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 We are reviewing our stories with a skeptical eye and banishing outdated plots on feminist grounds.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.
These productions had their work cut out for them. All call back, in some way, to old-school stories of Pygmalions and Petruchios — of domineering men who build their own fantasy women or else beat them into submission. (“Tootsie” offers a variation: In that one, the domineering man remakes himself as a woman.) And each has signaled a refresh of its gender politics in its promotional push.
The Lincoln Center Theater revival of “My Fair Lady,” the musical based on George Bernard Shaw’s “Pygmalion,” asks of the phonetics professor Henry Higgins and the flower girl Eliza Doolittle: “But who is really being transformed?” The new “Kiss Me, Kate,” the show in which the insufferable director Fred Graham tames the diva Lilli Vanessi, promises, “This time, she’s rewriting the script.” (Literally: Amanda Green took her scalpel to the original.)
And then there is “Pretty Woman: The Musical,” itself a modern “Pygmalion” story, which seems more ambivalent about its changes: Even as its creative team is whispering to theater reporters that the show holds a “feminist twist,” the poster coaxes the audience to “fall in love all over again.”
One irony of the meta-narratives around these shows is that they tend to focus on the makeovers they’ve given to their women. The New York Post reported that the new “Pretty Woman” was re-imagined to make Vivian Ward “stronger and more independent,” edits that “have taken on more urgency in the wake of Harvey Weinstein and the #MeToo movement.” In Playbill, the “Tootsie” version of Julie — the Michael Dorsey-slash-Dorothy Michaels love interest — is hailed as a thoroughly “2019 woman,” one who is “independent, strong and outspoken.”
Empowering the female lead may be a celebratory hook for selling a show, particularly given that women buy the bulk of Broadway tickets. But on closer inspection, it is rarely the women that require revision. The streetwalking Vivian Ward, stage-dominating Lilli Vanessi and hardscrabble Eliza Doolittle are not lacking in grit. An additional injection of strength risks turning them into bland, uncomplicated superwomen.
No, the real problem with these stories is the men. They are terrible, and yet they have the audacity to believe they can teach these women lessons, and to come out on the other side looking like plausible romantic leads. A modern production’s success rests on how it tames its man.
When “My Fair Lady” opened on Broadway in 1956, Rex Harrison inflated Henry Higgins with such self-satisfied pomposity that he loomed frighteningly over everyone. He was old, and he was mean. In the revival, Harry Hadden-Paton has instead reduced Higgins to an aloof but harmless man-boy. When he utters his infamous final line — “Eliza, where the devil are my slippers?” — he looks so pitiful that you can’t help but feel sorry for the both of them. Henry has helped Eliza grow, but he can’t help himself.
So this time, she leaves. In fact, she marches up and out of the theater itself. This risks disappointing sentimental fans, but it realigns the story with Shaw’s original intention, and it produces an altogether new sensation: a kind of mourning for the classic romantic ending that we now recognize was always a sexist farce. We wish it didn’t have to be this way, but since Higgins won’t change, Eliza must.
“Pretty Woman” seeks to soften Edward Lewis, too, but instead it sands his edges down until he is a mere nub of a man. Edward is already the flimsiest Pygmalion in the pantheon: He throws money at everything, so even his lady-construction project is outsourced to shopkeeps and hotel staff. This allows Edward to avoid the grosser implications of the Pygmalion character; you rarely have to watch him lord over his woman.
But it also raises the question: What is the point of him? One crucial moment in the film, when Edward’s smug lawyer attacks Vivian and Edward pulls him off her and punches him in the face, is rewritten so that Vivian is the one who lands the blow. This helps build her into a totally self-sufficient character, but it reduces Edward to a sentient ATM.
OK: A singing ATM. When Edward is not receiving implied oral sex, he is crooning Bryan Adams tunes straight to the audience with lines like “She really is quite something / more than meets the eye.”
The “Pretty Woman” team seems to have decided that what would drag its story into the 21st century was for Edward to become more sincerely romantic. This helps make the show the rare update that is more offensive than the original. The musical opens with a dead prostitute in a dumpster, just like the movie, but this time, she is surrounded by the prostitutes and panhandlers of Hollywood Boulevard, dancing and singing about their hopes and dreams.
Following a troupe of actors staging a musical based on “The Taming of the Shrew,” “Kiss Me, Kate” is dealing with even darker source material, and an almost irredeemable leading man — he is not merely gruffly paternalistic but actually abusive. When it debuted in 1948, the toxic masculinity of its male protagonist wasn’t just an unfortunate detail; it was the main event.
The plot has Fred and his ex-wife, Lilli, reuniting for Shakespeare, and just as the sadistic Petruchio starves Kate until she literally allows him to walk all over her, Fred terrorizes Lilli until she, too, submits. The first act ends with Fred violently spanking her onstage, which prompted the theater critic from The New York World-Telegram to praise Fred’s “confident swagger.”
The new Roundabout Theater Company version cuts the corporal punishment — instead, Fred and Lilli both kick each other in the pants, and the script wrings humiliating humor out of both of their inconveniently placed sores. Mostly, they use their words. Lilli earns some sharper comebacks in this version, and Fred’s hulking demeanor is whittled down enough until he becomes a teasing thorn in her side.
The show’s smartest move is to transpose Petruchio’s character traits onto Lilli’s alternate love interest, her very important Washington fiancé. In the original, he is merely a bore. But here, the fiancé is a control freak who seeks to whisk her away from the theater and dictate her diet and wardrobe with military precision. This time, when Lilli chooses Fred in the end, she is also choosing her career, herself, and her closet, thank you very much.
When an adaptation strives to be both nostalgic and a contemporary political commentary, the first thing it often sacrifices is sense. The original “Kiss Me, Kate” ended with its backstage plot converging nicely with “Shrew”: Lilli submits to Fred just as Kate offers to place her hand under Petruchio’s foot. In the new version, Lilli’s final song, as Kate, has been changed from “I’m Ashamed That Women Are So Simple” to “I’m Ashamed That People Are So Simple.” This makes the plot much less horrific, but also less legible.
And then there is “Tootsie,” which actually benefits from its weakness as a nostalgia piece. Though the 1982 film was a hit, few treasure it enough to care much that its plot has been ransacked for parts. The musical slashes easily at the homophobia of the original; in this one, when Michael-as-Dorothy comes on to Julie, she is receptive to “her” advances. And it delights in whipping up a backlash for Michael, whose misadventure as a woman is revealed, over and over again, as a privileged power grab.
“Tootsie” manages to be both very funny and very careful, signaling its hyper-awareness of modern gender politics at every step. But a woke “Tootsie” is a “Tootsie” that makes even less sense: Why would Michael, a pushy middle-aged actor, have more luck as a pushy middle-aged actress?
Tellingly, though, the play’s greatest feminist failure is Julie: She is strong, independent and forgettable. A powerful woman but a wisp of a character.
The “strong female character” we hear so much about — the “2019 woman” who is “newly empowered” in “the wake of #MeToo” — has emerged as the new empty cliché for actresses to squeeze themselves into.
Better than a strong female character is an interesting one. I suspect that these old stories of male domination endure partly because they give their female characters plenty of scenery to chew — in the beginning, at least, before they are refined and tamed. It’s the endings that let these women down. Sometimes all a 2019 woman needs is one final twist.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.