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Broadway has body issues.\nWhat is a Broadway Body? Broadway has long preserved the ideology of the "Broadway Body": the hyper-fit, exceptionally able, triple-threat performer who represents how Broadway musicals favor certain kinds of bodies. Casting is always a political act, situated within a power structure that gives preference to the Broadway Body.\nIn\xa0Broadway Bodies: A Critical History of Conformity\xa0(Oxford UP, 2023), author Ryan Donovan explores how ability, sexuality, and size intersect with gender, race, and ethnicity in casting and performance. To understand these intersectional relationships, he poses a series of questions: Why did\xa0A Chorus Line, a show that sought to individuate dancers, inevitably make dancers indistinguishable? How does the use of fat suits in musicals like\xa0Dreamgirls\xa0and\xa0Hairspray\xa0stigmatize fatness? What were the political implications of casting two straight actors as the gay couple in\xa0La Cage aux Folles\xa0in 1983? How did deaf actors change the sound of musicals in Deaf West\u2019s Broadway revivals? Whose bodies does Broadway cast and whose does it cast aside?\nIn answering these questions,\xa0Broadway Bodies\xa0tells a history of Broadway\u2019s inclusion of various forms of embodied difference while revealing its simultaneous ambivalence toward non-conforming bodies.\nLearn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices\nSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/gender-studies