"Wanna Be Startin' Something'": Black Feminist Bookwriters and Bio-Musicals
Michael DeWhatley
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MICHAEL DEWHATLEY is a Ph.D. candidate in Performance as Public Practice at The University of Texas at Austin. A native of Asheville, N.C., he has a B.A. in Theatre with departmental honors from Wake Forest University and an M.A. in Theatre from UT-Austin. His research is focused on the role of community and locality in American regional theatres, as well as the governance of those theatres and related arts organizations. He is particularly interested in large cast and large scale community oriented performances in American regional theatres and their larger impacts on institutional health and focus. Before coming to Austin, Michael served for six years as the associate production manager at Actors Theatre of Louisville, and had a variety of experiences in production and artistic management at Zilker Botanical Garden, Kentucky Shakespeare, Berkshire Theatre Group, Lexington Children's Theatre and the Austin Film Festival. His work has previously been published in Howlround Theatre Commons, Theatre Design and Technology, and Artivate: A Journal of Entrepreneurship in the Arts.
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Abstract
Ain’t Too Proud: The Life and Times of the Temptations, Tina: The Tina Turner Musical, and MJ the Musical are three biographical jukebox musicals that premiered on Broadway between 2019-2022. All three feature books by Black women, a significant diversification of the Broadway musical, which has been historically dominated by white men. However, each of these three shows in turn were lambasted by critics as intellectually flimsy musicals; unoriginal, nostalgic and of limited cultural value. Important critics from The New York Times to The Hollywood Reporter to Variety dismiss the shows (and particularly their books) as unworthy of the performers cast in them and the audiences who attended them. Using Black feminist epistemologies and surveying various reviews by different types of critics, I reframe Ain’t Too Proud, Tina, and MJ as not merely the latest iterations of a tired biographical-jukebox musical form, but as important celebrations of Black feminist cultural memory and historically significant breakthroughs for Black women creators on Broadway.
Ain’t Too Proud: The Life and Times of the Temptations, Tina: The Tina Turner Musical, and MJ the Musical are three biographical jukebox musicals that premiered on Broadway between 2019-2022. All three feature books by Black women, a significant diversification of the Broadway musical, which has been historically dominated by white men. However, each of these three shows in turn were lambasted by critics as intellectually flimsy musicals; unoriginal, nostalgic and of limited cultural value. Important critics from The New York Times to The Hollywood Reporter to Variety dismiss the shows (and particularly their books) as unworthy of the performers cast in them and the audiences who attended them. Using Black feminist epistemologies and surveying various reviews by different types of critics, I reframe Ain’t Too Proud, Tina, and MJ as not merely the latest iterations of a tired biographical-jukebox musical form, but as important celebrations of Black feminist cultural memory and historically significant breakthroughs for Black women creators on Broadway.
| etudesdec2023dewhatley.pdf |
