Rent: School Edition- Page 3

[Gobstopper]

Posted: 8/8/08 at 10:53pm

Okay, let's clarify some things really quickly.

Whether or not an actress is latina is kind of hard to determine, because latin people can have a very wide variety of skin colors. Nobody complained when when Yassmin Alers was Mimi in the tour cast even though she was kinda pale, and nobody complained when tons of African-American actresses have played Mimi full-time (Krystal Brown, Tamyra Gray, and on and on and on). Latina women can have many skin tones, so that argument doesn't even really make sense.

The same goes for Angel. Many full-time Angels have been African-American, including Kristen-Alexzander Griffith and Shaun Earl.

Additionally, Roger has been played full-time by a Hispanic actor before. I believe his name was Adrian Lewis, maybe?

And the ensemble actors have always been a variety of races. There have been many different ethnicities as Steve and Gordon, and the most recent tour Alexi (Jade Hicks) was black instead of Asian.

Additionally, the original workshop Collins was white, and I believe Benny miiight have been too.

Basically, I'm saying that the Broadway and tour cast has been filled with people of non-OBC ethnicities, so it's not a big deal that school productions (which have a much smaller talent pool) do too. And this comes from a person who used to think the actors should always be specifically what the OBC looked like.