Tony! Toni! Tone! was also heavily populated by dudes. Via Eda Cherry @ Flickr.
We’ve seen the crowding out of women’s voices in movie coverage, Supreme Court speculation, crap TV, and just about everywhere else, but I thought just maybe that my beloved theatre, which (backstage, anyway) is something of a haven for those who don’t relentlessly toe the sex/gender line, might offer a little hope to this weary Harpy’s soul.
Wrongo dongo, as an old troll once said.
Today, the Tony Award nominations (named for Antoinette Perry, co-founder of the American Theatre Wing) were announced, and you can see the whole list here. However, let me just quickly run down the top nod-getters (VAGUE SPOILERATION AFTER THE JUMP):
Billy Elliot, The Musical (Little Dude gender deviates, sorta) -15
Next to Normal (Mom is crazycakes, family copes) – 11
Hair (Dudes get laid, dodge draft) – 8
Shrek The Musical (Gross Dude finds love with Hot Girl) – 8
Mary Stuart (Two Queens battle to the death, thanks to major personal/political pressure from Dudes) – 7
The Norman Conquests (Dude tries to get with his wife and two sisters-in-law) – 7
God of Carnage (Bougie couples tear each other to pieces) – 6
Joe Turner’s Come and Gone (Displaced African-Americans struggle in 1910s US) – 6
Rock of Ages (Cock-rock jukebox with whisper-thin plot; you’re just there to pump your fist) – 5
33 Variations (Lady professor obsessed with Beethoven dies slowly) – 5
Exit the King (Crazy king dies as his two wives bicker) – 4
9 to 5: The Musical (3 female employees take vengeance on their asshole boss) – 4
Pal Joey (Gigolo has professional and romantic misadventures, learns nothing) – 4
West Side Story (Gangs of Dudes rumble, die. Girl feels pretty, sad.) – 4
Reasons to Be Pretty (Dudes compare notes, learn Important Lessons re: the hotness of chicks) – 3
Waiting for Godot (4 Dudes ponder the bleakness of Dude-ity) – 3
Blithe Spirit (Ghost of dead wife harrasses put-upon Dude and his new wife) – 2
Dividing the Estate (Adult siblings squabble over inheritance, suffer horrible old mother) – 2
Equus (Screwy passionate young Dude gets his head shrunk by old Dude, who mourns his passionless life) – 2
Guys and Dolls (Cartoon Dudes bet on bagging a chick, reluctantly marry) – 2
Irving Berlin’s White Christmas (Dudes honor war buddies, hook up with cute sister act) – 2
Pretty Dude-centric. And I’m just talking about on-stage representation here; I don’t have the heart to see how few directors, writers and designers are non-Dudes.
Even better, we get this lovely little nugget from NYT live-blogger Patrick Healy (guess what? A Dude.) during the coverage of this mornings announcements:
Cat Fight Alert! | 8:53 a.m.
Patrick Healy writes: Wow, the Tony nominators are casting their lot with feuding ladies in the category of Leading Actress in a Play. The two women in “God of Carnage” are almost as vicious as the two women in “Mary Stuart” — though, of course, there’s no beheading in “Carnage.” Of these four deliciously, colorfully, nasty roles, which proved the most memorable?
I quit.
Girl feels pretty; also feels witty, gay. But not that kind of gay. It’s not that kind of musical.
Akshooally, WSS has Anybodys, who is totes gay (she’s the boi who runs w/ the Jets). I didn’t recognize it when I was a kid, and it’s not really there in the Natalie Wood movie musical, but it was super-major-undeniable to me in the current production, which was generally riskier/more explicit with sexual matters. Whether or not that particular subtext was intended by the book writer/director Arthur Laurents, I don’t know.
While Healy’s comment is ridiculous and offensive I think it’s a little disingenuous to say that Mary Stuart is all about two women finding themselves in the situation they are in because of ‘major personal/political pressure from dudes’. Not in my viewing of it it wasn’t.
Obviously I’m massively simplifying the plot, emilyanne, but one of the many things that I lurv about Mary Stuart is how politically contemporary it always is vis-a-vis power, generally speaking, and women’s power–and its circumscription–in particular. Schiller was monkeying with The Facts, perhaps, but he sure ’nuff stumbled on some Truth.
My summary was not to deny either Mary or Elizabeth any agency (although Liz tries to weasel out of it in that scene w/ Davison), but to point out what an impossible situation each queen is in, and how that situation is almost always being manipulated by the actions of a man (the “romantic” attentions Leicester and Mortimer) or men (the larger political machinations of Burleigh-Shrewsbury-Leicester, the French, or if you wanna stretch it back, Henry VIII and the Pope). I thought Phyllida Lloyd’s direction really physicalized that dynamic (although I kinda hated the way they handled Mary’s execution).
My issue with the play is that the two women never met in person. Am I the only person who thinks that there’s actually infinitely more drama if it sticks to the historical record in that regard?
And re: WSS I confess I hated the movie and so avoided the new staging, so was not aware of Anybodys. But I don’t remember that from the Natalie Wood edition.
I hated the way they staged the execution too but otherwise love the direction and the acting.
sarah – I’m not sure that I do in this case because I think as PHDork says Schiller is really commentating on the nature of power as denied to women and the way in which women with power are viewed. Now if you want to talk about the hideous pointlessness of Braveheart’s innaccuracies in which nothing is illuminated by changing history that’s another matter.
@s.o.a.l.g.: I hate West Side Story in general, but I confess to being interested in the new staging because of the whole English/Spanish thing. Thought it was really neat how they have Anita speak in English for most of the play (when she’s pro-America), but she goes back to Spanish after an American boy kills Bernardo. (I haven’t actually seen it, but I heard about it on NPR awhile back…)
Kirvin – I enjoyed the West Side Story revival, mainly because of that. I think it’s well worth catching and thought it was interesting that one of the most dynamic new stagings on broadway was directed by a man in his nineties (she said somewhat ageistly but seriously it’s a more forward-looking staging than most of the nostalgia fests out there).
@emilyanne: I’m just a crotchety history geek. I also had the gall to get annoyed by the scene in Schindler’s List where he breaks down crying saying he could have done more. Never happened, and it does nothing to my cold nerd-tastic Jewish heart.
However, Monty Python’s Holy Grail is a fine historical chronicle, especially regarding Roger the Shrubber.
I don’t mind the fake meeting, because I find the almost-perfect symmetry of the play incredibly satisfying (I have a deep classicist streak). Now, if you wanna get me all het up about historical inaccuracies, we can talk about the bastardizing of well, just about everything in Shakespeare in Love.
@sarah.of.a.lesser.god, PhDork, Kivrin: I heard that avoiding the new staging is a good plan (of WSS). My mom’s boss, who used to direct a modern dance company and now owns her own theater company and has fairly impeccable taste, said the concept was interesting but it was horrifically staged and it was so distracting that she couldn’t enjoy it at all.
Not in the running this year, but I am pleasantly surprised that August: Osage County is still running. I haven’t seen it, but doesn’t it have several strong and interesting roles for women?
The staging of WSS was a bit messy, with set pieces zooming in and out, but I didn’t find it distracting. My major problem w/ WSS was the mismatch in tone between the first and second half.
Osage County does have good roles for women, but I wasn’t thrilled that it got the Pulitzer (nor was I surprised). Big family drama, dark secrets revealed, connections between nation and family, blah blah blah. Letts has done more interesting work.
Kelsium, ah well – I enjoyed the staging, I found it much more interesting than most things I’ve seen on broadway musicalwise.
PHDork – oh and Shakespeare in Love annoys me more than anything, well anything except Braveheart which is the film that drives me to near fury even thinking about it.
@PhDork: It seems with the exceptions of 9 to 5, 33 Variations, and Mary Stuart nearly every single one of those that you listed contains roles for women that are exclusively someone’s mother, girlfriend, or sister. To me, that’s more disheartening than the lack of roles. It wouldn’t make the imbalance any better, but I would feel slightly better about it if there were a few more shows that had more interesting lead roles for women.
PhDork, please please help me out here because it’s now driving me crazy and I’m sure you or someone else here can come up with it: what is the name of the “test” that determines whether two female characters in a film or play have a conversation that is not about a man? I am drawing a complete blank.
@emilyanne: I have never even made it all the way through Braveheart. I’ve tried a couple of times, but I just can’t bring myself to care about any of it.
@PhDork, emilyanne: I’ve not seen it, but I’m glad to know that it is not as terrible as she made it out to be, because I find the concept very interesting. She also saw it opening night, so it’s entirely possible that things have changed/improved, as they usually do.
kelsium, you’re thinking of the Bechdel Test (also know as the Mo Movie Measure and The Rule). The DTWOF strip where it first popped up (though not under that name) is here.
ETA: I cannot even bring myself to name the fetid celluloid wank-rag that rhymes with “cave-fart.”
THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU! It was rocketing around my brain but not landing anywhere where I could retrieve it.
Kelsium, PhDork, i am permanently scarred by the fact that i had to watch the appalling thing subsequently known as the not-Scottish film in the US where people actually stood and cheered at the climax of the film. To be honest I’m not sure to this day why I went to it.
That said it does not get me as irrationally annoyed as the fact that Matt Damon’s character could not possibly know what happened in Saving Private Ryan unless Tom Hanks wasted his last five minutes alive filling him in and thus the ending of Saving Private Ryan makes NO SENSE AT ALL.
Anyway back to the theatre – Billy Elliot also annoys me for its overt sentimentalising of poverty, and i haven’t seen God Of Carnage because it sort of seemed like a less interesting version of Whose Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
@PhDork, kelsium, & emilyanne: Of course I could run off and Google the historical inaccuracies in Shakespeare in Love, Braveheart, etc. — but it sounds like y’all would gladly expound upon the subject with a little prompting. So please, fill me in!
(Assuming it wouldn’t be too much of a threadjack!)
emilyanne: God of Carnage is Albee redux, AFAIK. I saw it in German in 2006, so I missed the finer points, but made notes on my program like “WOOLF!” and “Albee again!” at the time. P.Soul saw the NY production, too, so she could weigh in.
And I’m sure Billy Elliot both sentimentalizes (and naturalizes/justifies) poverty, because Billy can still succeed, rise above, class transcendence is possible, cream rises to the top, etc. If I can get a cheap ticket, I’ll see it here, but if it cleans up at the awards, that won’t happen any time soon.
Kirvin, I’ll let someone else weigh in on SIL but Braveheart – well where to begin – with the fact that William Wallace never met Isabella of France, who would have been eight years old at the time she’s supposed to have slept with Wallace in the film? And didn’t depose her husband until 1327, oh and didn’t marry Edward until 1308 three years after Wallace’s death.
This is just the tip of what’s wrong with the film, which is pretty much wrong on all counts.
emilyanne: I would say less-interesting Woolf about covers the writing. The performances are fabulous though, and you don’t usually get four people like that onstage, alone, to fight out their differences.
Kivrin, regarding Shakespeare in Love: one part of the suckitude is that mixed in with lot about accurate info about playhouses and people and such are huge, stupid errors like:
–Viola is supposed to go with her soon-to-be-husband to grow tobacco in Virginia, which didn’t exist yet. Jamestown was founded in 1607; the events of the film are in 1593.
–Will at one point speaks lines from Hamlet, which wasn’t written until 1601.
–Good Queen Bess would not/did not appear at a public theatre during her reign, nor did she request “something cheerful…perhaps for Twelfth Night.” Gawd.
The other part that makes me nuts is the relentlessly twee, too-clever gags spread thickly over it all. Will has an off-stage girlfriend named “Rosaline”! John Webster loved violence as a boy! Will has a shrink who keeps time with an hourglass! The play was originally called “Romeo and Ethel the Pirate’s Daughter”! A lot of my colleagues at the time about broke their arms patting themselves on the back for getting all the jokes.