Published in Studies in Musical Theatre 17.1, pp. 59-61.

Samuel Yates’s review examines Sarah Taylor Ellis’s Doing the Time Warp: Strange Temporalities and Musical Theatre, a study that reimagines the excesses of musical theatre—its camp, rhythm, dance, and song—through the lens of queer temporalities. Ellis proposes “strange temporalities” such as syncopated time, ragtime, and ecstatic time as frameworks that unsettle linear narratives and integration theory, reframing the musical’s dramaturgical and political work. Her eclectic archive, ranging from Rent and Company to Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog and A Strange Loop, demonstrates how musicals generate alternate structures of feeling across stage, film, television, and digital performance. While the book’s most compelling interventions lie in its readings of ragtime’s racialized histories and pandemic-era meditations on duration and precarity, Ellis’s broader contribution is methodological: she models how musicals, and their fandoms, open queer, communal, and resistant ways of inhabiting time.