#wayne koestenbaum

[previouslysad]

Wayne Koestenbaum, My Lover, the Rabbi

[ourstrangeduet]

“Opera has the power to warn you that you have wasted your life. You haven't acted on your desires. You've suffered a stunted, vicarious existence. You've silenced your passions. The volume, height, depth, lushness, and excess of operatic utterance reveal, by contrast, how small your gestures have been until now, how impoverished your physicality; you have only used a fraction of your bodily endowment, and your throat is closed.”

— Wayne Koestenbaum, The Queen’s Throat: Opera, Homosexuality, and the Mystery of Desire.

[asoftepiloguemylove]

Cameron Awkward-Rich THEORY OF MOTION (4): ANOTHER MIDDLE-CLASS BLACK KID TRIES TO NAME IT (via @sweatermuppet) // Wayne Koestenbaum "Figure;" My 1980s and Other Essays // Mary Lambert "Why I Slept With Makeup on for Five Years;" Shame Is an Ocean I Swim Across // Keaton St. James DYSPHORIA CREEK // Richard Siken "Birds Hover the Trampled Field;" War of the Foxes (via @newvision) // Greta Moran Slow First

[mervynbunter]

Wayne Koestenbaum, Humiliation (2011)

[pneumaticpresence]

Pleasure, for Harpo, lies in transformation for transformation's sake. Why not be thrifty, and make use of every inanimate scrap? (Gertrude Stein's credo: Use everything.) Harpo takes part in the grand tradition of art (from Marcel Duchamp to John Cage to Dieter Roth, and beyond) that recycles—or transubstantiates—debris.

At the hotel's registration desk, Harpo sniffs the telephone, scrutinizes it, tries to interpret it, to cozy up to it, as if it were human. Then he chews the phone and looks toward the camera; his eyes, alight with pleasure, signify it tastes good or else I've accomplished another transformation; I've metamorphosed phone into food. The ink jar, like a precious thurible, glistens; pinkie in air, he drinks. Harpo's face, a scientist's, evaluates. With a receptivity to the strangeness of the ordinary as radical as Thoreau's or Wittgenstein's, Harpo treats existence as a sequence of experiments, none fatal. He puts down the ink jar, smiles, and nods. Job well done, another foodstuff pilfered, another item of garbage transformed into treasure.

When Chico enters, Harpo's face remains immobile—arrested by panic—but his alert eyes try to figure out whether the universe is sanely functioning. Hyperawareness of atmospheric dangers is an opportunist's, a paranoid's, or a traumatized soul's—a shtetl mentality, transmuted to Paramount.

—Wayne Koestenbaum, The Anatomy of Harpo Marx

[onenakedfarmer]

WAYNE KOESTENBAUM The Queen’s Throat: Opera, Homosexuality, and the Mystery of Desire

Opera has the power to warn you that you have wasted your life. You haven’t acted on your desires. You’ve suffered a stunted, vicarious existence. You’ve silenced your passions. The volume, height, depth, lushness, and excess of operatic utterance reveal, by contrast, how small your gestures have been until now, how impoverished your physicality; you have only used a fraction of your bodily endowment, and your throat is closed.

[unpopularwiththepopulace]

The English premiere of Rebecca the Musical: navigating insatiability and treasure hunting musical lesbianism in the theatre

“The curiosity is insatiable, and the pursuit of such knowledge is a spiritual exercise, demeaning but also secretly ennobling.” The Queen’s

Propelled chiefly by last year’s London production, I have written a (rather) long form piece to do with Rebecca the Musical. Though focusing mainly on this eventual and heavily expectant premiere of the English production of the musical, discussion relates also to the original and other iterations of the show, and musicals more generally, too.

The piece is anchored by the central theme of insatiability while looking in turn at:

the process of tracing the evasive histories of character representations and theatrical productions over many decades – including also flickered and largely forgotten records of the play and opera forms of Rebecca, and the “apparitional”, equivocal lens that queer female sexuality is handled with across large spans of time

decoding evidence of sparse, if periodically rather dire, female queerness in theatrical, musical contexts – guided by the disciples of dykeish dissatisfaction in the musical’s character of Mrs Danvers or the story’s primary author of Daphne du Maurier herself

considering what it means to exist as an audience member responding in situ to (principally female) performers with thrilling voices, both in and outside an auditorium, and the delicate but frequently under-discussed predicament of queer female diva devotion.

Take a look if you're interested!

In further expansion of photographic documentation of each of the examined stage-based, theatrical iterations of Rebecca, more images are presented below.

Discussion originates from the existence of the 2023 English premiere production of Rebecca the Musical at the Charing Cross Theatre in London, where cast principals included Kara Lane as Mrs Danvers (alternated by Melanie Bright), Lauren Jones as I (the new Mrs de Winter), and Richard Carson as Maxim. Photos by myself.

The first stage production of Rebecca arose much earlier, concerning the 1939 play by the same name at the Queen’s Theatre on Shaftesbury Avenue (now The Sondheim Theatre). Daphne du Maurier herself wrote its script. Margaret Rutherford played Mrs Danvers, Celia Johnson was the new Mrs de Winter, Owen Nares appeared as Maxim. The Queen’s Theatre was bombed in 1940 during WWII at the time of Rebecca’s occupancy, becoming the first theatre in London to be hit by a wartime bomb, and bringing to an immediate premature close the show’s successful run - and highlighting earlier associations of this story's connection to tumultuous tales and dramatic events in histories of it's staging, as the attempted primary stagings of the English musical iteration would later return to.

Photos from this first theatrical, London production include those by Angus McBean from a periodical spread entitled ‘Mystery and Murder in Stately Cornish Home - Dramatic Moments of Du Maurier’s “Rebecca.”’, published in The Sketch (vol. 190), May 1940.

The play also then appeared on the road in America, and subsequently on Broadway in 1945 at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre for a fleeting 20 performances; and of this entity, record remains even more scarce. Cast principals included: Florence Reed (Mrs Danvers), Diana Barrymore (the new Mrs de Winter), Bramwell Fletcher (Maxim).

The next and last distinct adaptation of Rebecca to appear on stage before the musical was the 1983 opera production devised for Opera North, with music by Wilfred Josephs and libretto by Edward Marsh. It toured the UK before being revived briefly in 1988 and never seen again. Cast principals included: Ann Howard as Mrs Danvers, with Gillian Sullivan and later Anne Williams-King as the new Mrs de Winter, and Peter Knapp as Maxim.

Finding these few, historic photographs in obscure newspapers or consulting original scripts and librettos, for instance, in libraries and archives during this effortful and active treasure-hunting felt special and rewarding. But possible reconstruction of these stage iterations in the present day is only incompletely possible, because of reduced ease of access to or apparent remaining visceral evidence of a visceral art form.

The frustration in trying to seek out these apparitional traces not only foregrounds the importance of maintaining accessible, comprehensive primary records within the theatre, but mirrors also the act of trying to seek out records of queer female sexuality across history in works of literature, cinema or theatre, as a process typified by a similarly effortful navigation of apparitional erasure. This facet connects with the notion that consideration around Rebecca entangles with a web of insatiability or dykeish dissatisfaction, a web that stretches from this erasure and liminality of representation, to character constructions within the work – including of its infamous housekeeper, Mrs Danvers, to contextual backgrounds like those of the story’s primary author itself, Daphne du Maurier.

The entity of Rebecca, then, across its many themes, productions and decades, is uniquely useful in the way it can in turn encompass and facilitate explorations of these many facets – being capable of simultaneously holding consideration of these expansive webs of documentation, erasure or dykeish dissatisfaction that can be found lurking in historical margins, as well as also the contrasting luminous energy that can be produced in the present in association with the musical, as physical audiences interact with and respond to the material of the show and its performers within theatres in real time. These considerations have transferrable applicability beyond this singular context of this particular show to more general notions of theatrical pieces and the practice of theatregoing, too, as they foreground the question of how audience members respond to, process, and interact with shows; and, as a matter of far less common discussion or scholarly writing on the subject of diva devotion, how female fans specifically navigate the complex predicament of queer, female, performance-driven high regard.

[parmandil]

Stern aesthetician Adorno condemned gay Tchaikovsky for sentimentality; but ignore Adorno, for Tchaikovsky at his most purple, in Tatyana’s “Letter Scene”, from Eugene Onegin (1879), justifies “sick” emotions. How can my sexuality be sick if lush violins reinforce it?

Wayne Koestenbaum, The Queen’s Throat