Stagestruck: Theater, AIDS, and the Marketing of Gay America Review

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(More customer reviews)I often read a book and then, once I've seen the author read from his own stuff, had to go back and read it again with a different tone of voice. That applies to this book. It's much funnier and rueful than I realize the first time.
It's also not recommended unless you have a dark sense of humor, and understand that it's not about Rent or Broadway really, but about some of the subtle ways that history gets revised by the winners. It's a brilliant book and I often had those moments of recognition where I got goose bumps reading a paragraph. Then I would laugh at the next paragraph.
I think that people who read this ONLY because they are fans of Rent will be mystified or offended. Rent is a moving show, but it IS sort of odd for urban gays - it's kind of like reading a Hitler biography devoted solely to his being a wonderful father and compassionate family man. . . It may be true, but you have to scratch your head and wonder how the author managed to completely avoid mentioning the holocaust even once in 1000 pages, and just what was his agenda in doing so.
It is clear that Ms. Schulman's book was completely stolen by Larson. However! As she points out, the theft of the plot is not really a problem, cause plot borrowing and character theft is common practice; what she regards as the sore spot is that, in stealing those elements, Larson inadvertently did the same thing that bigots and the media often deliberately do to gays and lesbians: in the same way that the winning side of a war gets to decide what version of the war goes down in history as the TRUE version, Jonathan Larson's made-up version of the AIDS epidemic will be written on most people's hearts as the true version, when in reality it is a powerful distortion of who and what actually happened - unfortunately wrapped in some excellent theater so it is more likely to burn into people's brains as the truth.
I didn't expect so much humor from a book that makes those sorts of points. I laughed repeatedly when reading this book, starting with the introduction.
Also, as I've come to expect with her books, Ms. Schulman manages to find the words to explain things I've always sensed but not been able to articulate. The section on marketing to gays (who, as she puts it, are still struggling with post-traumatic stress as a result of being raised in this society) was brilliant, and funny. An instance where she really stopped me in my tracks: when she compared gays and lesbians to a older relative of hers who was freed from a Nazi concentration camp and shortly afterwards had a small breakdown when trying to choose what color drinking glass to buy from a shelf of glassware that came in too many colors, sizes and shapes.
My advice to potential readers: Schulman is more like Sondheim than the Sound of Music. If you're a Broadway boy with a good heart and not much critical faculty, don't read it and you'll live happy. If you're a Broadway fan with a brain, you'll find it's not really about Broadway but rather an interesting tap dance on the subject of how things get twisted around. If you've got a political sensibility of any type, and maybe you're much older and wiser -- and you read the book with a tone of voice that's rueful and ironic much more than just angry, you'll love it. It brings out all the humor, which appears on every page, and makes me laugh even in public places.
People in Trouble were not one of my favorite novels of hers, but having read stage-struck, I now enjoyed it much more. Empathy is her funniest novel, but most experimental, and Rat Bohemia a truly angry ranting novel (and I mean it in the best Victor Hugo-if-he-were-a women sense of the word).
I'd recommend Shimmer as a more 'traditional' linear story line sort of novel - it's quite beautiful. I give this book 4 stars not because it's not wonderful, but because I liked Empathy better and so needed to keep one star extra if I ever review that book online. :-)

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Acts of Intervention: Performance, Gay Culture, and AIDS (Unnatural Acts: Theorizing the Performative) Review

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(More customer reviews)This book is a valuable source for the variety of performances that have accompanied the appearance of AIDS in the United States. Roman carefully evaluates how theatre and performative events, from the activism of ACT-UP to Magic Johnson's announcement of his HIV status, have shaped the way that AIDS has been portrayed. In his introduction, Roman outlines his positionality within his subject, remaining critically responsible while acknowledging the impossibility of "objectivity." An important aspect of his critical approach is his "generosity" towards the performances he analyzes. He states that his purpose in the book is not to evaluate the performances for their artistic merit, but to show their position within the overall field of AIDS performance. He shows how performances that may have been "bad" nonetheless had an impact on their audience. Roman never succumbs to romanticism or nostalgia, but approaches his subject with reverence and respect. Roman's book leaves room for others to continue within the subject of AIDS performance and will continue to be a valuable source for those working in the field.

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Acts of Intervention examines the ways that gay men have used theatre andperformance to intervene in the AIDS crisis. It discusses dramatic texts and publicperformances -- from cabarets and candlelight vigils to full-scale Broadwayproductions such as Angels in America and Rent -- that have shaped, and been shapedby, the history of AIDS in national, regional, and local contexts. Román examinesmainstream as well as alternative and activist forms of theatre, including soloperformance, community-based projects, mixed-media events, activist demonstrations,and AIDS educational theatre initiatives.Acts of Interventiontraces the ways in which performance and theater have participated in and informedthe larger cultural politics of race, sexuality, citizenship, and AIDS in the UnitedStates during the last fifteen years. The book discusses not only how the theaterhas provided a forum for gay male response to the epidemic but also the degree towhich those responses have in turn shaped the ideological formulation of AIDS.Román offers a new method for mapping the relation between AIDS and representationby combining interpretive strategies from performance theory, gay and lesbianstudies, critical race discourse, and cultural studies.This bookis dedicated to writing the history of theatrical interventions in the AIDSepidemic, including performances whose official history has been largely neglectedor forgotten. Because many early performances about AIDS left little or nodocumentation, the task of constructing an AIDS theatre historiography confrontsimmediate problems and limitations.Acts of Intervention arguesthat the history of AIDS performance is located at the juncture of memory anddisappearance, of mourning and survival, of representation and its impossibility inthe context of epidemic loss.

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A Song in the Dark: The Birth of the Musical Film Review

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(More customer reviews)The poet Frank O'Hara once wrote that of all the American poets only Walt Whitman and Stephen Crane were better than the movies. While O'Hara's selection of poets is debatable, I think his point is applicable to this wonderfully witty analysis of the first generation of movie musicals: it's as much fun to read as the movies Barrios writes about are to watch.
I was rather perplexed by the previous review that stated this book had no central thesis. It is, I believe, a serious misreading of the book. Barrios states quite clearly that the first generation of movie musicals were a matter of trial and error. Hollywood needed to find out what would--and what would not--work on FILM regarding musicals. This is one of the reasons why Barrios's analysis is so insightful. Busby Berkeley, for example, is such a great choreographer precisely because he realized that FILM choreography is a different art form from dancing on stage. His wonderful combination of vision and movement *as captured ON FILM* continues to delight us today. But Berkeley could not have known this without the previous examples of movie choreography that was filmed as if it were a theatre performance. Hollywood learned from its mistakes.
And Barrios's writing is quite simply a delight. So much film analysis misses the popcorn for the postmodern theory. Whereas even a truly awful film can be a secret delight (as Barrios acknowledges over and over again), really dry criticism is like week old popcorn: pretty tasteless and hard to swallow. But I must admit that I laughed out loud again and again as I read about one disaster after another, all preserved on film for us to gaze at in wonder (as in "I wonder how in the world they thought THAT would work on film?"). And his analysis of the great musicals of the period made me long to be sitting in the third row from the back, transported to another world as only a really wonderful movie can do. The book is extensive in witty and incisive reviews of the good, the bad, and the truly ugly of early music musicals precisely to bear out Barrios's central thesis: that Hollywood did not approach the movie musical with preconceived notions of what would work like gangbusters on the screen. Rather they learned from their mistakes after watching gangs bust out in unintended laughter at some of the real bombs of the musical genre. And Barrios's book is the only one I am aware of that so truly captures the spirit of the age: hey guys, let's film a musical and see if it works.
The auteur theory, while often instructive and interesting, has done some serious disservice to film criticism. It has led us to believe that directors all have these preconceived, "unified visions" that are applied to every film project they undertake. But I believe that Barrios is far closer to the truth: Hollywood laid some eggs and THEN learned to make some delicious omelettes.
And Barrios is something that most film critics and historians are not: as much fun to read as the movies he analyzes are to watch. Put some butter on the popcorn, put your feet up and enjoy a book that is truly a joy to read.

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