by Sam Biederman on May 14, 2010
The musicians and lyricists behind some of the greatest works of musical theater were often gay men who wrote their own repression into their work. Using heterosexual characters, they expressed an experience of love that was interrupted or destroyed by prejudice. Three cornerstones of the genre, Show Boat (1927), South Pacific (1949), and West Side Story (1957), all turn on interracial romances, which were still subject to public debate when the pieces were written. West Side Story’s climactic “Somewhere,” in which Bernstein’s star-crossed lovers imagine that “there’s a place for us” must have reverberated beyond the theater for the gay men in his audience.
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by Greg Afinogenov on May 13, 2010
Were Engels to read Ben Davis’s “9.5 Theses on Art and Class,” written and circulated in early 2010, he would no doubt be shocked out of his complacency. He would immediately recognize, of course, the phrases that he and Marx had coined so long ago: “working class,” “relations of production,” “class interests.” Something of the style would also seem faintly like his own. Indeed, to Engels’s undead eyes the strangest expression would probably be “middle-class,” used by Davis, it seems, in place of “petty bourgeois.” Almost everything would be familiar—and yet everything would be strange.
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