Often dismissive and far from balanced, Mordden is strong on barely remembered writers like lyricist-librettist John Latouche. ![]() Despite the latter’s openness about his sexuality and the reputation of his plays, Mordden points out: “Williams’ outwardly gay characters are usually off-stage or dead.” And he also floats the idea that Noël Coward – the man he argues first used the word gay in the contemporary sense onstage in a lyric for his operetta Bitter Sweet – was writing a coded gay relationship when he brought a threatening first love back into a marriage in Blithe Spirit. ![]() Mordden reserves his highest praise for Edward Albee, and has a revisionist take on Tennessee Williams, usually deemed the patron saint of gay playwrights. Gentleman in the demographic once doomed never to marry will love the jokes about Ann Miller taking over from Angela Lansbury in Mame others may be left wondering.īut sharp-eyed observations are dotted throughout. Half of the book is straightforwardly informative, the other trading in illuminating gossip and insider knowledge. Racing conversationally through 120 years in 218 pages means there’s little time for sustained argument. Only on rare and intriguingly dangerous occasions did homosexuality make it into the text itself. Thus much of the first half of the book deals in disguise, as writers dropped hints and relied on subtext. ![]() The Wales Padlock Act of 1927 threatened those putting on plays treating, as the law stated, “sex degeneracy, or sex perversion” with prosecution. Mordden makes it clear that, for decades, far from being a cowardly option, the closet was a necessity, offstage and on. Kaier Curtin got there in 1987 with a book Mordden references not least for its title, borrowed from the remark movie mogul Sam Goldwyn made when told that the play he had bought, Lillian Hellman’s The Children Hour, featured lesbians: “We can always call them Bulgarians.” It’s scarcely the first survey of its kind.
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