Though unintentional, the 20th anniversary season of Stumptown Stages couldn’t be more perfectly timed for a repudiation of our current anti-trans, “ah yes, the two genders” political climate. Three of the productions undertaken by the local theater company are musicals that involve characters or portrayals that fall into that wonderfully fluid spectrum of sexuality.
Kiss of the Spider Woman, staged last October, centers on the fantasy world created by a gay window dresser to help survive the abuse and fear he endures while languishing in an Argentinian prison. And every production of the gloriously campy Hairspray, from John Waters’ peerless 1988 film to its Broadway iteration as a musical (and subsequent 2007 film adaptation) features a male actor playing Edna Turnblad, the doting mother of the main character. Stumptown’s production of the musical, which just wrapped up last month, was no exception with the great Gary Wayne Cash slipping on the house dresses and hair curlers to play Edna.
Gender roles get even blurrier in the final production of Stumptown Stages’ 2024-25 season as the company takes on Tootsie, the Tony-winning musical based on 1982 comedy film about a difficult actor who decides to take on a new identity as a woman to score a role.
“They address a lot of really cool things,” co-director and co-star of Stumptown’s production of Tootsie Steve Coker says of the musical’s creators Robert Horn and David Yazbeck. “It was written during the #metoo movement and it really is pro-woman in so many ways.”
