Theatre Journal

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...