There was only one female director of a Broadway musical this past season. And she won the Tony Award.
“I wish I wasn’t the only woman directing a musical on Broadway this season,” said Rachel Chavkin during her acceptance speech for directing “Hadestown,” which is based on the ancient Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. Urging the Broadway community to embrace racial and gender diversity, she said, “This is not a pipeline issue. It is a failure of imagination by a field whose job is to imagine the way the world could be.”
Know Your Value founder Mika Brzezinski recently sat down with Chavkin to talk about her call for greater representation in the theater world. In fact, this past season, 85 percent of Broadway show writers and 76 percent choreographers were male, and seven shows had no females in major roles on their creative teams.
Chavkin said ironically many people consider theater and the arts to be “amongst the most progressive industries because they’re industry is filled with progressives … and yet unfortunately, there’s the same systemic white supremacy and patriarchy that we see operating in so many different industries around the world.”
Blazing a trail
Chavkin has found that working with females and artists of color has become “an increasing core value” of hers. “Hadestown,” which brings two love stories from Greek mythology into the Great Depression, is certainly an example of this. Anaïs Mitchell, who wrote the book, music and lyrics, is only the fourth woman in Broadway history to complete this triple feat. And Jessica Paz, one of two sound designers, is the first woman to have been nominated for the “sound design of a musical” award since the category was introduced in 2008. Both women took home Tony Awards for their efforts.









