But it’s not always that the man is tall and muscley and hairy. My brothers go to an all-boys school, and in nearly every school production there are boys dressed as women. This is automatically hilarious, even if they’re trying to do it seriously. Yet I went to an all-girls school and when we had students dressed up as men in shows that part is nowhere near as funny.
I saw a production of As You Like It where one of the minor characters, I forget who, was a man dressed as a woman. This garnered by far the greatest audience reaction of the whole show. It’s probably just me being elitist and snobbish, but I felt that this was just a cheap grab for laughs, upstaging the fantastic dramatic irony of Rosalind’s situation (for the unfamiliar, she is a girl dressed as a boy pretending to be a girl).
I don’t get what’s so entertaining about female impersonators either. Glitz and glamour and great songs and cheesy dancing is great, but I don’t think the main drawcard should be that these men look just like women.