The End of a (Very Short) Era: 9 to 5 Closes on Broadway

As you all no doubt have already heard (if not dealt with), Dolly Parton's 9 to 5: The Musical closed this past weekend after only about 5 months on Broadway. This is just appalling, obviously. Mama Mia, after all, is still on, relentlessly, night after dreary night, after how many grim years of blanding its audiences to death? Of course, I shouldn't expect the world to understand or appreciate such a brilliant, campy, tacky '80s boob odyssey as 9 to 5, which Dolly wrote each and every song for. After all, the world loved Cats, and that thing was awful and Satanic, was it not?

Well, I wasn't going to take this horrible news lying down, no no no. On Friday night my friend Sarah and I headed straight to the Marquis Theater to show our support for this office musical of our times. I just don't understand why negative critical reception and poor ticket sales have to sink a Broadway production. What about pizzazz, chutzpah, and moxie? Do these things count for nothing in the dog-eat-dog devil's daycare popularly known as Broadway? (Moxie is expensive.) Huh? The curtain was made of curled phone chords, for God's sake. What else do you people want?
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Sarah and I are smiling because we've just realized we're the skinniest people in the audience.
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Well, Sarah and I arrived at the show prepared to see an unmitigated disaster along the lines of Lestat or Titanic, the Musical. Sarah was wearing her smartest officewear in solidarity with the three women we would soon see on stage gagging their boss with a handkerchief; and I was wearing Superman Underoos under my H and M slim-leg slacks, in solidarity with what I used to wear when I watched the movie over and over on HBO as a child.

The show was nothing like Titanic. It was fun, in addition to being stupid, and it had Allison Janney playing the Lily Tomlin role. There's really not much more you can ask for. Its closing is a crying shame. But, much like the electric typewriter, this show will not soon be forgotten.



Beverages are much more delicious in an official 9 to 5: The Musical sippy cup.


Outside the Marquis in front of a pole advertising the show, a pole that, sadly, will probably soon be advertising the next piece of Disney trash they roll off the assembly line.

My Whole Life Has Led Up to This Moment: 9 to 5 Comes to Broadway

Like many young gays of my generation, I wanted to marry Dolly Parton when I was about 6 years old. I would be her proud house husband, also acting as her tour bus driver and wig tester.

But when I saw 9 to 5 in 1980, my goals abruptly changed: I was now more career oriented, wanting to work as a typist alongside Doralee, Violet, and Judy in an office of at least 30 stories for a company called Consolidated. We would smoke weed in the ladies room in the afternoons and go on happy hour excursions of hilarity in the evenings. I would have a special locker for my hats. (What a way to make a living.) Then after I grew weary of being a working girl I would retire to Florida and live with the Golden Girls, eating cheesecake and doing mushrooms on the lanai with Estelle Getty. In short, this was the life plan that I hid from my parents.

Of course, things haven't turned out exactly as I'd planned during those long bubble baths I took while playing with my sister's Barbie and Ken (mainly Ken). Yes, sadly, I'm not a secretary with two fed-up sidekicks. But I am a great typist. And my first love is still Dolly. Which brings me to an event that my entire life until this point has been leading up to: the adaptation of the movie 9 to 5 into a Broadway musical.

Now, I'm not a blind devotee of musicals. They can be good. They can also be just awful. (I wanted every person in Rent to die of AIDS, for example.) But if Dolly Parton is at the helm, writing the music and lyrics, then I'm all in. And if Allison Janney of The West Wing is playing Violet, then I'm in deep.

So, who's going with me?