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THE GREAT WHITE WAY: RACE AND THE BROADWAY MUSICAL. By Warren Hoffman. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2014; pp. 264.
Throughout its history, the American musical has been inextricably linked to issues of race: from minstrel shows, to blackface performers like Al Jolson and Eddie Cantor, to the appropriation of African American musical forms, to musicals that actually dealt with race-from Show Boat, to South Pacific, to The Scottsboro Boys. This history has been recounted in many volumes, but in his interesting, stimulating, and at times frustrating book The Great White Way: Race and the Broadway Musical, Warren Hoffman takes a new approach. His focus is on the politics of whiteness, "the ways in which white identity has been shaped, protected and upheld by this art for over one-hundred years" (3-4). Whiteness is so much accepted as the norm by white people that we do not see ourselves as having color or race, while "people of color" (as if white is not a color) are treated as the "Other." Hoffman is interested not only in overt treatments of race in the musical, but also in musicals like Oklahoma! and The Music Man in which, he argues, the absence of mention of race actually reinforces a nostalgic view of a fictional pure-white America.
The book is in two parts. After an introductory chapter, the first part has three chapters that deal with race in classic American musicals. The first and strongest chapter is an excellent, detailed reading of the 1927 Kern-Hammerstein musical Show Boat. Emphasizing its metatheatricality, Hoffman maintains that one can see Show Boat in postmodern terms: "While it might at times appear that identity is fixed and...