[.ca] The Changing Room: Sex, Drag and Theatre (ISBN 0415159865)

It's Not a Drag!:
Laurence Senelick's The Changing Room is an entertaining and well-written exploration of the "inherent sexuality of all performance, the ability of the live theatre to construct gender variants unencountered anywhere else, and an abiding 'queerness' in the most authentic types of theatre...." Scholars will mine the rich lode of material found in the text and the footnotes. Less exacting readers, including this reviewer, will find the book a curious admixture of fascinating, funny, and illuminating. I am still smiling at Senelick's description of the untimely passage of Bert Savoy, an entertainer with whom i was not familiar: "Rumour ran that he had exclaimed 'Mercy, ain't Miss God cutting up something awful!' just before he was struck by lightning. The book is illustrated by numerous photographs which are equally interesting. The Changing Room's greatest accomplishment is to synthesize many centuries of material in a manner which places our contemporary experience in perspective. I ordered the book to read about an entertainer who particularly intrigues me. I ended up spending the weekend reading the whole book. It is without any reservation that I heartily recommend The Changing Room to all readers.

Cool topic, but as enjoyable as reading a phone book:
Drag performances tend to be funny and light. Of course, studying gender and studying gender in relation to theatre warrants a "heavier" reading of such performances..... But STILL, this book is as fat as a binder and is as dense as a computer manual.... Nothing you could read from cover to cover -- and I think that this would have been a lot more fun.