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Why should Shakespeare run mostly white? Many of the most popular Shakespeare plays aren't historical...there's no reason for something like A Midsummer Night's Dream not to have a diverse cast. Sure, take Othello or Merchant of Venice where race/ethnicity - and gender, for that matter - are highly relevant to the plot, and yes, race needs to be a consideration in casting. If Othello is Native American and Desdemona is Cambodian the plot doesn't make sense. But beyond that... at this point it's super common to set even the history plays, and the tragedies with historical roots, in times and places other than the original...like, if you're doing Macbeth set in a 1980s corporation, at that point does the historical ethnicity of any of the characters matter?
I once watched an ancient Hindu epic, the Mahabharata, enacted by diverse actors from around the world. That didn’t work out well either.
Authenticity matters, whether people like it or not. But of course, people have the choice to watch this inferior stuff if that is what they prefer. 90% of entertainment has always been BS anyway.
Nobel idea but I think the audiences may be lacking. When Broadway was open a sizeable minority of the shows were revivals. Also, true classics such as Shakespeare run highly white. You can tinker with some shows, such as putting on a Hispanic production of West Side Story or maybe using some East Asians or Pacific Islanders in South Pacific, but I think any doubts should be resolved in favor of integration and color-blindness. That is the society I want.
Les Mis is Victor Hugo. The characters aren't defined by being white, they're defined by being French.
I mean, the Asian kid can't have been the only non-French actor in the play, right? Is it really much odder or more ahistorical to have an Asian person playing Jean Valjean or Javert than to have, say, a Slav or a Scandinavian?
As you can see, I'm not all that well-versed with the great classics of literature.
When Les Miz (and A Tale of Two Cities) was written, being French was essentially synonymous with being white, in the same way that even today, being Japanese is synonymous with being Asian. I can't tell a Slav or a Scandinavian by looking at them from way up in the cheap seats, but I sure can tell an Asian from a white person.
And I'll reiterate that, in the context of this being a school play, I had no objection to an Asian person playing a role that, historically speaking, was 99.9999999 percent likely to have been written as a white person, just by virtue of where and when the story was set. Yes, it seemed a bit odd to me, but in no way did I object to it.
When Les Miz (and A Tale of Two Cities) was written, being French was essentially synonymous with being white, in the same way that even today, being Japanese is synonymous with being Asian. I can't tell a Slav or a Scandinavian by looking at them from way up in the cheap seats, but I sure can tell an Asian from a white person.
Being Asian didn't stop Lea Salonga from successfully playing Eponine.
Norm Lewis (black) played an outstanding Javert.
I don't think anyone cared about their race while they were belting their faces off.
As you can see, I'm not all that well-versed with the great classics of literature.
When Les Miz (and A Tale of Two Cities) was written, being French was essentially synonymous with being white, in the same way that even today, being Japanese is synonymous with being Asian. I can't tell a Slav or a Scandinavian by looking at them from way up in the cheap seats, but I sure can tell an Asian from a white person.
Victor's Hugo's contemporary, Alexander Dumas, was very French and also visibly mixed race of African descent.
I mean, I'm sure someone can write a dissertation about French identity over time, and the topic of "whiteness" is a huge can of worms in and of itself (it's a relatively new concept and it's a shifting target, and definitely meant something different in the ~1830 than it does now) but Paris in the 19th century was one of the most cosmopolitan cities in the world. Sure, there would have been minimal people of Asian descent or origin in the first half of the 1800s, when Les Mis takes place (France only really got it's Asian colonization on post-Napoleon...after that you would see more people coming from French colonies to attend university or seminary) but France did have lively trade and missionary work happening in SE Asia, so it's not like an Asian in Paris would have been a total oddity. The non-white population that would have been more common in Paris at this time were people of African heritage, particularly French Afro-Caribbean heritage. Paris was a hot destination for black people from the Americas who had the means to get there, because once you were in mainland France, you were safe from being enslaved - slavery and enslaving was wholly illegal. If you had been a slave, you weren't anymore; if your status was ambiguous in some way, it no longer was; and you were no longer at risk of being (legally or illegally) pressed into slavery in some way. France also had laws that theoretically required the government to treat people in a race-blind manner, which...in practice, yeah...but it was more than most other parts of the West could claim. And, of course, Paris also had diaspora from France's "adventuring" in Africa. Now, I'm not saying that African people or mixed-race Afro-European people were a huge percentage of Paris's demographics of the time, but the residents of Paris weren't blanket white by any stretch of the imagination. 19th C Europe was more diverse than people picture, and Paris was one of the more diverse parts of it. And a random Parisian person in ~1830 almost certainly would have had more national fellow-feeling with a person who spoke French and was culturally French but wasn't white, than they would have with a white person from some other part of the world.
It's kind of weird to be able to accept people just randomly bursting into choreographed song and dance - in English! - but having a non-white actor ruin suspension of disbelief, isn't it?
My other problem with diverse casting is that it's not equally done. No one would dare attempt a diverse casting in a movie about an African tribe. No one would dare diverse casting in a movie about the imperial Chinese court. So there's definitely double standards involved.
But what can you say. Woke people rarely care for truth and accuracy.
Here are some actors/roles to ponder (26 are listed, to be exact):
"As if it wasn’t enough that Hollywood lacks serious diversity behind and in front of the camera, the industry also has a nasty (not so) little habit of giving diverse roles to white actors.
That means that while an average of 75.2 percent of speaking roles already go to white actors, according to the 2014 University of Southern California study “Inequality in 700 Popular Films,” some of those parts are actually characters of color.
Over time we have come to expect a tsunami-sized wave of backlash when an actor of color is cast as a fictional character that audiences feel should be white ― see controversies over Michael B. Jordan as the Human Torch or Amandla Stenberg as Rue of “The Hunger Games” ― but the outrage isn’t quite the same when white actors portray characters of color. Even when, often, they are based of off real-life people of color.
Think whitewashing, blackface and yellowface are things of the past? Get ready to cringe. Here are 25 times white actors played people of color and no one really gave an ish."
Please correct me if I am wrong on the historical accuracy but recently i have seen two historical dramas, one based on fact (Mary Queen of Scots) and the other fiction, Bridgerton.
In both there were Black and/or Asian actors cast in roles that surprised me. I am all for equal opportunities workwise for actors but to cast a black actor into a role from 16th century Scotland when surely there were no black people there seems strange to me. It might be a sign of an inherent racist side to my mindset, and I am laying myself wide open with this, to criticism on that subject. I dont see it as wrong only that it is historically incorrect. In the same way as casting a blonde in the role of Elizabeth I would be wrong as she was famous for her red hair. I am reminded of Downton Abbey and the painstaking research done by historians to make that 100% accurate and how impressed I was with that show
I am reminded of great white actors; Olivier perhaps? playing Othello in blackface - the whole question of race in drama is something that I tend to overthink
Of course, both Orson Welles and Laurence Olivier played Othello in blackface in the 1950s and 960s. It is such an incredible role that they badly wanted to do it.
I saw Patrick Stewart play Othello in 1997, but they had to race reverse the entire cast so that the Venetians were all played by black actors and the Moor and Cypriots were all white. My only issue is that in today's world we cast Othello as being fundamentally a play about racism. Racism, as we know it, didn't really exist 400 years ago, and the play is more about jealousy than it is about racism.
In Romeo + Juliet, also 1996 starrin Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes I did not particularly like Harold Perrineau playing Mercutio as gay. I don't have any particular problem with recasting a Shakespearian character as gay, and I would have probably enjoyed Romeo and Julius as it was performed in Liverpool in 2017. But a fundamental aspect of Mercutio is that he is a ladies man, in contrast with Romeo who is terminally in love. I thought that it twists the basic part too much.
I recently saw Romeo and Juliet at the RSC and Romeo was Indian. It was incredibly good.
Old TV shows in the 1970s where white actors play Japanese characters are simply dated. The jokes are racially insulting by today's standards.
But I don't see a real problem with Netflix's Bridgerton casting 1820's Britain as racially diverse, or Netflix's "The Irregulars" casting 1870s Britain as racially diverse. These shows are fantasies and I think only the purely dense people will confuse them with real life.
Sherlock Holmes four novels and 56 short stories are set in the Victorian or Edwardian eras, between about 1880 and 1914.
The author "Holmes is as inhuman as a calculating machine and just about as likely to fall in love". As most modern audiences want some romance in their stories, the minor character of Irene Adler has been expanded in Sherlock Holmes movies and TV shows for decades.
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