THE GOLDEN GIRLS THEME PLAYS
It’s hard to find someone who doesn’t like the Golden Girls. Nearly 40 years after the sitcom first aired, they’re still as popular as ever with the show bringing in audiences both on cable and streaming. And now, they can be seen in an entirely new medium, the stage as the parody show GOLDEN GIRLS THE LAUGHS CONTINUE begins its run in Chicago at the Broadway Playhouse.
JASON BOWEN: We’re basically putting these five characters that we knew in the 80s and 90s in today.You know everything looks the same all the costumes look the same the set looks the same But the scenarios are a little bit different.
That’s Jason Bowen, who plays two roles in the show, one is Stan, Dorothy’s ex husband and arguably the Golden Girls’ villain, and another is Burt, a new role invented for this show.
BOWEN: Burt is a completely different character. It’s Dorothy’s current love interest in the show.
While Dorothy has a new beau, the other girls aren’t left out of the fun. Blanche and Rose have founded a dating app for senior citizens that Dorothy sets up an account on. Meanwhile Sophia has been placed on house arrest for selling some let’s call them dubious cheesecakes.
RYAN BERNIER: We like to say that this is sort of the audience’s opportunity to come to the most unhinged live taping of a Golden Girls episode that they’ve ever seen.
That’s actor Ryan Bernier who plays Dorothy. Another thing setting apart this show from its on screen counterpart, is that none of the titular ladies of the Lanai are played by women. For Bernier, the Golden Girls the Laughs Continue is just one part of a history of male parody casts for this show.
BERNIER: As queer men, sometimes the first thing that, I mean, I can speak for some of our cast, some of the first people that we really latched onto as celebrities, as icons, are these women. And it’s because We see something in them that we maybe didn’t immediately recognize in ourselves, or maybe we weren’t allowed to show about ourselves. So I think the tradition of having, uh, men play these characters is simply that, it’s just a chance for us to express something that we really connected with.
And despite these changes, at its core this parody show is the same as its sitcom counterpart. Dorothy is still taking care of her mother, Blanche is as flirtatious as ever, Sophia is still causing chaos, and Rose is still the heart of the group.
But why do we still care about this show all these years later? Well while the quote un quote typical audience for the Golden Girls is older women, something that makes the show unique is its ability to appeal to so many different people as Liz McCabe who’s an assistant professor of instruction in Chicago field studies at Northwestern, who also teaches a course on sitcoms notes.
LIZ MCCABE: I think this particular show speaks to an audience that’s trying to reject something else about expectations of whether it’s gender or seriousness or, um, an emphasis on, uh, heteronormative family instead of your friends as your family.
This appeal is part of the reason the Golden Girls have remained relevant for so long. Another reason?
MCCABE: There has been a nostalgia for sitcom structure of a very traditional sort since about the mid 2000s, 2010 ish. So I think that it has kind of ramped back up in popularity in this wave of nostalgia for the media and art of the 80s and 90s.
And it’s this nostalgia that brings people week after week all across the country to see this show, something Jason Bowen knows more than anyone else as a cast member.
BOWEN: Especially with a show like this, because people are coming with so much nostalgia to be a part of the show. And it’s funny, the age range of people that come to the Golden Girls is everywhere from, you know, late teens all the way up to 80 year olds and people that grew up with their mom or grew up with their grandma.
Because at the end of the day, The Golden Girls isn’t just a show for older women, or queer men, or even Gen Z. It’s a show for everyone as Ryan Bernier says.
BERNIER: We open the show with a theme song and when the audience is singing that theme song along, suddenly it’s not just actor-audience. It’s not just spectator-performer. It’s one large community getting together to come and laugh.
Simply put, bringing people together is what the Golden Girls has done best for the past 40 years, and hopefully for many many many more years to come.
Golden Girls: The Laughs Continue runs February 6-25 at Chicago’s Broadway Playhouse.
For WNUR News I’m Sophia Casa (not Petrillo)
