Femme Fight

Am I the only one who was surprised by this intriguing study from Princeton University grad Emily Glassberg Sands that found unintentional discrimination against female playwrights — at the hands of female artistic directors, no less?

Looking back on the past New York theater season, the new plays that resonated the most with me were all written by women, Lynn Nottage's Ruined, Gina Gionfriddo's Becky Shaw and Lisa Loomer's Distracted. And the first two were staged by theater companies whose artistic leaders are women. I also admired Annie Baker's Body Awareness and Yasmina Reza's Tony-winning God of Carnage and look forward this fall to Theresa Rebeck's The Understudy. (I caught last year's Williamstown Theatre Festival production, and it was a riot.)

When I interviewed Gionfriddo and Sara Ruhl, both agreed that women playwrights had a tougher time getting produced but, though I’m not contradicting the study’s findings, I think that were the economy as robust as it had been several years ago, Ruined would be playing on Broadway. But is it so terrible that it isn’t? The run keeps getting extended (it’s now playing through Aug. 2.

But is it so terrible that Ruined hasn’t transferred to Broadway? It’s ideally suited to Manhattan Theatre Club’s intimate 299-seat space. How much would it lose in the way of atmosphere if it ended up at the Belasco or the Lyceum? The bigger-is-always-better philosophy seems like a product of the old boys club that we should be rallying against.

As for women artistic directors giving lower scores to the plays the women had written when they thought men had scripted them, could it be that they were simply more impressed when they wouldn’t expect a man to be as insightful when it came to depicting female characters?

Of course even if this were the case, isn’t that a form of discrimination as well?

Hearts for Harlequin

I seem to be running just a little bit behind whatever I do these days. It's far too late for me to comment on the spry and smart Tony Awards broadcast from two weeks ago, one of the best I've seen in years. (The cuteness of the three Billy Elliots as they accepted their Tonys was matched only by the adorableness of host Neil Patrick Harris who, dare I say it, may have even topped my all-time favorite Tony emcee, Hugh Jackman.)

And it's too late to recommend the Heart of a Woman: Harlequin Cover Art 1949—2009 exhibit at Soho's Openhouse Gallery, in honor of the romance novel publisher's 60th anniversary, because I didn't catch it until two Fridays ago, its final day. But it was a hoot, as much from a social history perspective as an artistic one. Forget what they say about not judging a book by its cover; in the world of publishing you certainly can.

As the doctors and nurses on the covers of the novels from the '50s and '60s gave way to the more glammed-up heroes and heroines of the '60s and '70s and then to the chesty Fabio-esque cover models of the '80s, the change in cover art mirrored what was happening in the lives of the women reading these books. How appropriate that some covers from the early days of women's lib 1960s and '70s prominently featured the heroines front and center, while the men were relegated to the background. Nowadays it's not unusual for a cover to feature just the hero, and I'm certainly not sure I like what that implies. Frankly I find the quaint cover illustrations from those days much more appealing than the photographs of the finely chiseled but often generic cover models that so often grace today's novels.

My pal Connie hoped Harlequin was planning some sort of catalog or coffee table book to commemorate the exhibit, but I haven't heard anything to confirm this. If you want to catch a peek at what was, these blogs have some fine photos.

Vieux from Tennessee

Attentive New York theatergoers have had more than a few opportunities to catch the little known latter-day plays of Tennessee Williams over the past few years. To varying degrees of success, Off- and Off-Off-Broadway theater companies have staged revivals of Small Craft Warnings, Out Cry and now, Vieux Carre presented by the Pearl Theatre Company.

They get a lot of runners on base, even if they don't always bring them home. Still, ambitious theatergoers looking for challenges and rewards might want to check it out. It's also your last change to see a Pearl production at the company's longtime 's the last stand for the Pearl at their East Village home before a the company moves uptown next season.

Not So Perfect Union

Catching Epic Theatre Ensemble's new Supreme Court romance/political drama A More Perfect Union with about 100 New York high school students certainly made for a memorable evening. Despite their youth they were well ahead of some of the play's plot twists. But with a new Supreme Court nominee this week, it at least seems timely.

Hurts to Be Kind

Critics weren't terribly philanthropic to the Roundabout Theatre Company's revival of The Philanthropist, a play by Christopher Hampton (Les Liaisons Dangereuses, Atonement) produced when he was still a 23-year-old Oxford grad student. For comparison, I was a receptionist at a sperm bank in the Empire State Building when I was 23.)

Regardless of what you think of the play, which riffs on Moliere's The Misanthrope, or the current production, I'm sure you'll enjoy my interview with Hampton for Front & Center. The playwright-screenwriter-translator-adaptor-etc. made news earlier this week with the announcement that he would write the English-language adaptation of a German-language musical version of Daphne du Maurier's suspenseful novel Rebecca.

That book was one of my favorite reading assignments freshman year of high school. I was already enraptured with musical theater at the time and contemplated turning Rebecca into a a musical I wanted to call Our Beloved Manderley. Plans for the musical have long since been abandoned, so if Mr. Hampton is considering a title change for his adaptation he's more than welcome to mine.

Wet and Wild

After the success of its five-year-old Brits Off Broadway festival, 59E59 is keepin' it local and inaugurating the Americas Off Broadway festival. I quite enjoyed the first offering, The Dishwashers, and will try to have more appreciation for clean forks and plates when I go out to eat.

Much of the appeal comes from its wacky yet understated sense of humor, something Canadians seem to do terribly well. Did you know that many of my favorite TV shows are Canadian? I'm talking about The Kids in the Hall, Twitch City and the one that's currently in my DVD player, Slings and Arrows, a series every theater lover, whether you hate Hamlet or not, has to see.

Dreams and Dreamcoats

Curse you, Andrew Lloyd Webber and BBC America, for getting me absolutely hooked on a two-year-old British reality TV show — the outcome of which I already know — to cast a West End musical that I can't even see. I'm talking about Any Dream Will Do, the series that plopped 12 wannabe musical theater performers in front of a British TV audience and asked viewers to vote on which one they wanted to see play the lead in A West End revival of the Lloyd Webber–Tim Rice musical Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat.

After a rather chaotic first episode, which took viewers through the audition process and involved a lot more crying than singing, I've become swept up in the contestants' stories and struggles as they perform a song each week to impress a panel of judges that includes a surprisingly bitchy John Barrowman and producer Bill Kenwright, even though episodes are a whopping 90 minutes.

I'm not sure why I like this series so much more than Grease: You're the One That I Want, the American reality show that cast the leads for a Broadway revival of the popular musical that nearly every high school (mine included) does at some point. Perhaps the it's delicious ceremonial stripping of the colored coat from the contestant who's eliminated each week as he sings "Close Every Door," one of the show's ballads. Maybe it's the chance to see Andrew Lloyd Webber as a smart, caring man of the theater, not the caricature he's usually depicted as. Or it could just be that the wannabe Josephs are just more appealing than the Grease contestants, if not more talented.

It's probably also because it's the Lloyd Webber musical I'm most fond of, having seen the original Broadway production in 1982 or '83, when Allen Fawcett, who played Kelly McGrath on my favorite soap opera, The Edge of Night, was playing Joseph.

The show stuck with me. I sang along to the cast album, memorized the lyrics and longed to have a voice like Laurie Beechman so that I could one day play the Narrator (and soon learned that, despite the musical's message, it doesn't always pay to be a dreamer). I used a lyric from the show in my high school yearbook, and still love the song "Any Dream Will Do," though as an adult I've come to realize that the lyrics makes absolutely no sense. And I know some of my more puritanical musical theater friends must cringe when they hear some of the songs' false rhymes. ("All these things you saw in your pajamas,/ are a long-range forecast for your farmers" is one.)

But I will be tuning in for the final two installments, because beyond having the pleasure of watching young hopefuls aspire to musical theater stardom (something that is worth celebrating in and of itself), I'm enjoying being reminded of the sheer joy I felt when I first fell in love with musical theater.