Hats in the ring? Maybe. Hats on the stage? Definitely. - The Boston Globe (2025)

Or turn your eyes to Broadway, where “Wicked” is still playing to full houses more than two decades after it premiered (and five months after an excellent movie version was released). When golden-girl Galinda (not yet Glinda) gives social outcast Elphaba a black witch’s hat to wear at a dance in the Ozdust Ballroom, her goal is to humiliate Elphaba in front of the other students at Shiz University.

But as the hat-wearing Elphaba defiantly begins to dance by herself, making the hat her own, Galinda’s mean-spiritedness transforms into something like empathy. She begins to dance with Elphaba. It’s the beginning of an unlikely friendship that will ultimately take “Wicked” to a deeper place — and that friendship became a key part of the reason the musical continues to resonate so profoundly with girls and women.

The history of the American theater abounds with memorable hats that have been used to swiftly establish character, time, and place. And, sometimes, authorial voice, as with Stephen Adly Guirgis’s mordant comedy-drama “The Mother------ with the Hat.”

Hats can also serve as a signifier of social status. Consider Tevye’s cap in “Fiddler on the Roof.” As careworn as he is, that hat embodies the countless mornings Tevye has spent delivering milk to the villagers of Anatevka. And the headscarves worn by the Jewish women in “Fiddler,” including Tevye’s wife, Golde, signal their attachment to custom and tradition — the very things that are under siege.

Or look at the faded, flat-brimmed straw hat that 20-year-old Julie Andrews wore as Cockney flower girl Eliza Doolittle in the opening scene at Covent Garden in “My Fair Lady,” which premiered on Broadway in 1956. And, later, the staggering array of wide-brimmed hats worn by the women, including Eliza, in the Ascot racetrack scene.

A hat can also punctuate key moments in a musical or play. Because we learn so much about the individual dancers in “A Chorus Line,” we know what landing a role in a Broadway show will mean to them, professionally and personally. So we’re moved by the big closing number, “One,” when the dancers — those who got cast in the show and those who didn’t — unite in synchronized movement, donning and doffing gold top hats to underscore what they did for love, to borrow a phrase.

A hat can also serve as a visual motif that forges a connection across eras. When “Boop! The Musical” premiered on Broadway earlier this month, featuring Jasmine Amy Rogers as Betty Boop, Rogers wore a ’30s-style top hat in one scene — the decade in which the animated cartoon flapper made her first appearance.

In September, Keanu Reeves will make his Broadway debut in Samuel Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot.” He’s slated to play Estragon, one of the bowler hat-wearing tramps trying to puzzle out the riddle of existence. (All four principal characters in “Godot” wear hats.) The cast for this fall’s revival will also include Alex Winter, Reeves’s costar in the film “Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure,” as Vladimir.

A revival of Kander and Ebb’s “Cabaret” opened a year ago on Broadway and is still running, with Eva Noblezada (Eurydice in “Hadestown”) playing Sally Bowles.

But no stage performer can hope to displace the memory of Liza Minnelli’s multilayered portrayal of Sally in the 1972 film adaptation. The black-felt bowler hat with a black ribbon hatband that Minnelli wore in that movie is in the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, as is the hat worn by Zero Mostel when he played Tevye in “Fiddler.”

“Cabaret,” the movie, was directed by Bob Fosse. As he began losing his hair at a relatively young age, Fosse had taken to wearing hats. Soon, fedoras and derbies — not just on the head but in the hands — became a core part of his signature style, as vital as hip rolls and jazz hands.

When Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman” was revived three years ago, the production simultaneously made history as the first “Salesman” where all four Lomans were portrayed by Black actors, and connected with history. As in the 1949 premiere, starring Lee J. Cobb as Willy Loman, the revival opened with the sight of Wendell Pierce, as Willy, the picture of weariness beneath his hat, a pair of valises on the floor before him after another unsuccessful sales trip.

At the end of the play, standing by Willy’s grave after he died by suicide, his friend Charley says of a traveling salesman: “‘He’s a man way out there in the blue, riding on a smile and a shoeshine. And when they start not smiling back — that’s an earthquake. And then you get yourself a couple of spots on your hat, and you’re finished.”

Of course, sometimes a hat is just a hat, a way to heighten a scene and/or make a big stage personality even bigger.

Consider the gigantic red feathered headdress — roughly the size of an aircraft carrier — that was worn by Bette Midler as Dolly Levi Gallagher when Dolly descended the stairs at the Harmonia Gardens in the 2017 revival of “Hello, Dolly!” (Equally sizable were the hats worn by other Dollys: Carol Channing, who originated the role; Pearl Bailey; Bernadette Peters.)

A piece of headgear can help an actor get a firmer fix on his character or shape their approach to a role — sometimes in unexpected ways, as happened with Jonathan Groff when he stepped into the role of King George in the 2015 Broadway premiere of ”Hamilton.” As the musical obliterated one attendance record after another, Groff’s characterization of the malevolently amusing monarch became associated with the measured, careful glide with which the actor materialized onstage from the wings.

“The crown was so heavy at first,” Groff explained in a 2016 interview with Vulture. “When I first put it on, I couldn’t tip my head back or to the side, or I’d fall over. A lot of the [king’s] physicality was defined in the beginning by trying to hold my balance. That was sort of the beginning of it, walking with the glide walk. Then it became an attitude thing.”

And Sondheim? Fourteen years after “Company,” when Broadway’s greatest composer-lyricist sought to capture in song the arduous process of artistic creation, he chose to do so with a hat as his vehicle. In “Finishing the Hat,” in “Sunday in the Park with George,” his musical about the pointillist painter Georges Seurat, Sondheim gave the painter lines that captured the apartness and obsessive labor that making art requires, as well as its occasional satisfactions.

“There’s a part of you always standing by/ Mapping out the sky/ Finishing a hat/ Starting on a hat/ Finishing a hat/ Look, I made a hat/ Where there never was a hat.”

But Seurat — and Sondheim — knew what most artists know: There is ultimately no way to ever truly finish the hat.

Don Aucoin can be reached at donald.aucoin@globe.com. Follow him @GlobeAucoin.