The Broadway Musical Has a Man Problem

One of the greatest pleasures to be found on Broadway is the illusion of the past being magically transported into the present. We get the feeling whenever a classic is capably revived, though these days Broadway seems to want to conjure it from everything — ’80s movies, a children’s cartoon about an underwater sponge, the extended musical catalog of Cher.

This has become a suddenly complicated trick. 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 We are reviewing our stories with a skeptical eye and banishing outdated plots on feminist grounds. It’s as if Broadway is offering to draw us a warm bath of nostalgia just as we’re bent over the tub, peering into the clogged drain.

Classic stories have a way of burning holes in our memories. We treasure them, or at least what we think we remember them to be. Often when we watch them again, years later, we are confronted by their newly ghastly details. The hope of the modern Broadway adaptation is that it can upgrade a show’s gender politics just enough that it comes out looking fresh but familiar, as if it has passed through the offices of a highly skilled plastic surgeon.

Last season, I heard that “My Fair Lady” had had some very good work done, managing to recast the show’s perspective on men and women without tinkering much with the script at all. I set out to see for myself, and then to see how several of this season’s shows tried to achieve a similar look.

They include another uncomfortable classic, the backstage “Taming of the Shrew” musical “Kiss Me, Kate,” and two movie adaptations: “Pretty Woman,” which has been the subject of feminist scrutiny from the moment it hit theaters, and “Tootsie,” a film with precisely the kind of plot at high risk of premature aging.