Last December, right before New Year’s Eve, there was a blow-out Broadway celebration of the 80th anniversary of the memorable Rodgers and Hammerstein musical partnership that produced the acclaimed musicals “Oklahoma!,” “Carousel,” “South Pacific,” “The King and I,” “The Sound of Music,” and a couple of clunkers. It was a manufactured event to say the least. Why the 80th anniversary, for example? The team’s first successful collaboration was “Oklahoma!” in 1943, but it opened on March 31 of that year, so they were celebrating the so-called anniversary a full nine months late. (Try THAT with your wife!) But the real anniversary of the team’s formation was when Rodgers and Hammerstein collaborated on the 1920 Varsity Show, Fly With Me when the two were at Columbia University together. Nobody remembers that show, however, but Broadway could have celebrated the 100th Anniversary of R&H in 2020 right before the stupid pandemic lockdown almost killed live theater.

PBS has been showing the event on its “Great Performances” series, and it’s not that great. I was tipped off that the thing would drive me crazy when for some perverse reason the opening number, after the 40 piece symphony orchestra performed an overture that was a medley of well-known R&H tunes, featured a group of gay young men singing “There Is Nothing Like a Dame” from “South Pacific.” There might have been one straight guy among them, but my Gaydar meter almost blew up. Whose idea was that? If you’re going to have gays singing that lament supposedly belted out by horny, sex-deprived sailors in WWII, at least tell them to butch up, or better yet, pick a different song.

This provided a hint that show business has not quite figured out the diversity, equity and inclusion fad that it so passionate embraces, or thinks it does. Here’s an idea for inclusion: cast some heterosexual men in heterosexual roles now and then. But the real proof that the entertainment industry hasn’t thought through this supposedly ethical policy (it isn’t) came when Hollywood legend Rita Moreno, now 90, introduced a salute to “The King and I.” Why Rita? She played the tragic heroine Tuptim in the 1956 Academy Award winning film version of the Broadway hit starring Yul Brenner and Deborah Kerr.

Moreno began her introduction by confessing that she had been cast despite auditioning for the role against “the most beautiful Asian girl” she had ever seen. She now feels guilty about getting the part, she said, but “I am happy to say that times have changed.” Ah, yes, America is slowly making progress thanks to the forward thinking entertainment community to conquer the racial discrimination that the evil U.S.A was built on. Cue the uproarious applause from the assembled woke in the audience.

Morons. Rita Moreno, who is Puerto Rican, was speaking to them because she is major star who has had an epic career. She is very, very good; she’s not bad even now, in her ninth decade. That beautiful Asian actress apparently wasn’t as talented or capable, and that’s why Moreno was cast. She is convincing as Tuptim, a Siamese concubine. TheAsian actress, whom Moreno didn’t name because she obviously sank into oblivion, wasn’t good enough to win the part. Times have changed? Hollywood and Broadway still cast stars over unknowns with remarkable consistency. [See: Bill Murray as FDR, ruining “Hyde Park on Hudson.”]

So what exactly have the times changed to? Nobody in Hollywood or on Broadway can explain the woke principle they supposedly cheer.. In an absurd Broadway revival of “1776” in 2022, the Founding Fathers were cast as women, blacks, transsexual and Asians. But casting a Puerto Rican actress who could sing, act and play a Siamese woman convincingly is outdated and insufficiently sensitive? Explain, please. As a result of the lockstep DEI casting rules, “The King and I,” like Gilbert and Sullivan’s “The Mikado”,”” and Sondhein’s “Pacific Overtures,” is now almost impossible to produce because a producer has to find an entire cast of sufficiently talented Asian performers. I would have loved to hear Moreno suggest that Yul Brenner, the unique actor who created the role of the King, wouldn’t be cast today because he wasn’t the right ethnicity. Yul owned the King of Siam role like Marlon Brando was Stanley Kowalski. Are Hollywood and Broadway really ready to have less successful movies and shows by casting inferior stars? Only when it means putting white men out of work, as in the “1776” debacle, apparently.

Times have changed. See, now it’s okay to cast a generic Asian actress as a Thai, and Puerto Rican Rita Moreno can make her career playing whites, Mexicans, and other ethnicities and be cheered as enligtened, but an inferior Asian actress should be cast over a superior non-Asian star, and as Asian actress taking the role of signer of the Declaration of Independence is an example of diversity, equity and inclusion.

The people who applauded this tortured nonsense all voted for Kamala Harris.