Ladies Take The Stage

Image: Ethel Merman in Gypsy

Musical theatre may be dominated by male writers, but the true stars of the genre are women. Coral Drouyn raises a glass for Broadway’s leading ladies.

In Jerry Herman’s iconic musical Hello, Dolly!, the composer gives a song to the male lead character, Horace Vandergelder, which starts “It Takes a Woman, …” and then goes on to denigrate the entire gender by listing all the menial tasks that women are fit for, all in the name of love. Of course the woman, in this case Dolly Levi, gets her own back in a splendid 11 o’clock number where she tells him to “Wave your little hand and whisper so long dearie, you ain’t gonna see me anymore.” She’s playing him, of course, but on her terms. She’s a strong woman who doesn’t need a man but would like one.

For younger people this may seem like just another case of treating women as inferior, and shockingly sexist, but stay with me here. When it comes to the stage, the opposite is true. In Musical Theatre women are the stars - the leading ladies, the Divas - and composers have known that since Ethel Agnes Zimmerman stopped the show Girl Crazy in 1930 singing “I Got Rhythm”.

Ethel who? It’s almost 100 years since then and the great Ethel Merman, Broadway “Diva of all Divas”, is all but forgotten except by those of us addicted to musicals. And the most interesting thing for all women in theatre is that she smashed the glass ceiling to smithereens. Composers, mostly middle-aged Jewish white men, realised that they needed to write strong female Leading Lady roles and give them the best songs in any show if they wanted to capitalise on the BOS (Bums on Seats) factor. So began a half century or so of writing musicals specifically for female stars, and those are some of the most enduring musicals that we have today and some of the biggest smash hits ever seen on Broadway. The format was to place a heroine into an adverse situation and have her rise above it and triumph. It worked then and still works even today. It’s the “spoonful of sugar” that makes the medicine go down.

If you think back to the shows of the last sixty years or so, how many can you name with a man’s name in the title? I can think of only a handful: Billy Elliott, Oliver!, Jekyll and Hyde, Mack and Mabel, Chaplin, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Jesus Christ Superstar, Sweeney Todd, Dear Evan Hansen, Hamilton and Barnum, though there are obviously more I can’t recall. With perhaps one exception, none of those would make it to the top 100 musicals list in anyone’s imagination.

There are, of course, the ensemble musicals which give equal weight to a variety of characters – Sondheim excels at those, but alongside Company you’d have to list Les Mis, South Pacific, Ragtime, Chess, Phantom, A Chorus Line and a host of others. Shows like Chicago, however, were built around the females in the cast, while the male characters were very much second string - it took two great Leading Ladies in Gwen Verdon and Chita Rivera to bring audiences to their feet.

But if you look at the composers who adopted the formula, the list of female names is longer than my weekly shopping list, and that’s saying something.

There’s Annie, Annie (Get Your Gun), Babette, Carrie, Charlie Girl, Cinderella, Coco, Hello, Dolly!, Flora the Red Menace, Gigi, Gypsy, Irma La Douce, Kiss Me, Kate, Little Mary Sunshine, Mame, Mary Poppins, Marguerite, Thoroughly Modern Millie, Matilda, No No Nanette,  Roberta, Sally,  Sweet Charity… well, you get the picture.

A female name in the title meant a better chance of the show being at least of interest to a potential audience. But why? What is it that people are drawn to?

Is it the fact that female characters are more emotional, more readily vulnerable? Is it that we want to see glamour when we go to the theatre and it’s sometimes difficult to make male actors appear glamorous? – unless you’re doing a production of Priscilla Queen of the Desert (a girl’s name again) or The Boy from Oz. Perhaps it’s because the audience for musicals is largely female or else identifies with the glamour of theatre. Most likely it’s a combination of all of those things.

But the other question is – Does the character make the star, or the star make the character, and hence the show? Is it the name in the title, or the name on the Marquee?

Merman was a star from that first night in Girl Crazy and went on to create the lead character in 13 musicals, many of which were written specifically for her. Stephen Sondheim was commissioned to write the lyrics for Gypsy after the producers had signed Ethel Merman. It was a terrifying experience by all accounts, as Merman had certain words and pronunciation that she was self-conscious about and purposely avoided. The result was perhaps the greatest 11 o’clock song of all time, “Rose’s Turn”. It’s the turning point for the character - the moment of truth. And just like plays and films have their second act turning point, so do musicals, except the protagonist sings it. The song is so great that It makes ALL Roses (well, nearly all) seem brilliantly talented, even in the lowliest of circumstances. If you can sing it (it’s hard) you can nail it.

But would that song have been as good if Sondheim and Jule Styne weren’t writing for someone who was already a legend? And would she have even been a legend if it weren’t for a Gershwin song from 30 years earlier? There’s the conundrum - a bit like “The chicken and The Egg” (no! That’s NOT a musical) and a classic case of something surpassing the sum of its parts. The truth is that Merman wasn’t a star before Girl Crazy and might not have become a legend without “I Got Rhythm”. But supposing someone else had got the part and sung the song? Would the song have the same longevity? Would the artist become a big star? Boy, there’s a lot to ponder.

While it might be impossible to break down creativity using intellect (the two are so often on opposite sides) we can see that the greatest stars in Musical Theatre are all females. Everyone’s choice would be different of course, but these would be on most people’s lists. There’s Merman, Mary Martin, Gwen Verdon, Carol Channing, Angela Lansbury, Patti Lupone, Barbara Cook, Bernadette Peters, Julie Andrews, Kristin Chenoweth, Idina Menzel, Mandy Patinkin … oops sorry, I got carried away there, but it is a girl’s name. And it is hard to think of another male performer who could compete on that list. Is that the fault of the songs they are given (Mandy had Sondheim through the bulk of his career - lucky him) or the charisma and appeal on stage?

Sometimes the song is so intrinsically linked with a performer that it’s hard to even hear anyone else sing it. For me that’s true of Mame’s “If he walked into my life today”. I hear Angela Lansbury no matter who is singing. But other songs become completely detached once taken from a show. Who would ever have imagined that “You’ll Never Walk Alone” (written by Rodgers and Hammerstein for Carousel at the end of the war, as a beacon of hope) would end up as the club song for Liverpool Football Club? This iconic song wasn’t even a leading lady song. It  was written for the supporting character of Nettie Fowler and reprised at the finale by the entire cast. It’s not strictly an 11 o’clock showstopper but it’s a tearful moment in the show and you’ll cry even more if you ever hear the soccer fans singing it. It’s tragic!

Perhaps composers know instinctively that women on stage, especially the leading ladies in musicals, can take an audience to dizzying heights and so deserve the best songs along with the accolades. It’s long been acknowledged that the female of the species is more resilient, and so writers and composers can adopt the idea that the greater the adversity, the more satisfying the happy ending is. Perhaps it’s something more esoteric - a feeling of connection that can’t, or shouldn’t, be explained. One thing is certain, musical theatre is one of the few places where females don’t have to play second fiddle to their male counterparts. They can fill a thousand seat theatre and command respect and admiration simply through their talent, and isn’t that great for all of us? Long live the Leading Ladies.