Stacy Wolf’s title promises more than her book actually delivers. Instead of attempting to cover the broad topic of “gender and sexuality in the American musical” mentioned in her title, she offers an intriguing lesbian feminist reading of the image and performances of four of the leading ladies of the American musical—Mary Martin, Ethel Merman, Julie Andrews, and Barbra Streisand—focusing on musicals from South Pacific (1949) to Funny Girl (1964). Her discussion of these stars includes analysis of a number of the musicals in which they starred, particularly South Pacific, Peter Pan, Gypsy, My Fair Lady, Camelot, and Funny Girl. A final chapter offers a queering of The Sound of Music.

Ours may be the last generation to take full advantage of massive, hard-copy, data-rich reference volumes such as Richard C. Norton has here compiled. Each of the three volumes is about a thousand pages, the third including a four-hundred-page index of shows, persons, and songs. As the economic obstacles to electronic publishing are overcome, and as the obvious advantages the electronic medium offers for portability and ease of revision are given time to persuade, these massive physical tomes are likely to be moved to storage and then to the shredder during our lifetimes. Though I accept and admire the utility of electronic research tools, I confess to a fondness for the smell, feel, and seeming permanence of these large-format, gleaming reference volumes. This set conveys a particular authority, not to mention heft.

In 1974, John Towson and I edited an issue of TDR devoted to popular entertainments. The field was essentially terra incognita then, and considered of little importance by most people interested in theatre history and dramatic theory. The emphasis at that time was overwhelmingly on “high” art in theatre and the theory connected with it, and anything else was considered beside the point.

In Disciplining Satire, Matthew J. Kinservik revisits the perennially fascinating topic of the Licensing Act, exploring its effect on satiric comedy during the remainder of the eighteenth century and presenting the Licensing Act as an instrument of discipline in Foucault’s sense, a mechanism that provided both training and correction for playwrights, educating them in the production of socially and politically acceptable plays.

Gerry McCarthy’s intention in this book is to “re-examine Molière, the man of the theatre, in the context of his profession, his education and the views of behavior he might have held in common with his contemporaries” (xiv). At the center of this re-examination, McCarthy places Molière the actor, asserting that it was because he was an actor that he was able to “annex Corneille’s tragic scene to the popular stage of Sganarelle or Le Médecin volant” (61), that is, to develop a form of serious comedy that relied on the power of the actor to engage the audience. It was in the age of Molière that the French theatre began to turn toward the illusionistic stage, “asserting its potential to overwhelm the performer,” but Molière—though often involved in enormously spectacular court productions—remained faithful to the “experience of the actor, conceiving the means of imaginative life out of the bare skeleton of words and action which is the play” (4). In McCarthy’s view, Molière’s fidelity to actor and text must have arisen from his early experiences with popular theatre in Paris and his apprenticeship as a nomadic actor playing in assorted spaces before 1655.

For almost twenty years, Joseph Loewenstein has explored the rise of what he calls “the bibliographic ego,” particularly in the work of Ben Jonson, and his new book is his most sophisticated analysis yet of its genesis and evolution in early modern England. What is especially valuable about his new study of Renaissance literary/theatrical sociology is the manner in which he refines and expands our current sense of the complex interface between performance and print that played such a decisive role in shaping the careers of professional writers. Performance and publication were, he contends, competing media that elicited a wide range of attitudes from such dramatists as Shakespeare, Robert Greene, Thomas Heywood, John Marston, and even Jonson himself. The result is an illuminating portrait of Jonson as a writer who took greater pride in the specific theatrical origins of his drama than recent histories have allowed.

Gary Taylor, in his leadoff entry in The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare on Stage, begins with a catalog of images of pregnancy, labor, and childbirth in Shakespeare’s plays in order to assert that “we mislead ourselves if we imagine a playing moving from text to stage, as though textuality and theatricality were two separate entities. . . . For Shakespeare, a play began life in the theatre” (1). Just so. But the challenge of writing Shakespeare performance history is that subsequent theatres—however much they implicitly recognized Taylor’s truism, regardless of the literary or canonical status they granted to the text, and regardless of the cultural capital invested in the very notion of “Shakespeare”—were, nonetheless, moving from text to stage, making theatre from pre-existing scripts. To write about the history of Shakespeare in performance is to write about this fact.

The past two decades have seen the emergence of a great deal of scholarly work in English on West African performance in general and Nigerian theatre and drama in particular. Works by Alston, Ukpokodu, Dunton, Quayson, and an entire library by various authors on the theatre of Wole Soyinka have arguably made Nigerian performance second only to South African in terms of material in English about African performance available in the West. To this list must now be added Victor Samson Dugga’s book, which sites Nigerian theatre as part of “the process as well as the product of social change,” and goes on to offer a thorough analysis of three different contexts in which theatre and performance occur (12).