Prouvaire

tjhart85, 4 months ago

Thanks for the reminder, I threw in a dozen coffees.

Thank you for all that you're doing, @Ernest ! This platform is fantastic and I really hope that you're able to get enough support to keep it alive long term without it needing to turn to outside funds to stay alive!

ETA: Get well soon! Don't overwork yourself, you've got us stable at the moment, please, don't cause yourself so much stress you delay your recovery (as they say, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure!)

Emotional_Series7814, 7 months ago

“sexually oriented performance” as… “a male performer exhibiting as a female, or a female performer exhibiting as a male, who uses clothing, makeup, or other similar physical markers and who sings, lip syncs, dances, or otherwise performs before an audience.”

Critics point out [the law] was written so broadly that unintended targets such as the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders could be subject to its restrictions for wearing suggestively skimpy costumes.

So speaking of unintended targets… non-professional musical theatre has a shortage of interested men, even moreso when it’s musical theatre put on by a high school or a younger age group. The way I usually see things done is that once you run out of men to cast in male roles, you offer the remaining ones to women if their vocal range can handle it, and sometimes even if they can’t—their parts would just be moved up an octave. (You usually wouldn’t look into changing the character’s gender to match that of the actor, because the show rights usually say something about not being allowed to do that.) This never came across as something subversive or trying to make a statement about gender, just as “we have to fill the role with someone”. Now with this law, the countless middle school girls who get offered minor male roles because maybe 5 boys tried out for the show are legally said to be putting on a “sexually oriented performance”. After all, it’s a female performer exhibiting as a male, using clothing and makeup and singing and dancing and acting before an audience. But somehow I doubt the middle schooler wearing a too-big suit and saying their three lines a little too loudly is meant to inspire sexual desire in the audience.

Although, I think if the lawmakers were aware of this practice for amateur theatre, they’d probably want it killed too, no matter how nonsubversive it is, because it’s a person stepping out of their assigned gender role. Nevermind that an actor’s job is to portray someone they are not.