‘On Broadway’ documentary offers hope for New York theater
NEW YORK – Broadway is down right now, struggling to reopen after being shuttered during the pandemic. But it has been down before and gotten back up. That’s the message of “On Broadway,” a new documentary celebrating the history of the Great White Way.
“Broadway is resilient,” said the film’s director, Oren Jacoby. “The story of that resilience is really the message. And we hope that inspires people and will make
need to be rethought,” says Amy Shack Egan, a wedding planner in Brooklyn, New York. “I’ve seen couples get so creative and make choices that really feel right for themselves and their partnership so that a wedding can actually feel empowering.”
Though couples make varied decisions on which practices to include at weddings, planners agree that two traditions are on the way out: The bride tossing her bouquet to her single female friends, and the husband removing his wife’s garter in front of all their guests.
“Anything that feels super gendered or patriarchal or anything that supports the notion that women are property to be handed off from one man to another man – all those things are things that have been questioned,” says Cindy Savage, a wedding planner based in Seattle.
When it comes to other traditions – like the bride wearing white – couples differ in their approaches.
For Cavin Elizabeth, a wedding photographer based in San Diego, who got married in 2019, a white dress “did not feel like it honored my personality,” she says. Instead, she opted for a blue gown with vibrant floral patterns. She also declined to take her husband’s last name, with the aim of “not giving in to the system of patriarchy.”
“A poofy, fairytale white dress might actually feel really empowering and awesome for somebody, and for somebody else, it might feel like a cage,” Egan says.
One tradition that can be more difficult to ditch is the bride’s father walking her down the aisle to symbolically give her away to her groom. In a June
Yougov poll of 700 Americans who have been married, 64% said they think the tradition of the bride’s father, or another male, giving her away should be maintained. But it’s not because brides necessarily want to be traded from one man to another – they just don’t want to hurt their parents’ feelings.
Minneapolis-based marketing director Megan Westman says she would have skipped this tradition for her wedding in 2020 but kept it because it was important to her dad.
“Just the context of it seems like, why would you give a person away?” she says. “But I just loved the idea of something special for my parents, because it was a really big day for them, too.”
Some couples are more inclusive with their wedding parties, not letting gender determine who gets to be a bridesmaid and who a groomsman, and calling them whatever they want.
Despite de-gendered trends becoming more popular among couples, the $51 billion wedding services industry is still playing catch-up when it comes to inclusion, says Laura Reitsma, whose company Fierce Productions specializes in nontraditional celebrations.
According to a 2018 Community & Marketing Insights survey of same-sex and queer-identified couples, 83% of respondents said it was important to see other LGBTQ couples on a wedding vendor’s website for them to consider doing business with them.
“I’ve definitely seen an uptick in the last couple of years, with more of the Gen Z, the younger folk who are getting married, getting engaged and coming to me because they’re realizing the wedding industry is still extremely binary,” she says. “They’re not seeing themselves represented in a lot of publications, a lot of websites, documents, photos, so they come to us to create their own traditions.”