SEX & THE CITY GIRL
BUSHNELL TO TAKE STAGE WITH A MORE FEMINIST SHOW
And just like that, Candace Bushnell is back.
Bushnell, the real-life Carrie Bradshaw whose Observer column and book became “Sex and the City,” is trading in pen and paper for the stage.
The one-woman show, “Is There Still Sex in the City? ... an intimate conversation with Candace Bushnell,” will have its socially distanced world premiere June 22 at the Bucks County Playhouse in Pennsylvania and run through July 19.
It’s not just the format that will stand out to dedicated Manolo Blahnik wearers.
“This is the original. So, you know, it all comes from me,” Bushnell, 62, told the
Daily News this week of the differences between the long-running series, its accompanying films and her one-woman show.
“I had a really interesting life and I had a lot of adventures, you know, before ‘Sex and the
City,’ during ‘Sex and the City’ and after
‘Sex and the City,” the author said. “It’s really about a full journey.”
While the show weaves in and out of promoting female independence — with Miranda and Samantha giving men a run for their money, professionally or sexually, and Charlotte deferring to tradition — Bushnell’s show is “probably more overtly feminist” than the series.
But unlike Sarah Jessica Parker’s Carrie, who religiously revisits her confounding relationship with Chris Noth’s Mr. Big, Bushnell has never inferred that’s the be-all and end-all.
“Is There Still Sex in the City?” — also the name of Bushnell’s 2019 novel — is “the story of somebody who’s also a creative person and an artist in the city ... a story of New York City and being a woman who really wants to succeed in New York City and wants to succeed on her own terms, and wants to be as successful as a man,” she said.
“My message,” Bushnell said, “has never been to find Mr. Big and marry Mr. Big.”
Rather, the show will deal with “being an independent woman and psychologically, like, how do you do that? How do you put that together?”
The last year has certainly facilitated alone time more than anything in recent memory, but this one-woman show has been in development since well before the coronavirus pandemic, when a producer friend suggested Bushnell do a show, she recalled.
“So I said, God, that’s something I’ve already been doing in a way ... since the mid-’90s,” she said, referencing lectures and book talks.
Besides, said Bushnell, this is what she’s written about “since I first came to New York in, oh God, the late ’70s.”
She told The News she’s hoping New York audiences can see the show after its Pennsylvania run, but nothing is certain with Broadway still closed.
Bushnell’s words provided the basis for not just “SATC” on screens big and small, but “Lipstick Jungle” and “The Carrie Diaries,” which aired on NBC and The CW respectively. “
“And Just Like That,” the “Sex and the City” revival is aiming to start shooting this spring.
It could be ideal timing — and the perfect excuse to pour a Cosmopolitan — for a populace whose dating options have been severely curtailed for more than a year by the pandemic.
“I think people want to go out. They want to go out, they want to be with other people. … They want to laugh,” said Bushnell, who hopes audience members will “have a better understanding, somehow, of themselves and what they want in life and get some inspiration on how to go about and get it.”