For many people the 1982 comedy Tootsie is considered one of the best comedies of all time. But seen through a modern perspective it doesn’t reflect the times we live in today. When it came time to exploring the idea of turning the film into a musical (first announced in 2012), one candidate to write the book, Robert Horn, did something most people wouldn’t do in his first meeting.
“I sat with [composer] David Yazbeck and I actually went in saying, ‘I’m going to blow this meeting,'” Horn recalled when we spoke last week via Zoom. “I’m going to tell them everything that I would want to do, which is so different than in many ways in the film and how I would want to approach it in a more contemporary way and what I would want to change. And David just embraced all of it.”
The premise is Michael Dorsey (Dustin Hoffmann in the film/Drew Becker in the tour) is an out-of-work actor known for being difficult. When his agent tells him nobody is going to hire him, Michael recognizes an opportunity to play a woman. He dresses in full drag and assumes a new identity as Dorothy Michaels. She gets the part at the expense of his on-again off-again girlfriend, Sandy (Teri Garr/Payton Reilly) who also auditioned for the show. While working on the show Michael as Dorothy befriends another actress, Julie (Jessica Lange/Ashley Alexandra), and things get complicated.
In the film the role was in a soap opera. In Tootsie, now touring and opening tonight at the Dolby Theatre in Los Angeles, the setting is a new musical.
Amongst the changes Horn first suggested was making this the journey of a man who has to find a way to stop sabotaging himself.
“What I loved about the idea of doing it,” Horn realized, “and what I related to is how tough this business is and how we often are our own worst enemy. What would you do if somebody said to you, ‘You can’t ever do the thing you love more than anything?’ If somebody told me I could no longer write, what would I do to overcome it, to push past that and make it happen? And I related to that. I think we both felt if we could hold on to that as the thread and then rebuild the story to work in a different medium, we were onto something.”
Horn, Yazbeck and the entire team also had to figure out how and where Tootsie fits in the #MeToo era. A task that some critics say was never resolved, but Horn insisted on some pretty significant changes after consulting with a wide swath of people.
“I did a lot of work with GLADD. I did a lot of work with women on the forefront of the feminist movement to talk to them and explain to me what I don’t know. I had very open communication with the women involved in the production, both on the stage and off. Once you understand what you don’t understand you can use your talent to make it funny to you, but you have to know what it is you’re writing. And so it was very daunting and very scary.
“We made some very strong decisions. Unlike the movie, the women will not become better women by virtue of this man dressing as a woman. He will become a better person by being surrounded by the women in the piece. We definitely looked at Julie and the characters that in the movie felt a little victimized or felt sort of oppressed by men in some ways, and gave them much more of a life and a story where they were independent women. Where they didn’t have to explain themselves to anybody.“
As revered as the movie is after forty years Tootsie can feel dated. Keeping a show alive without relying on contemporary references was of utmost important to Horn.
“What you’ll notice in our tropes is that there really aren’t any contemporary references in terms of political or pop culture. There’s very few, if any, references to that. The references we do make that are political are more about the the issues that are brought up about feminism and what it is for a cis man, a man who identifies as male, to take on the experience and identity of somebody they are not. And what that means in the world of feminism and how we’re changing culturally. I don’t know where we’ll be with those elements ten years from now. We may feel very dated ten years from now when there’s a woman president and when the world has changed. But we decided if we’re going to put anything contemporary it would be those issues that the story itself struggles with.”
Tootsie was not a success on Broadway. Though it received 11 Tony Award nominations (winning two – one for Horn), the show only ran for 293 performances. In fact, films turned into musicals have a very checkered history. The graveyard of unsuccessful Broadway musicals includes Breakfast at Tiffany’s; Victor, Victoria; Nick and Nora (based on The Thin Man); The Goodbye Girl; Gone With the Wind (yes that really happened) and Honeymoon in Vegas by Jason Robert Brown. Horn collaborated with Brown on the original musical 13.
He does have some thoughts as to why so many of these adaptations failed.
“I’m not a designer, but I see a pattern,” he says with a laugh. “The shows that have become successful [are] from lesser-known movies. You look at Hairspray, you look at Waitress – they’re niche movies. I think when you have a huge title there’s such an association to something. I can only speak for myself. I didn’t want to put my name on something that someone else had written. I idolized Larry Gelbart and Don McGuire and everybody that was involved in it. But I didn’t want to take credit for their work. It’s really hard when people associate something. I’m sure people came to see Tootsie and wanted the ‘How’s Cleveland’ line and didn’t get it. My job, I felt, was in the first five minutes: make them forget the movie and forget that stellar cast. We had our own stellar cast, as does the tour have a stellar cast, and make them invest in your story in the way you tell it. I don’t know that there’s a rule. I think people will keep trying.”
To see our full conversation with Robert Horn, please go to our YouTube channel here.
Tootsie continues to Broadway Sacramento May 17th-May 22nd; The Smith Center in Las Vegas May 24th – May 29th and Segerstrom Center in Costa Mesa from May 31st – June 12th.
Photo: The touring company of Tootsie. All photos courtesy of Broadway in Hollywood.