MA CPP Musical Theatre Students presents...

A... my name is Alice

Directed & Choreographed by Steve Elias

Musical Directed by Zara Nunn

Synopsis

"A ... my name is Alice, and my husband's name is Adam, and his girlfriend's name is Amy, and my lover's name is Abby, and her husband's name is Arnie, and his boyfriend's name is Allan, and my analyst's name is Arthur, and we're working on my anger."

The format is that of a musical revue in two acts, which includes twenty or so songs and sketches performed originally by an ensemble cast of five women. IAB MA students explore a wide variety of situations and relationships: friends’ sisters, rivals and even members of an all-women’s basketball team. with insight, empathy, and self-deprecating humour. 

Authors

A... My Name is Alice, was born out of a collaboration by directors Joan Micklin Silver and Julianne Boyd who co-conceived the show, for the National Abortion Rights Action League benefit in 1982.

Joan Micklin Silver said they wanted ‘to try to get new and original material that dealt with women the way we felt as women’.  

Julianne Boyd added ‘We felt we’ve come a long way, and we wanted to show women with a sense of humour, who could be entertaining and laugh at themselves. We didn’t want to diatribe’. 

DIFFERENCE FEMINISM

Difference feminism developed in the 1980s as a reaction to popular liberal feminism also known as EQUALITY FEMINISM – ‘aimed at equality of men and women, it emphasizes the differences between men and women and argues that idealistically or sameness are necessary for men and women and masculine and feminine values to be treated equally’.  

Joan Micklin Silver was a director of films and plays and worked hard to break down the barriers of sexism in Hollywood in an interview, she said in 1970, ‘I had no chance of getting work as a director’. Again, in 1979 a studio executive who told her bluntly ‘Feature films are very expensive to mount and distribute, women directors are one more problem we don’t’ need’.