Scholar Spotlight: Stacy Wolf
Stacy Wolf is an Associate Professor at the University of Texas at Austin, as well as the author of the groundbreaking text A Problem Like Maria: Gender and Sexuality in the American Musical (University of Michigan Press, 2002). She is a long-time ATHE member and holds a B.A. in English from Yale and an M.A. in Drama from the University of Virginia. She received her Ph.D. in Theatre from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her dissertation, “Theatre as Social Practice: Local Ethnographies of Audience Reception” used reception theories and methods from theatre and performance studies, literary, film, and tv studies, anthropology, and sociology to explore how audiences actually made use of theatre at specific performance venues in Madison in the early 1990s.
Stacy Wolf
While she is a noted scholar, her performance background is not as well known. Wolf got her start as a child performer at a dinner theatre in the D.C. suburbs. She frequently performed at school, at camp and in community theatres. She speaks fondly of a group she was involved with as a young teenager - The Young Columbians (so named because the group was based in Columbia, MD). Wolf performed with the group in what she describes as “a kind of ‘Up With People’ musical revue” as part of the Bicentennial Celebrations in 1976. The show was very successful, and Wolf and the group found themselves travelling the country with it performing at Disney World and at the Bicentennial Parade in D.C. In high school, Wolf was involved with both musicals and plays, and in college, she says she was “always in a show - usually in a featured chorus role.” Her real love in college, however, was performing in an a capella group, since she was “always more of a team player-type than a star on stage.” Wolf majored in English at Yale, and while she did theatre for fun during her years there, she didn’t take a single theatre course, except for, as she says, “Shakespeare and a lot of it.” She adds, “Theatre studies was relatively new at Yale at the time and wasn’t considered a serious academic field—yet.” She notes that while she took acting, dance and voice lessons as a child, it wasn’t until she started graduate school that she realized that “one could actually study theatre.”
Her first directing experience came after her Yale days, during her first job teaching at a small private school where she was responsible for teaching 5th, 8th and 10th grade English classes and Humanities courses, advising the school paper, coaching girls’ soccer and running the theatre program. In spite of her extremely packed schedule there, Wolf found that she “really fell in love with directing.” She went on to do her M.A. at UVA, which had a small graduate program, so she was able to take directing and acting classes with the M.F.A. students. She also directed a number of plays at UVA, including some site-specific work. During her Ph.D. studies, she found time to direct at UW-Madison and in the surrounding community.
Upon completing her doctorate, Wolf first taught at Florida State University for two years and then at George Washington University for four years, where she had a joint appointment in English and Theatre. She’s taught at the University of Texas at Austin for seven years and notes that she has directed one major play there, but now works primarily as a dramaturg and more frequently, as an advisor for student dramaturgs. She’s been an active ATHE member for years, serving in a variety of roles including on the board of the Women and Theatre Focus Group, on the Conference Planning Committee and as the editor of the ATHE publication Theatre Topics from 2001-2003. In addition, she served on the committee that drafted a White Paper in support of accepting “Scholarship about Teaching” as legitimate scholarship.
Wolf’s most visible theatre work is as a scholar. She has published widely on theatre spectatorship, performance pedagogy, and musical theatre in many journals, including Theatre Journal, Modern Drama, and Women and Performance. Her book, A Problem Like Maria, has quickly become the seminal book about musical theatre and gender and sexuality. She notes that the book grew out of an article she was invited to write about Mary Martin having been a lesbian for Passing Performances, a collection of essays about gay and lesbian theatre artists, and the first of several volumes edited by Kim Marra and Bob Schanke. Wolf was intrigued with the subject matter, but first needed to learn about musical theatre as a scholar, since her work had been almost exclusively as a practitioner. Her subsequent work has continued to explore the intersections of musical theatre and female identity and sexuality. Her article “‘We'll Always Be Bosom Buddies': Female Duets and the Queering of Broadway Musical Theatre," published in GLQ (Gay and Lesbian Quarterly) in 2006, won the year’s award for Best Essay in Theatre Studies from the Association for Theatre in Higher Education.
Wolf is currently at work on her next book, Defying Gravity: How Women and Girls Feminized, Radicalized, and Queered the Broadway Musical. It builds on her recent work on female duets in the 1950s and on the female dancing body in the 1960s, and argues that gender and the conventions of musicals are inextricably bound. The book’s title, taken from the signature tune from the hit musical Wicked, reflects the research Wolf has done on that musical, which she describes as “completely queer and girl-centered.” She credits her interest in the show as growing out of a symposium sponsored by Northwestern, which she was invited to participate in by Tracy Davis, that focused on the school’s development of another musical, WAS, which, like Wicked, is based on The Wizard of Oz. Wolf reflects that that experience was “a great model for how a university can support the creation of new musicals and also foster an intellectual atmosphere around the production.” She went on to examine Wicked from a critical and feminist perspective, and also to explore internet fan sites and girls’ fandom surrounding the show, work which she will incorporate into her new book.
Her future publication plans include an article on dinner theatre and middlebrow culture that she first presented at ASTR several years ago and then worked on for a roundtable at ATHE in 2006. Also, upon completion of Defying Gravity, Wolf plans to return to her research on Mary Martin that inspired her first book in order to write a more conventional biography of the actress. In addition, she is co-editing a collection of “keywords” in musical theatre and film studies with two musicology colleagues at UCLA, with whom she organized a conference in October 2007. She continues to publish widely, and often writes for journals that target broader audiences, as she is focused not only on writing for theatre scholars, but also on helping scholars in other fields to take scholarship on musical theatre, as well as on theatre and performance studies, seriously.
In addition to her research and publication work, Wolf is a teacher of theatre and musical theatre and acknowledges that “it is fantastic to teach something that students enjoy so much.” She also enjoys that students “come into the class knowing that it will be fun but not having a sense of musicals’ enormous significance in U.S. culture.” She notes that her classes are student-centered and that she doesn’t lecture in her courses. She limits her approach in musical theatre classes to ten musicals each semester because, as she says, “I care much less if students can remember anything about Rodgers and Hammerstein than if they can analyze a script, music, and dance, and do independent research on musicals and history.” She has her students do research presentations, present creative responses to musicals, write analyses of songs and/or dances, and analyze librettos. She notes that in Spring 2008, she is offering her musical theatre course for the first time to theatre and dance majors, in addition to an Honors course with students of various majors, which she has done in previous semesters. She is “excited and curious to see how performers and theatre artists approach and make use of the material differently.” Beyond her musical theatre course work, she also teaches classes in dramaturgy, dramatic literature and play analysis, performance theory, and reception theories.
Musical theatre work is central to her teaching and to her scholarship, and Wolf is a passionate fan of musicals. Her love affair with musical theatre started early, and she notes that “A Chorus Line was the first Broadway musical I saw, and I made my father take my to NYC 12 times to see it.” Also, she confesses that she “saw Evita every single week for 15 weeks when I lived in London for a semester abroad from college, and I still love that musical.” She enumerates a long list of current favorite musicals, and admits that she comes to loves every musical she is working on. She says:
I love Company, in part because one of my undergrads is doing amazing primary research on it. I love West Side Story in spite of its politics, mostly because of the dance. I love Spring Awakening, especially Bill T. Jones’s choreography and the way it creates these two worlds in movement, music, and lights, although I was unhappy with the all-white cast. I love Sweeney Todd, and even more after seeing the John Doyle production, which was chilling and utterly theatrical. Caroline, or Change may be the most moving and complicated musical I have seen and taught.
Her passion as a fan is evident in her teaching, research and publications and in her hopes for the future of musical theatre scholarship.
While assessing the current state of musical theatre publications, Wolf is quick to note that the untimely death of noted musical theatre scholar Bruce Kirle in August of 2007 has greatly affected the field. She says:
We have suffered an incomparable loss with Bruce Kirle’s death. His book is enormously important, and he was among the very few people who truly crossed the scholarship/ practice divide. I can’t imagine what important contributions he would have made to our field.
Beyond the loss of Kirle, however, she is optimistic about musical theatre scholarship. She notes that recently released books in the field, especially The American Musical and the Performance of Personal Identity by Raymond Knapp, The Musical as Drama by Scott McMillan, The Megamusical by Jessica Sternfeld and The Theatre Will Rock: A History of the Rock Musical, from Hair to Hedwig by Elizabeth Wollman are “terrific.” She also suggests that interesting developments in the field may result from “theatre people learning from musicologists and vice versa.” She urges musical theatre scholars to “be brave” and submit their work for publication, as she is a strong advocate for a greater volume of good musical theatre scholarship. She notes, as a sign of progress that musicals are being taken seriously, that in the November 2007 issue of Theatre Survey, “there was an article about Spamalot by Laurie A. Finke and Susan Aronstein in the company of articles about commedia dell’arte, a Middleton play, and docudrama, which I think is great.”
As for the scholarship she would like to see published, Wolf encourages musical theatre scholars to:
keep learning about the areas in musical theatre that are more challenging for each of us, whether it’s text analysis, performance analysis, design, music, dance, etc. Our object study is especially challenging and we need to keep extending ourselves to new areas.
Also she notes that the field is in “desperate need of good work on dance in musical theatre.” In addition, though she admits that for a long time she had hoped that a good textbook for musical theatre history would be developed, she has come to realize that she would never be able to use one in her classes because she would always find problems with it. Finally, Wolf stresses that musical theatre scholars need to find an equitable way to deal with the various musical theatre licensing companies so that students and scholars can more easily get access to the librettos of musicals. The currently restricted system limits the ability of musical theatre teachers and scholars to share their scholarship and train their students to study musicals.