Female Representation
in Musicals (2017-2018)

 

Musicals have always been an important part of my life. While most parents were introducing their children to rock classics such as Led Zeppelin and The Beatles, my parents opted to raise us on Miss Saigon and Les Misérables. Every summer, we would pile into the back of my dad's beat-up, 1996 navy blue Jeep Cherokee, and we would make the eight-hour drive to Sebago Lake, Maine. There, my grandparents had a summer vacation home. My dad would reach into the tape deck and pull out a well-loved copy of The Phantom of the Opera. He'd turn to us in the backseat and say, "Pick a part kids! I call dibs on Christine!” He would then deliver the most off-key rendition of "Angel of Music” I have ever heard. It was beautiful. My love of musicals only grew from there. 

Just this past summer, we were sitting in our normal box number fifteen at the Philadelphia Academy of Music, enjoying one of our favorites, Wicked, when my dad asked me, "Is this the only musical with two female leads?” I didn't know how to answer him. I spent the entire car ride home contemplating this and thinking back to every musical I had seen or listened to in the past twenty years. I soon realized that not only was he right, but that Wicked signified a major change in the concept of the modern musical. 

Music and theater have been a popular source of entertainment for centuries. The ancient Greeks began performing tragedies around 532 BC. Attending operas was considered the chic thing to do in the 1800s. However, it wasn't until the early twentieth century, after World War I, that the popular musicals society would come to know and love gained such sweeping popularity. The entire world fell apart after World War I, and the arts experienced a creative boom with the Modernist movement. People needed to be distracted from the horrors of war, and artists were beginning to look at the world through a completely different lens. And so, the modern musical was born.

When Broadway was first formed in 1750, women were not allowed to be a part of theater productions. Every show would feature male leads, and usually displayed a relationship between father and son. Since the creation of the theater, women had been excluded from participating. The Greeks saw women as inferior and too "dangerous” to be on stage, so men were cast to play both the male and female parts. This tradition continued for centuries. Men always played women in Shakespearean plays as well. However, as society slowly began to accept women more, and grant them such freedoms as the right to vote, the theater began to feature more women. By the 1950s, women were not only appearing in more shows, but were beginning to be cast as the lead roles. Around this time, Ethel Merman emerged and worked her way up from secretary and nightclub work to the big stage. Merman is well known for her groundbreaking roles in Annie Get Your Gun, Anything Goes, and Gypsy, and she is still highly regarded as the "First Lady of the musical comedy stage."

While Merman blazed the trail for leading ladies in musicals, the musicals themselves were still not portraying women in the most positive light, or giving them the best roles. Most musicals seem to follow a simple format: there's a boy, there's a girl, they fall in love, they sing. The women are often just there to deliver some large, heartfelt ballad, and are really not given any other storylines or substance beyond their love for the leading man. There are countless examples of this such as The Sound of Music, West Side Story, and Once. Other musicals, like The Producers, Bullets Over Broadway, and Cabaret, over-sexualize the women in their productions. The sole purpose of female characters is to serve as sex symbols or comic relief, and are depicted as rather unintelligent. More blatant in their sexism are productions like Grease and How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying. Grease ends with Sandy completely changing her personality and donning a skimpy, all-leather outfit just to gain the attention and love of the boy who spent the entire musical rejecting her. How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying is somehow worse, since it contains the song "Happy To Keep His Dinner Warm,” in which Rosemary says she's happy to play the role of dutiful housewife while her husband is out succeeding in the world of business. Even when women are given leading roles, like Christine from The Phantom of the Opera, there is still a significant romantic component. Christine is shown as a young, naive girl, and when she is taken hostage by the Phantom, she only escapes through her sexuality. In the end, the musical still belongs to the Phantom, and even though it can be argued that the most memorable and most intricate songs are sung by Christine, the Phantom is still the title role. 

Times are changing, and modern-day musicals are beginning to shift towards more leading roles for women. What really made way for more female-centric plays, and gave female roles more substantial character development, was The Color Purple, which was originally produced in 2005 and revived in 2015. The Color Purple not only depicts multiple strong female leads, emphasizes female friendship and sisterly love, and tackles sexual and physical abuse, but it also features an all-Black cast. The Color Purple is also based off of a novel written by a Black woman and the musical features a book written by a woman with songs and lyrics involving two other female writers. It paved the way for a change in the musical format. Musicals can feature prominent female leads, and those leads can sing about something other than loving a man. Better yet, these musicals can be written by women and still be successful.  

Of the most current popular musicals on Broadway, there are four which feature a woman in the starring role. Beautiful is a celebration of the life and musical works of Carole King, Fun Home recounts the relationship between a lesbian woman and her closeted homosexual father, and Waitress tells the story of a pie chef who bakes as a means of escape from her unhealthy marriage. All three of these musicals show something that is rarely ever seen on the Broadway stage: a strong female who doesn't need a male's approval. Then there is Wicked, which, in my opinion, is the most feminist musical of the bunch. Women are constantly being pitted against each other in the media. Whether it is on film, television, or the theater, women fighting other women over a man or their careers is a consistent, overused plot point. However, in Wicked, not only are there two female leads, but the entire plot, similarly to that of The Color Purple, also centers around their friendship. Sure, there are secondary plot lines involving romance, and the two women do not get along for almost the entire first half of the musical, but the theme still centers on friendship with the two women singing a duet at the end about how their relationship has changed each other for the better.  

What sets these newer musicals apart though? The answer is rather simple: women are getting more involved. Five of the most prominent current musicals feature female writers: Kinky Boots, Wicked, Fun Home, Beautiful, and Waitress. Even though Kinky Boots stars a male lead, while the others feature strong females, it is still very feminist, pro-woman, and inclusive. Despite the fact that nearly 70% of all theater-goers are women, women are underrepresented in the creation of these productions. Research has repeatedly found that in theater productions across the board, men tend to outnumber women two to one, whether the roles are directors, writers, composers, or actors. When it comes to these newer musicals though, women are not only cast more, but they are more involved with the creation. Women are increasingly writing the scripts and composing the music. To date, only three women have won the Tony Award for Best Original Score since its creation in 1947. Cyndi Lauper became the first woman to win without a male writing partner in 2013, and in 2015 Jeanine Tesori and Lisa Kron became the only all-female songwriting team to earn the award. That's it: three women in seventy years. In addition, it wasn't until 2013, five years ago, that the first woman won. The underrepresentation is astonishing, and it's no wonder why women have been depicted so poorly for so many years. Imagine that: women know how to accurately portray other women. 

 

As an avid theater enthusiast, I am excited to see this change in the musical theater community. I think back to the six-year-old me crammed into the back of my family's Jeep with my three-year-old sister while my dad belts out "I Dreamed a Dream”, with more emotion than could ever be expected from a software developer with no musical background. I wonder what I will sing to my children. Will it be the power anthem of "Defying Gravity” from Wicked or "I'm Here” from The Color Purple? Maybe it will be another pro-woman ballad, proving that we can stand alone from men and that stories do not need to center around love and dependence in order to be interesting.