We can quibble over frequency and the word "common", but we had two celebrated and award-winning all-male Shakespeare plays in rep on Broadway in the past decade. And yes, there is an element of this which is exploring the tradition of Shakespeare's time, but since they aren't casting teenage boys as the women, it's very much a modern practice, just as with all-female productions.
Arguably, the artistic impulse to explore those plays with cross-gendered casting (in either direction), is akin to this casting of "1776": it gives modern-day audiences an opportunity to reconsider classic stories in a new way. So you may not have been considering plays like Shakespeare, but the comparison strikes me as apt. |
