| re: The Lempicka score, recommended to me; what am I missing? | |
| Last Edit: Chazwaza 05:07 pm EDT 05/04/24 | |
| Posted by: Chazwaza 04:55 pm EDT 05/04/24 | |
| In reply to: re: The Lempicka score, recommended to me; what am I missing? - Singapore/Fling 03:39 pm EDT 05/04/24 | |
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| But the question of the subject and story and protagonist is not the same as who wrote the show. A) Being by someone has little to do with being about someone or something. Living something is not necessary for writing it. Sometimes it helps enormously, some times it does not. I'm not going to pretend we have a broadway musical canon with no interesting major female characters or stories because they were most often written by men. And shocking as it will or won't be, the same is true for musicals about non-white people. Those stories and characters exist, some are written by the writers of the same skin color some are not, that doesn't erase the shows/stories/characters. I mean literally the score to Lempicka, about a bisexual female immigrant painter was written by a non-immigrant male composer who is gay... where does he get off! How is that woke (in the way it's being applied in this thread)? Letting a man write a woman lead, finally the first musical about a strong female and it's written by a male composer? What does he know about the music that runs through the soul and beats in the heart and moves the life of a *woman*? Let alone an immigrant, who lived during a time in society and culture decades before he was even born! He's also not a painter. Or a bisexual! He is not a woman nor is he sexually attracted to women, and neither is the woman he wrote it with (or... is she? Or is he?! Do we know, should we know, should we care, should it matter if the work is good/true?)... how could they write "Woman Is"?! Or is it that this is another musical about a strong woman, GIVEN once AGAIN to a man to musicalize? Which narrative is more useful to the reduction of how art actually works and what audiences actually respond to? Oh and the musical seems to mostly care about Lempicka's relationship with her female love, who is played by a black woman... so this musical probably should have been at least co-written by a black woman, let alone a black lesbian woman. Certainly someone on the creative team should have been a lesbian, a black person, and/or an immigrant, or even had a background in painting or graphic design... this is probably the least woke version of a musical about Lempicka i could ask for... and obviously had a musical about Lempicka been written before 2015, it would have been centered around her husband, who was straight and male and white. Obviously I'm being sarcastic, I don't think this musical is especially "woke", for good or bad, and I don't think these are things we should be looking for in the artists who are compelled to spend years of their lives, talent, and artistic energy creating a musical and telling a story. B) "almost no female writers" is not none. (FWIW there weren't actually all that many men who wrote broadway shows either, which doesn't mean there shouldn't have been and be way more women than there were involved in the writing of scores and scripts, but it's still true that it's a pretty small pool of people period). Yes, there were very few women writers in broadway musicals, almost no women, and when there were there were not nearly enough... for the 40s-80s especially. Okay... so they have a handful of shows from pre-80s with women writers, and then more came later in the 80s and 90s, more in the 00s, and even more in the 10s and 20s, this year being the peak so far) Still not enough then, not enough now. But that isn't none, and the students studying musicals theater shouldn't be so quick to dismiss every year and every decade from 1940 to 2020 as the dominion of the all encompassing straight-white-men, and neither should anyone. C) Not all men are straight. Not all men are white. Not at all men, or straight men, or white men, or white straight men, are incapable of the talent, skill, emotional intelligence, life experience, and abilities of research and observation to be able to write about things and people that aren't themselves and their exact experience. That does NOT mean that i think or am happy with the idea most stories in broadway musical end up being told by male people (who are not all white or all straight or all both) or white people (who are not all straight or male) or straight people (who are not all white or male), far from it, but a little less generalizing and boxing people in would be nice (and worthwhile i think). D) Not only are all both of the Lempicka writers white, so is the director, and while one is not straight, 2 of 3 are straight (as far as we know) and none of them are attracted to women (as far as we know)! In fact, almost all of the writers and directors working on broadway this season, male or female, are white. We have a long way to go. But specifically in putting female protagonists on stage in musicals is not a thing we/they are behind on. |
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