Reviewed by:

• Mormons, Musical Theater, and Belonging in America by Jake Johnson
• David Mason

Jake Johnson’s book’s most intriguing element is its embodied performance theory. The same element of the book also underpins what is most frustrating about the book. The book’s challenging assertion that voice—the sound, the very vibration of voice— affects people is the great promise that the book does not quite realize. The theory certainly matters, and not only to our understanding of musical theatre. We were long ago seduced into regarding theatrical performance as simply a version of a text, to be read and understood, so that our discourse about theatre of all sorts has struggled to account for bodies and for what they might do to each other in shared space and time. Johnson’s book does offer something valuable to the effort to “get” theatre as a thing that rests in bodies more than in minds. The book’s incomplete conclusions about such things as vocal vicariousness are nevertheless compelling enough to direct further scholarship.

Readers should be aware that the book says very little about the recent musical The Book of Mormon. Those who are interested in a detailed analysis of this recent nexus of Mormonism and musical theatre will not find satisfaction here. Johnson’s last chapter provides something, in this vein, with its sharp demonstration of musical allusion in The Book of Mormon. But the book offers something much better than another take on this particular Mormon/musical phenomenon. The sensation that has been The Book of Mormon has clouded the history of Mormonism and musical theatre. For one thing, Johnson shows that Broadway has been lampooning Mormonism since 1917. More importantly, this short book does quite a bit to recover and to re-present the history of Mormon/musical entanglement. As a teaser, I expect that few people know that in the mid-1940s the LDS church tried to sign none other than Kurt Weill to write the music for what the church imagined would be its own Oklahoma! accomplishment. The church had to settle for young, LDS-Mormon composer Crawford Gates, but it did engage Weill’s own recommendation as the lyricist for its Promised Valley (74). Johnson’s book shows how Mormonism, from its origin in the mid-nineteenth century, grew with the very roots of American musical theatre—in racist minstrelsy, operetta, and the so-called integrated musical. The book’s broad historical argument is that Mormonism and musical theatre “share a historical trajectory that begins with the self-fashioning of Jacksonian ideology” (26).

Running through the book’s always-surprising history is a theoretical claim that voices do things, and that Mormonism has always depended on what voices do. Early on, Johnson identifies his approach with “the burgeoning field of voice studies,” which probably resonates with musicologists a little differently than it does with me (18). His various charges throughout the book that “the vocalic body can actually reshape listener’s [sic] perception of the body out of which the voice emanates” sounds unmistakably to me like performance studies (36). And Johnson’s vocabulary confirms the book’s concern with performance, as understood since Austin: “The Mormon prerogative that ‘without our history we have nothing’ needs to be considered a performative statement rather than simply partisan boasting. A more accurate wording might be, ‘Without the continual performance and constant revisiting of the one particular historical narrative we claim as our own, we have nothing’” (116; emphasis in original). But Johnson is more musicologist than performance theorist. On the whole, the text uses the terms theatre and performance and their cognates interchangeably. The book’s theoretical aims might have been strengthened by some attention to current performance theory, including those foundational texts such as Davis and Postlewait’s Theatricality and Taylor’s Performance that articulate differences among terms in an ever-evolving field.

Semantics aside, Johnson’s most compelling performance claim is undermined by his reliance upon a dubious historical illustration. Johnson argues throughout that Mormonism has always depended on vocal mimicry and vicariousness, and...

审核人：

• 摩门教徒、音乐剧和归属于美国，杰克·约翰逊
• 大卫梅森

杰克约翰逊的书中最有趣的元素是其体现的表演理论。这本书的相同元素也支持了这本书最令人沮丧的地方。这本书对声音的具有挑战性的断言——声音，振动声音——影响人们是这本书没有完全实现的伟大承诺。这个理论当然很重要，而且不仅关系到我们对音乐剧的理解。很久以前，我们被引诱将戏剧表演视为文本的简单版本，以供阅读和理解，因此我们关于各种戏剧的论述一直在努力解释身体以及它们在共享空间中可能对彼此做些什么和时间。约翰逊的书确实为努力“获得”戏剧提供了一些有价值的东西，因为它更多地依赖于身体而不是头脑。这本书关于声音替代性等问题的不完整结论仍然足以指导进一步的研究。

读者应该知道，这本书对最近的音乐剧《摩门教之书》几乎没有提及。那些有兴趣详细分析摩门教和音乐剧最近的关系的人不会在这里找到满足感。在这方面，约翰逊的最后一章提供了一些东西，它尖锐地展示了《摩尔门经》中的音乐典故。但这本书提供的东西比另一种对这种特殊的摩门教/音乐现象的看法要好得多。《摩尔门经》的轰动给摩门教和音乐剧的历史蒙上了一层阴影。一方面，约翰逊表明百老汇自 1917 年以来一直在讽刺摩门教。更重要的是，这本短书在恢复和重新呈现摩门教/音乐纠葛的历史方面做了很多工作。作为预告片，我预计很少有人知道，在 1940 年代中期，LDS 教会试图签下库尔特·威尔（Kurt Weill）来为教会想象中的俄克拉荷马州写音乐！成就。教会不得不接受年轻的摩门教派作曲家克劳福德·盖茨，但它确实接受了威尔自己的推荐作为其应许谷的作词人(74)。约翰逊的书展示了摩门教起源于 19 世纪中叶是如何随着美国音乐剧的根源而发展起来的——在种族主义吟游诗人、轻歌剧和所谓的综合音乐剧中。这本书广泛的历史论据是摩门教和音乐剧“有着共同的历史轨迹，始于杰克逊主义意识形态的自我塑造”（26）。

贯穿这本书总是令人惊讶的历史是一个理论主张，即声音做事，摩门教一直依赖于声音做什么。早期，约翰逊将他的方法与“新兴的声音研究领域”联系起来，这可能与音乐学家产生的共鸣与我的共鸣略有不同（18）。他在整本书中的各种指控“发声体实际上可以重塑听众[原文如此] 对发出声音的身体的感知”，这在我看来就像表演研究（36）一样。约翰逊的词汇证实了这本书对性能的关注，正如奥斯汀以来所理解的那样：“摩门教的特权，即‘没有我们的历史，我们一无所有’需要被视为一种表演性声明，而不是简单的党派吹嘘。一个更准确的措辞可能是，“如果不不断地表现和不断地重新审视我们自称是我们自己的特定历史叙述，我们将一无所有”（116；强调原文）。但约翰逊更像是音乐学家而不是表演理论家。总的来说，本文交替使用了戏剧和表演这两个术语及其同源词。本书的理论目标可能会因对当前表演理论的一些关注而得到加强，包括戴维斯和波斯特莱维特的戏剧性等基础文本和泰勒的表现，它阐明了不断发展的领域中术语之间的差异。

撇开语义不谈，约翰逊最令人信服的表现主张被他对可疑历史例证的依赖所破坏。约翰逊自始至终认为，摩门教一直依赖于声音的模仿和替代，并且......