Wolf of Princeton University on “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, Stacy Wolf discusses how the performance of femininity on Broadway conversed with U.S. culture in the mid-1960s.
About Stacy Wolf
Stacy Wolf 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. She was the editor of Theatre Topics: A Journal of Pedagogy and Praxis in 2001-2003. She also oversees the Lewis Center’s Music Theater Lab and has experience as a director and dramaturg.Recent publications include “Wicked’s Women and Other Queer Conventions in the 21st Century Broadway Musical” ( Theatre Journal, 2008); ” 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, The American Musical After Broadway: Dinner Theatres, Road Shows, and Amateur Hours explores the persistence of musical theatre across the country in amateur and semi-professional venues like summer camps, high schools, Jewish Community Centers, African American churches, dinner theatres, and non-Equity touring companies. She is also working a biography of Mary Martin, star of South Pacific, Peter Pan, and The Sound of Music.Wolf teaches courses in American musical theatre history (including a seminar on the musicals of Stephen Sondheim), dramaturgy and dramatic literature, histories of U.S. performance, performance theory, and performance studies.
This event is supported by Stanford Arts and the Clayman Institute for Gender Research.
