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1 results

  • Chapter 16 - Women, Gender, and Sexuality

  • from Part III - Composition, Creation, and Reception
  • Edited by Elizabeth A. Wells, Mount Allison University, Canada
  • Book:
    Leonard Bernstein in Context
    Published online:
    06 April 2024
    Print publication:
    28 March 2024, pp 131-139

  • Summary

    As a socially and politically engaged composer, Leonard Bernstein created works for the stage that dramatize and explicate the changing status of women, gender relations, and heteronormative sexuality in the society around him. His Trouble in Tahiti (1951), for all its parodic hilarity, constitutes a powerful critique of bourgeois marriage under McCarthyism and establishes the garden as a recurring trope in his subsequent theatrical compositions. The woman-authored Wonderful Town (1953) turns a nostalgic eye on working women in 1930s Greenwich Village, and, elsewhere in Manhattan, West Side Story (1957) both advances the garden trope and gives us Anita, the wise and powerful Latina. In Trouble in Tahiti’s sequel, A Quiet Place (1983) the garden returns musically and textually to prompt a loving reconciliation between non-binary characters and the family patriarch, brokered by a woman.