RUTHFULLY YOURS

Broadway has been depressingly dark for months, so Disney produced Hamilton on TV for a large and grateful audience. However, the PC monitors, who never rest, criticized the play for portraying principals who were slave owners.

When the lights go on again, will they come for the theater?

Could Driving Miss Daisy ever be performed again? It is a heartwarming tale by Alfred Uhry about the relationship of an elderly Southern Jewish woman, Daisy Werthan, and her black chauffeur, Hoke Coleborn. It enjoyed wide praise in various iterations on stage and in a movie, but today it would raise the hackles of political correctness officers.

South Pacific?  No way! “There is nothing like a dame” is male chauvinism writ large. Could it be saved if the original song is performed by a chorus of female soldiers? Or if the lyrics were changed to “there is nothing but a they.”

“Climb every mountain, Ford every stream.” That’s not The Sound of Music for the disabled. Really what were they thinking?

Goodbye to Jerome Kern and Showboat: “Tell me he’s lazy, tell me he’s slow, tell me I’m crazy, (maybe I know). Can’t help lovin’ dat man of mine.”

That is a subliminal racist stereotype. These lyrics are insensitive… although Billie Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald and Shirley Bassey and Barbra Streisand recorded great renditions without getting the vapors.

Guys and Dolls, a masterpiece by Frank Loesser based on Damon Runyon stories, is sexist right in the title.  Are you kidding? Binaries and trans maybe but rhyming is hard. And it’s about the Salvation Army and gamblers… not hip.

No woke could tolerate “If she’s getting a name for herself and the name ain’t his.”

Or: “The average unmarried female
Basically insecure
Due to some long frustration may react
React?
With psychosomatic symptoms
Difficult to endure
Affecting the upper respiratory tract
Achoo
In other words
Just from waiting around
For that little band of gold
A person can develop a cold.“

Absolutely demeaning to all “single by choice” persons of diverse sexual orientation.

Forget about Oklahoma, where one half of the state has been deeded to Native Americans. That wonderful musical about lovely mornings, open skies, cornfields, the grit of the pioneers  and the American dream has been reworked into a boring diatribe on guns, corruption, and bias.

Remember this old song? It’s probably going to be axed.

“It ain’t so much a question of not knowin’ what to do.
I knowed whut’s right and wrong since I been ten.
I heared a lota stories and I reckon they are true
About how girls’re put upon by men.
I know I mustn’t fall into the pit,
But when I’m with a feller, I fergit!
I’m jist a girl who cain’t say no….”

In The Pajama Game, music and lyrics are by Richard Adler and Jerry Ross. There is a song with a title that should please gender warriors: “Her is….”

But  “I wouldn’t never tell this to nobody else but you, To nobody else but you I wouldn’t never tell this, What I mean to say is, you’re different from the rest, Baby, you’re the best.” You just don’t call women “Baby” or “Babe” even if it’s cold outside.

Another great hit by Richard Adler and Jerry Ross is Damn Yankees, a seduction song in which a provocatively dressed woman uses guile and sex

“Whatever Lola wants
Lola gets
And little man,
Little Lola wants you.”

Unacceptable. Sex as a tool?

And what about Annie Get Your Gun? Gun! Did you say “Gun”???? Never mind that the musical is a feminist gold mine. Imagine saying to a man…  “Anything you can do I Can do Better., I can do anything better than you.”

But there is the complaint that “getting a man” was the only goal. Rubbish!

“I’m quick on the trigger with targets not much bigger
Than a pin point, I’m number one.
But my score with a feller is lower than a cellar-
Oh you can’t get a man with a gun.”

In fact, Irving Berlin’s merry musical won a Tony in 1999.  However, there is a song in it “I’m An Indian Too” with the following lyrics:

 “Just like Battle Axe, Hatchet Face, Eagle Nose, Like those Indians I’m an Indian too.”

Now that offends American Indians and the lyrics have now been sanitized, and it could have been a campaign song for Elizabeth Warren.

Finally, in the musical 1776…. with music and lyrics by Sherman Edwards and a book by Peter Stone. there is a song” The Lees of Old Virginia” actually about a Richard Henry Lee, but what’s in a name for the woke? In a great scene where the liberal members of Congress leave for a fact-finding trip, the conservatives in Congress sing:

“To the right, always to the right, never to the left” Those are words that give liberals hives.

The woke will challenge romance and fun and frivolity and culture in the wake of their destructive path.

Rest assured — to paraphrase the lyrics of the Gershwin classic “Our Love is Here to Stay”

“In time monuments may crumble, statues may tumble
They’re only made of clay

The theater and the music and the movies that we know
May just be passing fancies and in time may go.”