Broadway Theater's Denigration of Men

Overview

Over the last several months, I have seen three Broadway plays, Pictures from Home, Leopoldstadt, and Goodnight Oscar, and four musicals, including Parade, Shucked, Some Like it Hot, and & Juliet. All these had talented performers, and the production quality was first-rate, as one would expect of Broadway Theater. I especially enjoyed the plays, as they were more substantive than the musicals (no surprise). Still, the musicals left me wondering why I, as a man, should even bother to continue to patronize Broadway Theater.

Image Credit: REDBUBBLE

I am a Marketer, and marketing requires one to be an astute observer of society, politics, culture, and trends of all sorts and an analyzer of data and anecdotal patterns. Having seen so many plays and musicals in a relatively short period, I have noticed recurring themes within the musicals and even one of the plays.

Only Men Have Faults

Pictures from Home is a play based on the photographer Larry Sultan’s 1992 memoir. It takes the audience through a photographic journey of his childhood home life and is an engaging and touching account of the challenges of family life. It was enjoyable, but the play struck me as one-sided. The father, Larry Sultan (played by the incomparable Nathan Lane), is a successful salesman who lost his job and struggled to get his career back on track. The mother, Jean Sultan (played by the amazing Zoe Wanamaker), is the family’s hero, becoming a top-selling real estate agent who supports the family financially. She points out her husband’s many shortcomings (affairs and other issues), yet she is portrayed as one without any blemish. She is a successful woman who does everything right. The character isn’t believable.

Image Credit: TodayTix

This theme is certainly not limited to Pictures from Home and is featured in most plays and musicals.

Men are Stupid and Losers

& Juliet is a musical that explores what would happen if Romeo and Juliet lived (instead of dying, as in the original play), and Shakespeare (Austin Scott) and his wife, Anne Hathaway (Betsy Wolfe), introduced competing narratives about Romeo and Juliet’s future. Without giving away too much, the musical demonstrates how a more brilliant and uplifting outcome would have happened if only Shakespere’s wife had been the writer. Shakespeare is portrayed as an unimaginative, unenlightened idiot. The play intends to be humorous but instead comes across as annoyingly self-righteous.

Romeo (Ben Jackson Walker) is brought back to life towards the end of the play and is the only character who is humiliated (for having affairs while with Juliet) and has to refer to himself as a douchebag.

Solutions

These two productions are a small sample of a much larger societal problem. For example, when you turn on the TV and watch the commercials — yes, we all hate them, but they go much further in diminishing men than even theater. Men are rarely shown in commercials; if they are, they’re almost always portrayed in an unflattering and demeaning manner and are inferior to women.

The question I have is, why? Why is this narrative now the “default” for entertainment?

Image Credit: Susan G. Adams, M. ED.

The entertainment industry has painted itself into a corner. There can be no challenging narratives that present men positively — that would require going against prevailing narratives and would not be tolerated. There is no more “liberal” thinking of presenting and considering multiple, divergent ideas. Call it what you want — political correctness, wokeness, whatever — the days of great theater that challenges the audience, where original scores are developed, and most of all — that surprise the audience are past us. Some will say the anti-men narrative is challenging us, but it is dogma, ugly, divisive, predictable, and one-sided.

Be Empathic Towards Your Audience

While attending the performance of & Juliet, I noticed there were many families. I thought about how this play would make those young people feel at its end. If you’re a boy, you walk away diminished — uncreative, stupid, pathetic, and uncommitted to your relationships. If you are a girl, you are told you are the best the human race offers — creative, much more intelligent than men, and the victim of their bad behavior.

According to a February 2023 Teen/Young Adult Suicide Study from UCLA Health, suicide is the second-leading cause of death among people aged 15–24. Further, 20% of high school students report serious thoughts of suicide, with 9% making a suicide attempt.

With all this negativity in society, where our young people are hurting, why can’t Broadway challenge itself, rise above their unattractive narrative of being anti-men, and show characters where both women and men have flaws and unique and amazing traits? Because outside the theater world, they do. It’s what makes plays and musicals real and relatable. It represents life as we intuitively know it to be. You don’t have to attack men to be successful and challenging, Broadway.

Stop Attacking God

When a theater production resorts to attacking God, using the crudest language, it shows a lack of creativity and innovative thinking. The writers and performers are desperate for any audience response. Referring to God as a douchebag, as was done in & Juliet, is the lowest common denominator of discourse. Unfortunately, attacks on God are now allowed on broadcast television. NBC’s show Saturday Night Live frequently uses the God D…. word. You can take the Lord’s name in vain, but you can’t say S___ or F___. That is how far we have sunk, and its unnecessary.

Conclusion

I have supported theater for many years and have friends who are cabaret singers, actors, and scriptwriters. Their creativity and introducing me to beautiful music that I did not know of are great gifts. I WANT to support theater and entertainment. But theater must first remember its crucial role in society — to entertain and help the audience escape for a moment from day-to-day life and the goings on of the world.

The best theater broadens one’s imagination and shows the kaleidoscope that is the human experience. It is possible to recapture this. It was not lost on me that & Juliet was performed at the Stephen Sondheim Theater. Sondheim, whose prolific gifts to the world of music and theater cannot be adequately addressed here, was but one of many who showed us the way.

For now, though, I will take my money elsewhere. Broadway has made it clear it no longer values men, and there is no need (or want) of our funds, support, and patronage: point taken, Broadway.

Fortunately, there are plenty of organizations outside the entertainment space that promote the goodness of humankind. They will receive my support.

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Michael Benedict published his first book, The Civil Society Playbook: A Commonsense Plan for a Return to Civility, in 2024. His career spans 25+ years in senior-level marketing positions at Fortune 1000 companies, tech startups, and marketing consultancies. His book covers areas of incivility that are not frequently discussed in the media. It offers solutions - actions - that anyone, regardless of age, can implement to improve civility in all aspects of society. He can be reached at michaelbbenedict@gmail.com. The book is available on Amazon, Apple Books, and Audible.