Jake Johnson is a writer, pianist, vocal coach, and associate professor of musicology at the University of Oklahoma. He is the author of Mormons, Musical Theater, and Belonging in America (2019) and Lying in the Middle: Musical Theater and Belief at the Heart of America (2021). The many strands of his scholarship and creative practice are reflected in his writing and are especially present in this unique study of the musical and its relationship to grief. Unstaged Grief: Musicals and Mourning in Midcentury America presents both a cultural and musicological look at how Americans approached the film musical of the 1960s. Situated as part musical analysis, part cultural history, and part history of the musical, Johnson provides readers with a multiplicity of new lenses through which to view a genre that is often presented as a superficial, commercial enterprise.Johnson's scholarship has gained a reputation for challenging our assumptions of the musical as a genre. This book is no exception, drawing readers in with an invitation to examine vulnerability coupled with portraits of both personal and collective grieving. His unique overview, which brings together personal and scholarly lenses, takes the reader into the world of the screen musical, drawing a parallel to the Western film. As Johnson demonstrates, screens make the musicals of the 1960s feel both “immediate and distant.” He states: “Grief is an interconnected and complex network of experiences, feelings, practices, and performances” that creates an overlapping “pathway” to community for American audiences of the musical (x). The unusual structure of the book draws readers in, employing Kübler-Ross's categories of grief as a methodology for guiding us through case studies of the film musical at a critical moment in America's cultural and political history in the 1960s. He notes that Kübler-Ross's On Death and Dying (1969) sparked new ideas on grief, emerging at the same time as the Golden Age musical.Johnson argues that grief manifests as a messy entity in weird, meandering ways and that while the musical appears to be a utopian escape on the surface, it conceals grief beneath. As he writes, “Whatever the world we grieve, musicals grieve, too” (5). His methodology entails readings of images, texts, and musical analysis placed in sharp relief against each other and the historical events of the time period. Johnson's interlocuters, which he calls “thought partners,” include prominent writers and poets including Anne Sexton, Roland Barthes, and Time magazine, bringing strands of contemporaneous culture to bear on five musical films that have often been viewed as escapist. Certainly, he builds on the groundbreaking scholarship of Stacy Wolf, Jim Lovensheimer, Dominic McHugh, Jessica Sternfeld, Elizabeth Wollman, and others who have provided new perspectives on musical theater that have both pushed the boundaries of our understanding while remaining historically grounded. However, Johnson's approach moves beyond these foundations. He examines five different films not as reflections of American optimism, but as complex responses to modern life and the horrors wrought by technology: Evening Primrose (1966), Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (1954), The Singing Nun (1966), the remake of State Fair (1962), and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (1968).Chapter 1, “Frozen Figures,” examines the first stage of grief, denial and isolation, as a means of understanding an ill-fated television musical written early in Sondheim's career. Sondheim's musical Evening Primrose centers on “social nihilists” hiding as mannequins in plain sight. The production featured Anthony Perkins in the role of Charles Snell and Charmian Carr as Ella Harkins. The cultural backdrop of this musical is the abject horror of modern life as an “immobilizing force,” at the height of the nuclear era. Life magazine's 1955 article on nuclear testing outside Las Vegas is an eerie parallel to a story in which the protagonist is transformed into a mannequin. Johnson further notes the connections to horror both with Perkins being cast in Psycho (1960) and with Sondheim and Perkins cowriting the screenplay for the 1972 thriller The Last of Sheila. He also brings to the fore resonances with Charmian Carr, noting that her casting in The Sound of Music alters audiences’ perception of her character in Evening Primrose. The music in Charles's musical numbers goes nowhere and so too does Charles; he falls in love with Ella, who is enslaved to Mrs. Monday, as Sondheim's music provides a meandering and oddly nostalgic underpinning. Both the character portrayals and Sondheim's analysis leave the audience with a profound sense of isolation.Chapter 2, “Anger,” brings us a reconsideration of the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer musical film Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (1954), not as a portrait of dated gender stereotypes and athletic dancing but as a representation of grieving American masculinity. Johnson makes a compelling case for the seven Pontipee brothers, who are haunted by the idea of rehabilitation, suggesting that they are “men who grieve the consequences of survival” on the other side of the Korean War and World War II (38). In the film, the audience views these men through multiple lenses, including a likening of Adam Pontipee to religious figures of the era like Billy Graham. This connection to the rise of evangelical religious communities in the United States is made apparent in the revivalist number “Sobbin’ Women.” Women in Johnson's analysis are scarred by the same cultural climate, becoming subjugated by grieving men who felt they lost their place in society. Although this brings a much darker reading to the musical, it is interesting to reconsider a classic musical film not as a portrayal of nostalgia but as one with hidden layers of sadness and existential struggle.The book's third chapter, “Bargaining,” begins with a stark reminder of the 1960s intellectual discourse on the clash between secularism and faith, encapsulated by John Lennon's song “God,” which rejected religion outright. This tension was foregrounded in Johnson's next case study, The Singing Nun, which displays the reckoning of identity the Catholic Church faced after Vatican II. Johnson notes the similarity to The Sound of Music in the portrayal of both protagonists as separate from yet deeply embedded in their gendered roles. As he states, “Both Maria and Sister Ann arrive in the corrupt city from an idyllic rural world, their gendered purity wrinkled by an instrument tokenizing the comfort of everyday people” (65). His analysis raises questions not only about the identity of Catholics seeking their own place in the world but also about those who wrestle with the very concept of religion writ large. Other examples he brings to the discussion, including Leonard Bernstein's Mass (1972), suggest that works of this era question both religion and the concept of art itself. Films like The Singing Nun bring audiences face to face with the idea of bargaining for a new world, an “attempt to postpone” the inevitable problems in life and death, and like the nuns featured so prominently here, they are caught in a world between the sacred and the secular.His fourth chapter, “Depression,” explores the concept of “good grief” in the 1962 remake of State Fair, tainted with the trials of the post-World War II years. As Johnson argues, “Cultural artifacts enter into our imagination utterly burdened by the world as it is” (82). Even the most lighthearted musical film in this era brings with it the layered knowledge and collective memories surrounding it. This collective memory is significant. For Johnson, grief is not something that is individual but rather “the picture that we put together in the end shows a conspiracy in the most literal sense—that American grief is something we conspire, that is, we breathe together” (82). Collective memory is the fuel for collective depression and longing, as seen through the eyes of the family in State Fair.In Johnson's analysis, the film portrays the emotional dichotomy of nostalgia and clinging to dreams of one's past and the push toward modernity and progress. The parents in State Fair are a “rustic foil” for American progress, while the children choose modernity despite, or perhaps because of, their overwhelming sense of depression. Margy, for instance, is in a perpetual state of grief throughout the film. The 1960s remake is certainly more progressive, including a focus on the sexually adventurous characters of the children, mirrored in Richard Rodgers's song (with his own lyrics) “This Isn't Heaven,” which incidentally is another layer of grief, having been composed entirely by Rodgers after Oscar Hammerstein's untimely death.Johnson also points out the philosophical aspects of the film, which further darken the picturesque portrayal of American life. As Margy's love interest Jerry states, “You know Schopenhauer says we live all our lives in pain—the pain of wanting something—and when we relieve some pain we think that's enjoyment, when it's really just relief.” Perhaps Rodgers, through the eyes of Jerry, waxes philosophical here, but the point is well taken. The grief of a modernity not yet fulfilled and also increasingly violent, dangerous, and disconcerting, even to those in rustic America, is a common thread pulling on American popular culture of the 1960s (97). Clearly, this version is a far cry from the optimism of the original 1943 film, which Hammerstein defended to critics proclaiming, “Someone's got to keep saying life is worth living . . . because it's true,” whereas the revised film portrays the grief of everyday Americans laid bare (98).Johnson's final chapter explores the last stage of grief, “Acceptance,” through the lens of the deus ex machina in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, based on Ian Fleming's novel and adapted by Roald Dahl. In Johnson's view, this film demonstrates the acceptance of a world without happy endings and the recognition that circumstances are often beyond our control; it is achieved through the deus ex machina, that mythical, otherworldly “hand of God” that plucks mortals out of one situation and places them in another, although the plot does not always resolve with a happy ending. The technological advances of the twentieth century brought as much grief as they did joy, often fueling unspeakable violence. This violence is an undercurrent in many films of the late 1960s, including the 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey. Much like the fanciful science fiction aspects of Kubrick's film, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang combines fantasy with the darkness of loss, portraying a widowed young father, Caractacus Potts, in the final stage of grief as he continues to invent absurd creations and parent his two young children. Johnson draws parallels between technology in the film and the advances of the late 1960s. The car is likened to the moon landing, as he notes “both vehicles launching humans into worlds farther than the eye could ever hope to spy” (106). Even at points in the film where technology provides escape, such as the Potts family's getaway from the battle with Baron Bomburst, the ruler of Vulgaria, it still poses a threat to stability.Throughout his analysis, Johnson includes other examples of both grieving and struggling fathers who work for the greater good, including To Kill a Mockingbird (1962) and The Andy Griffith Show (1960–1968). He notes that even examples where the father is not widowed but simply absent, such as in Mary Poppins (1964), require a feminine, mother figure to rescue both the father and his family. In these examples, as in life, the ending brought by death is perhaps not final but instead provides those who experience grief to move forward and to redefine their place as fathers and creators. As Johnson argues, though these endings are often terrifying in their own way, “endings are not simply scary. They are scary gifts. They give clarity and definition to what otherwise sneaks by unobserved” (123). Perhaps, in this assessment, the acceptance of grief is the driving force behind the triumph of the fatherly wills against the evils of technology and the enemy at home and abroad.Fittingly, a book that explores so many narratives of grief and our cultural responses to loss concludes with a “Codetta” that provides a glimpse of hope. As Johnson shows, loss is as inevitable in the musical as it is in life; musicals, like stage plays, songs, novels, or any other aspect of popular culture, serve as mirrors in which we see ourselves and the world around us. Many of these films employ the form of the Golden Age musical, itself with a complex history, as a framework that allows audiences to engage with darkness in ways that are more accessible and relatable than other artforms. Johnson's analysis pushes our understanding of not only the musical but of the boundaries of scholarly writing itself, skillfully demonstrating that conversational, sometimes personal, narratives can be combined with scholarly and cultural interlocuters for a vibrant, meaningful exploration.
Arianne Johnson Quinn (Wed,) studied this question.