Little Women the Musical: A Manly Preview

Little Women the Musical is slated to be experienced during the next two weeks in the greater New York Metropolitan area at The Secret Theatre, I, for one, am excited, with no resemblance to the online predator meme of pedo-bear. Promise.

It has been years since I had even thought of the book, Little Women. Yes, due to a mother hell-bent on me reading women’s literature in order to make me an upstanding young gentleman, I was forced at a young age to read such novels as Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, Jane Eyre, and, of course, Little Women.

Apparently, this was the first step to literacy for me, as I was taking out the Lord of the Rings Trilogy from the library to read next at the age of 9. The words started blurring a quarter way into The Two Towers, and I lied to my mother about finishing it.

I did, however, finish Little Women, and promptly forgot every word of it except for the title. This was fortunate because, at the age of 14, I found that some of the hottest girls on television that were around my age decided to all star in the movie adaptation of Little Women: Claire Danes, Winona Ryder, Samantha Mathis. While my bed-time fantasies about petticoats and bonnets may not have been enough to get me to actually watch the movie, there was a time that I watched a preview of Little Women repeatedly, and pondered. Furiously.

But the fates have continued to tease me, and cannot be tamed anymore. Why are they called  little women? What do they do in that big house by themselves? Why does the name John Brooke sound like a 19th century pimp? Will they ever meet little men?

Hopefully all will be explained, in song no less, when I brave these questions and see the show in person this weekend. If it’s as hot as the previews I saw of The Crucible, we all win.