At this point, you can all but expect to see ‘woke’ storylines portrayed on Broadway stages (Megyn recounted her own daughter’s experience seeing the musical & Juliet on the Great White Way earlier this year), but what about in smaller regional and community theaters?
Megyn and her family went to see a local production of the show Head Over Heels before heading home from their summer at the Jersey Shore, and let’s just say the storyline was not what she was expecting.
On Tuesday’s show, Megyn was joined by The Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh, star and producer of the new film Am I Racist?, to discuss the storyline and what, if anything, has changed since Walsh exposed the state of radical gender ideology in his 2022 documentary What Is a Woman?
Woke Theater
As Megyn shared, she and her family got tickets to see the latest production at a local theater on the Jersey Shore because it’s “usually [a] family friendly” environment. The show was an adaptation of the musical Head Over Heels, which had a short run on Broadway in 2018, and bills itself as “a modern musical fairy tale where once-upon-a-time is right now” following “the escapades of a royal family who set out on a journey to save their beloved kingdom from extinction.”
“It was set in Shakespearean times, so it was like Shakespearean language but every once in a while they would break out into a song having to do with the Go-Go’s,” Megyn noted. “It’s kind of a fun idea, and we brought the whole family.”
But the plot ended up taking some turns Megyn did not see coming. “Next thing I know, some character is declaring herself non-binary and saying she goes by they/them. Then, there is another character who dresses as a woman the whole time in order to see the girl whose father won’t let him in to see her and, it turns out, he really liked being both a girl and a boy and is going to stay flipping between the two. There was adultery. It just keeps going,” Megyn explained. “Now, this is not Broadway. This is at the Jersey Shore.”
While her kids spent most of the performance laughing because, as Megyn said, they correctly predicted she “would not like any of this,” she still found it problematic. “I’ve got to say, it felt like a real setback to those of us who are on the side of sanity,” she shared. “I hate to sound 200 years old, but [what happened to] family values? Keep that sh-t out of the family value theater. I don’t want to see it.”
Making Progress?
Walsh, as Megyn noted, helped to mainstream the conversation around radical gender ideology with What Is a Woman?, and she asked him where he sees the movement today. Despite her “pretty grotesque experience,” Walsh believes there has been progress. “Generally, things are heading in the right direction,” he said. “We have a long way to go, but I think you can look at it… culturally and politically.”
When it comes to the latter, Walsh pointed to laws that now limit gender affirming care. “There have been laws passed in many states outlawing the castration and mutilation of children,” he said. “Republican politicians, for the most part, are much more open about talking about these issues than certainly they were three years ago, so I see that as progress.”
In his view, that is true culturally as well. “It seems like more and more people are fed up with this and willing to call it out,” Walsh added. When he made the documentary three or four years ago, Walsh said he did a lot of man-on-the-street interviews in which he felt like people were telling him what they thought they had to as not to be offensive.
He doesn’t think that is true anymore. “I think that if we… did those same interviews again today, we would find a lot more people who would be willing to say on camera, ‘A woman is a female.’ ‘No, men don’t belong in the women’s room.’ ‘Boys shouldn’t be in girls’ sports,'” Walsh concluded. “I think there would be a lot more people willing to say that.”
You can check out Megyn’s full interview with Walsh by tuning in to episode 877 on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you like to listen. And don’t forget that you can catch The Megyn Kelly Show live on SiriusXM’s Triumph (channel 111) weekdays from 12pm to 2pm ET.