A different kind of diva: representations of aging women in three American musicals
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Despite increased interest in aspects of identity within musical theatre scholarship, few have turned a critical eye toward issues of aging. This thesis furnishes a new perspective in both musical theatre studies and musicology by engaging in an analysis of aging, gender, identity, and representation in the American musical. By providing close readings of both score and book of three canonic musicals – Jule Styne and Stephen Sondheim's Gypsy (1959), Sondheim and James Goldman's Follies (1971), and Scott Frankel, Michael Korie, and Doug Wright's Grey Gardens (2006) – this project outlines the emergence of a complex set of women in narratives that confront the aging process, both directly and indirectly. Furthermore, these shows act as cross sections of the past 60 years of musical theatre, and therefore exemplify a development of the representation of aging women within the genre. In the first chapter, the thesis considers the representations of aging women in the Golden Age of musical theatre (1930-1966). This was a time when aging women were typically portrayed as one-dimensional characters, found at the margins of these narratives, and stereotypically characterized as sexless, passive, and merely supportive to the youth-oriented plots. However, the musicals Gypsy, Follies, and Grey Gardens boldly place aging women as the focal point of their respective narratives and bring attention to the perspective of aging women, addressing issues of visibility and agency in the aging process. The following three chapters explore the complex protagonists of these musicals. I examine the function of certain songs in the narratives, such as the "I want/I am song" and duets, that reveal age-based complexities of these newer leading ladies. Their motivations, ambitions, relationships, and ambivalences are considered in conjunction with themes outlined in age studies, such as decline, life course, and generational conflict.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".