s03roman

Faculty Travel Report: David Roman
“What Good is Sitting Alone in Your Room?”

Thanks to the Center for Feminist Research Travel Research Grant I was able to travel last summer to New York City to continue my research on women and cabaret. This research will form the basis of the last chapter of my book on contemporary American performance, Now and Then: Performance, History, and American Culture. The chapter examines women and cabaret and focuses on how cabaret becomes an embodied archive of American cultural history, a place where women, especially older women, perform the history of their lives in the theatre and, by extension, society. In New York I was able to see two cabaret acts that were directly relevant to my research: Mary Cleere Haran’s Falling in Love with Love, her tribute to Richard Rogers (of Rogers and Hart fame) at the storied Oak Room in the Algonquin Hotel, and Barbara Cook’s Mostly Sondheim, her tribute to Stephen Sondheim at Lincoln Center’s Vivian Beaumont Theatre. I also used this visit to return to see the Broadway revival of Kander and Ebb’s 1966 musical Cabaret. I had seen the original Broadway cast of the revival when it first opened a few years back. But I needed to return in light of my new interest in the topic.

Generally, cabaret performance is understood in two ways. The traditional take on cabaret imagines cabaret as the liminal space of urban nightlife, a location that licenses decadence and excess in periods of ideological uniformity and control. This sociological position was made enormously popular by Kander and Ebb’s Cabaret. Its primary focus remains on cabaret’s audience and venue. The second way cabaret is imagined is as a showcase for popular song. Cabaret performers sing standards from someone else’s songbook. (Barbara Cook Sings Mostly Sondheim and Mary Cleere Haran’s Falling in Love with Love fit this model.) This position promotes the idea of a musical canon and generally trumpets the work of male composers. Neither of these positions accounts for the actual centrality of the performer herself. I argue that women performing in cabaret perform a narrative of their own careers in the theatre, that cabaret functions as a kind of autobiography of women’s individual struggle in the performing arts, and that the performance of this personal narrative functions as a form of theatre history. These cabaret performances serve multiple pedagogical functions to the larger culture. They keep alive a nearly forgotten history of American theatre as they provide the historical context necessary for us to understand contemporary performance. They also help track the shifting ideologies of gender, race, and class in the United States.

Drawing on my research, I am scheduled to deliver lectures on women and cabaret at the annual conference of the American Studies Association, the Modern Language Association, and The American Society for Theatre Research. I am indebted to the Center for Feminist Research for supporting my work and for their broader commitment to the critical study of gender and the performing arts.


	back to index

Faculty Travel Report: David Roman “What Good is Sitting Alone in Your Room?” Thanks to the Center for Feminist Research Travel Research Grant I was able to travel last summer to New York City to continue my research on women and cabaret. This research will form the basis of the last chapter of my book on contemporary American performance, Now and Then: Performance, History, and American Culture. The chapter examines women and cabaret and focuses on how cabaret becomes an embodied archive of American cultural history, a place where women, especially older women, perform the history of their lives in the theatre and, by extension, society. In New York I was able to see two cabaret acts that were directly relevant to my research: Mary Cleere Haran’s Falling in Love with Love, her tribute to Richard Rogers (of Rogers and Hart fame) at the storied Oak Room in the Algonquin Hotel, and Barbara Cook’s Mostly Sondheim, her tribute to Stephen Sondheim at Lincoln Center’s Vivian Beaumont Theatre. I also used this visit to return to see the Broadway revival of Kander and Ebb’s 1966 musical Cabaret. I had seen the original Broadway cast of the revival when it first opened a few years back. But I needed to return in light of my new interest in the topic. Generally, cabaret performance is understood in two ways. The traditional take on cabaret imagines cabaret as the liminal space of urban nightlife, a location that licenses decadence and excess in periods of ideological uniformity and control. This sociological position was made enormously popular by Kander and Ebb’s Cabaret. Its primary focus remains on cabaret’s audience and venue. The second way cabaret is imagined is as a showcase for popular song. Cabaret performers sing standards from someone else’s songbook. (Barbara Cook Sings Mostly Sondheim and Mary Cleere Haran’s Falling in Love with Love fit this model.) This position promotes the idea of a musical canon and generally trumpets the work of male composers. Neither of these positions accounts for the actual centrality of the performer herself. I argue that women performing in cabaret perform a narrative of their own careers in the theatre, that cabaret functions as a kind of autobiography of women’s individual struggle in the performing arts, and that the performance of this personal narrative functions as a form of theatre history. These cabaret performances serve multiple pedagogical functions to the larger culture. They keep alive a nearly forgotten history of American theatre as they provide the historical context necessary for us to understand contemporary performance. They also help track the shifting ideologies of gender, race, and class in the United States. Drawing on my research, I am scheduled to deliver lectures on women and cabaret at the annual conference of the American Studies Association, the Modern Language Association, and The American Society for Theatre Research. I am indebted to the Center for Feminist Research for supporting my work and for their broader commitment to the critical study of gender and the performing arts.