If/Then - more musing, less theater review

[lauradi7dw]

I spent a good chunk of this month in NC because my mother had a stroke on the 9th. She's OK, relatively speaking, and we went ahead and hosted the bridge club on Tuesday (they rotate hosting duties, and it was her turn). They are mostly old ladies, some of whom have been playing together for fifty years, so the games take place in the daytime. One of the players is a season ticket subscriber to the Durham Performing Arts Center Broadway touring company series, and she gave me her ticket to see If/Then. What I remembered from the stories about it when it was on Broadway a year or two ago is that the title is apt - there is a scenario, and then a "what if" scenario, presuming one small change in the initial incident. It's a musical. There are lots of songs. Only two or three of them stuck in my mind at all, but what I noticed was a trend (or beyond a trend). All of the songs sung by women ended up reminded me of the kind of Broadway songs Idina Menzel is famous for - in fact, as we were leaving, I was humming "Defying Gravity" rather than any song from If/Then. The male singers got to do ballads and various other styles, but all the women songs (that I recall) by whatever character ended up full out, high, etc. The partial exception is
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zBZyKtD5d2M
I wondered what all the elderly theater-going public (there were at least two buses of residents of local assisted living places there) thought of the language, but I'm getting old myself, and I talk that way.
I got back to my parents' house and looked the play up on Wikipedia. The role was originated, in fact, by Menzel, heard above. So - was it written for her, or do modern composers think all female Broadway singers should sound like that? I'm trying to remember what the girl in "Fun Home" is required to do.