Playing dress-up
The musical adaptation of ‘Tootsie’ is much changed from the 1982 movie but an actor’s desperation for a role is still at its core
NEW YORK – In 2015 — when the absurdly reductive short-form listicle became the Hail Mary of flagging entertainment journalism — a prominent New York weekly decided to ask a group of actors, and only actors, to rank the greatest movies of all time. The widely disseminated winner gave the internet chatterati a collective kanipshin: “Tootsie.” “Tootsie”? What were these prominent thespians thinking, kvetched many? What about a masterwork like “The Godfather” or “Citizen Kane”? Why the 1982 Sydney Pollack movie wherein Dustin Hoffman played a neurotic, middle-aged, out-ofwork actor named Michael Dorsey who impersonated a woman in order to improve his chances of getting a job on a soap opera, only to find that his work was of such quality as to attract the romantic attentions of a straight-laced heterosexual man? The curvy Hoffman even afforded his fictional Dorothy a little Southern accent which, Roger Ebert observed at the time, helped him “squeak by” vocally as a credible woman.
Actually, “Tootsie” wasn’t entirely a choice from left field, any more so than the decision to turn “Tootsie” into a major new Broadway musical, scored by David Yazbek (“The Band’s Visit”), starring Santino Fontana and lead produced by the hitherto highly successful Scott Sanders (“The Color Purple”),
“I had to have an actor who understands that Michael’s deception is all about the truth, who cares so much about his fake character that he puts his entire self into her.” — Director Scott Ellis “This show really has evolved into a tribute to this art form.”
with a Chicago tryout at the Cadillac Palace Theatre now in previews (opening night is Sept. 30) and a New York bow firmly set for next spring.
“Tootsie” trailed only “E.T. the Extra Terrestrial” in box office success in 1982 and eventually grossed almost $177 million in the United States alone. Its cast included such legendary comics as Teri Garr and Bill Murray. It was nominated for 10 Oscars. And, for a comedy, it was exceptionally well-reviewed. Ebert gave it four stars, admiring its ability to fuse human tenderness with comedy, social commentary with farce.
“In an uncanny way,” Ebert wrote, reflecting both his Midwestern roots and the moment of his writing, “the woman played by Hoffman looks like certain actual women who look like drag queens. Dorothy might have trouble passing in Evanston, but in Manhattan, nobody gives her a second look.”
That’s a comment few critics would make today, of course, given how much sensibilities about the representation of gender have changed and how any comedy based largely on mistaken sexual identity — a humorous look at the purely transactional appropriation of a false gender, you might say — can reasonably expect scrutiny. Very intense social media scrutiny.
But none of that lies at the heart of the result of that Time Out New York poll. Actors are hard-wired to like “Tootsie” because the movie is fundamentally about acting: the insecurity and dysfunction of the profession, the desperation of needing a job, the lack of agency afforded to even very skilled and experienced actors, the need to kiss up to way too many fools with power (and, not infrequently, you might have heard, giant tempers and wandering hands). On that other hand, most actors are so compelled to do what they do that they see no other profession productive of happiness or fulfillment. Larry Gelbart and Don McGuire’s story makes much of that paradox, but also functions as a powerful veneration of what great actors actually do, which is to make you believe they are something they absolutely are not.
“You want to see the set?” asks Scott Ellis, the genial, Chicago-trained director of “Tootsie” (the musical), as he leads a visitor past such performers as Lilli Cooper, Julie Halston, Sarah Stiles and Michael McGrath, all the way to the back of one of the many similar studios at the New 42nd Street Studios, the rehearsal complex in midtown Manhattan that has been hailed so many times in the media as a secret hive of creative activity that it is now in danger of becoming more famous than some of the shows that emerge. “Tootsie” will amp that up to a whole new level: The David Rockwell-designed model that Ellis is showing looks a lot like the very room in which the rehearsal is taking place at this very moment, even down to the neon-crusted view outside the huge windows. “See how everything is angled, tilted a little?” Ellis asks. “Some things are leaning in. Some things are leaning away. Nothing here is entirely straight.”
This is something of a reveal: The big deviation of “Tootsie,” the musical, from “Tootsie,” the movie, is that Michael does not pull off his masterstroke in the world of daytime TV soap operas, but on Broadway itself. And in the present day.
In the new and updated book — which is by Robert Horn (“Moonshine”) — Michael, an obsessive method actor, becomes so infuriated by off-Broadway fools with hiring authority, and they with the difficulty of dealing with him, that he decides to audition for a musical as a performer of a different gender. He’s good enough to pull it off and attract national attention — fueled by chat rooms and gossip columnists — even while the show-within-a-show remains in previews. It is all very meta. The show, incidentally, is “Romeo and Juliet, Part Two,” which functions not unlike “Marilyn the Musical” in the canceled NBC musical drama about Broadway, “Smash.”
“This,” says Ellis, grinning, “is one hundred percent not your grandfather’s ‘Tootsie.’”
Everyone involved with “Tootsie” (including Ellis) says that Ellis was insistent from the get-go that Fontana play the lead role. His reasons were myriad. “Michael is the most important character, not Dorothy,” the animated director says, perched in a corner room at New 42nd Street. “On the other hand, if you cannot play Dorothy, then you can’t be cast. And I had to have an actor who understands that Michael’s deception is all about the truth, who cares so much about his fake character that he puts his entire self into her.”
Clearly, Ellis has zeroed in on a crucial rule with this story: Michael has no interest personally in being a woman (or exploring any gender nonbinary), and the premise of “Tootsie” will collapse if that is not immediately clear. Michael merely is using Dorothy as a tool to get some work. He can pass himself off as a woman because he is a very fine actor. It’s as simple — and as fraught — as that.
Fontana — who performed “Hamlet” at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis when he was just 23 years old, whose eclectic slate of previous Broadway credits range from “Cinderella” to “A View From the Bridge,” and who is known in real-life rehearsal rooms to have more than a little in common with the intense character he is playing — was born the year that “Tootsie” first was released. In conversation, he gives the sense that he knows the huge and personally perilous challenge he has been given: “Tootsie” has other plot strands (they’ve changed quite a bit too), but the two leading characters still are Michael and Dorothy, both of whom happen to be played by Fontana. Real-time. Without any Hollywood trickery.
“Becoming Dorothy is not a good decision that Michael Dorsey makes,” Fontana says during a quick rehearsal break. “It’s entertaining for the audience, but it’s a terrible decision made out of desperation. The wrong decision. This is what is so great — I have a character so desperate that he is not thinking even two steps ahead. He’s not seeing the end point, which means he ends up deceiving and hurting so many people. He betrays all of the people who grow to love Dorothy. And that leads to the question of how he might redeem himself.” As the show wends toward Broadway, the publicists for “Tootsie” are likely to be pitching many stories about how Fontana is having to get used to the need to constantly wax all of his body hair, being as Michael is so compulsive about accuracy (“the upkeep of all of that,” Fontana says, “is a nightmare”), or about how playing such a role affords a man a rare chance to actually see what women must endure in all kinds of arenas. Fontana — perhaps sensing his future marketing duties — volunteers that his wife has been fascinated by her suddenly empathetic husband.
Many movie-to-musical translations adhere closely to the original book: “Pretty Woman,” the last Broadway musical to try out in Chicago, directly employed J.F. Lawton, the original screenwriter, and it retained the 1990s feel of the source film. There are good reasons for those choices: Some of them involve prior contractual deals and obligations to specific individuals, but savvy Broadway creatives well know that one of the reasons for the abundance of such projects is both the power of preawareness and the pull of nostalgia. As the current box office receipts for “Pretty Woman” on Broadway attest, audiences go in part to such musicals to re-live their experience at the source film (and maybe convince themselves that they remain young). This applies to jukebox shows too; For example, it explains why Bob Gaudio famously insisted that all of the musical arrangements in “Jersey Boys” be close replicas of the original Four Seasons recordings. Such talismans often are compromised at an artist’s fiscal peril: Arty New York critics might crave and reward the challenging and the unexpected, but they don’t pay for their tickets.
On the other hand, as the character of Vivian Ward sings in “Pretty Woman,” currently eight times a week to packed houses, you can’t go back.
Thus Horn describes his work on “Tootsie” as “an homage” to the original screenplay. Gelbart and McGuire are both deceased, although Murray Schisgal, who worked on the screenplay, is still alive. Nonetheless, Sanders says that it was Gelbart who first suggested that “Tootsie” be made into a musical. But that was nine years ago. And Sanders, who is highly experienced in the Broadway-Hollywood intersection, negotiated rights that freed his creative team from mere replication. And he was quickly convinced that the story had to lose the soapy setting. “Those soaps really don’t exist anymore in their old form,” Sanders says. “We needed a new setting.”
Horn argues that by updating the story, it becomes much easier both to reflect contemporary sensibilities and to include some surprises and twists that were not in the original movie — and thus give audience members the feeling that they are watching something new and fresh and worth their time and money — while still being true to what Horn calls “the original DNA of the movie.”
“By moving the show to Broadway, we get the chance both to pay tribute to the theater and make fun of it,” Horn says.
Sanders, Ellis, Yazbek and Horn all say that the creative team has constantly discussed, and worried over, how the passage of time might change how “Tootsie” will be received, and how that should impact the current production.
“I think we basically have decided to let the story be the guide,” Horn says, “and then hit those issues as we contemporize them. This really is the story of a desperate actor. It asks the question, ‘How far will desperation take you?’ And it looks at the repercussions of desperation in someone’s life. We all understand desperation — we live in desperate times, in many ways. By approaching the story that way, we are able to get a lot of hope into what we are doing and, ultimately, find the happy ending.”
Ellis — who, like many of his peer directors of musicals, is functioning here as a kind of grand creative overseer — says he would be the first to admit his own desperation for working in the theater. “What if we could no longer do what we need to do?” he asks, his eyes widening as he talks, rhetorically, not only of the need to convince an audience of Michael’s existential dilemma but to draw from the actual experience of a roomful of obsessive-compulsive-perfectionist artists, all rather like himself.
Yazbek, the composer, says he was hardly lusting after the chance to provide some replication of the songs stylings of the 1980s or an amplification of “It Might Be You,” aka, the theme from “Tootsie.” “Oh, those dream machines,” he says. “Those shoulder pads,” he says with a mock shudder, gently poking fun at the boppy, loungy David Grusin-scored soundtrack (“It Might Be You”) for the film. “There was some cool new-wave and punk stuff,” Yazbek says, “but, in general, the music of that era does not need a new lease on life. I like to think of my music here as the exact opposite.”
Talking to Horn and Yazbek, you come to see that the pair have figured out one of the truths of the musical — the crucial role of empathetic central characters. As with “Wicked,” which famously cut many of the scenes that did not involve the contrasting duo of Glinda and Elphaba, so “Tootsie” is heavily focused on Michael and Dorothy. Sure, it’s the same actor, but for the show to work, audience members will need to see two very different people. “Tootsie” worked, Yazbek argues, because the root comedic situation is so fundamentally delicious. The key is to maintain that same scenario.
“Struggling artists are still with us,” Sanders says. “That is our universal story. We’re just asking, ‘What is the craziest thing you’ve ever done in order to live your dream?’ That’s old, it’s young, it’s tourist, it’s local, it is not bound by gender or race, it’s everybody. And everybody needs to laugh.”
After all, “Tootsie” always was a comedy — even now, it cannot be so worried about offending some sensibility somewhere that it fails to be funny. Yazbek, who is not given to hype, insists that Horn has written “the funniest book with which I ever have been involved.”
Even the actors, he says, keep breaking up in rehearsal.