Customer Reviews

Place for Us: Essay on the Broadway Musical

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(8)

 

 

As the Times's cultural critic Margo Jefferson says on the back cover, Miller's book is "like a musical score that the genre has yet to catch up with." If you go into a Sondheim show expecting Jerry Herman, you will be disappointed. Miller writes in long, complicated, Proustian sentences: his approach is demanding, sometimes exhausting, but if you do the work, it pays off richly, both intellectually and emotionally.

This book is not designed to be read quickly for information or to confirm existing recieved ideas about gay men. It is a dreamy meditation, a passionate combination of language and sentiment that is designed to be read with love, the same love that gay men so often have for musical theatre. This is not a simple expositional piece, nor does it attempt to be. "Place for Us" requires substantial time and rereading, and when given the attention it deserves, it is enormously rewarding and insightful.

Obviously this book is not for everyone! But it is easily the best thing ever written on this subject and if the reviewers below can't deal with the difficulty of the prose (and ideas) that's their loss. They want Miller's "purple prose" to be less lavender, but did they ever think that maybe that's the point? The cult of "straightforwardness" obviously thrives even in the most defensively gay circles.

In this volume D.A. Miller, as he did in its brilliant predecessor BRINGING OUT ROLAND BARTHES, does what few other academic writers, born with the moon in Barthes and Foucault rising, have been able to accomplish: he takes the work of these celebrated theorists further both in the name of and toward the understanding of pleasure. Hence his style gets the bad rap that all great gay displays receive, since it is willfully ostentatious, proud of its own capacity to desire, and as complicated in its elaboration as we imagine all of our individual desiring lives (real and fantasized) to be. Moreover, it refuses to testify to the so-called straightforward mode of criticism that blunt populists and people who can't stand gay men (imagine Paglia in both categories) moralistically rant about so tiresomely; instead, it uses language like a scalpel or, better yet, as the integrated musical uses song-and-dance: in only the most highly specificed, uniquely articulated manner required by the task at hand. This work is strange, difficult, tremendously thoughtful and, once a reader has taken the time to savor each of its gorgeous sentences, as satisyfing as a great night at the theater. Let me add that PLACE FOR US doubles as a powerful manifesto in the somewhat uneven tradition of post-Stonewall gay male writers, taking us to a place, for no one else but us, that had been impossible to imagine before we read it.

This book is short but densely compacted with original and genuinely imaginative arguments as D.A. Miller proceeds to demystify the attraction and allure of Broadway musicals. Previously, books about this subject too often descended into nostalgic reminiscences of their authors' favourite shows and their most beloved divas; it was as though their love of musicals disarmed their ability to develop sustained critical interpretations of them. But Miller ingeniously builds his own nostalgia into a successful attempt to theorize contemporary attitudes to musical theatre. He takes the old cliche that the biggest fans of Broadway shows tend to be gay, and turns it on its head. He argues that gay men, like him, have not only responded enthusasistically to musical theatre but have also shaped and influenced its trends, diversions, and vagaries. He demonstrates this argument by recounting his personal history, from childhood (when he would sneak downstairs to a secluded part of his family home to listen to the latest cast recordings of shows such as 'Damn, Yankees!') to adulthood (when his relocation to New York City enabled him to frequent gay piano bars, where he joined other men in rousing renditions of showtunes). This autobiographical argumentation is strange enough; but rather than alienate his readers, Miller engages them by presenting his personal details as evidence of a wider cultural phenomenon - a phenomenon in which his own love of theatre is intimately bound up with his sexuality, his maturation, and his gradual coming-out of the closet. All this crescendos into a soaring, extended critical analysis of Miller's favourite musical, 'Gypsy', enveloping his interpretation with poetic, self-deprecatory, incisive prose while he simultaneously dissects his own responses - including his inclination towards not merely praising the originary divas such as Ethel Merman, but wishing to be them. Along the way, readers learn why Miller dislikes 'new' musicals such as 'La Cage Aux Folles' and 'Les Miserables'; how musicals are examples of 'pop culture' even though they are no longer 'popular' in mainstream society; and why Miller agrees with Ethel Merman's famous pronouncement that the big finale in 'Gypsy' - 'Rose's Turn' - is no less than a 'goddamn aria!'. Just as that showstopper is an 'aria', this book is an aromatic bouquet thrown in earnest praise of a much maligned art form.

Many of the readers' comments on this book are highly amusing, but perhaps the funniest is the insistence that Miller's awful writing is Barthesian--that is, when it isn't Proustian! I'm afraid it's neither. Barthes wrote with eloquent precision and clarity. Even in translation, his works are a joy to read. The verdict is in, as the comments below make clear, and it's simply undeniable: the emperor IS naked.

Roland Barthes: Madamoiselle Lee, is not the most erotic portion of a body where the garment gapes?
Gypsy Rose Lee: But Monsieur Barthes, I'm not a stripper - at these prices, I'm an ecdysiast!
D.A. Miller spends more than a bit of his book, A Place for Us, Essay on the Broadway Musical, musing on Mama Rose from Gypsy, but the muse of his book is none other than Gypsy Rose Lee, famous for putting the tease in strip-tease, revealing little, but doing it with finesse and elegance. While admiring Dr. Miller's turns of phrase, when I finished the book I wondered what exactly I had just read. Though enthralled by the swirl of feathers and witty patter, I had hoped to have seen more. Call me a vulgarian or worse a pornographer, but a little more flesh would have been nice. The relationship between gay men and the musical is a rich one and a more meaty analysis with less post-structuralist/queer theory gimmickry would have been far more satisfying to this reader. But as Miss Electra, of the trio of advice-giving strippers in Gypsy, says: "I'm electrifyin, and I ain't even tryin, I never have to sweat to get paid, cos' when you got a gimmick Gypsy girl you got it made..." Despite Dr. Miller's electric brilliance, the difficult nature of his prose is designed to conceal rather than reveal. Some day, hold your hats and hallelujah, he'll let down his guard and the gimmicks, stop playing to the academic vaudeville circuit (vaudeville IS dead), and strike out on his own to speak in his own voice, which there is too little of in this book. As another former student and avid reader of Dr. Miller's other books and papers, I know "this people's got it and this people should be spreadin' it around...."

Everyone below has it wrong. This book isn't Proustian, it's Barthesian. It complicates as much as it describes. The Barthesian writing style is not "political" and I don't see the how it's productive to legislate what constitutes "admissable" writing and demand that people "speak against" it. Those who say the book is empty are wrong; they just didn't get it. I hope that serious students of the musical and of gay culture will take the time to work through this brilliant and thought-provoking book, and not be dissuaded in advance by all the smug viciousness on display here.

The curse of Hans Christian Andersen: Whenever an emperor dares to wear clothes that are truly fine and new, a dozen ... boys will appear at their windows to claim that he is naked.

Miller's finery will outlast the smug japes of those who refuse to see it. His book is a witty, idiosyncratic, deeply original, often thrilling analysis of Broadway musicals and of the gay culture in which they once played so central a role.

A reviewer below -- though not as below as he deserves to be -- writes: "DA Miller is an old professor of mine, and this book is as insufferably pretentious as is the man himself...The only person stupid enough to say about this book that it's "Barthesian" is Professor Miller himself (who I actually suspect to be the author of the review below...)"

The bad faith inscribed in this "review" is evident enough, even if its history is obscure; my guess is that Miller gave this guy a B+ instead of the A he thought he deserved. But for the record: Miller did NOT write the review that called his approach Barthesian. I did. And, by the way, I'm another former student of Miller's (back in his Harvard days, where he was one of the very best teachers I've ever had). PLACE FOR US is difficult, sure -- I think everyone can agree on that. But it more than rewards those who make the effort to meet its challenges. It's a dazzling critical and literary performance.

Part manifesto, part post-hoc diary of a current and former musical theater queen, this wordy and often rambling manuscript will be enjoyed by those who, like the author, can relate to a coming-of-age/coming out story set to the tune(s) of the Broadway musical. Those in academia will likely de-bunk the literary integrety of the author in much the same way that the people of River City kaboshed the "Think System" espoused by Professor Harold Hill. Indeed, the reader of A PLACE FOR US finds himself humming the "Minuet in G" as he makes his way through this clever and tune-full read. "La dee da dee da dee da dee da, la de da, la de da..."