‘You wanna hear the real story?’ (Mis)remembering masculinity in Clint Eastwood's adaptation of Jersey Boys

Whitfield, S. K. (2017) ‘You wanna hear the real story?’ (Mis)remembering masculinity in Clint Eastwood's adaptation of Jersey Boys. In: Twenty-First Century Musicals: From Stage to Screen. Routledge, London. ISBN 9781138648906 (hardback) 9781138648890 (paperback) 9781315626123 (e-book)

Abstract

This chapter considers the particular version of masculinity that the film presents, and argues that the choices made in moving from stage to screen have exacerbated the work's underlying problems in its presentation of gender, sexuality and race. Clint Eastwood's film exacerbates the problems in the original text, and both stage and film version rely on the misrepresentation of homosexuality as inseparable from camp, and as camp as inseparable from theatrical flamboyance. Eastwood's film almost entirely succeeds in pulling Jersey Boys away from the risky business of theatricality, until all of a sudden it can bear it no longer. The absence of African-American voices in a story about a musical form dominated by black groups is constantly referenced by 'slips' in Jersey Boys, slips which serve to highlight a racism so well established and accepted in the musical that is has largely drawn little comment.

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