As promised, I am adding some of my own concerns to Curmie’s post two days ago on the controversy regarding the lack of “diversity” among the ensemble in a Sacramento production of the meh Broadway musical, “Elf.” I know many out there in EA Reader Land don’t give a rip about casting ethics. Ethics Alarms has posted on it often, because I believe, as with a lot of ethics issues in particular industries and areas of the culture, it has larger significance than only where the controversy arose.

Curmie covered most of the ethical issues in this kerfuffle well, as he always does, but I have some pointed conclusions that I think bear emphasis.

The whole episode illustrates what’s fatally wrong with DEI in general and the Left’s obsession with it. It has become an ideology unmoored to the real world. The mission of a theater director or producer must be, first and beyond all else, to put on the best production possible. We can argue about other priorities, but not that. Putting on the best production possible means, without exception, casting and staffing the production with the most talented, experienced, reliable professionals the production can afford. The entire discussion Curmie explores among four theater professional reveals the crippling mission confusion and ideological fanaticism that has infected if not most of the entertainment business, far too much of it.

The smoking gun quote is the one from Tony nominee Amber Imam (whoever she is) writing indignantly that  “A show that takes place in NEW YORK CITY cannot… CAN NOT have an ensemble that LOOKS LIKE THIS!!!  Do better.  Have you learned nothing?????” This an asinine assertion from both an artistic and an ethical perspective; it’s an endorsement of affirmative action in an area that must be merit- and product quality-based; it is asserting that appearances should be any concern at all to a director whose primary duties are to entertain and engage an audience, fulfill the objectives of playwrights, and create the highest possible level of performance. The job of theater professionals is not to address social inequities when they interfere with those objectives. Her edict is Great Stupid wokism at its worst. Now I’m wondering whether her Tony nomination was really based on her talent, or her skin shade. Maybe that’s why she’s so shrill.

As a director, I’m concerned about how a cast “looks” when that appearance will either increase or decrease the audience’s experience. I have flipped the gender, race, age or physical type of a role when 1) I had a performer who was as good or better than one who would be a more traditional choice and 2) when I felt that an unusual casting choice would open up the work to new opportunities and discoveries. I have refused to do this when I believed that a non-traditional choice would be a distraction to the audience or would undermine the clear intent of the playwright. Women and actors “of color” do not belong in “Twelve Angry Men.” Tevya in “Fiddler on the Roof” cannot be black; Henry Higgins in “My Fair Lady” cannot be played by a woman or someone with a Spanish accent. There are progressive activists who will argue with me in each of these cases. They are wrong. Diversity and inclusion is fine when it doesn’t debase or interfere with the effectiveness of the show as measured by the audience’s theater-going experience.

Have I, as a director (and indeed as an employer in other fields) sometimes hired a minority individual in order to make the burden of being a minority in a field where the majority has inherent structural and traditional advantages? I have, and many times. I have done this, however, only when I was certain that the non-traditional choice would either enhance the show or, at very least, not harm it. Sometimes I have been mistaken, but I have made mistakes casting parts traditionally too.

Two other observations: First (and I mentioned this in a comment to Curmie’s post) if how a cast looks matters more than what the cast is, it means that minority actors who look white don’t count to social justice dolts like Amber Imam. Maybe all of the cast members in the photo Curmie used for his post weren’t white. Would this mean that Scott Klier, the CEO of the theater company that produced the insufficiently inclusive “Elf,” really “fell short” of that goal, that he achieved his goal but it just didn’t look like it to someone who cares, or that the goal cannot be achieved unless it looks like the goal has been achieved?

Second, the entire discussion as revealed by Curmie demonstrates a condition in professional theater and the entertainment business that became obvious to me almost as soon as I became part of them. Most of the artists, certainly not all, but too many, are too narrow in interest and experience, under-educated, vulnerable to group-think and, let’s see how to put this, intellectually limited to handle such issues competently.

And most of the time, unfortunately, they don’t.