“A Complicated Woman” at Goodspeed Musicals’ Norma Terris Theatre in Chester takes a nostalgic old-fashioned musical theater style and uses it to explore personal journeys that couldn’t be reasonably discussed in mainstream society at the time when the show is set. The subject is gender identity and self-acceptance. This of-the-moment cultural debate is given a rousing, highly entertaining song-and-dance treatment.
Especially given its deep and complex emotional subject matter, “A Complicated Woman” is amazingly bright, colorful, frisky and nostalgic. John Kenley was a real-life theater impresario whose career spanned most of the 20th century. He was a trusted associate of Lee Shubert, one of the famous family of theater producers whose name still adorns theaters on Broadway, in New Haven and elsewhere.
Rather than stay in New York City, Kenley created an extremely popular circuit of summer stock theaters in the Midwest and pioneered the casting of TV and movie stars in touring productions of hit plays and musicals. Only those who knew him, including the show’s director and main instigator Jeff Calhoun (Broadway director of “Newsies,” “Grease,” “Will Rogers Follies” and the Deaf West reworking of “Big River”) were aware that Kenley had a separate life in Florida as a woman named Jean. Kenley, who died in 2009 at the age of 103, gave Calhoun permission to tell their story.
With a likeminded creative team that both upholds the glories of classic mu.