Editor’s preface: Austin Tichenor of the Reduced Shakespeare Company wrote an extensive Facebook post after seeing a production of 1776, directed by his sister, the author of this essay, at their old high school in California, 38 years after having directed his own production in their hometown. His reflections prompted Arts Integrity to solicit this post, about how the production had come together; it is certainly only one example of how 1776 and many works for the stage are being reexamined in high school productions, especially in the wake of the success of Hamilton. Amy Tichenor Moorhead, teaches dance and musical theatre at Piedmont High School in Piedmont CA.
The musical 1776 has been a favorite of my family’s for decades, but I never considered it for my high school’s annual musical until I realized the opportunity that lay in gender-neutral, as well as color conscious, casting.
Like most high school musical theater directors, I’m always looking for shows that have lots of roles for female actors. While researching online, I learned of Kansas City’s Musical Theatre Heritage all-female 1776 in 2010. There was precedent for this in our 2011 production of Les Misérables in which two women were cast in small roles written for men. I realized right away that there’s no reason women couldn’t play any of the male roles in 1776, and that in this way, we could fully embrace trans* and non-binary students as well.
Keith Edwards, son of the late composer and lyricist Sherman Edwards, told Playbill.com in 2010, “An inclusive society is roughly what the Founding Fathers desired with the launch of the Declaration of Independence, and although they did not emancipate slaves or women at that moment, they prepared the way for both.” Inclusion is always one of my primary objectives and though I don’t think of 1776 as a show frequently performed in high schools, it felt like a valuable way to include young women in discussions from which they’ve been largely excluded. With the addition of an ensemble, plus color-conscious and gender neutral casting, the experience could be powerful.
The announcement that I would employ gender neutral casting was met with enthusiasm, and the audition process began in September for our February 2018 production. The casting process is challenging, more of an art than a science. It revives memories of my own auditions which makes me sensitive to the actors’ hopes as well as despair in not being cast as they’d wished.
I entered the audition process with no plan about how I would cast each role. I asked the actors to indicate on their audition form if they were comfortable playing either male or female characters as well as playing opposite either male or female actors and almost all were fine with both.
I could have cast the show a number of different ways, but I chose the actors I thought were strongest for each role, taking the whole cast into account. I didn’t plan to cast Abigail/John and Martha/Thomas traditionally, and I looked seriously at other combinations. During callbacks, certain actors emerged for roles that I never could have anticipated and this is the marvel of the audition process.
I hoped a student with a decent Scottish brogue would audition for McKean, and it turned out there was more than one – a woman won the role. One casting intent I did have was that the Courier would be played by a woman, but it was ultimately cast traditionally. At the conclusion of casting, only 30% of the roles were cast gender typically.
With the rehearsal process underway by early October, I decided the production would be costumed in traditional dress of the period. I considered modern-day gender neutral costuming, like formal concert attire, but found this was actually going to be more expensive, and the cast was excited about wearing 18th century coats and trousers, with buckles on their shoes, cravats, the use of canes, and a few powdered wigs.
Though 1776 calls for a cast of 26, I chose to add an ensemble to help bring the streets of Philadelphia to life — and to be inclusive of more students who wanted to participate in this musical — bringing the cast to 48. About half of the ensemble were costumed as female and the other half were dressed as male.
In addition to costume and staging choices, the physicality of each character is vital, because in a classic musical like 1776 the characters need to be defined as following the social expectations of their particular gender. How to shake hands, how to sit up straight, how to stand tall, how to bow in the manner of a stereotypical 18th century male required extensive rehearsal for all in the cast. The issues of correctness are more about the time period and region, so the women worked just as hard as the men to achieve the proper physicality. Even though the male characters are dressed as males, the fact that many are female actors in male roles is still apparent and it allows us to see these eighteenth-century congressMEN in a new light.
Rehearsals provided ample opportunity to take note of gender equality. In scene two, Richard Henry Lee declares, “I’ll stop off at Stratford just long enough to refresh the missus” and the bawdiness continues when he launches into the song “The Lees of Old Virginia” with the lyrics “may my wife refuse my bed if I can’t deliver . . .” Seeing a 21st century teenage girl portray an 18th century slaveholding man – conceived by a man in the 1960s to be an energetic but righteous buffoon – was both entertaining and eye-opening. It also emphasized that women’s roles in the story of our nation’s founding are missing from 1776, and when they are present, it is as a partner in bed.
Early in scene three, Thomas Jefferson announces he is leaving for home on “family business”, Stephen Hopkins’s response required attention in rehearsal. Hopkins chimes in and tells Jefferson, “Give her a good one for me, young feller.” We tried several different deliveries in attempt to retain the spontaneous, lighthearted intent of the line and the female actor, ultimately, embraced the notion that Hopkins is completely unaware that he is being offensive and was not considered to be so at that moment in history, though he is today. He’s not evil, he’s just of another time and set of sensibilities.
Benjamin Franklin is probably the most inappropriate character by 2018 standards with riotously suggestive dialogue throughout the show. Upon the arrival of Martha to Jefferson’s room in scene 4, Franklin asks, “Well, Halooo, and whose little girl are you?” Hilarious (because impropriety is often a source of humor) – and creepy – whether Franklin is played by a male or a female. With a female in the role, it is even more difficult for the audience to ignore the impropriety because we can’t overlook the fact that a female delivered the line.
While the Thomas and Martha engage in a lengthy kiss, Franklin explains, “Of course she’s his wife. Look how they fit.” I had thought this line would be even funnier delivered by a female actress, but it never got the laugh that I expected. Perhaps because we know more about Thomas Jefferson than we used to, and times have changed. Later, Franklin jumps up from his nap at the invitation to go to New Brunswick “for the whoring and the drinking” – and once again the idea of women as “little brides” or whores is highlighted by the young women in the male roles saying these lines. It’s arguable whether the casting or the fact that it’s 2018 made the line more, or less funny.
Abigail Adams, a more fully-developed character than Martha Jefferson, still revolves around her husband John. She does reference their sick children and their farm’s struggles, alluding to how difficult it must have been for the women left at home. I initially planned to bring Abigail’s home to life with little children scurrying around to suggest all she would have had to contend with while still scraping out time to correspond with John. I had to let this staging idea go given the complexities it presented with the congress set and the placement of Jefferson’s house, and given Abigail’s primary role within the script as her husband’s main source of strength and support.
* * *
“The Lees of Old Virginia” in the Piedmont High School 2018 production of “1776” (Julie Reichle Photography)
Piedmont High School is predominantly European American (68%); however, the audition pool contained African-American and Asian-American students, as well as students of Indian and Pacific Islander heritage. As a white, cisgender woman I gave a great deal of thought in casting deliberations as to how to cast the individuals not historically granted access to privilege and power. In prior years, I have practiced color blind casting. But as Diep Tran, associate editor of American Theatre magazine told the Los Angeles Times, “Color-conscious” means “we’re aware of the historic discrimination in the entertainment industry . . . and we’re also aware of what it means to put a body of color onstage”. Snehal Desai, artistic director of the Asian theater company East West Players in Los Angeles, the longest-operating theater of color in the United States, said in the same article, “The thing about colorblind casting is that it denies the person standing in front of you. It ignores identity, and for people of color, that further alienates us”.
In casting a high school production of 1776, does color matter ? Yes it does. I was aware of the critical need to becolor conscious. On casting Hamilton, Lin-Manuel Miranda told The Atlantic, “This is a story about America then, told by America now…and we want to eliminate any distance between a contemporary audience and this story”. One-quarter of the actors featured in my 1776 production were students from communities traditionally underrepresented on stage, playing historical characters who were, in real life, white.
There are two roles in particular that gave me pause. In the casting of Joseph Hewes (North Carolina) and Dr. Lyman Hall (Georgia), although I knew the actors would be wonderful in their roles, it occurred to me that the audience might be troubled and unsure how to interpret African-American students portraying Southern delegates, that is, stepping into the shoes of slaveholders. As Jessica Gelt wrote in the Los Angeles Times, “Color-conscious casting implies an understanding of the profound implications of skin color.”
I wrestled with how the Southern delegates were arranged on stage. Initially, I followed the Director’s Stage Guide’s furniture positioning for the scenes in the chamber which called for Hall and Hewes to be upstage left. I worried that the audience might see the casting of Hall and Hewes as resulting in an unfortunate accident which placed these two students in the back, behind others, rather than a conscious casting choice that would cause people to think. I tried several subtle variations on the arrangement of the delegates in that up-left corner, and eventually placed Edward Rutledge (cast typically) between them, and further upstage than Hewes. We did have a stage level change that gave some flexibility.
I worried about what the audience would think about the casting during Rutledge’s “Molasses to Rum to Slaves”. Even more than worrying what they might think, I worried that they wouldn’t think about it at all. At the conclusion of the song, the stage directions call for Rutledge to walk out as Hewes and Hall follow him. I directed Hewes and Hall to exchange a look and a nod before they began to follow Rutledge to suggest that they were making the independent decision to walk out rather than to simply be followers of Rutledge, under his authority.
* * *
From the 1980 Tichenor family production: “But, Mr. Adams” (l-r) Austin Tichenor (John Adams), John Tichenor (Benjamin Franklin), David Stein (Roger Sherman), Chris Stevens (Robert Livingston), and Bruce Turner (Thomas Jefferson)
I noted previously that 1776 has been a favorite of my family, dating back to when my brother Austin directed it in 1980. It was a community theater production that we produced with alumni and then-current students from Piedmont High School, performed in the same high school auditorium as my production 38 years later.
Austin cast himself as Adams, my other brother, John Tichenor, played Franklin, our dad played Hall, I assisted the choreographer and dressed the wigs, Mom sold tickets and cleaned the toilets — it was very much a family affair. In a post on Facebook after seeing my production, Austin noted an example of the benefits of diverse casting: “When Dr. Lyman Hall reveals his famous epiphany (“A representative owes the People not only his industry, but his judgment, and he betrays them if he sacrifices it to their opinion”) the moment retained all its irony but gained added resonance by being spoken by a young African-American woman. It became a fantastic and moving moment about the power of representation: Not only on our stages but in our governments.” Just the reaction I’d hoped for.
With a gender neutral, culturally diverse cast, 1776 facilitates dialogue about our 2018 political panorama and reminds us of our responsibility for making sure that all voices are heard as we move forward. Rehearsals presented frequent opportunities for discussion and making connections to our country today – and there would be even more if we were doing the show this summer. The experience provided us with an opportunity to consider gender, racial and ethnic equality through the lens of musical theater.
As I continue to unpack the adventure five months later, the production still informs my thoughts about casting and directing. I’ve realized that my casting process must be color conscious rather than color blind and even more than before, I will consider the gender spectrum. Instead of auditioning two distinct groups, men and women, I will look beyond the strictures of gender expectations, and, as I have in the past, the racial and ethnic default to casting roles as white unless specified as characters of color when choosing actors for roles. Yet I will be carefully aware of how the words and messages of the text resound when embodied by actors who do not replicate the characteristics of those who may have created the roles.
As I anticipate RENT, which I’ll be casting in September, a show that embraces characters all along the gender and sexuality spectrum, I’m eager to see what revelations we’ll come to when we cast consciously.
This week, Stephen Sondheim and John Weidman’s 1990 musical Assassins will have its first major New York performances since the 2004 Roundabout Theatre Company production*, in a concert version as part of City Center Encores!’s Off-Center series. Given the controversy sparked last month by The Public Theater’s Julius Caesar, in which Caesar and his wife were portrayed as analogues of Donald and Melania Trump, prompting the withdrawal of sponsors, sparking disruptions of performances and precipitating threats against the production, the theatre, the artists and the staff, it seemed an appropriate moment to speak with Weidman about how Assassins has been perceived over the past 26 years and how the newest incarnation might be received. Weidman, a former president of The Dramatists Guild, currently serves as president of the Dramatists Legal Defense Fund, founded to, according to the organization’s website, “advocate, educate and provide a new resource in defense of the First Amendment.” This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Howard Sherman: Given the state of discourse about public expression, given what happened with Julius Caesar in Central Park, it seems that putting up this show at this moment carries not necessarily more weight than other times, but that people may bring some other baggage to it in a different way they might have at other times. Back in 1991, it did not move to Broadway, the reason given being it wasn’t the right time, it was the first Gulf War, etc. Then there was the first planned Roundabout production, coming right after 9/11, when you and Steve and others felt it was not the right time to do the show. So is there ever a right time or ever a wrong time to do Assassins?
Stephen Sondheim and John Weidman
John Weidman: I don’t think there’s ever a wrong time to do it. I think the reception of the first production was honestly more a function of the fact that people did not know what to expect when they came into to theater. They were not prepared for the shock value of the opening number, which was a deliberate choice on our part to kind of knock the audience off balance. I think that, 25 years ago, even though there had been many adventurous musicals that had been done, some people simply assumed that the musical theater was not an appropriate place in which to tackle material that was this fundamentally serious. I think we’re well past that assumption at this point, given the kind of musicals that have been written in the last 25 years.
When the show was scheduled to be done at the Roundabout, and when we decided to delay the production after 9/11, that wasn’t a good time to do Assassins. But it wasn’t because we thought people would find the show problematic, that they would resent a show about presidential assassins in that sudden new political moment. In order to engage an audience, given the way the show’s designed and the way it’s written, it requires an audience which is, frankly, prepared to laugh in certain places, to take the humor on board. That’s part of the roller coaster ride of the show. We all felt that at that time, it was unfair to ask an audience which was grieving to come into a theater and to engage this kind of material in a way that was intermittently humorous. The show in that context simply wouldn’t work. And If it wasn’t going to work, it made sense to delay the production.
As far as now goes? When the show first opened, we had a conservative Republican in the White House, and then for eight years we had a centrist Democrat in the White House, and then for eight years we had a conservative Republican in the White House, and then we had a centrist Democrat who was black, and now we’ve got this guy. The show’s been performed continuously over the course of those 25 years in all kinds of different political and socioeconomic contexts. This is just a different one.
That said, people will obviously come into the theater from a different place, because the world outside the theater is a different place. Which will affect the way in which the members of the audience take the show on board.
But I don’t think it makes it a particularly good or bad time to do Assassins. Personally, I think it’s always a good time to do the show, because the show is meant to be provocative, and hopefully people will walk out of the theater talking about it, that it will provoke the kinds of conversations that Steve and I hoped it would provoke when we wrote it. That should happen now the way it’s happened with previous productions. They may be different conversations, but that’s what I would hope would happen.
Sherman: Have you and Steve made any changes in the show since it was last seen in New York, since the 2004 Roundabout production?
Weidman: No. The text of the show that’s going to be performed at City Center is exactly the same as the text which was performed at the Roundabout. And the text at the Roundabout was exactly the same as the text that was performed at Playwrights Horizons with the exception of “Something Just Broke,” the song which we added in London. The show’s really been what it’s been since it was first performed 25 years ago.
The 2017 Yale Repertory Theatre production of “Assassins” (photo by Carol Rosegg)
Sherman: Assassins was performed this spring at Yale Rep. Was there a difference in response to the show than for previous productions?
Weidman: You know, I was curious to see if there would be a difference in the way in which the show was received after the last election, and Yale was the first significant production that was available to me. I didn’t feel, sitting in the audience, as if there was any kind of shift that I was aware of in terms of the way in which the audience was connecting to the material.
Sherman: Speaking to you both as an author of the piece, and also in your role with the Dramatists Legal Defense Fund, it’s fair to say that there was some very heightened conversation, and actions around the Julius Caesar, admittedly by people who didn’t see it, didn’t take the time to understand it or understand its context. In the wake of that, are you concerned at all about how, not even the audience, but how people external to the audience might choose to speak about this piece?
Weidman: The word you used was concerned. I’m not in any way worried about it. At the same time, I’m sensitive to the possibility that in this current political climate, there will be people who will react to the idea of a musical about the people who tried to attack the President, that they will react to that in a way which is similar to the way in which some people reacted to the show in 1991, when they hadn’t seen it and weren’t going to see it. They simply knew what the show was about, and they had a problem with that. That happened then and that could conceivably happen now.
I do think that we’ve had 25 years in which this show’s been performed a lot everywhere, and so people have a better idea of what the show’s ambitions are and what its intentions are. I’ve got Google alerts set on my computer to Assassins, because I’m always curious to see how the show’s being received. The reviews tend to be really good, which is always nice, but the main thing is people writing about the show all over the country, in a variety of different kinds of publications, seem to understand what Steve and I were intending. That’s really reassuring. People get the show. They can like any show, they can like it a lot or not like it a lot. But they seem to understand what we were doing, and I assume that that will be the case this time around as well.
Sherman: In reading some of the press about the prior productions and some of the commentary, one of the ways in which the show is described is that it’s about, and I’m not quoting here, I’m paraphrasing, it’s about an America that causes people who feel they have no voice to take extreme actions. As we look at politics today, there are those who say that where we are is about people who felt they were disenfranchised from the political system, and that has brought us to the real polarization that we’re at now. Might that affect people’s perceptions?
Weidman: As Steve and I started to talk about this material 25 years ago, I realized at a certain point very early on that what drew me to the material was an attempt to explain something to myself which I had not understood since I was 17 years old when Kennedy was shot. The Kennedy assassination was my first real experience of loss and it was devastating to me. Two of my friends and I got together and we went down to D.C. and stood on the sidewalk as the funeral cortege went by, and all the subsequent attempts to try make sense of what happened — conspiracy theories. Was it the Cubans, was it the CIA, the FBI? It all seemed like, on some level, a waste of time to me. The fundamental question was: how could so much grief and pain be caused by one angry little man in a t-shirt with a rifle in Texas?
When Steve and I started to talk about these other personalities who had articulated a variety of wildly different motives for attacking the President, we said, ‘Well if we gather them together and look at them as a group’ – something which had not been done much, even by academics – ‘would some common grievance, some common complaint beyond what they articulated begin to emerge? And if it did, that would be a useful thing to write about.’ That is at the heart of what the piece explores. The people who, with one or two exceptions, picked up guns did tend to be, when you look at them as a group, people who were operating on the margins, the fringes of what we would consider a mainstream American experience.
In the last election, a lot of people who you and I would have identified as operating on the margins of a mainstream middle-class American experience, cast their votes in a particular way and elected a particular guy President. That does seem to suggest a different way of looking at the characters on stage in the show. I’m not quite sure what the change is. I’m not quite sure what it means in terms of how one observes their behavior and listens to what they have to say. But we are in a different political moment, and that moment will undoubtedly have an impact on how the audience responds to the piece.
I do think it will probably make for conversations on the way out of the theater which will be different from the conversations people might have had five years ago or ten years ago. I’m not sure if any of that’s clear. If it’s not, it’s because it’s something I’m still working through in my own head.
The 2004 Roundabout Theatre Company production of “Assassins” (photo by Joan Marcus)
Sherman: Given that the run is sold out, if there is conversation about why this show at this time, and if people choose to try to politicize it, is there something you would like them to know beyond the simplistic plot descriptions of a marketing brochure or a PR release about the show?
Weidman: I have always felt that that it’s essential with this show that it be allowed to speak for itself. It obviously can only speak to the audience that’s in the building, but that’s true of any theater piece. You know, somebody can describe to you what Hamlet means, but if that’s all it took to appreciate Hamlet, then you wouldn’t have to waste time listening to Shakespeare’s language for three and a half hours. I think you need to experience the piece itself, and I think that’s true of this piece. That said, Assassins is an exploration of where these vicious acts came from, in an attempt to get a better handle on how to prevent them from happening again in the future.
Sherman: Speaking to your role with the Dramatists Legal Defense Fund: is there any sense that there has been a change in people wanting to assert their own prerogative over what happens on stage? Has that changed in the past six to eight months? Does DLDF have more concerns now than in the past, or is it just consistent with the kinds of challenges that you’ve faced?
Weidman: I’m not aware of any kind of seismic shift, in terms of what people are either attempting to repress or ways in which people are self-censoring, although it would be hard to know about the second one. It may be the decisions at the high school level, it may the decisions at the amateur level, but also at the stock level, that people are making more cautious decisions in terms of what they think a school board or parent body or a subscriber base is going to be comfortable with. It’s entirely possible that they are shying away from things which they think are likely to be controversial. I would obviously hope not, because this seems to me a period when it’s important for controversial material to be produced and to become part of the national conversation.
When DLDF gave an award last year to Jeffrey Seller, and Lin-Manuel Miranda, and Thomas Kail, and the cast of Hamilton for the speech that was made from the stage when Mike Pence was in the audience, I wrote the citation and I handed the award to Jeffrey. The point I wanted to make most forcefully was that Mike Pence apparently had stood there and listened and that was fine, but the President-elect the next morning had not only castigated the cast for being rude, but he had instructed them to apologize. I said if censors tell artists what they’re not allowed to say – here we have someone going beyond that, instructing artists what they’re required to say. The latter is a genuinely frightening prospect, and I wouldn’t have thought five years ago that it was something we had to be concerned about, but I think we all feel like we’re living in a new world where anything is possible and nothing is surprising.
* There was a one-night reunion concert of the 2012 cast, held as a benefit for Roundabout.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
How to describe how I’ve felt this week? In approximate order: anxious, worried, heartsick, afraid, resolved, exhausted, embraced. But it wasn’t until this morning that I felt something that made me break into a wide grin, while sitting alone in an office watching YouTube.
It is well known by now that I am a Hamilton partisan, and exist unofficially at the fringes of show’s orbit due to my near-obsessive recordings of the outdoor #Ham4Ham shows. As a result, people constantly share articles and videos about Hamilton with me – and even with those and the ones I see on my own, I’m sure there are plenty I miss.
So when I clicked play this morning, on a video sent by a friend I’ve known since we started going to religious school at age five or six, I expected something sweet and well meaning, but probably a bit forced and amateurish. Yet as I said, I started smiling and then downright grinning as it played. And that’s no small achievement, because the video was obviously set within a synagogue, and I have had a complex and difficult relationship with my faith since I was young, and it was exacerbated by my mother’s death 12 years ago.
Whatever my intellectual feelings may be about my extensive religious training, I remember so many of the prayers and songs and, at times of loss, I still take comfort in the ritual and the words, both in Hebrew and in English. So this resetting of “Adon Olam,” the closing hymn at many Jewish services, to the tune of “You’ll Be Back,” was so unexpected and well-done that my only response was surprised joy.
Now I understand that many people who see this might say, ‘Well, I’m not Jewish’ or ‘I don’t speak Hebrew,’ and want to move on. Well the fact is, while I can repeat Hebrew words that have been recited to and by me for decades, I don’t speak Hebrew either. On those occasions now when I do find myself at a service, typically for bar and bat mitzvahs and for funerals, I have to look at the English translation every time if I want to know what I’m saying.
Here’s a bit of what “Adon Olam” says:
The Lord of the Universe who reigned
before anything was created.
When all was made by his will
He was acknowledged as King.
And when all shall end
He still all alone shall reign.
He was, He is,
and He shall be in glory.
And He is one, and there’s no other,
to compare or join Him.
Without beginning, without end
and to Him belongs dominion and power.
To use the melody of King George’s song from Hamilton puts a new spin on the prayer and on the power of a King as seen in the musical. It creates an intersection of the ancient and the present, words of unknown Jewish authorship that are centuries old with the music of a truly humane and talented Latinx man from in the heights, Lin-Manuel Miranda.
In sending the video my way, my friend asked that I share it with Lin. I will, but I want to share it with all of you too. Shalom. Peace.
P.S. Thanks to Jane Lipka Helfgott for sending this my way, kudos to Cantor Azi Schwartz, and mazel tov to Zoe Cosgrove on her bat mitzvah.
Daveed Diggs and the ensemble of Hamilton (photo by Joan Marcus)
I am not a betting man, but if you are reading this column, I would wager that you’ve already listened to the Hamilton original cast recording. Yet given this publication’s UK reader base, and the relatively small number of people who have actually seen Hamilton in comparison to the number of albums sold, I’m also willing to bet that a great number of you haven’t yet seen the show.
I raise this issue not to once again lionize or even analyze Hamilton, but rather to raise the fact that the success of the Hamilton recording, a virtually complete version of the show’s through-sung score, means that a great many people who ultimately see Hamilton will do so while being very familiar with the full text. It’s quite possible they’ll be able to sing along.
To those who say that this has often been true for cast recordings, I would counter that few shows have been recorded so fully. Yes, many people know a musical’s songs before seeing it, and I know of many people who specifically prefer to listen to a score before seeing a show (though I’ve never understood the need). However, for most musicals, songs aren’t all there is. There are, of course, exceptions, such as Les Miserables and Jesus Christ Superstar, but I wonder whether those recordings were as widely heard as Hamilton prior to the shows being seen.
As the second Hamilton company prepares to begin performances in Chicago later this month, and other engagements are announced, it’s fair to say that the story will hold few surprises. Sure, there’s a brief neck-breaking moment that has no auditory presence, but even the story’s final chapter is pretty much a given to those who secure the golden tickets. As for Burr shooting Hamilton, that’s in most US history textbooks, and we probably wouldn’t have a show without it.
This textual familiarity affords a rare opportunity for making an important distinction too often lost on many theatregoers, and certainly on the casual ones, namely the difference between a play (or musical) as text and in production. The foreknowledge not only of the story, but of the very words of the piece, means that what will be new (video clips notwithstanding) is the direction, the set, the lights, the costumes and so on. Even people familiar with pictures and videos of the original Broadway cast will be embracing its physicality for the first time, without the “distraction” of trying to keep up with what is being sung. Yes, some will register vocal variances from the recording, especially with almost all of the original cast gone. Still, the primary focus will be on the non-auditory elements, as what they may have previously imagined is made flesh before them.
Some might be tempted to say that this holds true for Shakespeare plays, given how widely read, taught and seen his ‘greatest hits’ already are. I would counter that, yes, for regular theatregoers there is the opportunity to ultimately compare how productions differ over time, long after we’ve learned when Hamlet will stab Polonius, but I doubt that many people have ever seen Hamlet for the first time only after having committed the majority of the script to memory.
Many modern musicals, when staged indelibly the first time out, tend to form a template by which all subsequent productions – I refer not to companies stemming from the original, but later regional, university and amdram productions – model themselves. It wasn’t until John Doyle’s Sweeney Todd that that show was freed from the visual spirit of Harold Prince’s original staging; Cats is in the process of having its 1980s design re-imprinted on US audiences even as we speak.
So while we are in the full flush of Hamilmania, and long before its theatre audience numbers manage to equal or surpass its cast recording listeners, the show can be a teaching tool, not simply to students but to the public at large. The brains of countless fans have partitioned an area just for the recording masterminded by Lin-Manuel Miranda and Alex Lacamoire, but their visual imagination is still free until they see the work of Thomas Kail and his team. In that space, and for that time, theatregoers have the chance to explore and ultimately understand what it means to realise a production.
And I, having been fortunate enough to have seen Hamilton three times so far, already look forward to how another set of creative artists will reinterpret the show many years from now. If I live that long.
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.
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.
“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/ChoreographerBrenda 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.
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.
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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.
