The NY Times has printed yet another theatrical essay bemoaning the male supremacist content of classic Broadway musicals (“The Broadway Musical Has a Man Problem”, May 2, 2019). The author, one Amanda Hess, states,

“In 2019, a central obsession of American culture is the reassessment of all of its previous obsessions. We are reviewing our stories with a skeptical eye and banishing outdated plots on feminist grounds.”

Really? And who is this we, Tonto? Her theme is the enervated state of the main male characters when productions are reinterpreted in a feminist direction, but her starting point, never questioned, is that the shows need to be reinterpreted in the first place. That is, female leads need to be empowered if the shows are to be viable in the 21st century.

What a sad diminished viewpoint. She specifically cites My Fair Lady and Kiss Me, Kate as stories of “domineering men who build their own fantasy women or else beat them into submission”. What is she talking about? As I’ve noted here and here, both shows feature feisty young women who give as good as they get, returning at the end on their own terms after showing that they are perfectly capable of leaving if they choose. (The latter show also includes a character who tells her boyfriend that she will only be faithful “in my fashion”.) By the end of Lady, Eliza Doolittle has tamed her professor, who is clearly besotted with her; it is impossible not to see that he has been transformed by feelings he was not even aware of and doesn’t yet know how to deal with. As for Kate, while Lilli does sing as the character in the play-within-a-play that women should love and obey, the relationship between Lilli herself and the relieved Fred has always seemed at that point pretty evenly matched to me. Even the famous spanking scene comes only after Lilli herself physically and repeatedly beats Fred. (Kate was co-authored, incidentally, by a woman.)

One part that raised my suspicions was the reviewer’s stark declaration that Rex Harrison in the original production of Lady “loomed frighteningly over everyone. He was old, and he was mean.” Is that so? What makes her think that? Was she even alive to see that production? Her dogmatic attitude and unsupported arguments strike me as millennial, way too young to be around in the 1950s or 1960s; I wonder if she’s even seen the film. She is evidently putting her politics first and fitting the review – and the facts – to match.

What needs to change isn’t the classic Broadway musical but the blinkered thinking of reviewers like this. Readers deserve better.