This transcript was automatically generated and might contain errors.

[0:21] David Armstrong: Welcome to another episode of Broadway Nation, the podcast that tells the remarkable story of the Broadway musical and the immigrant Jewish, queer, and black artist who invented it.

[0:34] David Armstrong: My guest again today is author Maya Cantu, who returns to discuss her book Greasepaint Puritan, Boston to 42nd Street in the queer backstage novels of Bradford Ropes.

[0:46] David Armstrong: In this terrific new book, Maya reclaims the life and work of Broadway dancer-turned novelist and screenwriter Bradford Ropes, with a central focus on his three long-forgotten backstage novels 42nd Street, on which the classic film and stage adaptation are based.

[1:04] David Armstrong: Go Into Your Dance, a thinly disguised fictional version of the career of Broadway showman George White and his scandals, and the book will focus on today his 1933 novel STAGE MOTHER, all of which were inspired by Ropes' own experiences as a gay man in show business during the 1920s.

[1:26] David Armstrong: If you missed the first part of our conversation, you may want to catch up with that before listening to this one.

[1:31] David Armstrong: Maya Cantu teaches on the drama faculty at Bennington College and is also the author of American Cinderella on the Broadway musical stage, Imagining the Working Girl from Irene to GYPSY.

[1:43] David Armstrong: And as you will hear, the parallels between STAGE MOTHER and GYPSY are striking.

[1:48] David Armstrong: And as always, I want to send out a heartfelt thanks to our patron club members for their generous support with a special shout-out today to longtime patrons Juan J. Neumeister and Ruth Oberg.

[2:01] David Armstrong: If you would like to help support the creation of this podcast, please stay tuned to the end of the episode, where there'll be information about how you too can become a patron.

[2:11] David Armstrong: Here we go.

[2:15] David Armstrong: So let's continue where you were taking us a moment ago to Hollywood, because the novel becomes successful, but the main thing that it accomplishes most for Ropes is being sold to the movies, becoming the biggest movie musical to date and revitalizing the world of movie musicals.

[2:35] Maya Cantu: Yeah, absolutely.

[2:36] Maya Cantu: So it's a smash, 42nd Street takes Warner Brothers out of a financial hole.

[2:42] Maya Cantu: Saves the studio, right?

[2:44] Maya Cantu: Essentially saves the studio.

[2:45] Maya Cantu: Yeah.

[2:46] Maya Cantu: His book gives rise to this huge musical hit that again kind of revives the movie musical.

[2:51] Maya Cantu: And he doesn't even take much credit for that.

[2:53] Maya Cantu: He's characterized in newspaper profiles as a pretty modest person who didn't like to boast or brag too much about that.

[3:00] Maya Cantu: So he doesn't necessarily claim all the credit that I think he might have.

[3:03] Maya Cantu: And of course, we have to give a huge amount of credit to Lloyd Bacon to Busby Berkeley's iconic choreography that made that movie what it is.

[3:09] Maya Cantu: But he certainly had a role in that too.

[3:11] Maya Cantu: But you're right, after 42nd Street, it does open his options up in Hollywood.

[3:16] Maya Cantu: You know, around 1934, there's more censorship with the production code.

[3:21] Maya Cantu: And around that time, he stops writing his backstage novels.

[3:59] Maya Cantu: Go Into Your Dance is 1934.

[3:59] Maya Cantu: That's the last of the backstage trilogy.

[3:59] Maya Cantu: He publishes a book later in 1950 called Mr. Tilly Takes a Walk with Val Burton, who's become his screenwriting collaborator for many years.

[4:32] Maya Cantu: So he stays in Hollywood.

[4:32] Maya Cantu: He works on a film adaptation of STAGE MOTHER, and he co-writes the screenplay with John Meehan.

[4:32] Maya Cantu: So if you want to get a sense of a really faithful Ropes adaptation from one of the novels, if you can get a copy of STAGE MOTHER, it's easier to get certainly than the novel.

[4:32] Maya Cantu: Because he co-wrote the screenplay, it is pretty faithful to the book, although it kind of sentimentalizes the ending a bit, but it's still a really good film adaptation.

[4:32] Maya Cantu: Then there's a film adaptation of Go Into Your Dance that he doesn't write the screenplay for, and it's only kind of loosely connected to the source novel, and that stars Al Jolson.

[4:32] Maya Cantu: And has some horrifying elements in it.

[4:32] Maya Cantu: It does have some horrifying elements.

[4:32] Maya Cantu: Yes.

[4:32] Maya Cantu: So Jolson's in his expected blackface in Go Into Your Dance, in which Ropes did not write the screenplay for, but there are some elements that are drawn from the novel.

[4:32] Maya Cantu: And there's a really fascinating discourse on race in the backstage novels as well and cultural appropriation that I go into.

[4:32] Maya Cantu: But as far as that adaptation, that's not necessarily so much Ropes.

[4:51] Maya Cantu: But then he stays in Hollywood and he's writing musical Westerns for Roy Rogers and Gene Autry, and he's writing a lot of musicals, mostly for Republic Studios, but again for Columbia for MGM for various studios.

[4:51] Maya Cantu: And he's quite successful as a screenwriter from the mid-30s up into 1950.

[4:49] Maya Cantu: He's writing some TV as well.

[4:51] Maya Cantu: He didn't like writing for TV, so at about that point, the screenwriting career ends.

[4:54] Maya Cantu: But he stays in Hollywood.

[4:58] Maya Cantu: It was sort of the end of an era as we get to the 50s.

[5:02] David Armstrong: Yes, very much so.

[5:03] David Armstrong: Let's talk through a little bit more of his, we'll come back to his biography.

[5:08] David Armstrong: I want to go back though to while he's in Hollywood during a significant part of it.

[5:12] David Armstrong: We talked about his being seen out in public and being talked about with Queenie Smith.

[5:16] David Armstrong: But at the same time, he's living with a man rather openly in Hollywood at a time when that became more and more problematic, I'm assuming.

[5:25] Maya Cantu: Although by the time we get to the war, that man is dead.

[5:28] Maya Cantu: But yeah, during the 30s, a major part of his career, he has a boyfriend.

[5:32] Maya Cantu: He does.

[5:33] Maya Cantu: And it's very hard when you're going back into the show business histories to say definitively boyfriend.

[5:39] Maya Cantu: When the newspapers are discussing this man as the secretary or the friend, but it's pretty clear.

[5:43] Maya Cantu: He was in a relationship for a good six or seven years with a man named Roswell Jolly Black, who is also from Seattle, who was an organist.

[5:50] Maya Cantu: I don't know exactly how they met, maybe in vaudeville.

[5:52] Maya Cantu: They meet in the early 30s and they're in a relationship until I don't want to give too much away necessarily, but there is a sad ending for Roswell Black that was very saddening to learn about.

[6:03] Maya Cantu: But they were together for a good six or seven years.

[6:05] Maya Cantu: They're regularly written about.

[6:06] Maya Cantu: They love to go to the Club Ballet in Hollywood, which was operated by a fascinating, quite bawdy nightclub entertainer named Russ Fletcher.

[6:13] Maya Cantu: So they're hanging out with Brett who did some very openly gay songs that are a lot of fun to listen to.

[6:18] Maya Cantu: They're out of the club valley as part of this queer social circle.

[6:21] Maya Cantu: And the newspaper reporters are, oh, there's Bradford Ropes with Roswell Black and Patsy Kelly or Peggy Fears.

[6:27] Maya Cantu: But they're also, oh, there's Bradford Ropes and Queenie Smith, and there they are canoodling again, these lovebirds.

[6:33] Maya Cantu: He's both out with Roswell Black, his romantic partner in public, going to parties, going to nightclubs, but he is also doing this kind of simultaneous lavender romance, it appears with Queenie Smith.

[6:43] Maya Cantu: And maybe having a little bit of fun with teasing the gossip couple on this.

[6:46] Maya Cantu: I'm sure making as gay men needed to do in Hollywood in those days, they needed to manage the publicity around them.

[6:52] Maya Cantu: And they were living in the same house together.

[6:54] Maya Cantu: They were.

[6:54] Maya Cantu: They had an apartment in Beverly Hills together.

[6:57] Maya Cantu: I also found it interesting that you documented he takes him home for Thanksgiving to Boston with him.

[7:02] Maya Cantu: He does.

[7:03] Maya Cantu: I found a clipping that he motored home from New York to Quincy with an aunt and with Roswell.

[7:09] Maya Cantu: Here's my good friend, or here's my secretary.

[7:11] Maya Cantu: But who knows?

[7:12] Maya Cantu: Who knows what his parents made of that?

[7:14] Maya Cantu: But yeah, it was very clear from the research that these two men were in a loving relationship for some time, however much newspapers wanted to call the relationship something else.

[7:23] Maya Cantu: But it's clear.

[7:24] Maya Cantu: Newspapers reporting what they were told the relationship was as well.

[7:27] Maya Cantu: I found in his, I think high school yearbook a piece that Bradford Ropes considered Cary Grant one of his best friends around 1936, 1937.

[7:36] Maya Cantu: So I wish I'd found more there.

[7:38] Maya Cantu: And we know a lot more about Cary Grant and his relationship with Randolph Scott.

[7:42] David Armstrong: Exactly.

[7:43] Maya Cantu: But a lot of very similar elements in terms of managing that.

[7:48] David Armstrong: Yes, exactly.

[7:48] Maya Cantu: And I think at one point Cary Grant was linked romantically to Queenie Smith as well.

[7:52] Maya Cantu: A little bit of a small circle with that.

[7:54] Maya Cantu: She was the go-to girl, I guess, for that in a fun way.

[7:59] David Armstrong: I think so.

[7:59] David Armstrong: So one thing I wasn't totally clear about is he writing these novels while he's also in Hollywood, or are they two separate?

[8:06] David Armstrong: Does he write the three novels and then go to Hollywood?

[8:08] Maya Cantu: Seems like he went out there to write.

[8:10] Maya Cantu: There's an overlap.

[8:11] Maya Cantu: There's an overlap period because he writes STAGE MOTHER in 1933.

[8:14] Maya Cantu: By then he's already in Hollywood.

[8:16] Maya Cantu: And he worked in a very early draft of 42nd Street.

[8:20] Maya Cantu: Of course, he didn't make it to the final cut, but he did work on an early draft.

[8:23] Maya Cantu: And then he stays in Hollywood and co-writes the screenplay of STAGE MOTHER as well.

[8:26] Maya Cantu: The novel of STAGE MOTHER had already come out in 1933.

[8:30] Maya Cantu: So there's an overlap period where he's both writing his backstage novels and he's writing screenplays.

[8:34] Maya Cantu: Around 1935, though, he's pretty much exclusively writing screenplays.

[8:39] Maya Cantu: I say that though, I did find in you know my research mentions of a couple of novels he wrote that did not get published.

[8:45] Maya Cantu: The most kind of tantalizing is a Hollywood back studio novel, you might call it, called Preview, that he wrote in the early 40s.

[8:53] Maya Cantu: And it was compared to like the gossip columnist said.

[8:55] Maya Cantu: It's similar to 42nd Street, it provides a picture of the motion picture industry as a kind of collective.

[9:01] Maya Cantu: So I think he took a kind of 42nd Street Grand Hotel approach to Hollywood movie making.

[9:05] Maya Cantu: And unfortunately, I have no idea of what became of that manuscript, but it sounds like it would have been fabulous.

[9:11] Maya Cantu: But he did continue to write novels while he was in Hollywood.

[9:13] Maya Cantu: But by then he'd pretty much shifted into his work as a screenwriter.

[9:16] David Armstrong: Yeah, you tantalize me with the names of those unfinished novels as well.

[9:20] Maya Cantu: But I assume they were lost.

[9:22] Maya Cantu: As far as I know, maybe I hope, I can only hope they'll turn up one of these.

[9:26] Maya Cantu: Somebody will find them, yeah.

[9:27] David Armstrong: Yes.

[9:27] David Armstrong: So let's talk about that second novel now, STAGE MOTHER, which is the one which will be least known by anyone, because as you said, it's really hard to get your hands on.

[9:37] David Armstrong: It has not been republished like the other two.

[9:39] David Armstrong: I'm hoping that we will see it any day now, hopefully, maybe.

[9:43] David Armstrong: But I'd love to read that novel.

[9:45] David Armstrong: It's also a film I've never seen.

[9:47] David Armstrong: I think I'll represent a lot of the audience in being that I'm coming to this with no knowledge of it, other than your excellent synopsis of it in your book.

[9:56] David Armstrong: Tell us what is STAGE MOTHER all about.

[9:58] Maya Cantu: I'm assuming it comes from the Gus Edwards background that he had that we talked about earlier.

[10:04] Maya Cantu: He had this experience.

[10:06] Maya Cantu: He was not a child when he was 19, I think, when he was 18 or 19.

[10:06] Maya Cantu: 18 or 19.

[10:11] Maya Cantu: But he's surrounded by children and their stage mothers.

[10:14] Maya Cantu: Yes.

[10:15] Maya Cantu: Ropes has kind of a an ambivalent or maybe fraught relationship to stage mothers.

[10:19] Maya Cantu: Yeah, he certainly would have seen many of them while he was touring with the Gus Edwards troops and all kinds of stage children.

[10:25] Maya Cantu: And there were also kind of constant battles with the Jerry Society to protect, you know, child labor laws.

[10:30] Maya Cantu: But certainly he saw many types of stage mothers.

[10:32] Maya Cantu: If we go back to 42nd Street, the novel, another character who was cut in the film is a stage mother named Mrs. Blair, who was determined to get her young daughter Polly, who's a toe dancer, a role in Pretty Lady.

[10:43] Maya Cantu: So Polly and Mrs. Blair are cut from the 1933, 42nd Street.

[10:47] Maya Cantu: Mrs. Blair isn't necessarily a flattering depiction of a stage mother.

[10:50] Maya Cantu: She's really willing to go to any lengths to get Polly a role.

[10:53] Maya Cantu: But so fast forward to 1934 when Ropes writes his novel STAGE MOTHER.

[10:58] Maya Cantu: And in my opinion, we get a much more kind of nuanced and three-dimensional picture of the stage mother, who at the time was already this stereotype of like relentlessly determined woman vicariously living out her own ambitions on the lives of her children.

[11:10] Maya Cantu: So that archetype was already well established.

[11:12] Maya Cantu: In STAGE Mother, we get a character named Kitty Lorraine, who starts out in vaudeville after all of these twists, you know, is no longer able to perform in vaudeville, which is really Ropes' comment on ageism in the industry.

[11:25] Maya Cantu: Essentially, he shows Kitty's now seen as too old to keep up her career in vaudeville.

[11:29] Maya Cantu: She's probably like 30, right?

[11:31] Maya Cantu: But she's washed up.

[11:32] Maya Cantu: She has a young daughter named Shirley, and Kitty becomes this really kind of relentless stage mother who's determined after kind of prying Shirley away from these puritanical relatives in Boston.

[11:42] Maya Cantu: It's a real Boston novel to make Shirley a Broadway star.

[11:45] Maya Cantu: And if this all sounds familiar, I think there's quite a bit of resonance with GYPSY in the characters of Mama Rose or Rose and Kitty Lorraine in the way they are so ambitious for their daughters to become stars.

[11:57] Maya Cantu: So she's a really vivid character.

[11:59] Maya Cantu: And Ropes characterizes Kitty, yeah, as relentless, as willing to do anything to make Shirley a star, but also he really shows the forces of sexism and ageism and Puritanism that kind of turn Kitty Lorraine into this more kind of scary idea of the stage mother.

[12:15] Maya Cantu: You know, it's a really wonderful novel. It's incredibly hard to get. You know, I just looked it up recently, and it goes for hundreds of dollars on like eight books, and I really hope it comes back into print. It's really interesting to compare to GYPSY, I think. And again, Ropes was performing with Gus Edwards at a time when Rose Havick was being a bit of a stage mother herself with her daughters. So the characters in the novel would be happening at the same exact period as Rose Louise and June are in Vaudeville.

[12:41] David Armstrong: Yeah, the 20s.

[12:42] Maya Cantu: In the 20s. Yeah, because Ropes, as Billy Bradford was with the Edwards troupe around 1923, a little later, actually, uh, 1924, 1925. He's in our Edwards review called The Fountains, Fountain of Youth of 1925 as an 18, 19 year old. The time period overlaps. I think Rose is there a little bit later, but more or less the same time. Yeah, certainly the beginning of that story, I think is around that time. By the time June is leaving, at least in the events of the musical, the depression has hit.

[13:09] David Armstrong: Yeah.

[13:09] Maya Cantu: But it's roughly the same period.

[13:11] David Armstrong: Roughly. But this novel is 30 years before the musical GYPSY is written. And it's interesting. Ropes and Julie Stein were collaborators. I don't know how closely they worked together, but they worked together on seven films for Republic Studios movie musicals, where Julie Stein was quite a prolific Hollywood songwriter before all of his great Broadway hits. There was some cross paths between Julie Stein and Bradford Ropes, and I almost wonder if Stein or Arthur Lawrence are members of the GYPSY creative team get a hold of it, and maybe there's a little bit of kind of inspiration. Gypsy is obviously GYPSY Rosley's memoir, an adaptation of that. But it's interesting to put them side by side.

[13:46] David Armstrong: Very interesting.

[13:47] Maya Cantu: And in STAGE MOTHER as well, there are a number of gay characters.

[13:47] David Armstrong: There are.

[13:53] Maya Cantu: Don't go away. Broadway Nation will be back right after this quick break. Talk about that. Who are those characters? How do they fit into this world and what is their relationship? Well, one of the gay characters stays in the film, fascinatingly. This is kind of 1934, the film version. So we're right at the end of that pansy craze era where we actually get to see gay characters on film and we know that they're gay. So there's a dance teacher.

[14:09] David Armstrong: Right at the end of the pre-code era.

[14:20] Maya Cantu: Right at the end, yeah, before the production was made probably before just before that the code changes. So there's a dance teacher named Mr. Sterling Fritz Sterling, who's definitely coded as quite queer. But in the novel we get a deeper look at again kind of gay life backstage and gay male characters. And here in STAGE MOTHER we get a character named Jack Thomas who's a dancer and when Shirley Lorraine kind of starts her rise as a young Broadway star, she also becomes the mistress of the mayor who's based on Jimmy Walker. There's a lot of kind of political stuff in the novel that's really fascinating with that Jimmy Walker political story. But anyway, to go back to Shirley, she is befriended by a dancer named Jack Thomas who is characterized by ropes as pretty much an openly gay dancer with a kind of acid tongue, a camp wit.

He becomes a great friend to Shirley as well as her dance teacher. And then he has a loose tongue and he has a way of kind of gossiping. Gossip is a big theme in this novel as it is in 42nd Street. And he starts to gossip a little too loosely about Shirley's affair with the mayor and it becomes quite dangerous for Jack.

[15:27] David Armstrong: How much can I say without too many spoils?

[15:28] Maya Cantu: I guess nobody's read the novel.

[15:30] David Armstrong: Nobody's read but so you gotta tell us yeah.

[15:32] Maya Cantu: Right, right. So Jack Jack is murdered by a homophobic gangster. I'm in a really quite disturbing scene where the mayor basically countenances this political murder the mayor is characterized as quite homophobic and the gangster or the political boss, rather, it's actually a political boss who's kind of the puppet of the mayor. Or vice versa. Right, right. Um so he's working with the gangsters, and ultimately Jack is murdered by a homophobic gangster who is thinking he was a degenerate pervert. You know, it's mercy to get rid of him. Mercy in God's eyes to get rid of him. So again, Ropes is really commenting in a quite unsettling way about the levels and the layers of homophobia in politics, in society, in show business.

But Jack is a wonderful character. He's got a great wit. He's not afraid to speak truth to power, but it ultimately leads to his demise in the novel. And the way he characterizes the friendship with Shirley, Shirley really loves Jack. And once that murder happens, Shirley is kind of awakened to this kind of really horrible political corruption in 20s, New York. So STAGE Mother, there's a lot going on in STAGE MOTHER. It's you know, it's very much a backstage story. It's about Kitty Lorraine and her relentless determination to turn Shirley into a Broadway star, to the point of kind of pimping out her daughter to the mayor. But it's also a real kind of critique of what Ropes saw as a corrupt political system in 20s New York. He came from something of a political family as well.

[16:52] David Armstrong: And that's interesting.

[16:53] Maya Cantu: His grandfather had actually been mayor of Orange, New Jersey. So he actually had an inside knowledge, I think, of politics that he weaves into this. It's a really fascinating look at New York in the 20s at a time that's very mythologized. We think of Jimmy Walker as this debonair playboy mayor and what a permissive and fun and liberated time it was. But Ropes is saying there's a darker side to this. This is a time in which to be a gay man and to be open about it, to be a woman who's flouting sexual mores is dangerous. And he's kind of giving us a counter mythology to the more familiar story of Jazz Age Manhattan. And that Romana Clay aspect of that with Jimmy Walker is so clear in the novel, although he makes him the mayor of Newark or New Worker. Jersey City or Newark, Jersey City, somewhere outside of New York.

[17:38] David Armstrong: Right.

[17:39] Maya Cantu: But it's clear that that's who he's talking about. And it struck me that when he's at the Silver Slipper in the 1920s, Jimmy Walker is probably somebody who's there all the time, as because he was famous for going to all the top speakeasies, which the Silver Slipper was one of those.

[17:56] David Armstrong: Yeah, that's a great point.

[17:58] Maya Cantu: Jimmy Walker was probably there quite a bit. Yeah, he knew Jimmy Walker, at least was in the room with him, experienced him.

[18:04] David Armstrong: Yeah, definitely.

[18:05] Maya Cantu: And it's interesting, the Romana Clay, we have Jimmy Walker is a clear reference, but also Gus Edwards in the world of like the stage mothers. There's a kind of Gus Edwards-like impresario in the novel. And of course, Ropes gives us a disclaimer: this is fiction, nobody's based on any real people. And Gus Edwards is actually mentioned at one point just to further distance that. But it's daring. It's daring. And that Gus Edwards figure is not presented as being on the up and up either.

[18:30] David Armstrong: No, not at all.

[18:32] Maya Cantu: These real people are still alive.

[18:34] David Armstrong: They're still alive.

[18:37] Maya Cantu: Ropes must have been afraid of litigation to some extent. But I think he—

[18:39] David Armstrong: Which is why you put Gus Edwards in the novel as well, just make it clear.

[18:43] Maya Cantu: Well, that couldn't have been you because you're in the novel.

[18:45] David Armstrong: Exactly. We can only assume everybody knew what he was writing about.

[18:50] Maya Cantu: Yes, and when STAGE MOTHER comes out in 1933, there'd been the Seabury trials. Jimmy Walker had resigned, right? Out of the scandal.

[18:58] David Armstrong: In disgrace, just in total disgrace.

[19:02] Maya Cantu: Pretty much, yeah. He leaves office in total disgrace. A year later, there's this novel, and it's pretty clear. So he's really writing ripped from the headlines in many cases, in terms of these characters in the subject matter that he's writing about.

[19:16] David Armstrong: Yes, absolutely.

[19:17] Maya Cantu: Yeah, which is fascinating. And again, as he weaves these various worlds together that he has personal experience with, he does that so artfully. It's quite a delicate dance.

[19:26] David Armstrong: Yeah.

[19:27] Maya Cantu: Yeah. There's so much more to talk about, and we will indeed talk about it. And probably I'm most interested in the next novel that we'll talk about, which is Go Into Your Dance, which I found to be completely fascinating and have read actually twice now because I just found it so captivating and surprising in a way. Do you have a little uh teaser for us about that?

[19:48] Maya Cantu: Well, again, it's almost ripped from the headlines in that the character of Ted Howard, who we I say protagonist, but he's kind of an anti-hero. This character is a heel, you know, and is a not very likable character. But he's loosely based on George White of the George White scandals, although there are many other influences that Ropes is drawing upon. He never does simple biography or there's always mixing going on. But it's about the rise of Ted Howard from Messenger Boy to Virtue, ultimately Broadway producer. And again, he goes into a partnership with a young woman, an ambitious young dancer named Nora Wayne. So we get aspects of the Marion Hamilton partnership, I think, in that as well. They have an interesting relationship romantically, professionally.

[20:30] David Armstrong: Is that enough of a preview?

[20:32] Maya Cantu: I think that's great.

[20:33] David Armstrong: It's a very complicated relationship, which I found so interesting.

[20:36] Maya Cantu: From her point of view, she's a very uh how would you describe her as a character?

[20:42] David Armstrong: She's smart, you know.

[20:44] Maya Cantu: Yes. You know, you talk about performers going into show business quite young, and maybe they haven't had a lot of schooling. Nora is street smart. You know, she goes pretty much right into a career as a dancer in Vaudeville. You know, I think from like the age of 16 is when she partners up with Ted. She's extremely street-wise and smart, and she's a talented dancer. She's beautiful, and she puts up with so much from this man who she kind of hasn't not quite fully reciprocated romance with. She falls for him, but he's quite a skirt chaser. And I thought it was fascinating the way Ropes has portrayed her as smarter than Ted.

[21:21] David Armstrong: Smarter than Ted, yes.

[21:24] Maya Cantu: Right. When we return for the next episode of Broadway Nation, I can't wait to talk to you about Go Into Your Dance.

[21:31] David Armstrong: Looking forward to it, David.

[21:33] Maya Cantu: Thank you, James.

[22:06] ♪ Musical number: "Go Into Your Dance" — performed by Maya Cantu ♪

[22:18] David Armstrong: As I said, Maya Cantu will be back on the next episode of Broadway Nation to talk about Greasepaint Puritan, Boston to 42nd Street in the queer backstage novels of Bradford Ropes.

[22:44] ♪ Musical number: "Go Into Your Dance" — performed by Maya Cantu ♪

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