Enchanted Evenings:The Broadway Musical from 'Show Boat' to Sondheim and Lloyd Webber Block, Geoffrey (large ebook reader .txt) 📖

the woman’s own mouth. Therefore the play, though still worthy of a complete and efficient representation, would need, even at that, some apology.”32

Nearly seventy years later Robert B. Heilman wrote that “the whole wager scene falls essentially within the realm of farce” and assumes that Shakespeare accepted the idea that women are subservient to men even if modern theatergoers do not: “The easiest way to deal with it is to say that we no longer believe in it, just as we no longer believe in the divine right of kings that is an important dramatic element in many Shakespeare plays.”33 In the 1990s, David Thornburn, during a panel discussion on “The Remaking of the Canon,” asked a conference speaker rhetorical questions that implicitly accused the Bard of harboring antediluvian views:

Isn’t it true that Shakespeare actually believes that women are subservient to men in The Taming of The Shrew? Now it is incumbent on people who offer the reified conception of the canon, as you, Professor [Gertrude] Himmelfarb, do, to explain how you can justify or defend texts whose obvious, explicit themes are so deeply offensive to what you as a thinker and as a moral person would regard as acceptable.34

Shakespeare has few modern defenders from the ranks of those who accept Katherine’s speech at face value. But one unexpected apology might be noted—Germaine Greer’s pioneering book on feminism, The Female Eunuch:

The submission of a woman like Kate is genuine and exciting because she has something to lay down, her virgin pride and individuality: Bianca is the soul of duplicity, married without earnestness or good will. Kate’s speech at the close of the play is the greatest defense of Christian monogamy ever written. It rests upon the role of a husband as protector and friend, and it is valid because Kate has a man who is capable of being both.35

Other critics offer interpretations that bring the apparently sexist playwright closer to modern feminism. As Martha Andresen-Thom writes: “Extraordinary individuals learn to play with wit and wisdom the roles of sex and class that at once bind them and bond them. Subordination of woman to man, in this view, is an opportunity for a brilliant and worthy woman to transform limitation into an incentive for play.”36 The “play” interpretation is supported in Shakespeare’s text by the zeal with which Katherine takes the ball from Petruchio’s court and pretends that Lucentio’s elderly father Vincentio is a “young budding virgin, fair, and fresh, and sweet” (act IV, scene 5). At that moment Kate does not seem to be motivated by exhaustion and a realization that she cannot win, but by her newfound inspiration that play-acting can be fun rather than demeaning.37

Evolving sensitivities toward white and African-American racial relations have been explored briefly in the discussions of the history of Show Boat and Porgy and Bess. Two Rodgers and Hammerstein musicals introduced during the period of the present survey deal with relations between whites and Asians, South Pacific and The King and I (albeit on white terms), and the reworked books of Anything Goes revivals discussed in chapter 3 demonstrate a progressively less stereotypical approach toward Chinese Americans.

A discussion of sexism in Kiss Me, Kate opens the door to a broader discussion of how women featured in the present survey have fared. Show Boat’s Julie LaVerne and Magnolia Ravenal, Carousel’s Julie Jordan, and West Side Story’s Maria lose their men at some point in the musicals. Porgy’s Bess not only becomes a drug addict and a prostitute, she never gets to sing an aria by herself, even if she does have her own theme. The rich and powerful female executive in Lady in the Dark, Liza Elliott, must relinquish her post as head of a prestigious fashion magazine if she is to restore her lost glamour, femininity, and happiness, and complete her song, “My Ship.” Liza Elliott has merely exchanged her unpleasant dreams for a living nightmare of submission to a sexist man, Charley Johnson, the advertising manager of Liza’s magazine and her prosecuting attorney in the Circus Dream.

Compared to what happens to most nineteenth-century tragic European opera heroines, however, Broadway’s women manage pretty well.38 In contrast to her operatic sisters, none of these heroines dies, although Julie LaVerne is reduced to alcoholism and almost certainly a premature death (offstage) in response to the loss of her man. Before Miss Saigon in the 1990s many Cinderellas but no Madame Butterflys inhabited Broadway musicals. Even Maria in West Side Story, unlike her Shakespearean counterpart, survives and is thereby presumably able to effect societal changes that will lead to a less violent world. After losing her man, Magnolia gains fame as an actress, while Julie Jordan demonstrates enormous strength of character before and after Billy’s death. Anna holds her own with the King of Siam and her actions lead to democratic reforms.

Among our musical heroines Adelaide (Guys and Dolls) and Eliza Doolittle (My Fair Lady) perhaps do the least to placate modern sentiments. Adelaide’s saga of her fourteen-year engagement to Nathan Detroit (“Adelaide’s Lament”) and her advice to Sarah Brown to “marry the man today and change his ways tomorrow” might disappoint some. But audiences by and large have successfully distanced themselves from this cartoonish Runyonesque world and have been attending the Broadway and countless other revivals of this show in record numbers ever since. And although we shall see in chapter 12 that it is admittedly a tough call that Eliza should end up with (in the epilogue to Shaw’s Pygmalion she marries Freddy), her decision to return to the barely repentant misogynist Higgins in My Fair Lady might cause many to cringe in their seats. Porter and Spewack’s Katherine may, like Shakespeare, put her hand at Petruchio’s feet, but at least she is not asked to fetch his slippers.

Porter never surpassed the brilliance or the popularity of Kiss Me, Kate. Two years later he completed Out of This World, a show that, before it was dropped during tryouts, included the now-perennial favorite “From