Color Blind Casting - Is It Just a One-Way Street? — Page 2

Damn that Gershwin estate for keeping my Serena from being fully realized!

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Well, it's not as if there's some proliferation of all-black professional productions around the country. As far as New York is concerned they may come along once or twice a decade (not counting mixed race productions or amateur theatre). More than anything, it serves as a very rare opportunity for first rate black artists to take on roles that they normally wouldn't be able to. It's a privilege for an audience to be able to see what a genius like James Earl Jones could do with Lear or Morgan Freeman with Coriolanus and Petruchio or Andre de Shields with Willie Loman or Gloria Foster with Medea or Foster, Earle Hyman, Al Freeman and Peter Francis James with Long Day's Journey Into Night. In the thousands of years of theatre history, there simply haven't been very many great classic plays or roles that were written specifically for black actors (and its only been since the 1960s that the work of black playwrights has been produced with any sort of regularity on mainstream stages). The fact is that white actors still get 90+% of the roles out there, so I don't understand the uproar when once in a blue moon a traditionally white show is cast with a predominantly black cast. If the show isn't overtly about race and if the audience is able to suspend disbelief (and the actors are first rate), what on earth is the problem?

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Updated On: 4/23/07 at 05:31 PM

When I saw Drowsy last Thursday night, Kecia was out, and the understudies for Trix are white, so I was wondering what they were going to do about the line about how "progressive" the show was casting an African-American woman as the aviatrix.

They just left that part out. Just said "In mnay ways it was very progressive for its time" and went on with the rest of the script.

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I didn't know that Color blind Casting was the name of a street.

Where is it?

hehe

Skingdom out.

With Aida, I think its just a matter of differentiating the Nubians and the Egyptians. Technically, they should all be black.

Egyptians aren't black. And for the time period Aida is set in, the Egyptian rulers were of Greek descent.

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Updated On: 4/23/07 at 07:00 PM

Does anyone remember the controversy around Jonathan Pryce being cast as the Engineer in Miss Saigon? And then he went and won the Tony.

>> An all-white August Wilson would be ludicrous and undermine the very meaning and essence of any of the plays

With all due respect, Margo, it would not be "ludicrous". Granted, not all, but some of his plays would work regardless of what race plays what role.

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Actually, I once randomly thought Brian Stokes Mitchell would make a good Abraham Lincoln.

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I am all for Color Blind casting when it works. I did Inherit The Wind and lets saus some lawyers were women and the judge was african american and a woman. Rev. Brown at one point had been a woman until I replaced her. I just do not think that it fits in this time period...and plus it was done poorly.

right almost x famous?

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They could be...but I always feel that with all the African tones they put in, it may seem awakward.

That is just me.

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First of all, it's kind of interesting how there are currently two threads on the "first 50" regarding casting and race (this and the maria one). Second of all, I think if being black or being white (or Asian or etc etc) is a component of a character, then the character should probably not be cast blindly. However, many shows have developed these quasi-stereotypes for characters. Some of the ones mentioned above like the ronnettes in LSOH and Joanne and Benny in Rent are always cast one way due to our familiarity with the shows. I have been in a production of LSOH where none of the ronnettes were black, and it worked just fine. However, I feel that sometimes casting directors want to make sure their shows are historically accurate. For example, take Sweeney Todd. During that time period in England, it simply would not be historically accurate for someone like Beadle to be african american. However, race is not crucial to his character. It's all kind of one way or the other.

thank you folks, I will be here all week.

The "making of" specials for the London and Toronto productions of Miss Saigon don't address the controversy -- was there a Broadway one made?

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I think an African-American/black Abe Lincoln could be poignant.

In Hawaii they do open casting all the time and no one blinks an eye.

In fact, if you do Shakespeare and have Kings and Queens, it seems particularly appropriate there to cast Hawaiians since Hawaii was once a kingdom. And of course they're generally mixed or part-Hawaiian. [There are only about 2000 pureblood Hawaiians left, most on a remote neighbor island. Diseases wiped out about 85% of the Native Hawaiians who, being so isolated, had not developed much natural immunity. When measles entered Hawaii from the sailors on ships it was such a holocaust it killed like one member in every Hawaiian family. When leprosy entered, believed to have come from Chinese in-migration, it was also devastating.]

Updated On: 4/24/07 at 12:49 AM