"...and then sales plummet and his contract is paid out for his final 3 weeks so a much much bigger star who is the rare still-living theater legend with a household name can step in and try to save the box office."
Remember, though, we only knew this after the initial response, and after Mandy stepped down.
Much of the original response was due to Oak being heavily hyped as the leading man, and then being kicked out after a few weeks because an older, more famous white man wanted his part.
That was the narrative released by the Kagans, and that was what was being responded to. The tweets I read didn't so much say "This happened because Oak was black", as they said "I am familiar with situations like this because I'm also black and work in this business."
Apparently, even that level of acknowledging racial realities is too much for the status quo. For whatever reason, rather than discovering more about how this business functions for black actors on Broadway, the conversation became a very blunt argument about whether the Kagans are racist, and by extension whether we are racist as individuals.
That latter thread is interesting for how it exposes our personal beliefs, but we lose a chance to learn about and challenge the system.
This is why I have doubts about out future survival, to paraphrase Sister Aloysius. |
