Content area
Full text
THOROUGHLY MODERN MILLIE. Book by Richard Morris and Dick Scanlan. New music by Jeanine Tesori. New lyrics by Dick Scanlan. Directed by Michael Mayer. Choreography by Rob Ashford. Music direction by Michael Horsley. Broadway Touring Company, Capitol Theatre, Salt Lake City. 21 April 2005.
The current trend of remaking popular movies into staged musicals seems to be sustaining Broadway. In this year's Tony Awards, The Light From the Piazza, a musical version of a 1962 Olivia de Havilland vehicle, competed with Monty Python's Holy Grail remake, Spamalot, for top prizes. Other movies-turned-musicals, such as 2002 Tony Award winner Thoroughly Modern Millie, tour nationally. When theatre producers reconceive dated movies for contemporary audiences, the concept generally steers clear of racial and gendered offenses. Through the vehicle of slapstick comedy, the 1967 Millie movie pokes not-so-gentle fun at emerging secondwave feminism, and unapologetically demonizes Asian immigrant culture. The Broadway Millie deals with gender issues by cutting all offensive dialogue from the film. Without the movie's antifeminist climactic monologue, Millie's "modern" outlook resonates unproblematically with the new woman of the 1920s and today. Though eliminating antifeminist references, the musical treats the ethnic slurs of the film differently. Thoroughly Modern Millie radically revises characters, adds new musical numbers, and reconsiders the happy ending to create an adaptation that foregrounds, rather than avoids, racial issues.
The plots for both the film and the musical are similar. A young girl, the eponymous modern Millie, travels to New York in search of a "modern life": short skirts, short hair, and a rich boss to marry. Falling in love with a seemingly penniless Jimmy, while her boss Mr. Graydon falls in love with her best friend Miss Dorothy, seems...