Honestly though, I think this highlights a major problem with white people in the theatre community. There’s this enormous sense of entitlement. Since most of the existing canon and the field is tailored for white people, white people are used to getting their way all of the time and so when a good show comes along that’s written for people of color, white people just can’t stomach the idea that there’s something shiny that they can’t have and so they make excuses and disrespectfully appropriate the few works created with actors of color in mind.
The entire central plot of Once On This Island is that Ti Moune, because of her dark skin, can’t be with the light skin boy that she loves. It takes place in the Caribbean, the characters have names like “Asaka” And “Agwe,” they sing calypso music and speak with accents, there’s a whole song about colonialism and the dynamics of colorism and classism, yet a version of the show exists where all references to race are removed so white people can do the show. It’s a very clear cut example of appropriation. White people like the superficial aspects of the show (the music, the story) but it’s fundamentally unsuitable for an all white cast, so instead of respectfully understanding that this isn’t their place, they sanitize the show to make it palatable. It’s borderline disrespectful.
The Wiz never specifically mentions the race of its characters, but everything about the show indicates that it needs an all black cast. The characters speak ebonics. The score features r&b, gospel, and soul. The entire original Broadway cast and the entire cast of the film were black. The entire concept of the show is centered around the idea that it’s an African American retelling of The Wiz. And yet white people do the show all the time, and in the process, miss the entire point. The Wiz was born out of the idea that for children, even broad fantasy that was supposed to be universal and not bound by the conventions of the real world, was still predominately white, so the point of The Wiz was to express the universality of these stories by taking a story usually thought of as being a white story (The Wizard of Oz) and giving it new context to make it a parable for black audiences. A white production of The Wiz misses this entire point because a white production of The Wiz is unnecessary because there’s already The Wizard of Oz.
Even Dreamgirls, which is in no uncertain terms about the struggles of African-Americans in the music industry, is often appropriated and whitewashed. Every white person who can kind of belt thinks the world needs them to sing something from Dreamgirls. This is especially ironic because a major plot point in Dreamgirls is that black culture creates beautiful music that white culture appropriates and sanitizes to its detriment. I don’t understand how anyone who genuinely watches Dreamgirls would think it’s okay for a white person to sing a song from the show when there’s literally a scene in the show where a white person steals one of their songs and it devastates the characters who originated it. For a white person to sing a song from Dreamgirls is to fundamentally misunderstand the entire point that the show itself makes.
I hear “but the song doesn’t mention race there’s no reason a white person couldn’t sing it” and I hear “I can’t understand the history of racism in the world that’s created a system where actors of color have been historically marginalized and I choose to ignore that due to the original context of this song it would be disrespectful and tone deaf of me to sing it because it’s pretty and I’m white so I deserve everything pretty.” I was in a class once where a white girl sang a song from In the Heights, and when she was done the teacher told her to find a different song because even if the song didn’t specifically mention race, everyone in the room still knew the context and knew she was too white to be singing it. No matter how good these songs are, you should in all good conscience know that it’s not your place to be singing them.
A white girl once said to me “I can’t wait until the day when I just wake up black and I can sing all of these amazing songs” and if that’s not entitled tone deaf and insensitive I don’t know what is.
It does bear mentioning though that because the existing musical theater canon is so predominately white, people of color can’t appropriate songs or shows from white people. You can’t appropriate the dominant culture, you can only assimilate into it. I’ve heard people argue firsthand that it’s okay to cast a white girl as the Vietnamese Kim in Miss Saigon because Audra McDonald was cast as the white Carrie Pipperidge in Carousel. Number one, Carrie isn’t specifically a white character so already the analogy is flawed. But number two, there’s a major difference between the two because the only reason that Carousel is a “white” show is because for so many years white people were the default for any show not specifically about race. Casting a person of color in a traditionally white role isn’t appropriating roles from white people, it’s normalizing the theatre to make it reflect real life where people of color actively exist and do things.
READ THIS!!!!!
