The Thoroughly Un-Modern Woman

I watched Thoroughly Modern Millie last night with high expectations. After all, it had won six Tony Awards including Best Musical in 2002. The story (set in the roaring '20s) goes like this- Millie is a girl from Kansas who wants to try her luck in New York City. Her main stratagem to achieve success in the Big Apple is to find a job and marry the boss. But then she falls in love with a "poor" man. She decides to discard her plan to marry for money and chooses to marry for love instead. Voila! The "poor" man turns out to be a millionaire (and indirectly, still her boss)! So Millie leaves her secretarial job (which she was very good at, by the way) to marry her Prince Charming.

Despite the musical's title, Millie turned out to be a very old-fashioned girl whose purpose in life was to get a man to provide for her. Aside from the gender sterotypes, I didn't like the cultural stereotypes either. There was a subplot involving some Chinese men which is too complicated to explain. I was dismayed to see them portrayed as poor men (speaking in very broken English, of course) who were doing all they could to rescue their mother from her miserable life in Hong Kong by getting her to the US.

I know that this musical is set in the 1920s, but all those stereotypes continue to exist up to now. With the help of productions like this, I'm sure they will be around for a long, long time.