Respect: A Soundtrack to Women’s History Month

“If you could pick one song to be the soundtrack of your life, what would it be?” 

At Rosendale Theatre from March 27-30, packed audiences were asked this very question. In “Respect: This One’s for the Girls,” three singers and one narrator demonstrated how pop music, going all the way back to 1900, maps out a woman’s life. 

Written by Dorothy Marcic and directed by Ovi Vargas, “Respect” played at Rosendale Theatre in honor of Women’s History Month. The show consisted of four cast members: Rebecca Brown Adelman, Allegra Coons, Heather Roland-Blanco and Lydia Pidlunsky. 

The singers, almost like muses to the narrator, act out how women were treated and portrayed through each century. In between ballads of damsel distress like “Someone to Watch Over Me,” and numbers of seduction and power like “Whatever Lola Wants” and “Blues in the Night,” were monologues. These were real stories from women, giving voice to a community and acknowledging the role that storytelling plays between women. Stories passed down are what we have to show for the female perspective throughout history. 

“Respect” opened with the narrator’s struggle with a man, Jason. They broke up and he had the audacity to bring his new girlfriend to her book launch party. The singers comically jump into “I Fall to Pieces” as the narrator watches the singers’ helpless reaction in shock. They reverse the timeline, going back to the 1920s and the Great Depression, when the ideal woman was Betty Boop. We see the women enter the workforce, reclaiming their image with Rosie the Riveter and recognizing the huge role women stepped into during World War II. We see them fall back into the roles of housewives and boy-obsessed teens before a surge of anger and empowerment, shown in songs like “These Boots Were Made for Walking” and “I Will Survive.”

This musical was adapted from the book, “Respect: Women and Popular Music,” also written by Marcic. “There’s a lot of musicals based on books, but not many based on social science research,” said Marcic. In 1999, she started dedicating eight hours a day for eight months to researching all Top-40 female song lyrics since 1900. “I’m going to show how music really proves this emerging equality of men and women,” said Marcic. Because the show’s soundtrack is composed entirely of popular songs, it gives space for the audience members to think about the meaning behind the lyrics. The book was published in 2002 and the musical was picked up by commercial producers in 2004. 

The show’s run at Rosendale Theatre, a nonprofit organization run mostly by volunteers, was brought there by Theatre Arts Director Ann Citron after seeing it at Phoenicia Playhouse. “Why can’t we bring that here? In these times, sharing resources is a very smart thing to do for live theatre,” said Citron. “Live theatre is that thing that exists and then it doesn’t anymore. You can’t watch it from your living room, and you can’t have that experience of immediacy and intimacy.”

The show’s run at Rosendale is now over, but audiences can still watch women go “from Betty Boop to Betty Friedan” at the Phoenicia Playhouse April 4-13.