The Normativity of the Extraordinary: Musical Theatre on the Page and on the Stage

Musicals communicate in multiple semiotic languages at once—music and lyrics; speech; blocking and dance; and set, costume, lighting, and sound design. Characters exist on the page and on the stage, portrayed by actors whose bodies and voices carry their own meanings. It is in performance that musicals reveal culturally determined, paradoxical notions of ability, reducing disabled characters to simplistic stereotypes while valorizing the exceptionally able performer, both the abnormality of its most celebrated stars and the hyperability of the triple-threat performers in the ensemble. Disability studies scholar Samuel Yates notes this duality, writing, “An able body is at the center of musical theatre performance yet disabled characters are everywhere in the musical theatre genre.” This essay takes up both parts of Yates’s claims as it examines the ideological work of disability in musicals as well as the requisite freakish, exceptionally able and “talented” body and voice of the performer.

Duke Scholars

Author Ryan M Donovan Theater Studies