In some ways, it might make more sense if I wrote this post about some of my least-read pieces of 2016, because I value almost everything I write equally and never quite know why some get widely read and others just seem to be of only marginal interest to others. I of course prefer to blame social media and its vagaries, but in some cases it might be the photos I chose, the headline I drafted or the relative idiosyncrasy of the subject.

Because this year was the first during which I was writing for not one but two sites – my personal site and ArtsIntegrity.org, there are really two lists here, a top ten for the former and a top five for the latter. While I list each set by date published, rather than “popularity,” I am pleased to say that between the two sites, my total number of views this year was a 50% increase over last year. My concerns over cannibalizing my own readership proved unfounded.

You can access any posts you haven’t read, or wish to re-read, by clicking on the titles below. Thanks to everyone who read, shared, commented, liked or retweeted anything I had to say this year.

HESHERMAN.COM

January 25 Something Unpredictable With “American Idiot” in High School Theatre

This proved to be a two-part story, with a teacher claiming that the school had shut down his attempt to present the Green Day musical, which it had, only to ultimately find that the teacher had never secured the rights or any permission to make changes in the script that he had been trumpeting.

February 6 Is A Play of Plays Making Fair Use of Playwrights Words?

When a small performance in a Seattle bookstore, using only male dialogue from the ten most produced plays in the prior year, began to get cease and desist notices, I pondered the possibility that the collaged new script might fall under the fair use provisions of copyright law.

April 9 88 Years on 88 Keys: Tom Lehrer, The Salinger of the Satirical Song

The popularity of this post surprised me, but it also made me very happy. Apparently there’s so little written about the great Tom Lehrer that even my cursory overview proved to be catnip to his fans, and perhaps reached a few new converts as well.

July 8 Lin-Manuel Miranda: “Life’s A Gift, It’s Not To be Taken for Granted”

There’s no question about the appetite for all things Lin-Manuel and Hamilton, and traffic to this post came so fast that it shut down my site for a day and a half. He’s such a thoughtful guy, and what he had to say is so much more than simply fan service.

August 2 The Frightened Arrogance Behind “It’s Called Acting”

A challenge to those who push back against authenticity in casting when it comes to race and disability.

September 3 Wells Fargo To Arts Kids: Abandon Your Dreams

A foolish ad campaign caused no small amount of consternation in the arts community. But Well Fargo was in fact guilty of even more serious offenses in 2016.

September 8 When Deaf Voices Are Left Out Of “Tribes”

Another piece about authenticity in casting, about an Iowa production of Tribes that made no real effort to seek a deaf performer for the leading role.

October 13 In New Musical About Amputee, Faking Disability

In Canada, runner Terry Fox, a leg amputee, became a national hero before succumbing to cancer. So why on earth did a musical about him essential create a puppet leg, rather than find an actor who is an amputee?

November 9 A Post-Election Plea, To The Theatre and its Artists

When I began my commute the morning after the election, I had no intention to write anything, but over the course of one subway, this piece formed itself in my mind, and I wrote it in about an hour. I look at it now, and I don’t entirely recognize it as mine. It just poured out of me.

December 4 The Incredibly True Origins of Mike Hot-Pence, Times Square Icon

When I happened upon an activist using his looks to raise funds for progressive causes in Times Square, I caught lightning in a bottle, and over the course of the next two weeks, news of Mike Hot-Pence literally traveled around the world. This is the post, and the photo, that started it all.

ARTS INTEGRITY.ORG

March 9 A White Christmas (Eve) is Nothing to Celebrate on “Avenue Q”

The Character of Christmas Eve in the musical Avenue Q is specified as being from Japan. But while companies always manage to find a black actress for the role of Gary Coleman in the show, they seem to have no problem employing yellowface for Christmas Eve. This is but one example.

June 10 In Wake of Profiles Theatre Expose, A Few Points To Know

The Chicago Reader deserves enormous praise for their expose about a culture of harassment at the now defunct Profiles Theatre. Focus on the story was such that even my ancillary post, which primarily served to address the rights to their next planned production, proved of interest, and I kept updating as the situation played out to the end.

June 17 A Canadian High School Tries Too Hard to Get the Rights to “Hamilton”

A Canadian high school shouldn’t didn’t have the rights to give a performance that included six fully staged numbers from Hamilton, let along charge for it. But when they went after major media attention, and got it, their videos got shut down.

July 15 In A Maryland County, Taxing School Theatre In Pay To Play Plan

In Baltimore, a school board imposed a $100 per student fee to participate in school plays, even though the district doesn’t provide funding for the self-sustaining productions. I took an early look at the still evolving situation, and expect to return to it in 2017.

August 15 Quiara Alegría Hudes (and Lin-Manuel Miranda) on Casting “In The Heights”

In Chicago, a controversy over the casting of a non-Latinx actor as Usnavi in In The Heights. This post involves very little writing by me. It records for posterity a statement from bookwriter Quiara Alegría Hudes that was originally shared on Facebook by Victory Gardens Theatre artistic director Chay Yew, and because some questioned Lin-Manuel’s position, I confirmed that he was 100% with Quiara – not that I really had any doubts, but to silence those who did.

BONUS

Although it was published in early December of 2015, my conversation with Lin-Manuel Miranda about race in the casting of both In The Heights and Hamilton continued to be widely read in 2016, so much so that had it been new, it would have ranked in this year’s Top 10 from hesherman.com – just as it was last year. It may well be evergreen, though I hope to revisit the subject with Lin once again, most likely in early 2018, after the London opening of Hamilton.

Photo of Lin-Manuel Miranda © 2016 Howard Sherman

Lin-Manuel Miranda and Quiara Alegría Hudes, authors of “In The Heights” (photo courtesy of New Dramatists)

The casting of the upcoming production of In The Heights at Porchlight Music Theatre in Chicago, in particular a non-Latinx actor in the leading role of Usnavi, has provoked a great deal of comment and controversy. On August 9, Victory Gardens Theatre hosted a public forum, “The Color Game: whitewashing Latinx stories,” which drew a full house and an even larger online audience to explore the issues of race, ethnicity, authenticity and representation provoked by the Porchlight casting and an earlier production of Evita in Chicago; reporting from the Chicago Tribune and Chicago Reader on the forum expanded its reach yet further). The event had been preceded by multiple online essays on the subject, including posts by Trevor Boffone, Tommy Rivera-Vega and Jose T. Nateras, as well as two reports (here and here) from Arts Integrity as the situation unfolded, and a commentary by me, writing in my capacity as interim director of the Alliance for Inclusion in the Arts.

On Sunday evening, August 14, Victory Gardens artistic director Chay Yew shared, via Facebook, a post that was headed, “Just Got this from Lin-Manuel and Quiara.” Readers have noted that it seems to be coming from a single voice, but Hudes’s preface addresses that:

I will be swamped returning from vacation and may not get a statement out, I wanted to forward you my email interview thread with Diep Tran for American Theater at the end of July when this happened. Lin stood behind my comments in this thread then, and I assume that still stands. Here are some of my most relevant comments, cut and pasted for continuity which I am comfortable with them being posted publicly, in the context of “excerpts from her interview with Diep Tran for American Theatre Magazine.”

For those seeking more clarification about Miranda’s position, I was in touch with him with him following the publication of the American Theatre article; he had been on vacation when the controversy over Porchlight’s casting emerged. Responding to an offer to add his own thoughts, he wrote, referencing Hudes’s comments in the the article, “I honestly can’t improve on her words. She speaks for us both.”

Hudes’s full statement to Yew is as follows:

I am not familiar with Porchlight but based on them being Equity, then I can only assume this is a professional theater company. Within the context of professional productions, casting the roles appropriately is of fundamental importance.

The fact is that creating true artistic diversity often takes hard work. Concerted, extra effort. It takes time and money. You cannot just put out a casting call and hope people come and then shrug if they don’t show up. You may need to add extra casting calls (I do this all the time), to go do outreach in communities you haven’t worked with before. You may need to reach out to the Latino theaters and artists and build partnerships to share resources and information. You may need to fly in actors from out of town if you’ve exhausted local avenues, and house them during the run. When faced with these expensive obstacles, an organization’s status quo sometimes wins because it’s cheaper and less trouble. The Latino community has the right to be disappointed and depressed that an opportunity like this was lost. It can be very disheartening, as an artist and as an audience member.

The sad fact is that even in New York, where we Latinos abound, the theater world often reflects a much more closed system. I’m talking onstage and off.

For decades, the vast majority of Latino roles were maids, gang bangers, etc etc. It’s demoralizing, obnoxious, and reductive of an entire people. It’s a lie about who we are, how complicated our dreams and individuality are.

Chicago has a historic Puerto Rican and Latino community. Its history as a hub of Latino migration is beautiful and robust. I’ve had the honor of working in Chicago numerous times and getting to know a deep pool of diverse talent there. Artists like Eddie Torres founded Latino theater companies to create opportunities where there were none. The Goodman houses a Latino theater festival frequently, and they did a beautiful job casting my play The Happiest Song Plays Last. DePaul recently hosted the Latino/a Theater Commons festival. Chicago is poised to be at the forefront of these issues!

I am proud to have written complex roles for actors of many ethnicities: Latino, African-American, White, Asian-American, Arab-American. I have stumbled at times. But I continue to commit to nuance and specificity as the core of the dramatic impulse, and the gateway to the human experience.

I have been in a lot of rooms where people give lip service to being committed to diversity. But that’s different than doing the hard work that it often involves.

I do not hold these views as strongly with educational and non-professional productions. I’m happy for schools and communities who do not have these actors on hand to use In the Heights as an educational experience for participants of all stripes.

I have had the pleasure of working with directors of many backgrounds on my work. Women and men, Latin@, Asian American, African American, bicultural, and white. I have purposely tried to work with the widest range of directors possible, aesthetically and culturally speaking, and this broad group of collaborators has enriched my vision as an artist.

I have chosen directors based on many considerations: aesthetics, artistic mission, their connection with a given script, their history of excellent casting and designer collaborations.

Rather than demand a particular background for a director of my work, I try to encourage Artistic Directors and producers to consider hiring woman directors and culturally diverse directors THROUGHOUT their season–not just for the “Latino” play or “women’s” play. Directors of color should be hired to do EVERYTHING. They should be directing Shakespeare and Moliere and Ibsen and Cruz. Not just Cruz.

This post, in a slightly different form, first appeared on the website of the Arts Integrity Initiative.

The casting of the upcoming production of In The Heights at Porchlight Music Theatre in Chicago, in particular the hiring of a non-Latinx actor for the leading role of Usnavi, has provoked a great deal of comment and controversy in that community and beyond. In response, on August 9, Victory Gardens Theatre hosted a public forum, organized by ALTA, the Association of Latinx Theatre Artists of Chicago, “The Color Game: whitewashing Latinx stories.” It drew a full house and an even larger online audience to explore the issues of race, ethnicity, authenticity and representation, provoked by the Porchlight casting and an earlier production of Evita in Chicago; reports from the Chicago Tribune and Chicago Reader on the forum expanded its reach yet further. The event had been preceded by multiple online essays on the subject, including posts by Trevor Boffone, Tommy Rivera-Vega and Jose T. Nateras, as well as two reports from Arts Integrity (here and here) as the situation unfolded, and a commentary by Arts Integrity director Howard Sherman, writing in his capacity as interim director of the Alliance for Inclusion in the Arts.

On Sunday evening, August 14, Victory Gardens artistic director Chay Yew shared, via Facebook, a post that was headed, “Just got this from Lin-Manuel and Quiara.” Readers have noted that it seems to be coming from a single voice, but Hudes’s preface addresses that:

I will be swamped returning from vacation and may not get a statement out, I wanted to forward you my email interview thread with Diep Tran for American Theater at the end of July when this happened. Lin stood behind my comments in this thread then, and I assume that still stands. Here are some of my most relevant comments, cut and pasted for continuity which I am comfortable with them being posted publicly, in the context of “excerpts from her interview with Diep Tran for American Theatre Magazine.”

For those seeking to clarify Miranda’s position, Arts Integrity was in touch with him following the publication of the American Theatre article; he had been on vacation when the controversy over Porchlight’s casting emerged. Responding to an offer to add his own thoughts, Miranda wrote, referencing Hudes’s comments in the the article, “I honestly can’t improve on her words. She speaks for us both.” Additionally, Yew reports that he had received an e-mail from Miranda backing the statement.

Hudes’s full statement, the excerpts from her American Theatre interview, as she provided it to Yew, is as follows:

I am not familiar with Porchlight but based on them being Equity, then I can only assume this is a professional theater company. Within the context of professional productions, casting the roles appropriately is of fundamental importance.

The fact is that creating true artistic diversity often takes hard work. Concerted, extra effort. It takes time and money. You cannot just put out a casting call and hope people come and then shrug if they don’t show up. You may need to add extra casting calls (I do this all the time), to go do outreach in communities you haven’t worked with before. You may need to reach out to the Latino theaters and artists and build partnerships to share resources and information. You may need to fly in actors from out of town if you’ve exhausted local avenues, and house them during the run. When faced with these expensive obstacles, an organization’s status quo sometimes wins because it’s cheaper and less trouble. The Latino community has the right to be disappointed and depressed that an opportunity like this was lost. It can be very disheartening, as an artist and as an audience member.

The sad fact is that even in New York, where we Latinos abound, the theater world often reflects a much more closed system. I’m talking onstage and off.

For decades, the vast majority of Latino roles were maids, gang bangers, etc etc. It’s demoralizing, obnoxious, and reductive of an entire people. It’s a lie about who we are, how complicated our dreams and individuality are.

Chicago has a historic Puerto Rican and Latino community. Its history as a hub of Latino migration is beautiful and robust. I’ve had the honor of working in Chicago numerous times and getting to know a deep pool of diverse talent there. Artists like Eddie Torres founded Latino theater companies to create opportunities where there were none. The Goodman houses a Latino theater festival frequently, and they did a beautiful job casting my play The Happiest Song Plays Last. DePaul recently hosted the Latino/a Theater Commons festival. Chicago is poised to be at the forefront of these issues!

I am proud to have written complex roles for actors of many ethnicities: Latino, African-American, White, Asian-American, Arab-American. I have stumbled at times. But I continue to commit to nuance and specificity as the core of the dramatic impulse, and the gateway to the human experience.

I have been in a lot of rooms where people give lip service to being committed to diversity. But that’s different than doing the hard work that it often involves.

I do not hold these views as strongly with educational and non-professional productions. I’m happy for schools and communities who do not have these actors on hand to use In the Heights as an educational experience for participants of all stripes.

I have had the pleasure of working with directors of many backgrounds on my work. Women and men, Latin@, Asian American, African American, bicultural, and white. I have purposely tried to work with the widest range of directors possible, aesthetically and culturally speaking, and this broad group of collaborators has enriched my vision as an artist.

I have chosen directors based on many considerations: aesthetics, artistic mission, their connection with a given script, their history of excellent casting and designer collaborations.

Rather than demand a particular background for a director of my work, I try to encourage Artistic Directors and producers to consider hiring woman directors and culturally diverse directors THROUGHOUT their season–not just for the “Latino” play or “women’s” play. Directors of color should be hired to do EVERYTHING. They should be directing Shakespeare and Moliere and Ibsen and Cruz. Not just Cruz.

Margaret Hughes

It is quite possible that, when the English stage was officially opened up to allow women to perform alongside men, most likely in 1660 when Margaret Hughes played Desdemona, some argued against it, on the grounds that young boys had been successfully been playing women for years, and if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. After all, only 30 years earlier, a French touring troupe met with disdain for daring to employ women, and even once English women were permitted to act, men did not immediately cease playing women’s roles.

Ira Aldridge

When Ira Aldridge became the first black actor to find fame on the stages of Europe, having left America, which offered him no opportunity, there were at first people who took exception to the breaking of the color line, feeling that blackface had been more than sufficient for the portrayal of non-white characters and that a black man speaking the words of Shakespeare was “blasphemous.” One critic wrote that “with lips so shaped that it is utterly impossible for him to pronounce English,” while another objected to his leading lady being “pawed about on the stage by a black man.”

Phyllis Frelich

After Phyllis Frelich won a Tony Award in 1979 for Children of a Lesser God, might some have dismissed her honor as resulting from a sympathy vote because she was a deaf woman playing a deaf woman, or that her achievement was somehow less simply because she used sign language, which was how she communicated every day? After all, one critic, praising Frelich, took note of her “affiliction.”

Invented scenarios? Only in part. And certainly none are implausible, at distances of hundreds of years or just a few decades. They are, after all, representations of the breaking of a status quo, the altering of a dominant narrative, and the much too easy ways of diminishing significant achievements at the time that they happened.

The stage remains a place where certain practices, steeped in tradition, persist. Despite being seen by many as a bastion of liberals and progressives, the arts are dominated by white Eurocentric men, whether it comes to the stories being told or the people placed in the positions of authority who are charged with making work happen. While the not-for-profit arts community has begun in recent years to explore equity, diversity and inclusion initiatives designed to give voice to a broader range of gender, race, ethnicity and disability, the field is still dominated by white structures and white professionals “opening doors” to other stories.

That’s not to be dismissive of those efforts, but only a means of contextualizing them and reflecting how nascent they still are in so many places. Let’s not forget, it was only in 2015 that the Metropolitan Opera dropped using blackface on the actor playing the title role in Otello, an original Broadway musical featured an all-Asian cast, an actor with a mobility disability in life originated a role in a Broadway production using a wheelchair. How was it possible that this hadn’t happened sooner?

The changes on our stages, the efforts to assert of a broad range of identity where it was previously denied, is reflective of society as a whole. While it has been 51 years since the passage of the Civil Rights Act and 26 years since the passage of the Americans With Disabilities Act, there are still legal battles being fought to insure and protect their full and proper implementation. However, in the past decade, with the rise of social media, advocates for change have had the opportunity to make their cases ever more swiftly and directly, without adjudication by the media as to what concerns will be permitted to reach a critical mass of awareness, with people driving the story, not the story driving the people.

As efforts towards fairer and truer representations of racial and ethnic identity in theatre have resulted in particular shows becoming flashpoints – with The Mikado in Seattle and New York, with The Mountaintop at Kent State, with Evita and In The Heights in Chicago, The Prince of Egypt in the Hamptons and so many more – one of the more frequent and derisive responses has been, “It’s called acting.” That is to say, ‘Oh, it’s all make believe,’ all little more than ‘let’s pretend,’ and as such shouldn’t be held to the same scrutiny or standard as say, the make-up of juries or the population of schools. It says that since the discipline is about taking on a persona, the reality of the person doing so shouldn’t be considered, shouldn’t matter. The phrase condescends to anyone who dares think otherwise.

Those who would reduce efforts toward equity in the arts might wish to isolate them as being the result of identity politics or political correctness. The “it’s called acting” claim is, make no mistake about it, an argument for the status quo, for tradition, for the denial of opportunity, for erasing race. It expresses the thinking that gives awards to people who pretend to be disabled on stage and screen, while making it difficult for people with disabilities to attend cultural events, let alone be a participant in creating them. It is the mentality that loves West Side Story, but cries foul when songs sung by characters who speak Spanish are translated into and performed in Spanish.

“It’s called acting” is the response of those who perceive their long-held dominance, their tradition, as threatened, their own position as being at risk. “It’s called acting” sustains systemic exclusion. After all, as the saying goes, “When you’re accustomed to privilege, equality looks like oppression.” Privilege abounds in the arts, on stage, backstage and in the seats.

If we lived in a society, a country, where everyone was indeed equal in opportunity, then the arguments for paying heed to the realities of race, ethnicity, gender and disability might be concerns that could be set aside. But that’s far from the case, and if the arts are to be anything more than a palliative, they must think not just of artifice, but also about the authenticity and context of what they offer to audiences.

For the arts to survive, they must move forward, lest they become antiquated. In a society where the balance of ethnicity and race is shifting, it is incumbent upon the arts to at last fully welcome and support all voices and allow them to portray and tell their stories as well as the stories of others, instead of being forced to assimilate into some arbitrarily evolved template. There should to be an acknowledgment of how the lived experience can contribute to the arts, rather than denying its presence or validity, along the lines of the canard, “I don’t see color.”

There is no absolute in the arts, no definitive good or bad, right or wrong. The act of creation and the response to that act exist simultaneously in the eye of the creator and beholder (the audience). Consequently, the arts give rise to phalanxes of arbiters at almost every level – teachers, directors and artistic directors, and critics – who seek to guide and even control training, practice and opinion, each in their own way. When those arbiters have disproportionate influence, or in fact become gatekeepers, they assume a greater responsibility, one that goes beyond themselves into the field as a whole. How they are empowered, what they believe, becomes essential to sustaining – or diminishing – the arts.

When it comes to respect and recognition, diversity and inclusion, there is a new arts narrative being written right now. Within that process there are progressives making change, late adopters who are coming to understand, and reactionaries who want to hold on to the past. If we believe that art has value, so do the ethics and process of making it. Being unaware, or worse still, dismissive of how the arts are changing and how the arts reflect society, would keep the field trapped at a moment in time, one already mired in the past, as the world advances. That’s the road to irrelevance, which the arts cannot afford.

Howard Sherman is interim director of the Alliance for Inclusion in the Arts.

Subsequent to Arts Integrity exploring the Porchlight Music Theatre’s casting of their forthcoming production of In The Heights, as well as Hedy Weiss’s article for the Chicago Sun-Times (detailed in Race, Spoken and Unspoken, in Chicago Cast Announcement), other voices weighed in on the issue of authenticity in casting. They added details that weren’t all apparent to someone outside the Chicago theatre community, as well as commentary on the situation.

Trevor Boffone, a professor at the University of Houston and Ph.D. in Hispanic studies, wrote about the situation on his website, asserting that the cast features “a white actor playing Miranda’s theatrical doppelganger Usnavi, the musical’s main character,” going on to write:

This casting decision gentrifies a show that is about a community fighting against gentrification. Evidently, Porchlight fails to comprehend the lived realities of Latin@s all across the nation who face many of the issues seen in Miranda and Hudes’ musical. This especially rings true when a white man is cast as Usnavi. These roles were written by Latin@s for Latin@ actors. The Latin@ community wants their stories told, but in an ethical way that speaks with the community in question. To gentrify In the Heights is to completely miss the point of the musical.

Tommy Rivera-Vega, a Chicago area actor who had auditioned for the Porchlight production, wrote in a public Facebook post:

I understand that you cast some Latinxs in the show (people that I have worked with before, respect their work, and love.) But when the person actually narrating the story is not Latinx, you are creating an atmosphere, an ecosystem, a perfectly created barrio around him, where the white folks behind it can now feel safe telling our story. You are essentially “building a wall.” Not giving us a chance….

By casting a non-Latinx Usnavi, and not even having an overwhelming Latinx support in the Production team, the backbone of the show suffers, because it was never lived. Being a Latinx will turn into devising what being Latinx is, instead of just being it. You have essentially gentrified Lin-Manuel Miranda’s gentrification masterpiece.

*   *   *

Asked about the ethnicity of the actors cast in many of the show’s leading roles, Porchlight provided a statement through their press representative, which reads:

While Porchlight specifically encouraged artists who self-identified as Latinx to audition for In the Heights both in our AEA and non union audition announcements; we did not invite nor require potential employees to state their racial self-identification as part of our hiring practices. Even if we knew for certain an artists’ self-identification (of any qualification) we do not feel it is appropriate to violate the confidentiality of their privacy.

When it comes to the subject of inquiring about ethnicity in any casting process, Porchlight makes an important point, which can be stated even more emphatically: while the company neither invited or required actors to state their ethnicity, they legally can’t. To do so would violate antidiscrimination laws in regards to hiring, where subjects such as race and ethnicity, as well as age, sexual orientation, and medical status, are off-limits. However, that doesn’t prevent a producer, theatre company, director or casting director from proactively seeking actors of a specific ethnicity (or gender, or disability) and inviting them to audition.

Writing at fnewsmagazine, “a journal of arts, culture, and politics edited and designed by students at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago,” Jose T. Nateras explains:

The truth of the matter is, often, actors of color aren’t able to get an audition in the first place. For instance, Porchlight makes audition appointments available through a website that has only so many audition slots open for signing up on a first-come-first serve basis. It is well known that these slots fill up fast and whether or not the roles looking to be filled are for actors of color, a large portion go to white actors.

Granted, these are actors who, very understandably, want a chance to audition for one of the more respected musical theater companies in Chicago. An actor’s agent can submit them for auditions, or they can self-submit, but it is ultimately up to the casting department of a theater to call actors in from the many submissions they receive. So, yes, casting does come from the pool of actors who audition, but when you’re in control of who is in that pool, that’s not an excuse.

*   *   *

“…I immigrated from the single

Greatest little place in the Caribbean,

Dominican Republic.

I love it.”

– from In The Heights

The casting notice provided by Porchlight to the Casting Call portion of the Actors Equity website (the company hires both Equity and non-Equity performers) did state, “Especially seeking actors/actresses who identify as Latino.” However, the same posting, as is standard for Equity listings, also carried non-discrimination boilerplate, “Performers of all ethnic and racial backgrounds are encouraged to apply.”

Even Hamilton, praised for its diverse cast, got into trouble when it sought “non-white” actors, because such a notice violated non-discrimination hiring laws. But one way of addressing intentionality in ethnic casting, in being “color-conscious,” is to specify the race or ethnicity of the characters, not the actors.

It’s worth noting that when the AEA posting was used by Backstage as the basis for their own notice of the casting of Heights at Porchlight, the specific character breakdown repeatedly noted, under ethnicity, “all ethnicities,” which translates the non-discrimination language on the AEA website into the misleading suggestion that, unless otherwise noted, the characters themselves can be of any ethnicity. In an e-mail to Arts Integrity, Luke Crowe, casting vice-president at Backstage, explained, “With Equity listings, we also default to the inclusive ranges (all ethnicities, all ages 18+, etc.) unless the Equity listing specifically defines narrower criteria.”

While three of the more detailed character descriptions as provided to Equity by Porchlight mention ethnicity – Usnavi “dreams of returning to the Dominican Republic,” Abuela Claudia “moved from Cuba to New York,” Carla is “of Chilean, Cuban, Dominican and Puerto Rican descent – the others don’t address it, save for Benny, who is “not Hispanic.” This contrasts with the current casting notice for an upcoming production at Theatre Under the Stars in Houston, which at the start of the descriptions of the major characters in their breakdown, notes them as, “Usnavi, male, 20s, Dominican,” “Nina, female, 19, first generation Puerto Rican,” “Kevin, male, 40s, Puerto Rican,” and so on. While the published edition of the Heights script does not list ethnicity on its cast of characters page, the specific ethnicities are evident within the script itself, and even the back cover describes the setting as “a tight-knit Latin American community.” The clearer the breakdown, the stronger the call for the specific actors being sought.

*   *   *

Last fall saw questions raised and indeed controversy in connection with issues of authenticity in casting of Katori Hall’s The Mountaintop in a community theatre production at Kent State University and a theatre department production of Lloyd Suh’s Jesus in India, which was ultimately canceled, at Clarion University. In the wake of those incidents, In The Heights composer-lyricist Lin-Manuel Miranda went on record about his position over what should guide producers and directors in casting roles that call for specific races and ethnicities.

“My answer is: authorial intent wins. Period,” Miranda said, going on to emphasize that, “In every case, the intent of the author always wins. If the author has specified the ethnicity of the part, that wins.”

As part of the same interview, although previously unpublished, Miranda spoke of his intent in writing In The Heights. Having previously noted that West Side Story is populated by Latino gang members, he said:

“One of the impulses that went into the writing of Heights was, like, I don’t see a world in which I can play a part in musical theatre. There’s nothing existing. In the Heights was my way of writing something that had lots of roles for Latinos.”

*   *   *

In the struggle for equity in arts, across gender, racial, ethnic, disability and other communities which have seen choices default too often to white, Eurocentric males, there are many traditions, habits, practices and in some cases outright discrimination to be addressed. Exploring a single situation at a small theatre in Chicago is not meant to vilify that company, but only to highlight how challenging it seems to be for so many to move to a place of true diversity and equity, where stories that involve race and ethnicity are told with those elements intact, in addition to welcoming diverse artists into the telling of stories that were originally created by and for white artists. Only by looking at what has happened in the past and what is taking place today can we find our way to a fairer future – and a future where the voices of those creating work for today and many tomorrows can be heard and respected, even when they’re not in the room or even on the phone, checking to see that their intent has been understood and properly represented.

*   *   *

Addendum, July 27, 4:00 pm: Arts Integrity received the following statement from Porchlight Music Theatre, approximately five hours after this piece first went online. It reads, in its entirety:

To our colleagues in the Chicago Theatre community, please know that we at Porchlight Music Theatre have been intently listening to and have clearly received the messages of concern regarding our upcoming production of In the Heights. 

The thoughts that have been expressed are accepted with the utmost seriousness and consideration, and we humbly wish to contribute to this needed conversation.

In the casting of In The Heights, as with all productions at Porchlight, we did not invite nor require potential employees to state their racial self-identification as part of our casting and hiring process. All actors who attended were considered based solely on the content of their audition.

Our continual objective is to create and encourage an environment of inclusion in all our work here at Porchlight Music Theatre.

Moving forward, we are committed to expand our efforts in regard to inclusion and representation as well as furthering our relationships with the diverse talent and institutions that make up the Chicago Theatre community.

Addendum, July 29, 2:00 pm: In the wake of the casting conversations about the production, Michael Weber, artistic director of Porchlight, provided the following expanded statement to the website PerformInk, elaborating on their prior comments. Jason Epperson, publisher of PerformInk, told Arts Integrity that the site already had a four-part series on In The Heights in the works, with the first part always planned to focus on casting, when the controversy developed. This statement is reproduced with PerformInk’s permission.

We at Porchlight Music Theatre, as a company and as individuals, are deeply committed to being inclusive in all aspects of the organization. We acknowledge and apologize to the Chicago theatre community and the Latinx community as a whole for disappointment in the hiring of our IN THE HEIGHTS cast and production team, and for frustration that has been caused by the slowness of our fuller public response. We agree that we could have done a better job in making a public statement more quickly. We have been carefully paying attention to the conversations and assimilating them with the utmost consideration. During this time we have also been actively implementing many of the constructive ideas and suggestions that have been offered to us through social media and by email.

From the beginning, our casting approach was to hire an acting company that genuinely represented the community of characters as described in the play. We advertised in a transparent way with the intention of especially inviting actors who identify as Latinx to audition. There was an extremely large turnout, including many actors who had never auditioned at Porchlight before.

As is common knowledge, in the casting process we found ourselves at the heart of the challenge of how to hire a potential employee without crossing legal or privacy boundaries that would result in someone being denied employment based solely on their race. We found ourselves at the epicenter of the debate, “how can you know for sure when you cannot ask?”

There has been much conversation around the suggestion to do research and “ask around.” Prior to auditions, we did reach out to several noted Latinx artistic leaders in the community for guidance. All suggestions on avenues to post our casting notices were implemented. All suggested actors were invited to attend auditions. And during the audition process, we did ask around regarding actors we were interested in casting, but whose ethnicity we were unsure of, in order to gain as much insight as we could. However, that information often proved inconsistent and thus unreliable, with the only definitive means being to ask the actor directly as a condition of employment.

So, at the moment of decision, when an actor is in front of you, giving an excellent audition, and of whose ethnicity you are just not precisely sure, what do you do? From the information we were able to gather we moved forward with the actors who gave the best auditions, believing we couldn’t absolutely know their definite ethnic heritage without violating a boundary. We know now we could have done better.

Only post hiring did we learn conclusively that not all cast members self-identify as Latinx and that the fine actor playing “Usnavi,” Jack DeCesare, is actually of Italian descent. We want to be very clear that the responsibility for hiring Jack is wholly ours, not his. This excellent young actor merely showed up for an audition. And he did his job well. Our job was to assemble a company for a work that has unique casting responsibilities. We fell short.

We absolutely stand by the cast and creative team that has been hired for this production, but we recognize that more must be done to assure a truthful dramatic representation of this work, as well as how we at Porchlight approach diverse and representative casting in the future.

To this end we have reached out again to diversity and cultural leaders, including The Chicago Inclusion Project, The Latina and Latino Studies department of Northwestern University, The Latin American and Latino Studies Department at DePaul University, Latinx theatre professionals in our community, and others to obtain suggestions of cultural consultants that we can add to the creative team to assure the best representation of the nuances of the work and the community being represented in it.

Further, we plan to expand our already planned post-performance discussion series by inviting many of the voices who have expressed themselves on social media or to us directly to join in a prominent way in this needed and continuing national conversation. And we welcome this production being a point of example and learning for not only Porchlight but for other arts organizations who, like us, may face the same challenges. We look forward to creating forums where we can move forward, and closer, together.

IN THE HEIGHTS is not only a play about community and gentrification, it is a catalyst for conversation about the way things are and ways they can be better. This production has become a source of valid controversy and conversation in our community and an important source of increased understanding and growth for Porchlight Music Theatre. We acknowledge and accept the response our decisions have caused. We deeply regret that our actions have caused offense to our friends and colleagues in the Chicago theatre community, and beyond. We truly are embracing this as an opportunity to improve our artistic processes and we sincerely hope that we can once again earn your trust and respect as the inclusive organization that we have always striven to be.

We welcome further conversation both in public forums and directly via email.

Porchlight Music Theatre
Michael Weber, Artistic Director

Howard Sherman is director of the Arts Integrity Initiative at The New School College of Performing Arts and interim director of the Alliance for Inclusion in the Arts.

Late last month, a headline writer for McClatchy DC was not alone in getting caught in a linguistic, oxymoronic knot when they announced, “Minority babies outnumber whites among US infants.” While the word minority has been a catchall to describe people of any race or ethnicity other than white, it also means, per Dictionary.com, “1. the smaller part or number; a number, part, or amount forming less than half of the whole, 2.a smaller party or group opposed to a majority, as in voting or other action, 3. a group in society distinguished from, and less dominant than, the more numerous majority.”

What the McClatchy headline, and others like it, seemed unable to address was that, despite the very facts they were reporting upon, the so-called minority is rapidly becoming the majority overall; babies are just the bellwether. Using minority to denote people of color is rapidly becoming, and in many cases already is, both incorrect and passé. Bloomberg News had similar trouble in their headline on the same subject – “The Majority of American Babies Are Now Minorities” – but they salvaged the situation, to a degree, with a graphic headed “Minorities No More.” Other outlets managed just fine, ranging from Pew Research, which actually addressed the inversion of terminology in their headline, to NPR.

Does minority remain the prevailing term for people of color inadvertently, or is it deployed to sustain a narrative in which people of color are not only numerically but conceptually less than white society? One can only hope that editing stylebooks are grappling with this very issue, and will come out on the side of retiring the reductive use of minority as a synonym for any and all people whose race or ethnicity is not Eurocentric white.

Perhaps if stylebooks were all more advanced on language surrounding race and ethnicity, the Chicago Sun-Times wouldn’t have run a headline this week that read, “Porchlight’s ‘In the Heights’ names its authentic cast.” Those who see anything beyond the title of the show, the theatre and the word cast, might wonder about the presence of the word authentic. Aren’t all casts authentic, in that the actors are who they say they are and will be playing the roles they’re announced to play?

The source of this construction can be found in the body of what should be a straightforward casting announcement (as it was in the Chicago Tribune), where Sun-Times writer Hedy Weiss writes, “Porchlight Music Theatre will open its production of that first Miranda hit with an unusually ‘authentic’ cast.” This begs the question: what’s with the quotes around authentic? What’s so unusual?

Weiss doesn’t explain, and the rest of the piece goes on to quote the artistic director of Porchlight and to list the cast. Presumably, Weiss is using the word authentic to address the fact that the cast is, based solely on their names, largely Latinx. Of course, that is entirely appropriate, considering that the characters in Heights are almost entirely Latinx. But by utilizing authentic (a word which does not appear in Porchlight’s release) set off in quotes and by citing the casting as unusual, Weiss seems to imply that this is an exception to some norm and questions the very term and concept of authentic when it comes to casting.

This subtle undermining of what has rapidly become the prevailing, but by no means universal, casting practice in the U.S. reveals at best a disagreement with the practice. That no editor questioned it, that an editor compounded it in the headline, effectively making it the central theme of the brief, predominantly cut and paste, story, suggests the retrograde idea that through casting, race can still be acceptably erased on stage, even when it is absolutely essential to the story being told.

While Weiss introduced both authentic and the possibly sarcastic equivalent of air quotes around it, Porchlight’s press release unfortunately led her in that direction. A statement from Porchlight’s artistic director Michael Weber mentions “an exhaustive audition process seeing hundreds of the Chicago-area’s diverse established and new music theatre talent, and even reaching out to our city’s vast hip-hop dance community,” “[making] every effort to present a company that reflects the true spirit of this story of community,” and “all but one of our actors is making their Porchlight Mainstage debut.”

Without ever using the word Latino (let alone Latino/a, Latinao or Latinx), this statement comes off as Weber patting his own theatre on the back for working so very hard to meet the basic requirements of the musical he chose. That’s the implicit message that Weiss intuited and made somewhat more explicit, if still enigmatic to those unaware of the concept of authenticity in casting.

No doubt Weber’s statement was designed to ward off any possibility of the kind of criticism leveled at the casting of Evita at the Marriott Theatre in Chicago earlier this year. Actor Bear Bellinger was the first to call out the casting of that production, and the resulting press attention made very clear that when it came to authenticity in casting when it comes to racial representation (a term that needs no quotes surrounding it), Chicago needed to step up its practices. But now that color conscious casting has become the predominant practice nationally, there’s no need to point it out or expect kudos for employing it (inadvertently, Weber has demonstrated how little his company knew of Latinx talent in the city). The subject of race in casting should only be news when it is being ignored or exclusionary.

Lin-Manuel Miranda and Quiara Alegría Hudes (Photo: New Dramatists)

On a corollary note regarding gender, Porchlight’s release is a bit too caught up in Hamilton fever, as it came with a large photo of Lin-Manuel Miranda, Heights’s composer and lyricist. To be sure, Heights was Miranda’s baby from its earliest days at Wesleyan University, but that doesn’t excuse the fact that in addition to the photo, Miranda’s name appears in the headline, is mentioned in Weber’s statement and he gets a bio alongside the production’s director, while bookwriter Quiara Alegría Hudes’s sole mention amounts to “book by.” Miranda is rightly acclaimed and surely Porchlight is attempting to link itself to the impending Chicago run of Hamilton. That doesn’t excuse virtually ignoring Hudes, who – like Miranda – has received the Pulitzer Prize; in fact, she beat him to it by four years. Also, Porchlight’s In The Heights is not the “Latest Creation by Multi Award-Winning Director/Choreographer Brenda Didier.” Heights was created by Miranda and Hudes, two acclaimed Latinx artists.

Whether it’s the dissemination of messaging by theatres or reports on that messaging by the arts press, there’s an essential need for everyone to step up their game. While theatres are being encouraged, and in some cases required, to participate in equity, diversity and inclusion training that may help to smooth this transition, it’s not immediately apparent whether the same effort to raise awareness is taking place in newsrooms, especially among veteran writers whose concept of language around race may have been formed in an earlier era. But both the act of making art and the act of writing about it share the common goal of communication, and at a time when the conversation around race in this country is both heightened and often divisive, certainly the arts are one place where care and consideration can prevail.

Update, July 20, 2:45 pm: Additional information that reflects upon the topics in this post is currently being gathered, and further updates will include that material as it is confirmed. However, it has been noted by several readers on social media that while Porchlight may have done an extensive casting search for diverse talent in the cast, the primary creatives on the production are all apparently non-Latinx artists, which certainly bears on the discussion of authenticity in one of the few popular musicals that centers on the Latinx community.

Update, July 27, 11:30 am: an update to this post has been posted separately, as “Intricacies and Intent Surrounding Race and Ethnicity in Casting.”

Howard Sherman is director of the Arts Integrity Initiative at The New School College of Performing Arts and interim director of the Alliance for Inclusion in the Arts.

“I knew y’all would come. It’s the rest of the world I couldn’t have anticipated.”

Lin-Manuel Miranda (all photos by Howard Sherman)

That was what Lin-Manuel Miranda admitted about his extraordinary recent success with the musical Hamilton to some 200 high school drama teachers in a session on July 7, just two days before he was to leave the cast of the show. He was speaking at the Broadway Teachers Workshop, an annual summer program for theatre teachers from around the country, in a wide-ranging discussion that took him from elementary school to the present day. While questions came to Miranda at first from the moderator Patrick Vassel, the associate director of Hamilton, the session was predominantly Miranda responding to questions directly from the teachers.

For the benefit of all of the teachers (and students) who weren’t there, here are some highlights from Miranda’s remarks, slightly condensed and edited for clarity. Among the material not included here are any topics covered in my prior interviews with Miranda, both for Dramatics magazine and this website.

On being a teacher post-college

When I was about to graduate Wesleyan in 2002, I called Dr. Herbert [Miranda’s high school mentor] and said, “I have a BA in theatre arts, can I come substitute teach at Hunter for a living?” He said, “I’ll do you one better we actually have a part time English position.” So I taught seventh grade English my first year out of school.

There’s nothing better than the people who taught you becoming your friends suddenly being on the other side of that divide So that was enormous fun. And I loved it, I loved my students. I had two seventh grade English classes and I still follow them and they’re still in touch.

They offered me a full-time position at the end of the year and I could kind of see the Mr. Holland’s Opus life ahead of me and I said, ‘I’ll kick myself forever if I don’t even try to work on this musical I’d already been working on called In The Heights.’ I’d already met Tommy [Kail, Hamilton’s director], we were workshopping In The Heights in the basement of the Drama Book Shop while I was teaching. I basically quit teaching part time to be a professional sub, which is much more precarious because you don’t know if you’ll make rent month to month. But it’s much less draining, so your time is free to write.

Lin-Manuel Miranda

So I really was a professional sub until In The Heights opened on Broadway. Elementary school Spanish, physics, science – in the physics classes I’d be like “who wants a song”? I didn’t know what I was talking about. But it was enormously life-changing and it’s in the DNA of everything I do now.

A huge impulse from Hamilton is that impulse to teach. Because what you learn when you’re a teacher, in a lot of ways it’s different from being a performer. You go into being a performer because you get that itch that only applause can scratch. What you realize when you’re teaching is tactually the best moments when you’re a teacher is when you’re laying back and the kids are making the connections for themselves and all you do is keep the ball in the air. You watch them make the connections with each other and my best teachers always did that. You’ll know when those neurons are firing and things are happening and you just get to watch it. They’ve got the information and they’re making the connections, they are debating.

So that was enormously useful as well, because I think the best actors know how to listen. They don’t just scratch that itch that applause provides, they listen to their fellow castmates and they hold them up. They realize they’re twice as strong when they are in an ensemble than when they’re center stage and in the spotlight. Those are the lessons I’ve learned from being a teacher and a performer and they’ve been essential, really essential.

On his earliest musicals and the influence of mixtapes

I wrote four musicals in college. Only one of them was In The Heights. I wrote another one called On Borrowed Time, which was my senior thesis, which if I have my way you’ll never hear. I wrote a jukebox musical called Basket Case; I wrote the book and it was all 90s songs. It was about a school shooting and it started with “Jeremy” by Pearl Jam and it ended with the shooting to “Black Hole Sun” by Soundgarden. In it was “Barbie Girl” and Destiny’s Child.

It actually came as a result of listening to mixtapes of music I liked in the car. They were starting to form the spine of a story in my head which is sort of how I write scores. I’m really grateful that I was a teenager in a time when to impress a girl you made her 90 minutes of cassette music and that’s an art form unto itself, is it not? Draw the cover art, you have a rise and a fall, you can put in skits. It’s not like a CD, they have to listen to it in the order in which you have arranged it. That is a musical score. It’s usually the musical score of, ‘Why don’t you like me?’

But it’s also a way of making friends, a way of showing of your tastes, or a way of getting a friend into music that they don’t really know about, My knack for eclecticism in music is born of the mixtape era.

On student audiences at Hamilton

Lin-Manuel Miranda at the Broadway Teachers Workshop

To an insane degree, the best shows are the student shows, because they’re prepped. They know what they’re coming to see. You don’t realize how much life has beaten you up until you see a bunch of kids see a show. The things they react to wouldn’t occur to you to react to.

There’s a moment where an American spy passes another spy a letter and a redcoat comes and just twists her neck and pulls her away. It’s not on the album, it’s a physical moment, it’s just before “Right Hand Man.” Adults watch and they go, ‘oh, this is a transition, it’s a stage transition, this is information we needed to know.’ When kids see that moment they go “OH!” Honest. Life hasn’t beat them up yet, they can actually be surprised and afraid and annoyed. It’s such live ammo to have an audience of students but it’s so much more rewarding because they’re there for all of it.

They’re there for Anthony being gorgeous because he’s gorgeous, so when he says “Let’s strip down to our socks it’s like, “Aaah!” – ten kids just started puberty. Twenty girls just started puberty and ten guys just figured something out. ‘Oh. Oh this. I know this about myself now.’ The inverse is true for Jasmine. Jasmine did one of our video Ham4Hams and the overwhelming comment was from teenage girls saying, “I’m so gay, I’m SO GAY.” That’s because they’re in love with her.

All this is to say the student matinees are just thrilling because the reaction is completely unguarded. When our characters pass away there are honest to god hitching sobs. We get that from adult audiences too, but its harder to get to you. It comes unbidden from these kids.

The enthusiasm during the rap battles, holy crap! Rap battles are the lingua franca of these kids. I mean there’s YouTube channels devoted to rap battles, Wilmer Valderrama telling “Your mama” jokes on MTV, so to see the founders snapping on each other, it’s revelatory to them and they’re getting the food of what they’re fighting about almost in spite of themselves. We really tried, we’re threading the needle of, “This is what the debt plan is really about.” This is what they’re for and this is what they’re against – and also ‘I’m going to put my foot up your butt.’ Oh! It is that thing of being able to fly in both directions, therefore all of it, if one thing doesn’t get them, something else will.

If we start from the point that these founders are human and what we’re trying to uncover is as much humanity [as we can] in two hours and forty-five minutes, what does that mean about the rest of your history textbook? It’s the beginning of a discussion and that’s very exciting. It’s not ‘we spoon feed you a musical and you love history.’ This musical unlocks that history is written by the victors and so what does that mean for history, what does that mean in your mind.

On failing and learning from failure

Lin-Manuel Miranda

There is so much liability for a teacher. There is so much you’re not willing to go out on a limb on, because you don’t know what’s going to come back to you. I felt very lucky that I found teachers that were willing to show up and be present so we could have a student run musical. That’s huge.

I learned how to corral a group of kids when you couldn’t hire them or fire them. If someone missed rehearsal, what could I say? “You’d better come back or…you just really need to come back!” You learned how to get everyone involved in something and do it for the sake of it, as opposed to for a grade or for cool points. It’s about making a great thing and learning to inspire your peers. I think probably half the things I did were probably artistic failures, but they were met with support and I think that’s the sort of important thing.

That’s how we figure out who we are and what we like and what we respond to. One of the great lessons I took away from film and theatre is to watch everything critically. If you’re in a show and you hate the show, don’t turn your brain off. ‘Why isn’t this show working?’ I find myself often imagining my own scenes on the ashes of a failed show that is happening in front of me in real time. ‘What about this isn’t working? Is it the performance, is the set distracting you from the performance, is the set too much for the plot?’

Continue to think critically when you’re watching any piece of art, because even if you say, “I wish I had those two hours of my life back,” you’ll know a little bit more about your taste, about who you are as an artist, about what you respond to. So it’s never really a waste of time. I think that’s a good perspective to have both when it’s creating things that don’t work or seeing things that don’t work.

On policy makers, politicians and the arts

Lin-Manuel Miranda

What I am finding is Hamilton has become a Rorschach test for our nation. Every candidate has been compared to every character in my show. Depending on which way you lean, either Trump or Hillary is Burr, and that’s OK, that’s fine. It’s good for us to have shared things to discuss. That is one of the places where the arts help us, to have water cooler moments in a time when everybody curates their own reality, right?

I think what we’re finding with social media is we have some shared moments but actually they allow us to go into our own windows and take our lessons from that. I’m always grateful for the way the arts can engender empathy. That’s the biggest thing that we can do that a politician, unless they’re really good, can’t do. We can let you into someone’s life and make you feel like you spent a hundred years with Eliza Schuyler Hamilton and been in her world, and that’s going to change you somehow, in a good way or a bad way. That’s what the arts can do.

Music is our secret weapon. It sneaks in past your defenses, it doesn’t matter who you vote for. If you’re not crying at the end of Hamilton or at the end of The Color Purple, you’re not a human. [The arts have] the ability to engender empathy and to see world views beyond our own. When you can’t shut out people as the other, that what the arts can do that nothing else can do.

On writing Hamilton

Lin-Manuel Miranda

I think a part of me is always trying to write the ideal school show. So much of my life, from elementary school, was “What’s going to be the school play.” So there’s a part of me that’s always trying to answer that calling in my work now. That’s my ideal for what a great show is.

The watchword, the phrase I went by is “The personal is political.” It’s not enough to have a song about the debt plan for the capitol, how does it advance our story, how does it advance our characters. If it doesn’t it goes. We get away with all of the information that’s sneaking into your kids’ brains because Burr is like, “Everyone’s in that room, why can’t I be in that room?”

If the personal is political you can get away with anything. That’s the fun of it. It’s making sure you as long as you’re moving the story along, we can feed in as much stuff as we want, they won’t even know they’re learning. They just want to know what happens. We had to be very ruthless about that.

On the big takeaway from Hamilton

What’s the proverb? “May you live in interesting times.” I don’t know that it gets more interesting than right now. I don’t know if that’s a blessing or a curse. To be honest, it vacillates every day. I think that your kids are going to look to you to make sense of all this. We’re all trying to make sense of it. That’s an enormous responsibility, but it’s also an enormous gift.

We get 1,360 kids to see the show a few times a year. They’re not all going to become theatre teachers, they’re not all going to write musicals or songs. But what they do have to reckon with when they see Hamilton is that Hamilton made the most of his time, he made the most of his less than 50 years on this earth.

Charge your kids with that, the notion that life’s a gift, it’s not to be taken for granted, it’s not to be taken lightly You’re born with gifts and you’re born with an honesty that can never really leave you. What are you going to do with your time? What are you going to do with your time on this earth?

I remember being a teenager and thinking, ‘We have so much time, we have time to kill.’ Man, what I would do to get that time back. I think the continuing awareness that being here is a real gift, that whatever is happening in the world, make the most of it and sink your teeth into whatever you’re doing. That’s your biggest charge and the rest flows from there.

*   *   *

Disclosure: I presented four sessions on censorship in high school theatre at the Broadway Teachers Workshop in 2015, for which I received a $600 honorarium. BTW did not solicit this post, but agreed to my attendance at my request.

Lin Manuel Miranda (photo by Howard Sherman)

On the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, Lin-Manuel Miranda—bookwriter, lyricist, composer, and star of the Broadway hit musical Hamilton—has already given a matinee performance and served as master of ceremonies for a streetside #Ham4Ham show. He is optimistic there will still be time for a nap after talking with this writer and before a second performance of Hamilton in less than two hours.

“The sense of community I get from doing it is really why I’m here,” he says, sipping a cup of tea. “That’s joyous to me. That’s the thing that I loved most about doing high school theatre. I always try to stay connected to that same impulse. It’s the running joke that Jonathan Groff and I have: ‘We’re in the play.’ There’s nothing better than being in the play, of being chosen from everyone in your school and showing the world what you have.”

At thirty-five, with Hamilton, Miranda is at the top of the theatre world after only three Broadway musical credits, following his Tony Award-winning In the Heights and his contributions of music and lyrics to Bring It On. He’s already broken into film, writing cantina music for Star Wars: The Force Awakens and writing the score for an upcoming Disney animated feature, Moana, to be released next fall. He has performed at the White House, and the president has come to see him in New York. He’s welcomed at events from the Kennedy Center Honors to gatherings of historians who seem to love Hamilton just as much as die-hard musical theatre buffs. In the midst of all this attention and activity he’s still very connected to his roots. Anyone who follows him on Twitter can find him relating stories about his parents, his wife, his young son, his relatives, and his countless friends, as well as chatting with as many fans as he can.

The experience of high school theatre never seems to be very far from Miranda’s mind. He speaks of it often, and his school theatre experiences are the explicit topic of our interview. He tells me his earliest artistic goal was to be in his sixth grade play.

“We had an extraordinary music teacher at my elementary school who started the tradition of the sixth grade play,” Miranda recalls. This was at Hunter College School, a public elementary and high school for gifted students. “I’m very lucky that she started it just when I got there. I think the first sixth grade musical they did was West Side Story when I was in kindergarten.

“The entire school would watch the sixth grade play. I remember as young as second or third grade already fantasizing, ‘What’s going to be the sixth grade play when we get to sixth grade?’ It’s funny in retrospect to think how much of my life was spent thinking, ‘What show are we going to get to do?’ which is not the usual elementary school concern.

“Then, the crazy thing that happened was we got to sixth grade and they said, ‘We’re going to do the previous six years’ shows. We’re going to do short versions of all of them.’ So we get this lethal dosage of musical theatre at age twelve. I was a cowhand and a son in this unwatchable four-hour show that our parents had to sit through. But for me, it was the greatest experience of my life.”

Miranda didn’t go out for theatre at all in seventh grade but returned as an eighth grader with the encouragement of his English teacher, Rembert Herbert, whom he thanked in his Tony acceptance speech.“He really got me engaged as a student first. He told me, ‘You’re writing all this stuff in the back of my class, but none of it is for class. So can you join us?” Pressed on what he was writing at the back of class, Miranda confesses, “Bad love songs to girls.”

“What caught Dr. Herbert’s attention,” he explains in more detail, “was that we had an assignment where we were put into groups and we had to teach three chapters of Chaim Potok’s The Chosen, which was a book I really love. I decided we’re going to make a musical version. I wrote a song for each chapter, and I was such a control freak that I recorded them all a capella and the other kids lip-synced to my voice.”

Herbert encouraged Miranda to contribute to the annual student-written, student-directed Brick Prison show, and beginning in ninth grade, Miranda also began auditioning for shows.

“I was in Lillian Hellman’s The Little Foxes and in You Can’t Take It with You. Those were my plays. In ninth grade, I got cast as the Pirate King in The Pirates of Penzance, which was huge, because I beat out the seniors. Then, Godspell in tenth grade. I started dating the assistant director and she became my high school girlfriend. Then she directed A Chorus Line junior year and I was her assistant director, so I kind of apprenticed into the directing track. Then I directed West Side Story my senior year.

“So I got too busy to [act in] the plays. But I was a president of Hunter Theatre, even though I didn’t participate. I would do their budgets. We all hung lights. We all did all the stuff.”

Directing West Side Story as a senior was an important time for Miranda.

“West Side Story is such a controversial show, because everyone’s unflattering in that show. The Puerto Ricans say, ‘That’s our only thing and we’re all gang members.’ I’m sensitive to that. At the same time, for me, it was an incredible teaching experience. I got to bring Puerto Rico to school. My dad came in and gave dialect lessons to my white and Asian Sharks. There was no brownface, nothing stupid like that.

“But I wanted to make sure that while they’re in America, they’re yelling Puerto Rican things like ‘Wepa!’ It was a way for me to actually engage the part of me that only existed at home and bring that into school. That was really lovely.”

Were there any parts Miranda wished he could play again or roles he missed out on?

“If I could do the Pirate King again,” he says, laughing, “having more than a reliable half-octave of range, I’d love another crack at it. That being said, I have no regrets. I had a wonderful time doing everything. Those are the shows that are just in your bloodstream forever—because you did that. It’s a totally different thing than loving a cast album or seeing a show and loving it.

“That’s why, for me, a show I write becomes real when a high school gets to do it. Because I know there are kids who had their first kisses as Benny and Nina [in In the Heights]. I know there are salon ladies who are going to be friends for life because they were Daniela and Carla together. I had that experience with my friends on the shows we worked on. That’s what I love most about being on this side of the process now, being the one who makes the musicals.”

Theatre wasn’t Miranda’s only interest in high school. In addition to writing some short musicals, he was making films as well, pulling his friends together from all of their other activities to work on them. But he relates that experience back to theatre.

“I think that one of the best things getting to be in a position of authority in theatre in high school gets you is that you have no power to hire or fire or replace anyone. So the only voice you have is your self-created authority. I learned to harness that: ‘All right, guys, this is the plan,’ knowing at any point that anyone could say, ‘I don’t want to do this. I want to go home.’”

Given the wide variety of skills Miranda displays as writer, composer, and lyricist, I ask him about his musical training.

“I took orchestration and composition, which was a class available in high school, but really just piano lessons and basic music theory. I actually have a couple of friends I would call up in the middle of the night and ask, ‘Hey, I’m playing an F#, an A and a C. I don’t know what this chord is called. What is it?’ And they’d say, ‘You’re playing an F# diminished.’ I kept thinking I was going to invent a new chord. And they’d say, ‘No, they all exist.’”

Miranda discovered the friendships he made while working on shows gave him shortcuts across the usual boundaries of the school’s social order.

“The saving grace of being a theatre kid,” he explains, “is that you get to make friends in every grade. So if your grade is kicking your butt, which was true for me some of the time, I had friends in other grades. The heartbreak that comes with that is sometimes your best friend will graduate because they’re two or three years older than you.

“And that’s something. I knew even then that was something my peers weren’t sharing. They were relentlessly involved with who is friends with who, and what clique is big, and who is in and who’s out in my grade. Being a theatre kid allows you to have this birds-eye view of it. I would spend my lunch period with at least four different groups. So I was always a little friends with everyone.”

Miranda went off to college planning on a dual major in film and theatre, and those interests narrowed the schools he applied to very quickly, since few offered both. He chose Wesleyan University in Connecticut, where he eventually dropped his plans to also study film.

“I got to college thinking I knew everything. I got the rude awakening of, ‘Oh, I don’t know anything. I know how theatre at my high school worked. There’s still so much I have to learn.’ I was both humbled and empowered by this. We thought we were hanging lights right—we didn’t know what the heck we were doing. And that’s the fun of it. You learn the skill set you need to prepare you to work with lots of different kinds of people.”

Although we agreed the interview would focus on Miranda’s school experiences, it’s impossible to talk with him right now and not ask about Hamilton. Hip-hop, rap, and historical biography are not the usual ingredients of musical theatre. Had he always envisioned it on Broadway?

“I honestly thought of it like Jesus Christ Superstar,” he says. “I thought, ‘This will be a show, but I’m going to write it by writing the music first,’ which is exactly how Andrew Lloyd Webber did Superstar. It was a concept album. I had the good fortune to ask him about that. I peppered him with questions like ‘How did you get these for-real rock singers on that concept album?’ He said, ‘Because they were just around. We recorded the Jesus Christ Superstar concept album next door to where Led Zeppelin was recording album number III. You would just say, ‘Hey, do you want to come in and sing this part?’

“My vision for having rappers play the founding fathers started as ‘I’m going to get the artists first.’ Then we just started writing the show and I stopped worrying about landing the rapper and said, ‘Let me make the thing.’ Now we’re reverse-engineering it. We’ve got this mix tape coming out and hip-hop artists are going to be covering songs from the show.

“It worked out the way it was meant to work out. I was going to make a concept album that someone else was going to stage. It turns out I made a staged piece that someone’s going to turn into a concept album.”

Given the enormous demands on his time right now, one has to wonder, is Miranda having fun?

“What I’m enjoying so much about the success of Hamilton is it’s an opportunity to get together everyone who loves musicals. I know a lot of people who don’t love musicals like our show, but you can get them in because of history. You can get in because of politics. You can get in via hip hop.

“For me the fun is getting on Twitter and talking about Les Mis or Wicked for a little while, talking about the shows we all love, and reminding the pop culture world at large. Because you know what? We all do love shows. I know everyone likes to think of musical theatre as this niche genre. But a lot of us did the school play. A lot of us watched Glee. A lot of us, even if we never saw a Broadway show, could sing a few show tunes because of school and because of our parents. So it is this secret thing that we all know that we don’t all talk about together. That’s what I’m enjoying about this part of the process.”

What part of the creative process gives him the greatest pleasure?

“For me, it’s all about what I can bring, because musicals are such a hybrid art. They’re fourteen art forms mashed into one. So it becomes a simple calculus for me of ‘What can I bring into the room?’

“One of the things I love best about writing is being able to bring a song to my creative team—walking into a room with people you trust, showing them a new song, which is like being naked in front of them, to be honest. That’s why it’s important to get the right people in the room, and knowing you’re going to leave with a better song because of the people you’ve allowed. That’s an exhilarating process.

“Expand that to the whole show entirely. That’s a pretty great moment,” Miranda continues, enthusiastically. “Seeing a cast read your work for the very first time, that’s a really exciting part of the process.

“You know, it’s not lost on me that as someone who kind of felt like an outsider in my own community growing up, I’m just writing communities for myself. That’s what I get from being in the show, too.”

This interview originally appeared in Dramatics magazine, published by the Educational Theatre Association.

Phillipa Soo, Lin-Manuel Miranda and Renée Elise Goldsberry in Hamilton (Photo by Joan Marcus)

In the wake of the recent casting controversies over Katori Hall’s The Mountaintop and Lloyd Suh’s Jesus in India, there have been a number of online commenters who have cited Lin-Manuel Miranda’s musical Hamilton as a justification for their position in the debate. What’s intriguing is that Hamilton has been offered up both as evidence of why actors of color must have the opportunity to play both characters or color and characters not necessarily written as characters of color – but it has also been used to say that anything goes, and white actors should be able to play characters of color as well.

In the Broadway production of Hamilton, the characters are historical figures who were all known to have been white, but they are played by actors of many races and ethnicities, notably black, Latino and Asian. My position on non-traditional (or color-blind or color-specific) casting is that it is not a “two-way street,” and that the goal is to create more opportunities for actors of color, not to give white actors the chance to play characters of color.

As it happens, I had an interview scheduled with Miranda last week, the night before Thanksgiving. Race wasn’t the subject at all, however. We were speaking about his experiences in, and views on, high school theatre, for Dramatics magazine, a publication of the Educational Theatre Association (ask a high school thespian for a copy). But when I finished the main interview, and had shut off my voice recorder, I asked Miranda if he would be willing to make any comment regarding the recent casting situations that had come to light. He was familiar with The Mountaintop case, but I had to give him an exceptionally brief précis of what had occurred with Jesus in India. He said he would absolutely speak to the issue, and I had to hold up my hand to briefly pause him as he rushed to start speaking, while I started recording again.

“My answer is: authorial intent wins. Period,” Miranda said. “As a Dramatists Guild Council member, I will tell you this. As an artist and as a human I will tell you this. Authorial intent wins. Katori Hall never intended for a Caucasian Martin Luther King. That’s the end of the discussion. In every case, the intent of the author always wins. If the author has specified the ethnicity of the part, that wins.

“Frankly, this is why it’s so important to me, we’re one of the last entertainment mediums that has that power. You go to Hollywood, you sell a script, they do whatever and your name is still on it. What we protect at the Dramatists Guild is the author’s power over their words and what happens with them. It’s very cut and dry.”

This wasn’t the first time Miranda and I have discussed racial casting. Last year, we corresponded about it in regard to high school productions of his musical In The Heights, and his position on the show being done by high schools without a significant Latino student body, which he differentiated from even college productions.

Lin-Manuel Miranda, Karen Olivo and the company of In The Heights (Photo by Joan Marcus)

“The joy of In The Heights runs both ways to me,” he wrote me in early 2014. “When I see a school production with not a lot of Latino students doing it, I know they’re learning things about Latino culture that go beyond what they’re fed in the media every day. They HAVE to learn those things to play their parts correctly. And when I see a school with a huge Latino population do Heights, I feel a surge of pride that the students get to perform something that may have a sliver of resonance in their daily lives. Just please God, tell them that tanning and bad 50’s style Shark makeup isn’t necessary. Latinos come in every color of the rainbow, thanks very much.

“And I’ve said this a million times, but it bears repeating: high school’s the ONE CHANCE YOU GET, as an actor, to play any role you want, before the world tells you what ‘type’ you are. The audience is going to suspend disbelief: they’re there to see their kids, whom they already love, in a play. Honor that sacred time as educators, and use it change their lives. You’ll be glad you did.”

Daveed Diggs and the company of Hamilton (Photo by Joan Marcus)

Anticipating the flood of interest in producing Hamilton once the Broadway production and national tours have run their courses, I asked Miranda whether the acting edition of the script of Hamilton will ultimately be specific about the cast’s diversity, and whether, either at the college level or the professional level, he would foresee a situation where white actors were playing leading roles.

“I don’t have the answer to that. I have to consult with the bookwriter, who is also me,” he responded. “I’m going to know the answer a little better once we set up these tours and once we set up the London run. I think the London cast is also going to look like our cast looks now, it’s going to be as diverse as our cast is now, but there are going to be even more opportunities for southeast Asian and Asian and communities of color within Europe that should be represented on stage in that level of production.

“So I have some time on that language and I will find the right language to make sure that the beautiful thing that people love about our show and allows them identification with the show is preserved when this goes out into the world.”

Authorial intent, y’all. Authorial intent.

Howard Sherman is interim director of the Alliance for Inclusion in the Arts and director of the Arts Integrity Initiative at The New School College of Performing Arts.

Sesame Street music director Bill Sherman with Elmo and Zoe on the set. Sherman won a Tony Award for In the Heights in 2008 and has recruited Broadway peers to compose for the children’s show. (Photo: Howard Sherman)

You know how to get to Carnegie Hall: practice, practice, practice. But do you know how to get, how to get to Sesame Street?

Turns out there’s a shortcut from New York’s theater district — and it’s landed a number of Broadway’s top songwriting talents on the venerable children’s program.

The man to see is Bill Sherman, a 2008 Tony Award winner for his work on orchestrations for In the Heights. Sherman is in his fifth season as music director for Sesame Street. Back when he started the job, Broadway’s songwriters were an obvious go-to.

“I knew them,” he shrugs. “It was easy access. I was trusting songwriters I knew and loved.”

He’s since discovered that no matter whom he calls, Sesame Street meets with universal enthusiasm. “Everybody will stop some really important thing they should be doing and really focus on this.”

From A College Buddy To Strangers In The Biz

Sherman’s first call, five seasons back, was to Lin-Manuel Miranda, composer and lyricist of In the Heights. “Lin has been my best friend for 10 years,” Sherman says. “We went to college together, so asking him to write a song was very easy.”

Miranda was followed by other Heights alumni, Alex Lacamoire and Chris Jackson, and by composers Jason Robert Brown (Parade, The Last Five Years), Justin Paul (A Christmas Story) and Tom Kitt (Next To Normal). And while some of these artists typically write both music and lyrics, Sesame Street primarily taps into their composing skills.

“So much of what we do is curriculum-based that it has to go through many levels of approval,” Sherman explains. “So most of the lyrics come from the [Sesame Street] scriptwriters.”

Miranda, an adept lyricist, says being forced to focus solely on the music was “enormous fun.”

“The writer will say, ‘It’s very Harry Belafonte; it’s Ravel’s Bolero; it will build and build.’ You get a sense of what they were thinking, of the rhythm that’s in their heads.”

With “Elmo the Musical,” More Shots At The Spotlight

Sesame Street‘s musical universe expanded further when the show introduced its “Elmo the Musical” segments — stand-alone bits, eight to 10 minutes long, that take place entirely in the imagination of the childlike red fuzzball.

The Elmo the Musical segments are through-composed — musicalized from start to finish — “so each composer had their chance to really sink their teeth into the music,” Sherman says. “It became their episode, their thing. We tried to figure out a way to use the composers’ strengths for whatever particular episode it was.”

An installment called “Detective,” for instance, “asked for this complex, jazzy [sound], and Jason Robert Brown is known for that.”

Like all the composers, Brown — who’s never met Sherman — jumped at the opportunity.

“I had a 2-year-old who stared at Elmo all day long,” Brown says. “So there was nothing better than that.”

Then came the kicker: That episode’s script was to be written by John Weidman, a Sesame Street veteran and co-creator, with Stephen Sondheim, of iconic musicals like Assassins and Pacific Overtures.

“I called him and said, ‘So we’re finally writing a show together, only it’s for a furry red puppet,’ ” Brown says. “When I got the recording of Elmo, I could not have been more excited if it had been Frank Sinatra, if it had been Joni Mitchell.”

This fall, as puppeteer David Rudman laid down Cookie Monster’s vocal track on Tom Kitt’s “If Me Had a Magic Wand,” Kitt described the song using an old-school musical-theater term. It’s “a soaring, emotional ‘I want’ moment,” he said, a readily identifiable, recognizably Broadway kind of sound.

But as Sherman is quick to point out, the “Broadway sound” is very much in flux.

“I’ve been part of musical-theater situations that pushed boundaries, that brought new sounds to Broadway. Taking this job, like [working on] In the Heights, was an opportunity to put new sounds in kids’ ears. People assume musical theater is vaudevillian, epic ballads and tap-dance numbers. So to turn that on its head and bring in audiences that don’t go to Broadway shows is important to me.”

Is it a challenge for these sophisticated writers to gear their work for toddlers? “Sometimes,” says Sherman, “composers think that because it’s Sesame Street, they have to dumb it down. … [But] these days children have unbelievably sophisticated ears. I think dumbing it down is disrespectful to kids.”

“That’s Not What Cookie Monster Sounds Like”

When composers have kids of their own, they’ve got an in-house test panel. Brown did demos, complete with character voices, for his daughter.

“Her response was, ‘That’s not what Cookie Monster sounds like,’ ” he reports.

Sherman has met with greater success at home.

“If my 3-year-old hears something, and 15 to 20 minutes later she’s still singing it, then I know I did the right thing,” he says. “If the 1-year-old dances to it, then I know that it sounds right.”

There might well be more musical theater in Sesame Street‘s future; Sherman admits he’d like to work with Stephen Schwartz (Wicked, Pippin) and Marc Shaiman (Hairspray).

And there’s one more big fish he’d like to land — the whale of the business, really.

“We toyed a bit with going after Sondheim,” he said. “We haven’t gone that route yet, but to call up Stephen and see if he was down [for it], that’d be funny. Why not?”

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