‘Not just for gays anymore’: men, masculinities and musical theatre

This thesis explores how the changing masculinities of the 21\(^s\)\(^t\) century have affected how young men connect to musical theatre as a genre that has been stereotypically seen as gay. The investigation is first located in the theoretical framework of masculinities, utilising the concepts of the male sex role, hegemonic masculinities and inclusive masculinity to chart how the performance of the male gender has changed over the past century. The project then adopts an empirical approach to a group of 161 men and 25 women, establishing a methodological framework for correlating sexual orientation with attitudes towards musical theatre. There is a further honing of this methodology through the adoption of Jenifer Toksvig's \(The\) \(Fairytale\) \(Moment\) exercise, which identifies how each participant connects to narrative through a core emotional drive. Finally, this data is tested through three case studies of how individual participants connect to \(Les\) \(Misérables\), \(Wicked\) and \(Soho\) \(Cinders\), concluding that the emotional content of musical theatre is now as desirable to straight men as it is to women and LGBT men