Marlon Brando as Stanley Kowalski in the 1952 film of A Streetcar Named Desire. Photograph: Bettmann/Corbis
So the tough guy has had his day on Broadway? That's the word at the weekend from The New York Times, which has articulated what it sees as an upsurge in newly sensitive and conflicted men on stage - a phenomenon that extends to Britain's own Billy Elliot - the Musical, which finally reaches Broadway in the autumn.
Is this really news? Some might say not, citing a steady downturn in unbridled Broadway machismo ever since Marlon Brando decamped from the theatre for the cinema more than a half century ago, taking with him A Streetcar Named Desire's eternally bruising Stanley Kowalski. Whereas once it was the likes of Brando's braying "Stella" who ruled the street, those honours of late have tended to go to a sequined Hugh Jackman, vamping and camping his way through The Boy From Oz, and whichever male star of the moment is playing that capacious mama, Edna Turnblad, in Hairspray. As its title suggests, the recent, short-lived Broadway musical, Cry-Baby, had at its centre an anti-hero who - you guessed it - has to learn to cry, while Broadway's reigning straight play, August: Osage County, gives pride of place to its women. The men in Tracy Letts' three-act epic are either weakly pathetic, emotionally stunted, or, in one important instance, dead.
This trend stands in marked contrast to recent cinema, which at this year's Oscars awarded the most malign and murderous tough guy in many a year (Javier Bardem's Chigurh in No Country For Old Men) and the sort of unyielding American frontiersman in Daniel Day-Lewis's Daniel Plainview to render There Will Be Blood memorable for its resolute ferocity. No wonder the prevailing Broadway male seems comparatively dewy-eyed and simpering; it's the difference between the jokey shenanigans of something like Mel Brooks' Young Frankenstein, with its green-hued monster from Shuler Hensley that is revealed to have a heart of gold, and Heath Ledger's Joker in The Dark Knight, a character who comes at us entirely and thrillingly unredeemed.
It's in the very fabric of Broadway, particularly these days, that it should thrive on sensitivity and sexual ambivalence, as befits a culture that has made no secret over time of its enduring appeal for gay men. Lord knows what the testosterone-charged blokes who have helped make a long-running hit of Monty Python's Spamalot would make of the musical theatre love-in that is the newly opened [title of show], even though both musicals at their core are equally self-referential. One trades on babes and bad jokes and goes down well with a beer or two or three; the other represents Broadway's valentine to its self-examining, increasingly hermetic self. That [title of show] represents a commercial long shot tells its own, separate story: perhaps the only real tough guys left on Broadway are the producers willing to take a punt on a musical not based on a film that has no stars.
These days, male neurosis is the theme on which Broadway thrives. After all, when's the last time you saw Russell Crowe on a Broadway, or a London, stage?
