A History of Nudity on Stage

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This time, the reader question was: How often do plays and musicals feature nudity on stage?

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The play Liberation which is currently playing at Roundabout’s Laura Pels Theatre off-Broadway features nudity. It is hardly the most important thing about the stunning memory play by Bess Wohl, the playwright whose work over the years includes Small Mouth Sounds and Grand Horizons. And yet nudity always attracts a special brand of attention for a live stage work. In the case of Liberation, much like other productions featuring nudity in the past few years, audience members are required to lock their mobile devices in Yondr pouches for the duration of the performance.

While nudity on New York stages is nothing new, Yondr pouches are relatively new to the scene. Back in the days of Oh! Calcutta!, every audience member didn’t walk into the theater with a phone in their hand that could record an unlimited amount of content, relatively surreptitiously. The pouches protect actors who are baring their bodies on stage from images reaching those who did not pay to experience this within the context of the live performance. 

Liberation is a fascinating conversation between two time periods: 1970 and today. In present day, a daughter is examining what the women’s group that her mother led five decades earlier was all about. Women’s relationships with their bodies are the topic in one scene that finds the group shedding their clothing. This nude scene lends authenticity to the piece, as women during that era were indeed celebrating their own agency by liberating their bodies from restrictive apparel and displaying their naked bodies with pride and questioning.

Much discourse always surrounds the presence of a nude scene, with “is it necessary?” the likely echo. Societal shame about the naked body means that any time one is present in storytelling, it receives extra attention. Of course, in live theatre, there is an extra layer of titillation and taboo present since actors and audience members are actually in the same room.  

Nudity isn’t the only reason that Yondr pouches have been employed. The magnetic bags that prevent patrons from accessing their devices during the performance are also currently being used at the starry revival of Othello. Freestyle Love Supreme utilized them as well. In our current landscape, where audience members will often record performances even when told not to, the pouches are an extra means of protection for intellectual property and a measure against the live performance being disrupted. 

Controversy related to nudity was present during the 2022 Broadway revival of the Pulitzer Prize-nominated play Take Me Out. Nudity is a pivotal element in this work by Richard Greenberg that explores the topics of homophobia, racism and masculinity within a professional baseball team. Jesse Williams played the central role of Darren Lemming, a fictional baseball player who comes out of the closet. Since a baseball team is naked together in the shower and locker room, the realistic storyline depicts this as well. Controversy arose because an audience member snuck their phone out of the pouch and video-recorded Williams during the nude scene, leaking this online. During the original 2003 Broadway production of Take Me Out, which also included nudity, no such technological issue existed. 

Of course, video cameras go back farther than mobile devices that record video, but rarely were these bulky pieces of equipment snuck into productions that included nudity—and even more rarely was that content then widely distributed. Historically, nudity on Broadway became more explicit in the 1960s, when shows including Hair, celebrating free love and the natural state of being, included fully naked performances in their staging. Scantily clad performers have always been present on the Main Stem—think of the Ziegfeld Follies—but absolutely no clothing at all was another level which didn’t happen much until the liberated 1960s. 

In the roaring 20s, burlesque was a popular form of entertainment; burlesque shows were racy and often featured stripping and partial nudity. Some of this bled over to the legit entertainment of Broadway, although due to obscenity laws, theater could be shut down if nudity or sexuality was too graphic. Even when Hair came around in the late 1960s, a New York City law existed proclaiming that nudity on stage was only allowed if the actors didn’t move while undressed. 

Hair was not the only subversive contemporary musical to showcase nudity in the 1960s. Oh! Calcutta! opened in 1969 and ran for over 1,000 performances; a 1976 revival ran for almost 6,000 performances! While Hair’s nudity was brief, Oh! Calcutta! had its ensemble cast naked for extended sequences. The sexual revue became a must-see tourist attraction. Even more provocative was Let My People Come, which ran for two years off-Broadway before a few months in previews on Broadway where the show purposefully never opened so it wouldn’t have to be reviewed. Let My People Come’s song titles included “Come In My Mouth” and "The Cunnilingus Champion of Company C” and the show boasted plentiful nudity. 

Free love-era musicals didn’t have a monopoly on nudity. In the next few decades, plays like Equus (1973), M. Butterfly (1988), Love! Valour! Compassion! (1995), The Blue Room (1998),  The Graduate (2002), Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune (2002), and Slave Play (2019) all featured nudity in their storytelling. Whether being utilized to tell a story about sexual identity or to realistically explore a romantic encounter, nudity drew more attention to a play than it might receive otherwise—especially when said nudity was enacted by a star, such as Nicole Kidman in The Blue Room or Daniel Radcliffe in the Equus revival (2008). One compelling moment of nudity in Wit (1998 off-Broadway, 2012 Broadway) challenged expectations for nudity on stage. Here, a character dying of ovarian cancer appears naked to show the frailty of her suffering body.  

Nudity in musicals of the 21st century on Broadway has been erotic and largely in the context of sexual contact, like in Dracula (2004) or Spring Awakening (2006). Of course in The Full Monty (2000), nudity was the point; the show’s plot told the story of a group of down-on-their luck blue collar men who become strippers. Broadway’s most recent full nudity in a musical was within the Hair revival (2009), bringing Broadway’s nudity story full circle. 

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