Posts Tagged 'musicals'

Let’s take a moment to celebrate the recent court victory in California with a lovely little scene of queer domesticity from Calamity Jane.

The thing I find unbelievable about this musical (and this number in particular) is the idea that it would ever be possible to see it as anything but a lesbian love story.  Sure, there are references to men at the very end of the song (and also the disappointment of seeing the delightfully butch Calam given a girly makeover), but on the whole this is a song about two women making a life together, hand-painted door and all.  Of course, there was no law in Deadwood, so their marriage would’ve been as legal as anyone’s.

I was sad to hear about Lena Horne this morning, although if anybody had a good long run, it was her.  Here she is with Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, from Stormy Weather.  I figured the title song would be everywhere today, so I went with “I Can’t Give You Anything But Love.” If I mention she was easily one of the most beautiful women of the 20th Century, I don’t mean to minimize the fact that she also had one of the most beautiful voices of the 20th Century.

This week’s number finds a gorgeous jumpsuit-clad Jane Russell on an ill-advised quest for romance in a gay gym.  This ought to run off any lingering masculinists brought here by the Heavy Metal takedown…

For this week, here’s Dick Powell and Ruby Keeler, along with Billy Barty and a vast chorus, doing a classy Busby Berkeley number about fooling around in public.

I’m trying to avoid too much critic-talk on these MMM posts, but I have to take a second to mention  what an interesting picture this number paints of issues relating to sexual consent at the time of its creation.  It’s clear that male pleasure comes first, but the ideal seems to be that the woman will enjoy it just as much, but both partners (though especially the woman) are expected to pretend to disapprove.  When the woman really is into what’s going on, the faux-resistance can be experienced as a fun game (as it seems to be between Powell and Keeler here), but obviously if a woman genuinely didn’t want to, that’s where things would get disastrous pretty quickly.  I think that the issues on display here are the same as in a number of Betty Boop cartoons, as well as the song “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” (arguing about the implications of that song has become a Holiday tradition across the feminist internet).

I’ve always found that nothing helps start the week on a positive note quite as well as a great old fashioned upbeat musical number.  Even though I’ve shared it in other venues before, I can’t think of a better clip to start with than “Jumpin’ Jive” from Stormy Weather, by Cab Calloway and his orchestra, featuring the genuinely mindboggling dancing of the Nicholas Brothers.