Our resident musical theatre expert, Nicole Savin, has dug into the archives to highlight some of the reasons why musicals are home to so many violent women…
Pop. Six. Squish.
Violent women are fairly easy to find in Greek tragedy – By Jove have dug up two for our upcoming season. Agave (from Euripides’ The Bacchae) and Medea will be the focus of the season’s 2017 shows and in the past we’ve featured Clytemnestra and Electra. But for anything more recent than ancient, we’ve had to improvise: our Othello featured a female lead, and our next Shakespearean venture, Margaret of Anjou, is pieced together from numerous plays that feature the historical Margaret but never focus on her.
There is another genre, however, where powerful women abound and make up a core part of the canon. On the surface, you might think musical theatre and ancient tragedy are as far apart as two things can be, but they have a few very important similarities (there’s a PhD in there somewhere!) – they have choruses of townspeople who comment on the action, they have elements of magical realism, and they frequently feature powerful women. Sometimes those powerful women take more traditionally feminine roles: the Witch in Into the Woods does the whole stealing your first-born child thing and ultimate stage mother Mama Rose in Gypsy is emotionally abusive – itself its own kind of violence. But if we’re defining our violence as physical, our field is narrowed to a class of hard-as-nails ladies who are as different as they are similar. Here we look at three of my favourites.
Roxie Hart and Velma Kelly and the ladies of the Cook County Jail from Chicago
Maybe the most famous musical theatre murderers of any gender, Roxie and Velma and their fellow inmates all lovingly describe their violent crimes in musical numbers that each echo famous vaudeville routines, nostalgic theatricality that on the show’s premiere in 1975 would still have been familiar to many audience members. The women in the show avoid femme fatale-status – they are always decidedly the heroes of piece, not just seductive villainesses, despite the inevitable sexuality of Bob Fosse’s style; Fosse strips men and women down to their scanties in equal measure, both metaphorically and literally (you can see the original Broadway cast demonstrating this here). Every character in the show is playing a part, both in the framing device of a vaudeville performance and in the narrative, which follows a conniving lawyer and a client in need of some serious image management if she is going to avoid the electric chair (see how that plays out here).
The women of Carrie
I think it is probably Carrie that is the direct descendant of ancient tragedy – the stakes are so high and the brutality is so heightened. Based on the novel of the same name by Stephen King, legendary Broadway flop Carrie is a study in women whose passions lead them to violence, and is much more sympathetic to the eponymous lead than its source material. Sheltered, telekinetic outsider Carrie is bullied to extremes by her fanatically religious mother and the kids at her high school – chiefly Chris, a girl who in the climactic scene at the prom dumps a bucket full of pig’s blood on Carrie’s head.
The relationship between Carrie and her mother is astonishingly graphic by musical theatre standards (you can catch a glimpse of the original Stratford production staging here). It’s notable that Carrie’s mother’s brand of religious fanaticism is explicitly anti-feminist; she sees Carrie getting her first period as a punishment for womanly sins. And then, of course, Carrie turns her telekinetic powers on her classmates in a moment of utter frustrated abandon, turning the gym where the prom is held into a nightmarish bloodbath. As if that wasn’t enough violence for one evening at the theatre, when Carrie returns home she is stabbed by her mother, Margaret, who is sure that the Devil has sent her; in response, Carrie stops her mother’s heart. It’s an almost satirical amount of violence, but it isn’t played for any (purposeful) laughs.
Mrs Lovett from Sweeney Todd
Finally, maybe the most well-loved murderess in musical theatre. Mrs Lovett is undoubtedly the plum role in Sweeney Todd, treading a fine line between lovable, mumsy, Cockney type and viciously scheming purveyor of cannibalism. Sweeney may lend the show his name but it is worth noting that it is Mrs Lovett who is the driving force in the show’s narrative. It is she who suggests that Sweeney expand his murder spree and it is she who suggests that the ideal way of disposing bodies in the capitalistic world of Industrial Revolution London is to butcher them and bake them into pies. While Sweeney’s driving motivation is revenge, and then later guilt (when he kills someone he has had no previous problem with) Mrs Lovett has very few qualms, remaining cheerfully amoral until the very end. The role was created for and by Angela Lansbury (Angela herself tells the story here) and in her telling, she went wild with the music hall style of it, similar to the vaudeville-style of Chicago. By its nature, musical theatre lends itself to comedic or satirical depictions of violence and this is abundantly evident in Sweeney Todd, where Mrs Lovett swings wildly between the manic comedy of ‘A Little Priest’ (make no mistake, the crowd did go nuts) and the high melodrama of the moment where she confesses their whole violent scheme has been predicated on a passionate lie. Like a great tragic hero, a fatal flaw has been her undoing and as an audience, we see this moment – and not the dozens of previous murders – as the ultimate act of violence and Stephen Sondheim purposefully avoids giving us an easy way to feel about it. Euripides does the same in Medea, presenting the facts of her violence but never providing the audience with an easy value judgement – she’s a justified monster, and we empathise with her. There are just not that many plays that allow women that opportunity – but both ancient tragedy and musical theatre seem to be exceptions.
By Jove’s Season of Violent Women opens with Margaret of Anjou on November 1st at the Gallery on the Corner, Battersea. Get your tickets here.
