In 1936, Merle Oberon, best known today because of her co-starring role opposite Laurence Olivier in “Wuthering Heights,” became the first Asian actress to get an Academy Award nomination, for her role in “The Dark Angel.” But in 2023, Michelle Yeoh was widely hailed as the Academy of Motion Picture Sciences’ first Asian Best Actress winner. That is because Oberon hid her ethnicity from journalists and the public for her entire career in order to have a career at all. It worked: in addition to getting the much-sought role of Kathy in “Wuthering Heights,” Oberon played Anne Boleyn (in the Charles Laughton classic, “The Private Life of Henry VIII”) at a time when non-traditional casting was unheard of.
Oberon died of a stroke in 1979; it wasn’t until four years later that it was revealed that she had been born in Bombay, India, the daughter of an Indian woman who had been raped by a white man. Written before the secret was revealed, the Times obituary seems naive in retrospect: “A diminutive 5 feet 2 inches tall, Miss Oberon was of an almost exotic beauty, with perfect skin, dark hair and a slight slant to her eyes that was further accentuated by makeup.” Almost!
Yes, that’s “Jesus Christ” in the upcoming Hollywood Bowl production of Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice’s “Jesus Christ Superstar.” Needless to say (I hope!) Jesus was not black, female or lesbian. Moreover, the character’s songs were not written for a female voice, but rather a powerful rock tenor.
Never mind, though. This is stunt casting, maybe even D.E.I casting. It’s not fair to the work, the music, and for audience members who are Christians, it may seem just a teeny bit irreverent. But Erivo is currently hot, Oscar nominated for a (I thought) rather single-note portrayal of Elphaba, the Wicked Witch of the West, in the exhausting film version of “Wicked.”
The story and a lot of the book of “Superstar” is taken right from the Bible, but even the original stage production was attacked as blasphemous when it premiered in 1971. The “rock opera” had begun its cultural life, like The Who’s “Tommy” a bit later, as a recording. Director Tom O’Horgan put it on stage with such innovations as a King Herod who pranced around as a flaming transvestite and Jesus and Judas blasting into microphones. The film version had still more anachronisms. Jesus and the disciples encounter tanks rolling across the Sinai Desert, for example.
Here is another installment of a frequent topic on Ethics Alarms: non-traditional casting, DEI casting, and and virtue-signaling stunt casting just to appear woke. The position here as a long-time stage director who has been responsible for some audacious non-traditional casting in my time (I once cast the role Cole Porter with a woman) remains unchanged: if it works and the audience enjoys the show as much or more than it would have with a traditional casting choice, then all is well. (Full disclosure: casting Cold Porter as female did NOT work. At all…)
The mission of any stage production is to be fair to the show’s creators and make the production as effective theatrically as possible, not to make political or social statements that get in the way. (Prime example of the latter: this.)
Curmie sent me a link to “Yes, You Can Whitewash ‘Little Shop of Horrors’, But Please Don’t” at Chris Peterson’s Onstage blog. I love the musical (my old high school doubles tennis partner, Frank Luz, co-starred as the sadistic dentist in the original off-Broadway production and the cast album) based on the wonderful 1960 Roger Corman camp movie classic. I thought its creators would revive the genre, but Disney snapped them up (“The Little Mermaid”; “Beauty and the Beast”) and then half the team, Howard Ashman, died.
Peterson cites the license-holders’ quite reasonable casting note:
As EA columnist Curmie likes to say, and I’m sure he will, “Oh bloody hell.”
Citizen Free Press has taken over the conservative news aggregator title from the once ubiquitous Drudge Report, after the latter went pseudo-woke and virulently Trump-Deranged. CFP is conservative and Trump-lovin’ all righ; it’s headline links are also frequently juvenile (“Nancy Pelosi should have kept her pie-hole shut!”). Now we know that nobody connected with the website 1) knows more about theater, drama and Shakespeare than the average Frisbee and 2) doesn’t know what DEI means despite constantly complaining about it.
The linked story tells us that a West End production of “Romeo and Juliet” in London will feature a white actor as Romeo and a black actress as Juliet.
Non-traditional casting has been flourishing in the theater at all levels since at least the 1970s, and creative casting and conceptions of “Romeo and Juliet” are among the most common and varied of theatrical practices. Casting a mixed race couple in that classic tragedy is almost as routine now as casting two white lovers. (I saw a production with that mix just last year). There have been professional versions with two men as R&J, two women, two “non-binaries.” There have been production in which the doomed lovers are played by septuagenarians. The Montegues and Capulets have been transported to China, the African Plains, the hillbilly Appalachians a la Hatfield and McCoys, and galaxies far, far away.
Some of these wild re-workings of the ancient script have been good and even great. Do the right-wing dufusses who run the site not know about the obscure musical called “West Side Story,” in which “Romeo,” aka “Tony” is white, and “Juliet,” or “Maria,” is Puerto Rican? That “DEI” version premiered in 1957.
To sum up: there is nothing “DEI” or even novel about mixed-race casting of “Romeo and Juliet,” or any Shakespeare play, for that matter.
Jeez, conservatives…you really have to get out more. Try to keep up. That was pathetic.
In the latest “Dr. Who” adventure on the BBC (if you don’t know about this long-running cult scifi show, google it), Sir Isaac Newton is played by an actor of Indian heritage:
This raises several issues, most of which Ethics Alarms has delved into before:
1. Does it matter? As Curmie declared in his Comment of the Day regarding my post about another BBC production in which Anne Boleyn was played by a black actress…yes, it does, but it depends on the context and the objective of the casting. The major consideration in any non-traditional casting is whether it works, meaning that the casting isn’t distracting, that it adds something to the work beyond being just a gimmick. (The black Anne Boleyn was a gimmick.) In Curmie’s opinion, almost nobody was likely to see the black actress in the role and think, ““I didn’t know Anne Boleyn was black.” I am less certain of that assumption in the case of a brown Isaac Newton.
In Sherman, Texas, the local high school declared that senior Max Hightower, who has been a member of the school’s theater group all four years, is ineligible to play the part of Curley, the male lead in Rodgers and Hammerstein’s musical “Oklahoma!” despite the fact that he won the part in auditions fairly and squarely. The part is being taken away from him, or her, or “them,” because, as he was told by the principal (evidently an idiot miscast as an educator) that a new school policy dictates that student “actors and actresses could only play a role that was the same gender they were assigned at birth.” Max is a young trans male, a girl who “identifies” as male, and presumably has taken no steps to acquire male genitalia.
All aspects of this debacle are so stupid it makes my teeth hurt.
1. There is nothing about casting a female in a male role, a male in a female role, a heterosexual in a gay role (or vice-versa), a black actor as a white character…and so on, ad infinitum, that is inherently wrong or right, for that matter. If a school is going to have a drama program, it should be competent enough regarding theater to know, practice and teach that. A production does what its artistic directors believe is necessary to make the show work as drama, comedy, or entertainment.
2. A penis is not necessary equipment for playing the male lead in “Oklahoma!” Curley thinks with his penis, but he never shows it. A policy requiring any actor to actually possess features the character he or she portrays demonstrates abject ignorance of what drama is. Needless to say, except perhaps to the morons who run this school, Curley is also a lot older than a high school senior, lives in the Oklahoma territory, and ideally can sing like Gordon MacRae above. No high school performer is strictly well-cast as Curley by those criteria, or as a character in any classic musical with the exception of shows like “Grease,’ “West Side Story” and “Bye-Bye Birdie.” Without some version of so-called “non-traditional casting,” high school musicals, which have been a rich and beneficial part of the school experience for more than a century, would be impossible.
When the high school theater group in Arlington (Mass.) High School put on “Oliver!” in the early 1970s (my sister played Nancy, the tragic female lead), the part of the Artful Dodger, a male, pre-teen role, was taken by female senior. She was terrific. In Sherman, her casting would have violated policy.
3. There are potential copyright issues when a director actually tries to change the gender of a character as written by the author. That’s not what was being done here. By sheer coincidence, I saw a school production of “Romeo and Juliet” last week in which Romeo was played by a female. The show was not turned into a lesbian romance (though this has been done many times, and that works too): the part was played as male, and it worked just fine. The Rodgers and Hammerstein organization is appropriately flexible with casting variations: in recent Broadway revivals, the villain Judd, written as a white character, was played by a black man, and the comic female part of Ado Annie, the local flirt, was played by a woman in a wheelchair.
4. I could make an argument for a school policy requiring shows to be cast based on artistic considerations only, and not to make political points, but it would not be a good argument. It is impossible to separate art from politics and social commentary. High school actors need to learn that, too. Such a policy would also be impossible to enforce coherently—especially by fools like the Sherman high school principle, who can’t grok this theater thingy.
5. Also needless to say, except to people who run that high school and victims of closed head injuries, theater is not like athletic competitions. Being a female who identifies as a male or the other way around confers no unfair advantage on an actor. Presumably confusion on this rather basic point is what led to the ridiculous policy and the abuse of Max.
Oh, it gets worse. The Stupid is strong with this community. In a statement, the school district said the production is being postponed, writing,
….”It was brought to the District’s attention that the current production contained mature adult themes, profane language, and sexual content. Unfortunately, all aspects of the production need to be reviewed, including content, stage production/props, and casting to ensure that the production is appropriate for the high school stage.”because of “sexual content and profanity.”
Perfect. Some busy-body escapee from a Mennonite compound complained about the script to a bunch of illiterates who never have seen “Oklahoma!” Cultural illiterates should not be involved in educating children. “Oklahoma!” was judged G-rated fair when it premiered in 1943, and has been performed without controversy by high schools, colleges and community theaters ever since. The “sexual content” is called romance, like in “Romeo and Juliet”,” ” (which is a lot more sexually provocative than “Oklahoma!”) and if there’s profanity in the show, it consists of some cowboy saying “dang.” (All right, all right, Ado Annie’s song “I’m just a girl who can’t say no” is suggestive, but of nothing that a normal high school student isn’t very familiar with already.) Today, high schools have to worry about musicals containing words like “shit” and “fuck,” and these Neanderthals are investigating “Oklahoma!”?
Then the district makes things as clear as mud by adding, “There is no policy on how students are assigned to roles. As it relates to this particular production, the sex of the role as identified in the script will be used when casting. Because the nature and subject matter of productions vary, the District is not inclined to apply this criteria to all future productions.”
Oh.
WHAT???
Meanwhile, Max’s parents say they are going to fight to get Max back into the role. Good. But if this fiasco is sufficient to turn off Max and a lot of his fellow students to theater generally, I wouldn’t be surprised.
Disney has a tough job, trying to maintain its roles as a great middle class cultural icon and celebrator of Americana in the midst of social upheaval and culture wars. It couldn’t be doing a lousier, lazier, more destructive job of it, either, but that is, as they say, neither here nor there. The issue of the day is whether Disney deserves to be pilloried for its new teaser trailer for the live-action version of its animated classic “The Little Mermaid.”
It does not.
Conservative media is now resolutely anti-House of Mouse, so it is actively gloating over the detected (but inconclusive) negative reaction to the first look at the film scheduled to hit theaters in May of 2003. Ed Driscoll at Instapundit writes, “Disney in particular absolutely loves …to both gin-up hype, and wave away large scale fan hatred of their latest reboot.” But since fans haven’t seen the film yet, since it hasn’t been finished, “large scale hatred’ is an unwarranted assumption. At The Daily Wire, it is implied that there are widespread objections to the red-headed Ariel of the 1989 animated film being played by Halle Bailey, an African-American, and that fans of the original film who don’t like the color change are being called “racists” by the Woke and wonderful.
Guess what soon-to-open Broadway musical revival’s cast members are shown above. Come on—guess!
Why, it’s “1776” of course!
Yes, the 1969 Tony-winning musical is returning to Broadway in a new–ugh!—inclusive and diverse version with apparently no unequivocal men playing the unequivocal Founding Fathers who crafted the Declaration of Independence. The cast is entirely “a racially diverse cast of women, nonbinary and trans actors.” This, one of the co-directors tells the Times, “wakes the language up.” Oh. More quotes from the director:
“I want the audience to hold that dual reality, of what the founders were, but also a company of actors in 2022, who never would have been allowed inside Independence Hall.”
When she first read the script, she says she was shocked by the scene where Thomas Jefferson is forced to strike out the condemnation of slavery in order to get the Declaration passed. “I was unaware of that crossing out. How could I not know? That began my journey into the show. I had to reckon with my own experience of American history.”
She means her own ignorance of American history and her biases based on that ignorance. Yes, a show about a complex seminal event in American history is being crafted by people don’t know much about history, as Sam Cooke used to say.
“The Best of Enemies” is a stage adaptation of the film about the 1968 TV face-offs between arch-conservative pundit William F. Buckley and acerbic liberal author and wit Gore Vidal that climaxed with Buckley threatening to punch Vidal is the face. I haven’t seen it (which is now playing in London’s West End) or the film: I was lucky enough to see the original, live. Buckley was fascinating (and often hilarious); Vidal was the perfect iconoclast (I even had a correspondence with him briefly!), so I assume both play and film are at least entertaining. That’s not the issue at hand, however.
The issue is casting ethics. My position as a director and also from the ethics perspective is that a production’s obligations are to the audience and the work being presented, and everything else is subordinate at best. That does not mean that I am opposed to so-called “non-traditional casting;” indeed, I support it (and have done a lot of it as a director) when it benefits the play or musical. When funky casting accomplishes nothing but making activists happy or ticking off woke boxes at the expense of the show’s effectiveness, that’s unethical, plain and simple.
Oh, I just love this Comment of the Day by Curmie, who was AWOL from the ethics comment wars for far too long, and whose return recently has made my heart soar like a hawk. I love it for many reasons, including, of course, the fact that it is well written and enlightening, far more so than my post that prompted it, which focused narrowly on the double standard of applauding the having a performer of one race portray another, but only when it’s the “right” races involved.
As with my posts about ethics issues in another lifetime passion, baseball, I know that many readers nod off when the framework is theater. But the conceit of Ethics Alarms is that the ethics issues and process of analysis are often universal regardless of where the dilemmas and conflicts pop up. As it happens, baseball and theater happen to be two realms that I know a lot about.
But not as much as Curmie, at least as far as theater is concerned. I had hoped that he would weigh in on the casting of a black actress as Anne Boleyn, and he did.
Literally two minutes after reading this post, I saw that Katori Hall had been awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for her play The Hot Wing King. I don’t know the play—its Off-Broadway run was cut short by COVID, and as far as I can tell it hasn’t been published.
I do, however, recognize her name as the playwright of The Mountaintop, in which the two characters are Martin Luther King, Jr. and an employee of the Memphis hotel in which he is spending what he doesn’t know is his last night on earth. (Spoiler alert: she’s really an angel preparing him for what is to come.) It is a good, borderline great, play: by turns moving, humorous, and incisive. But what comes immediately to mind is the production by a student group at Kent State University, in which a white actor was cast as King. The director, of course, claimed the casting decision wasn’t a gimmick. (Newsflash: it was a gimmick.)
The original idea was to alternate the role between a white and a black actor to be, in the director’s words, “a true exploration of King’s wish that we all be judged by the content of our character and not the color of our skin.” The black actor had to drop out of the production, and the white one played the role throughout the run.
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