Sex Is Only For Making Babies

This was one that I held on to for a while. It stemmed from a book my mother gave me, one of many “your body/sex” books that she encouraged me to read and to talk about (I read them, but when she asked to talk to me about them I would just stick my fingers in my ears and yell “LA LA LA LA LA” until she rolled her eyes and gave up.) There was one page in the book that said: “When a man and a woman want to have a baby, they have sex. They hug and kiss because it feels good.” There was a pencil drawing of a man and a women sort of cuddling in a bed on the following page, and then it jumped right to the part where the baby is born.

This quick jump, accompanied by the clinical picture, led me to believe that it worked like this: couples decide to have a baby, book a hospital room, spend a night there to have the sex, and then return in nine months to have the baby. And never have sex again.

When a friend destroyed this misconception by telling me that her parents had sex all the time and mine probably did, too, I was VERY angry at her. I shut her up and managed to assume she was a liar for a few more years, but eventually I had to admit to myself that she was probably, dammit, right. SEX EWW. I secretly planned to be a virgin until at least 40, and was very proud of this.  

You Can Be Anything You Want To Be

This is a nice thought, right? And it’s just said to kids SO MUCH. “What do you want to be when you grow up? You can be anything you want to be.” Personally, I took this to mean that I could just pick various careers and blend them together and then be the best in the world. I was going to be the world’s first soccer player/actress. As in, I would be on the US Women’s National Soccer Team, while also starring in many Broadway musicals and winning numerous Tony awards. I figured I would do Broadway in the summer and winter, when soccer was not in session. 

It was a given, of course, that I would be famous. I didn’t actually consider that I might NOT be famous. I even looked around at all of the adults I knew and thought, aw, it’s too bad they never got to be famous, like I will be. 

I Can’t Even Feel My Body And It Will Never Bother Me

Okay, this wasn’t actually a misconception because it wasn’t a conception at all. I just don’t remember even being aware of my body as an entity. It was just me, I was just moving through the world. I wasn’t aware at all that my torso was, truly, ridiculously short in comparison to the length of my legs, or that my stomach was maybe a bit wiggly. I didn’t look at my arms and wonder if they were puffy because of water retention and if I should consider cutting back on sodium (something that I’ve mostly accepted I’m just never gonna do. Salt is awesome). 

I was lucky to make it longer than a lot of people, I think, before my body solidified into this thing that I was ALWAYS aware of, no matter what else I was doing. For a while there I just was just living, body not included as a concern. That was definitely one of the sweetest parts of being a child. 

Twenty Is Very Old

When I thought about age as a kid, I pictured a giant ladder-like structure, color-coded. Twenty was orange, and it was also where the ladder turned to the right, ascending into the sky. In other words, twenty was it: Adulthood. The people in my life who were twenty seemed as good as my parents, adult-wise, to me. My dad used to joke that, “You can date when you’re twenty and not before!”, and I would be like “DAAAD!” (it was a classic good time). I just assumed that at twenty I would be a fully-formed, complete person.

When I did, in fact, turn twenty, I celebrated in my college-sophomore dorm room by eating an entire cornbread cake that my roommate had gotten specially made for me, while lamenting my lack of a boyfriend. Twenty was a year in which I was DESPERATELY single, like, Single with a capitol S, getting-drunk-and-crying-and-leaving-the-party-early-every-weekend Single.

I was still wearing a lot of low-cut shirts and entertaining the idea of a double minor in sociology and theater (because that extra minor would definitely help me out later?). I had no idea what I wanted, let alone how to get it. I was nothing like the twenty-year-old my ten-year-old self had imagined. 

There were a lot of things I didn’t understand as a kid, but I had some essential stuff down that it’s easy to lose along the way. I had boundless, blind ambition, total physical comfort, ZERO understanding of sex (although a strangely intuitive sense that it might suck — I don’t mean to say that it sucks except that it sucks SOMETIMES), and an unrealistic sense of how easily I’d slide to the right and just BE an adult. Now that I’m hurling myself forward on the color-coded age ladder, I’m working to regain that blind ambition and body comfort while fully knowing who I am and what the hell is going on around me. I’m sure my ten-year-old self would be devastated if she knew. 

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When I was in the sixth grade, my grandma took me to a theater outside Ft. Lauderdale to see a production of the turn-of-the-century musical Ragtime.

We went to a lot of shows together when I was a kid because as an immigrant, she’d clawed her way into America and once here, was determined to indulge in the most glamorous aspects of our culture. This meant Broadway.

I was usually ambivalent about going to the theater with her, but something was different at this shoddy Ragtime matinee. I noticed, thanks to my new friend Puberty, that the guy playing “Mother’s Younger Brother” was a super fox. I also noticed he was, thanks to a very sweet Playbill shout out to a boyfriend, not likely to marry a middle school girl. Bummer.

Thus began a pattern of falling in love with gay theater boys.

It’s as much a fantasy as the big choreographed dance numbers or the shiny costumes: a beautiful man, with the impeccable grooming, obsessive body sculpting and flawless skin of a vain actor, on stage singing and kissing ladies. Nice.

Of course, most actors aren’t exactly like their characters. The Broadway actor I’m buggin’ about probably has a lovely long-term boyfriend and a pekinese named “Judy Garland” at home. It’s why John Barrowman is so sexy in Torchwood and not at all like Captain Jack in real life.

Obviously, another person’s sexual orientation doesn’t exist for my benefit and obviously, the concept of “loving gay men!!!” is limiting and fetishizing. My frustration here is pretty tongue in cheek.

But my crossed wires of attraction actually touch on a serious issue beyond my pathetically inaccurate gaydar; there’s a huge disparity between the number of gay actors and the number of good, meaty roles where the character is gay.

It’s true for other minority groups too. When I interviewed Broadway veteran Fredi Walker-Browne for my web project, 100 Interviews, she lamented that there are just two parts on Broadway for voluptuous, African-American women like herself: Mama Morton in Chicago and someone in The Lion King.

Even the part she originated, Joanne in the rock opera Rent, is now usually played by a thinner woman. Lack of meaningful, non-stereotypical roles is a problem for a lot of underrepresented groups in acting. (Not just in theater either. I’m looking at you, The Help.)

Speaking of Rent, (and getting back to the LGBTQ community) in high school, I was obsessed with the character of Mark, the neurotic cameraman. I wanted to scoop that lonely nerd-boy into my arms and squat together in the Lower East Side while somehow still dressing like Gap models.

As is my crush custom, the part of Mark was originated by out, gay actor Anthony Rapp. Sorry, straight boys Adam Pascal and Taye Diggs. The heart wants what it wants.

None of this is smooth detective work: A lot of hot men in Broadway shows are gay. Duh. Talented, queer actors flock to Broadway for the leading man parts they’d never get to play in Hollywood. It’s kind of a haven from the usual BS. Glee’s Chris Colfer notoriously had a difficult time booking acting gigs in LA because he, in his own words, is unconvincing as a straight male lead.

On Broadway, a talented actor like him would probably have more options.

Meanwhile, in film and TV, old-school thinking prevails. At least until I can get my script for The Gay Expendables off the ground. (“Enter NEIL PATRICK HARRIS, MATT BOMER, and ZACHARY QUINTO. They kick in a closet door action-movie-style, guns blazing.”)

What I’m saying is, it’s preposterous to insist that gay actors can’t play straight when I’m sure I’m not the only dude-inclined woman melting in my theater seat. If that’s a casting director’s concern, then he or she should check the line of ladies that’d form for a “Shirtless Cheyenne Jackson Convention.” How about the female Tumblr devotion to Jonathan Groff? I don’t need Kristin Chenoweth vocally defending Sean Hayes to prompt me into admitting that Gavin Creel can get it. (Not that he, you know, wants “it,” but for casting purposes, all systems should be go!)

Rock on, gay theater boys. You’re performing, working hard and convincingly portraying a character — whatever their preference. That’s your job. If you can do that, your real-life sexual orientation is moot. You deserve the same respect — and career opportunities — provided to other actors.

Here’s my additional evidence: You consistently confuse the crap out of my lady hormones.

A month ago, I went to see The Book of Mormon because I signed up for tickets in 1927, when the line for them started.

One of the leads is a fantastic actor named Andrew Rannells.

Rannells is gorgeous like a Ken doll. His smile is so white the front row of the show should be wearing sunglasses.

Outside the theater after the show, while planning our future children’s names, I Googled, “andrew rannells single?” Then, for no reason other than my own past, I changed my mind and instead, Googled, “andrew rannells gay?”

I’ll let you guess what I found.

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Every once in a while it’s fun to just go ahead and judge a book by its cover. Not an actual book though, they’re far too important. And obviously not a person — that’s just plain ignorant. But in a safe-space with a television program, sometimes I like to throw caution (facts) to the wind and just decide for myself, based on the commercials, the main plotlines and other important information about a certain show. Yes, without even watching it.

I know it’s very terrible, a pedestrian folly, and not at all what the writers intended. It doesn’t always make me dislike the show though. Sometimes I even enjoy my inaccurate, imagined version of the show that is based solely on TV/print/internet advertisements much more than I enjoy the actual version when I finally do watch it. Sometimes I don’t. It turns out I’m no better at predicting my own tastes than the tastemakers. Without further ado, I give you my interpretation of what has happened so far this season on the new hit smash“Smash” — which I have not watched one minute of — based entirely on their exhaustive pandemic of a marketing campaign.

1. It’s based on the movie Center Stage (2000).

2. It’s set 50 years in the future after Facebook is melted by lava and the majority of the American public starts caring about Broadway shows again.

3. It’s adult Glee.

4. Angelica Houston plays a sophisticated, devious person who is out to destroy the main character.

5. It is a massive hit. It is such a tremendously brilliant television show, that no one even needed to watch a single episode first in order for it to be a hit. Not even any television critics.

6. It is groundbreaking.

7. Grace from Will & Grace is in it. Not Debra Messing, but her character, Grace, who has sold her interior designing business to Karen Walker and now, living off the profits, devotes her time to wearing glasses and her biological daughter, Katharine McPhee.

8. This show was written by the writers of NBC’s The Voice. Or it was written, in collaboration, by singers on NBC’s The Voice. Or it was written by NBC’s The Voice after NBC’s The Voice anthropomorphized.

9. NBC’s The Voice wrote the entire first season of Smash in two days using the same pills Bradley Cooper took in Limitless. (Spoiler Alert! I know, but sorry, if you haven’ t seen Limitless by now, you are actively avoiding it. I think it came out on Netflix Instant the same day it opened in theaters. I saw it for free on a plane — it was on a Caribbean Sun flight and that airline’s been defunct since 2009. What I’m saying is Limitless is so pervasive it somehow gained the ability to time-travel to before it even existed. Anyway back to Smash.)

10. This is a reality show about Katharine McPhee.

11. The main character, Katharine McPhee, who sometimes goes by Karen, has a lot of growing up to do if she’s going to make it in this business.

12. Katharine/Karen has some difficult decisions to make, like how much to neglect her doting and supportive boyfriend in order to chase him away so she can have an ill-advised affair with one of the Jonas Brothers — and then ultimately return to the boyfriend.

13. It is also kind of based on A Face in the Crowd, The Imitation of Life, Coyote Ugly, Morning Glory, Felicity, The Devil Wears Prada, All About Eve, The L Word Season Five, The “Country Mouse” half of Aesop’s fable, and the all the boring parts of Julie and Julia.

14. Katharine McPhee/Karen’s adoptive parents are jealous of her talent.

15. It may or may not be a phenomenon. By this, I’m pretty sure they mean that Smash is the benign tele-visual reincarnation of the medical condition suffered by John Travolta in the 1996 fantasy-drama Phenomenon and it is causing Travolta to see illusions of light and experience dizziness.

16. There have been numerous misunderstandings that defy logic and perhaps at least one whimsical switcheroo.

17. The British judge director is a sharp-tongued truth-teller who deflates ego, but his mean quips often go a bit too far.

18. Katharine McPhee/Karen is a triple threat.

19. Those three life-threatening skills are yet to be determined, but she also seems to be good at singing.

20. A lot of people (double-threats) are about to be very unhappy with their non-speaking yet facially emotive, background dancer roles but, hey, somebody has to support Katharine McPhee/Karen on her quest from rags to riches and into our hearts.

21. It’s definitely getting a second season.

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Dear Outdoor Community Theater Back Home That Keeps Sending Me Facebook Invitations to Plays I Don’t Want to See,

I have fond memories of you from a few years ago. You were so popular (still are, in fact), people from all over New Jersey would line up hours before one of your shows just to buy tickets. Once we all parked our cars in the lot next to the theater, we were stuck there for the rest of the day. After all, it was only a matter of time before someone parked behind us, then had someone park behind them, and so on. We had no choice but to bring picnic baskets and spend the day in the park, or walk over to the nearby mall to kill a few hours until the show started, and we did so with big smiles on our faces. I have to admit — you are a huge slice of Americana, the perfect setting for the sun to set on the cheeks of thousands of children as they sit outside and eat ice pops. In fact, my entire family was so enamored by you, we went from lowly patrons to employees. My two sisters spent summers working in the costume and prop shops in the afternoons, then worked the wings as stagehands at night.

And I mean, you’ve probably forgotten by now, but one summer not too long ago, I was a performer.

Let me refresh your memory, because I assume my headshot is nowhere to be found in the theater anymore: you decided you wanted to put on a production of Thoroughly Modern Millie and needed two Asian guys to play Chinese-speaking henchmen. I was performing a bit in college and was talked into auditioning by a friend of mine. At your final callbacks for the roles, you ended up with me, a Taiwanese guy named Jeff, and a short Jewish guy whose eyes were as big as egg yolks. You were stuck with me, and you knew it, but we ended up having a blast. Our show together was widely recognized as the best one you put on that summer and for quite a while, you had me thinking I could be an actor for a living someday.

Then, as you probably expected I would, I soon found out there aren’t many roles for Chinese guys who flirt with being 5’9 only in certain types of shoes. I’ve since moved to New York City and hold no grudges, but you really did have me going for a little while. And in retrospect, your alumni are pretty impressive. Plenty of the performers I acted alongside are now on Broadway, on national tours, on television. Your infamous “theater pet” graduated from Princeton and ended up on The Amazing Race and Spiderman, The Musical (don’t get me started on that shit). Hell, even I went on to get an MFA, albeit in creative writing.

I’m sure all of us would say that our experiences with you, however extensive or limited they might have been, played a big part in motivating us to dream big. But that’s the thing: I have bigger fish to fry now. Not to be a dick or anything, but I’m knee-deep in research for a book I have no book deal for, I’m living paycheck-to-paycheck in a neighborhood I can barely afford, and I spend most of my free time wondering how the hell I am going to pay my credit card bill. I haven’t had a friend appear in one of your shows in years, and can see a Broadway play for not a whole lot more than what you charge. What on earth makes you think I am getting on an hour-long train to see a Broadway quality show?

That said, please accept this as a formal request to be taken off the mailing list you’ve created via your Facebook page. I would just unfriend you, but you’d never notice. And besides, it’s been a while. Just wanted to let you know that, contrary to whatever rumors might be circulating around town, I have not died.

One last thing – you’re doing Annie this summer? For fuck’s sake, have some dignity.

Sincerely,

Richard Moy

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The highly anticipated The Book of Mormon didn’t quite provoke the highly anticipated shower of controversy we were told to highly anticipate. In the months leading up to its debut, the show indulged the predicted criticism by dismissing it. Its website touted reviews calling it “blasphemous,” “boundary-pushing,” and “crudely provocative.” Trey Parker, one of the show’s directors/ writers/ composers, publicly declared “We’re just not scared… And not like in an ‘Awesome, we’re fearless’ way. We’re just reckless.”

Yet it seems Parker, Stone, and Lopez (of South Park & Avenue Q fame) had little to fear. In fact, the show made headlines last week when some of its LDS audience members were thrilled to have been “treated with affection” and declared themselves “pleasantly surprised by how incredibly sweet it was.” But how surprised should they have been? As Slate’s Christopher Beam pointed out, South Park has a long history of articulating conservative values with a decidedly liberal panache. And The Book of Mormon is in keeping with this tradition. In a brilliantly executed, entertaining production that crafts complicated and sympathetic protagonists, the show skillfully weaves a narrative that leads its audience to what is really the only reachable conclusion and then, in a final act almost religious in its blissful ignorance, concludes precisely the opposite. It seems the trio just wasn’t fearless enough to divine that while missionaries can be very, very good people, they are doing a very, very bad thing.

In a genre not known for its subtlety, this musical stayed away from stereotypes, portraying its two missionary heroes as deeply earnest, deeply flawed, and often deeply conflicted about their own beliefs. The young, idealistic, mismatched pair comes from a world that has thus far been far smaller than the isolated village in Uganda where they are sent on their first mission.

Before seeing The Book of Mormon, I remarked that for religious people, death isn’t scary. Life is. After the musical number “Spooky Mormon Hell Dream” I was singing a different tune. (Namely, that one.) The story humanized a religious minority that is often subject to mean-spirited parody and immature, unclever humor, and instead showed its audience how struggling to live by such a strict code can be overbearing and torturous for young people.

The irony, of course, is that these young people have been sent halfway across the world to impose this code on others. But when they attempt to do so, they are faced with far more immediate and pressing concerns than their religious text is equipped to solve. Upon hearing a missionary describe the deep-seated spiritual ennui that results from a life lived without Christ’s love, one villager mistakes this condition for the deep-seated physical discomfort that results from having maggots in one’s scrotum. “You should see a doctor about that,” the missionary suggests. “I am the doctor,” he responds.

We are eventually led to believe that doctrine, however fantastical, can be useful to struggling people when treated as a metaphor. Stone described this musical as being partly borne out of the questions “Do goofy stories make people nice? What if, in their goofiness, these stories somehow inspire that in the right way. Is that a social good?”

But doesn’t the practice of proselytism undermine the value of religion as social good? Any humanitarian effort requires some kind of framework in order to truly affect lasting change, but imposing a religious framework is dangerous and arbitrary. It’s based on the illusion that your stories are best suited to solve the problems of others. But everyone’s religion has evolved to provide them with the support and comfort that their environment requires. How can someone armed solely with his scripture claim to know the best way to earthly salvation? Isn’t it cruel in its recklessness to promote the notion that serious problems can be solved through religious belief, which after all can’t fill empty stomachs or exterminate the maggots in one’s scrotum?

And if the point is that religion really can save the destitute, then how far is it really from the argument that religion, or a lack thereof, is what damned them in the first place? Somehow, the three most politically incorrect people on the planet have found a politically correct way to rehash the age-old argument that the world’s wretched suffer because they have yet to discover the power of Christ.

Stone may be right when he suggests that “At the end of the day, if the mass delusion of a religion makes you happy, makes your family work better, is that bad or good?… I’m not sure the veracity of the stories is that important.” This is true only when mass delusion achieves the desired outcome. But can any religion effectively produce that outcome? If scripture is revered enough to have that kind of impact, it cannot be flexible enough to change with social mores and scientific progress. There’s an underlying danger that the show rightly touches upon, but far too playfully. Aren’t today’s parables tomorrow’s doctrine?

I was entertained, not insulted, by the crude boundary-pushing of The Book of Mormon. But these are all complicated questions that deserve complicated answers. And there is no holy book malleable or sophisticated enough to provide them. If anything was blasphemous about this play, it was the notion that there might be.

How does one “turn off the dark”? (See video above for an example of how to turn on the dark.) Is this question answered in Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark, the long-suffering Broadway musical that is still only its preview period after almost a season’s worth of technical mishaps, a couple of them gravely injurious? Maybe the critics have the answer. Regardless, the critics have spoken — more than a month earlier than they are supposed to (opening day is scheduled for March 15).

A number of major newspapers chose to run reviews of the show in today’s editions. Understandably, the musical’s rep was not happy. But maybe the critics are — not without snark — doing the musical a favor by potentially putting the spectacle to bed before it can disappoint an untold number of paying customers, as these writers seem to unanimously claim it will.

Herewith, a roundup of the reviews, because critics are seldom rewarded for their ability to be critical. This, if nothing else, is a nice lesson in criticism.

Ben Brantley, New York Times: “This production should play up regularly and resonantly the promise that things could go wrong. Because only when things go wrong in this production does it feel remotely right — if, by right, one means entertaining.” Things did go wrong during the performance Brantley saw, and a cast member chose to ad-lib a joke about the musical’s mishaps during the “mechanical difficulties.”

Elizabeth Vincentelli, New York Post: “A breathtakingly beautiful scene is followed by a laughable one. The flying sequences can be thrilling, as when Spider-Man first takes off over the orchestra; other times, they look barely good enough for Six Flags…”

Chris McNulty, Los Angeles Times: “[T]he investors of ‘Spider-Man’ have inadvertently bankrolled an artistic form of megalomania.”

Jason Zinoman, Slate: “Imagine the gall it takes to have Spider-Man wrestle a cheap-looking blow-up doll in the most expensive musical in history. Or to have an almost incoherent book so witless that what passes for a joke is a character misunderstanding the difference between “free will” and Free Willy. Then there’s the Bono-and-the-Edge anthem about shoes, and the more mundane issues such as inconsistencies of character …”

Peter Marks, Washington Post: “Story-wise, ‘Spider-Man’ is a shrill, insipid mess, a musical aimed squarely at a Cub Scout demographic. Looking at the sad results, you’re compelled to wonder: Where did all those tens of millions go?”

Joe Dziemianowicz, New York Daily News: “The show reportedly cost $65 million and that’s clearly gone into mechanics, hydraulics and aerial rigging. It seems only 10 cents has gone into the confusing story and humorless dialogue.”

Chris Jones, Chicago Tribune: “In essence, Taymor and Berger tie themselves in knots trying to shove the inherently dualistic nature of melodrama into a psychological hexahedron of their own creation.”

There you have it. Enter the psychological hexahedron at your own risk.

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First, a prediction: Next February when the three drag queens in the 1994 road film-turned-stage musical Priscilla: Queen of the Desert pull up on Broadway — after hugely successful spins in Australia and on London’s West End and a North American test drive that began last month in Toronto — gays, straights and everyone in between will turn out in droves to welcome them. Multiple Tony nominations are possible and a long, lucrative engagement is probable.

When it comes to gay-themed entertainment for the straight masses, a good drag queen is as close as you can get to a sure thing — and the more, the merrier. Straight-up gay men with active sex lives still can be a tough sell — note the as-yet-unreleased-in-the-U.S. I Love You Phillip Morris, starring Jim Carrey and Ewan McGregor as jailbird lovers (latest promised arrival date: December 3)  — but squeeze them into women’s clothing, paint them with garish make-up, and give them some funny jokes, and everyone’s laughing right along.

Back in the ’90s, I met up with a friend in Chicago for a three-day drag pageant. Yes, a drag pageant. Though I’ve never been particularly interested in drag, I went to Chicago because I love the Windy City, and I saw it as an opportunity to spend quality time with a good friend while working in a totally new experience.

Surprise! Not only was the talent on display at the drag pageant just as impressive as anything you’d see televised on Miss USA or Miss Universe, but it involved so much more than lip-synching to Garland, Streisand, Cher and Madonna. And the turnout was massive. Yes, the crowd was predominantly gay and lesbian, but there was a significant number of straights in the mix, including the mother of my friend.

By the time I left New York City in 2006, drag no longer had quite the drawing power in the U.S. that it had in the ’90s when Rupaul was a major star and Wigstock was one of the biggest events of the year, but it’s still a big part of gay culture in Argentina and in Australia. In Buenos Aires, most gay clubs and bars feature drag on the entertainment menu, and on some dancefloors, drag queens and transgendered patrons are nearly as populous as muscle studs.

The gay scene is similar down under. Perhaps it’s a lingering after-effect of the Oz-set Priscilla movie (which spawned the unfortunately titled U.S. copycat To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything, Julie Newmar, the following year), but in nearly every gay joint in Melbourne and Sydney, there’s yet another visual spectacle — big hair, big make-up, big personality — cracking jokes onstage and mouthing the words to Kylie Minogue’s “Get Out Of My Way” like it’s some kind of drag mantra.

But what happens when cross-dressing and gender-bending are no longer played strictly for laughs and/or visual effect? Despite the long-standing popularity of actors in drag (from Some Like It Hot to Bosom Buddies to Tootsie to Mrs. Doubtfire to Tyler Perry’s Madea films), and the steady presence of gays and lesbians in prime time and film (Annette Bening is currently the Best Actress Oscar frontrunner for her sapphic turn opposite Julianne Moore’s in The Kids Are All Right), transgendered characters (like Priscilla‘s saddest drag queen — natch!) remain largely on the outskirts of entertainment, showing up every few years to remind us that they, too, exist.

Occasionally, they’re played by actors and actresses who are too impressive for Oscar to ignore: Chris Sarandon and Al Pacino as, respectively, a pre-op transsexual and his boyfriend planning to rob a bank to pay for the operation in 1975′s Dog Day Afternoon; John Lithgow as a transsexual woman in 1982′s The World According to Garp; William Hurt, the first winner (Best Actor) for a transgendered role, in 1985′s Kiss of the Spider Woman. In the ’90s, Jaye Davidson, a man, received a nomination for portraying a transsexual woman in The Crying Game, and Hillary Swank won the first of her two Oscars for playing transgendered teen Brandon Teena in 1999′s Boys Don’t Cry. Most recently, Felicity Huffman scored a nod for her performance as a pre-op man-to-woman reunited with the son she never knew she had in Transamerica.

On TV, they’ve made sporadic appearances over the years, in sitcoms like The Golden Girls and Ally McBeal, in South Park and Family Guy, and in Normal, a 2003 HBO drama starring Emmy nominee Tom Wilkinson as a middle-aged dad who stuns his wife (Jessica Lange, also Emmy-nominated) by announcing that he wants to have sex-reassignment surgery. America’s Next Top Model featured transgendered competitor Isis King a season or two ago. Chris O’Donnell played a transsexual who dated Charlie as a woman and slept with Charlie’s mom as a guy on Two and a Half Men, Rebecca Romijn costarred as Alex Meade-turned-Alexis Meade on Ugly Betty, and several years ago, Broadway star Jeffrey Carlson played Zoe, a transgender rock star on All My Children.

Still, as was the case with gay and lesbian characters until recently, transgender characters — and certainly the majority of the ones mentioned above — are generally defined by their gender identity and the situations that arise from it. Modern Family features a gay couple doing “straight” things like going to work, bickering and getting their kid into a good pre-school, but where’s the hunky crime scene investigator who just happens to have once been a girl? (Transgender TV and film portrayals are almost always man-to-woman, though, according to the American Psychological Association, roughly 1 in 30,000 biological females is transsexual compared to 1 in 10,000 biological males, so Chaz Bono — formerly Chastity and the son of gay icon Cher — is part of a significant community.)

What an intriguing twist it would be to come across a transsexual lead living a normal life where gender-reassignment is not the crux of the character, or used for comic relief or as the source of angst. Someday it might happen, but for now, it seems about as likely as new American Idol judge Steven Tyler thinking “Dude looks like a lady” to himself as next season’s winner is announced.

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Benjamin Walker (center) and the company in Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson.

Joan Marcus

It isn’t news that America’s political past was as contentious and chaotic as its present. But the point isn’t often squeezed for its satirical juice as thoroughly as it is in Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson, the purportedly “emo” bio-musical currently playing at Manhattan’s Public Theater. (Twice-extended, the show’s run currently ends May 30.) For writer/director Alex Timbers and composer/lyricist Michael Friedman, the wave of popularity on which Jackson rose from Tennessee backwoodsman to Indian-fighting, expansionist general to the Presidency inaugurates our national habit of investing politicians, rather than policies, with a near-Messianic capacity to realize “the will of the people” – especially politicians who can sell themselves, as Jackson did in the 1820s, as “outsider” alternatives to a corrupt, out-of-touch Washington elite.

Or, as this Andrew Jackson calls them, “croquet-playing cock-gobblers.” In Brian Walker’s portrayal, Old Hickory is by turns a petulant teen, a man of action, and a heartthrob in packed jeans: as the groupies at his rallies have it, “We want to fuck you…and also, we hate the tariff!” He’s a rock star, in other words, a conceit that underlies both the show’s score and its primary theatrical mode, which might be called allegory-by-anachronism. The 19th century White House is outfitted with speakerphones and sleek, boxy furniture; Congressmen hand out Valtrex to their constituents; “like”s and “brah”s pepper the dialogue. The device’s wittiest payoff comes with the entrance of Martin Van Buren, John Quincy Adams and other Beltway insiders – over a century before there was a Beltway – who vogue against neon and a pre-recorded Spice Girls track like so many Prada models. (Washington is techno; the frontier is “indie.”)

There’s also no shortage of cartoon violence. Early on, Jackson’s parents keel over to the thwack and twang of offstage arrows, inspiring young Andrew’s animus toward Native Americans. A narrator in a motorized wheelchair – played hilariously by Colleen Werthmann as a cross between The Church Lady and Kids in the Hall’s Cancer Boy – gamely offers historical context, until Jackson tires of having his story told by someone else and picks her off with his rifle. “Sometimes you’ve got to shoot the storyteller,” the ensemble sings. “Sometimes you’ve got to kill everyone.”

Jackson’s military exploits, and the “clearing” of Northern Georgia, among other tribal lands, take place offstage, but his personal life supplies all the sanguinity promised by the title, as the “cutting” kink – more goth than emo, really – shared by Jackson and his initially bigamous bride Rachel Robards is presented in Grand Guignol (or Sweeney Todd) fashion, with gouts of stage blood. That scene also leads to the score’s gamiest song, “Illness as Metaphor,” which ends with the line, “Susan Sontag’s dead, so I guess her cancer wasn’t metaphorical after all.” Complaining that the joke is tasteless only proves that one’s buttons have been pushed, I suppose, but it’s also clunky – the night I saw the show, the audience merely groaned – and distractingly remote from the show’s main concerns.

With this kind of clusterbombing of satirical targets, it’s fair to question the show’s coherence as political theater. “Sound familiar?” moments abound, without adding up to a one-to-one correspondence with current events. The mass appeal of Jackson’s feckless conviction is meant to bring to mind Dubya’s famously “incurious” character; but when his first presidential contest is thrown to the House of Representatives, who hand the office to “legacy” John Quincy Adams, the parallel to Bush v. Gore casts Jackson in the latter role. Even co-creator Timbers notes in an online interview that, over several years of workshop productions, the show has successively “felt like” a comment on Bill Clinton, George Bush, Mike Huckabee, and Obama. (Surely Sarah Palin could be added.)

The company in Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson

Joan Marcus

Of course, Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson is “about” all of these figures, and none. When the show gives itself a chance to pause for breath, it puzzles over broader questions about the relative merits of representative and direct democracy that are (at least) as old as Rousseau and as current as the latest batch of California ballot initiatives – conundrums it can hardly be expected to solve in ninety minutes. The core of the play may be an extended Oval Office sequence in which Jackson comes to realize that the “people” – White House tour-groups of idolatrous gawkers – have no cohesive idea of what their own “will” might be, vis-à-vis the “Indian Question” of the day, or any other. Sound familiar?

Michael Friedman’s music takes on the difficult task of scaffolding the show’s potentially ramshackle structure. The arrangements, performed by an onstage power trio (with cast members strapping on additional guitars as needed), are appropriately direct, managing to approximate rock-club intimacy and volume in a theatrical setting. That said, the lyrics’ juxtapositions of suburban angst (“Why wouldn’t you go out with me in high school”) and frontier rage (“I’m pretty sure it’s our land anyway”) sometimes feel strained, laboriously emphasizing connections made more effectively by Walker’s performance.

As to whether this is the world’s first “emo” musical, let’s just say that dedicated Rites of Spring fans are not the intended audience. The show’s signature sound – call it “Glee-mo” — isn’t thrashy but clean-edged, anthemic, and insistently if sardonically upbeat, underlining major-key hooks with ensemble choruses (“Populism, yeah, yeah!”) and full-band breaks (WHOMP – “This is the age of Jackson!”). Friedman’s compositional chops are apparent in some clever contrapuntal passages and harmonic turns, especially in the stand-out “The Saddest Songs,” but that’s just evidence that he’s plugged into the same feedback loop between musical theater and the pop-rock mainstream that allows Fall Out Boy guitarist Patrick Stump to confess his love for My Fair Lady’s “Almost Like Being in Love” and brings Green Day’s American Idiot to Broadway.

A full evening of this kind of meta-rock might be numbing, and the score wisely turns down the amps at strategic intervals, with a patter song on electoral machinations for Van Buren and his cohort, and a dark reworking of “Ten Little Indians” that serves as comment on Jackson’s dishonorable (and eventually dishonored) treaties with the Creeks and Chickasaws. If that sounds glib, the show’s culminating tableau is anything but, as a ghostly frieze of Native Americans on the Trail of Tears rises up while an older Jackson struggles to justify his career. In fact, the introspective tone of the show’s last fifteen minutes – and its closing song, the acoustic “Second Nature” — is at odds with the irreverence of much of what has gone before. Then again, it isn’t surprising that a show that questions the means by which Jackson pursued national unity would undervalue the dramatic kind; in a way, these shifts in tone reflect the creators’ acceptance of the final verdict on its central figure’s legacy handed down by the “Storyteller,” who reappears as a puffy-sweatered angel near the show’s end: “You can’t shoot history in the neck.”

Information on Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark, the “circus rock ‘n’ roll drama” whose Broadway premiere has now been pushed back to the fall, is scarce so far. What we know now, though, is that it’s directed by Julie Taymor, of Across the Universe and The Lion King fame; that its songs were written by U2′s Bono and The Edge; that its costume design is by Eiko Ishioka; and that it will involve Spider-Man fighting a host of villains: Electro, the Rhino, the Green Goblin, Carnage, Swarm, the Lizard, and Swiss Miss.

Wait–who was that last one? Swiss Miss is a new addition to the Spider-Man rogues’ gallery. Her Ishioka-designed costume has been described as white dominatrix gear, and apparently involves corkscrews and rotating knives. She’s also a genuine anomaly in the world of Spider-Man, who’s been fighting bad guys for close to half a century now. And they’re almost inevitably bad guys. Spider-Man has no villainesses from comic books interesting enough to put in a musical because, historically, his relationship with costumed villains is all about his alter ego Peter Parker looking for a replacement father and failing to find one. That doesn’t seem to have been an intentional theme–but it’s present anyway, and it’s turned up in the three hit Spider-Man movies, too.

The central canon of Spider-Man stories is the forty-odd comic books about the character by artist Steve Ditko and writer Stan Lee that were published between 1962 and 1966. An endlessly inventive and very odd cartoonist, Ditko gave Amazing Spider-Man a sense of constant motion and trembling tension. He had a remarkable knack for action and grotesquerie and urban landscapes and broad comedy. His spindly, contorted figures inspired the style of every subsequent Spider-Man cartoonist. And he drew almost all of the series’ villains as old men–much older men than Peter Parker, men old enough to be his father.

Peter’s father, in fact, is conspicuous by his absence in those early stories: he wasn’t named or even mentioned directly until 1968. As the first Spider-Man story begins, Peter is a teenage boy, living in Queens with his elderly aunt and uncle. Uncle Ben is murdered within a few pages, and the disaster that drives the rest of Spider-Man’s career is Peter’s realization that he could have saved his second father’s life.

After that, Peter’s blown it. Again and again, Spider-Man finds himself fighting men who represent one model or another of bad fatherhood. The Tinkerer, Electro, Dr. Octopus and the Lizard are all scientists, like Peter, but instead of mentoring him, they turn on him. (Before director Sam Raimi’s plans for Spider-Man 4 were scrapped a few months ago, he had been pushing for the Lizard and Electro to appear in it.) Kraven the Hunter is the bad father as alpha male, bloated with his own machismo and his need to prove his superiority. J. Jonah Jameson, the editor of the Daily Bugle, where Peter works, is a furious, pompous, unsatisfiable father who parcels out precious crumbs of respect amid torrents of abuse.

And then there’s the Green Goblin, Spider-Man’s chief enemy–but it wasn’t clear what kind of father he was until Ditko left the series. In their first issue together, Lee and new artist John Romita put the crown on the series’ bad-daddy motif. The Goblin, they revealed, is the wealthy, successful Norman Osborn, who seems at first to be a good father to Peter’s friend Harry–but turns out to be the worst kind of father, the kind who passes along his legacy of violence and lies to his son. The Green Goblin went on to murder Peter’s girlfriend Gwen Stacy a few years later. (By that point, Gwen’s own father, police captain George Stacy, had been killed off as well. In Spider-Man stories, bad fathers never stop coming back, but good fathers are doomed.)

Spidey occasionally got to fight women: he tussled with Medusa, a supporting character from Fantastic Four; he had a run-in with the Black Widow, who dropped in from the pages of The Avengers. (“How can I fight her?” he asked on that issue’s cover. “She’s a female copy of MYSELF!”) But he didn’t get an actual recurring villainess to call his own until the Black Cat first appeared in 1979. (In more recent comics, they’ve developed what can only be described as an enemies-with-benefits relationship.)

That brings us back to the curious case of Spidey’s new hot-chocolate-inspired, castrating-weapon-wielding adversary. It’s hard to imagine a Broadway extravaganza like Turn Off the Dark not featuring a woman as one of its central characters; unfortunately, the 48-year history of Spider-Man comic books simply doesn’t offer many options. Taymor and Ishioka have created an option of their own, and it sounds like Swiss Miss will be a visual spectacle in the tradition of Ditko and Romita’s inventions. But it’s the painful undercurrents of masculine identification in Spider-Man’s early battles–the sense that he was fighting the substitute fathers he could never again have–that made them more than just a spectacle.