Broadway: The Impact Of Feminism On Broadway

My topic is Feminism on Broadway. Theater has always been a big part of my life, I have made many of friends through theater. I think the biggest impact it has had on my life would probably be the confidence and strength it has given me. Especially when I see a strong women on stage playing a powerful women. That is why I chose this topic. I wanted to share my love of theater, but also show other girls the confidence that radiates from these powerful actresses/characters and they can be what they want and be as strong as the actresses can.
Some of my goals that I’ve had throughout my Senior Project were to enjoy my topic. I believe that enjoying what you are working on can improve of the overall quality of the work. Another goal I had was
The topic I did for my Senior Project was a continuation of an Honors project I did in Junior year for my American Vistas class. I enjoyed the topic so much that I knew automatically that this was the topic I wanted to do for my Senior Project. After that I started doing my research. Some of my sources included: Playbill.com, and the book Changed for Good: A Feminist History of the Broadway Musical by Stacy Wolf. These sources helped me gained how actress felt about playing the iconic and powerful role of Elphaba, and what it meant to them. The book also gave me a deeper analysis of the musical Wicked and the impact it has had on many young girls. My next steps were to figure out what my songs were that I would look deeper into. I had 4 songs that I knew from previous research that showed a powerful female performance. After some more research I was able to find a 5th song. This song when I first heard it, I thought it had nothing to do Feminism, I just thought it was a catchy song, but in reality So Much Better can be seen as a female empowerment song. You just need to listen to it many times to get a deeper meaning from it. After all my songs were collected, I needed to work on my applied piece. After some thought, I decided I wanted to teach a mini-lesson about Feminism on Broadway to the younger girls at IACS. I would have them listen to my songs and then we would have a “class discussion” about their reactions to the songs. I also had some quotes I wanted them to think about. My first idea was to teach the 8th, 9th, and 10th grade girls. After talking to Mrs.Kapeckas and Dr.Arnold for permission to email students, I felt pretty confident that I was going to get a lot of responses because I knew a lot of girls who liked theater. Boy, was I wrong! After weeks of waiting I had gotten one response, two if I was lucky. So, I decided to change my audience to high school girls and I had officially chosen a date. I put a