Threaded Order Chronological Order
| Protest during St. Louis "Jerome Robbins' Broadway" | |
| Posted by: chrismpls 10:43 pm EDT 06/19/18 | |
|
|
|
| Underscoring that, even just a few years after the show debuted, this would now be a very difficult show to cast sensitively (and that Muny didn't try hard enough): | |
| Link | "Yellowface" protest during "Small House of Uncle Thomas" |
| reply to this message | |
| The Crazy thing is | |
| Posted by: winters 12:58 pm EDT 06/21/18 | |
| In reply to: Protest during St. Louis "Jerome Robbins' Broadway" - chrismpls 10:43 pm EDT 06/19/18 | |
|
|
|
| This is a white actress playing an Asian character who is playing an African American character. My question is: Was the actress wearing yellowface wearing blackface? More seriously: Was the actress really wearing 'yellowface'? Whopping it up with Indian headdresses is just boys will be boys in the 1940's??? Really? Would MUNY have let them....'shuffle along' or wave their limp wrists?? Did young American sailors behave that way at that time? Undoubtedly. But depicting that behavior in a musical revue when there is no dramatic need to do that is just plain offensive. |
|
| reply to this message |
| Terry Teachout has a piece about it in today's WSJ | |
| Posted by: singleticket 07:45 pm EDT 06/20/18 | |
| In reply to: Protest during St. Louis "Jerome Robbins' Broadway" - chrismpls 10:43 pm EDT 06/19/18 | |
|
|
|
| ...but I don't have a subscription. | |
| reply to this message | reply to first message |
| re: Terry Teachout has a piece about it in today's WSJ | |
| Posted by: singleticket 07:50 pm EDT 06/20/18 | |
| In reply to: Terry Teachout has a piece about it in today's WSJ - singleticket 07:45 pm EDT 06/20/18 | |
|
|
|
| Scratch that, I read it. It's ridiculous. | |
| reply to this message | reply to first message |
| re: Terry Teachout has a piece about it in today's WSJ | |
| Posted by: Singapore/Fling 10:16 pm EDT 06/20/18 | |
| In reply to: re: Terry Teachout has a piece about it in today's WSJ - singleticket 07:50 pm EDT 06/20/18 | |
|
|
|
| Can you give us the bold strokes? | |
| reply to this message | reply to first message |
| re: Terry Teachout has a piece about it in today's WSJ | |
| Last Edit: singleticket 11:52 pm EDT 06/20/18 | |
| Posted by: singleticket 11:48 pm EDT 06/20/18 | |
| In reply to: re: Terry Teachout has a piece about it in today's WSJ - Singapore/Fling 10:16 pm EDT 06/20/18 | |
|
|
|
| No, sorry. I read it really quickly and don't have access to it now. It was all over the place rhetorically. I agree with you that MUNY's written response to the protest was a decent one especially in that it took responsibility for the casting and deflected blame from the performing artists. |
|
| reply to this message | reply to first message |
| I read Teachout's piece | |
| Posted by: mikem 09:21 pm EDT 06/21/18 | |
| In reply to: re: Terry Teachout has a piece about it in today's WSJ - singleticket 11:48 pm EDT 06/20/18 | |
|
|
|
| I read Teachout's piece. It's not very well-written. He starts out by saying that this is "Culture Wars II," with "woke progressives" vs "old-fashioned liberals," but he never actually says who the old-fashioned liberals are. (I guess it's Muny, but he gives no reason in the article for us to think the Muny leadership is liberal. Are they liberal because they cast ANY of the roles with a person of color?) Then he describes the protestors' concerns, without sounding like he agrees with them. He spends the majority of the piece saying that the protestors should not have disrupted the performance, and there were other means for their views to be heard. He was actually at that particular performance where the protest happened. He says that people were upset that protestors disrupted Julius Caesar at the Delacorte last year because they did not like the analogies to Trump, and if you didn't think that disruption should have happened, then this disruption shouldn't have happened either. He definitely has a point that the protestors should not have disrupted the show, but it kind of gets buried in the baiting language he uses throughout the piece. |
|
| reply to this message | reply to first message |
| re: I read Teachout's piece | |
| Posted by: Singapore/Fling 01:08 am EDT 06/22/18 | |
| In reply to: I read Teachout's piece - mikem 09:21 pm EDT 06/21/18 | |
|
|
|
| I think he has a point that both protests are comparable. I'm generally in favor of protests that disrupt a show, because that means they are effective in a way that protesting across the street rarely is. Beyond that, it's really a question of whether we agree with the protestors' point of view. | |
| reply to this message | reply to first message |
| re: I read Teachout's piece | |
| Last Edit: singleticket 10:22 am EDT 06/22/18 | |
| Posted by: singleticket 10:14 am EDT 06/22/18 | |
| In reply to: re: I read Teachout's piece - Singapore/Fling 01:08 am EDT 06/22/18 | |
|
|
|
| I think you'd need to attach the article to even figure out what Teachout's point was in the piece. I think the two protests are comparable only in the fact that a performance was interrupted by protesters. The rhetorical comparisons Teachout goes on to draw are another matter altogether. | |
| reply to this message | reply to first message |
| re: Protest during St. Louis "Jerome Robbins' Broadway" | |
| Posted by: wisebear 06:01 pm EDT 06/20/18 | |
| In reply to: Protest during St. Louis "Jerome Robbins' Broadway" - chrismpls 10:43 pm EDT 06/19/18 | |
|
|
|
| I'm troubled by the nature of the protest. I suppose the purists believe that the actors onstage are complicit because they didn't quit rather than don yellowface, but I find that unrealistic and unfair. Protest outside. You'll make your point. Kudos to the performers who persevered during the protest, doing what they were hired and directed to do. I'm also wondering if the rules must be as rigid for a revue, and where that leads in terms of cabaret performance. Of course I'd never cast a full production of Flower Drum Song with non-Asian actors. But does that mean a white man can't perform You Are Beautiful in an R&H revue? Can any white woman ever perform Summertime or Love Look Away? I'm really asking, and not for a friend. I perform songs from Ain't Misbehavin, Eubie, Raisin....is that offensive because I'm white? |
|
| reply to this message | reply to first message |
| re: Protest during St. Louis "Jerome Robbins' Broadway" | |
| Posted by: NeoAdamite 03:37 pm EDT 06/21/18 | |
| In reply to: re: Protest during St. Louis "Jerome Robbins' Broadway" - wisebear 06:01 pm EDT 06/20/18 | |
|
|
|
| There is no definitive answer to your question, but I have a story. Back in the '90s I saw Maureen McGovern do a nightclub act at an East Side venue. She sang a Gershwin medley, and when she started in on "I Got Plenty o' Nothin'" it was impossible not to flinch at the contrast between the wealthy audience, expensively attired vocalist, and the POV of the song. In theory it could have been meant as a taunt to the audience, but there was no sign of such an intention. |
|
| reply to this message | reply to first message |
| re: Protest during St. Louis "Jerome Robbins' Broadway" | |
| Posted by: Singapore/Fling 10:22 pm EDT 06/20/18 | |
| In reply to: re: Protest during St. Louis "Jerome Robbins' Broadway" - wisebear 06:01 pm EDT 06/20/18 | |
|
|
|
| Others will have their own answers, but .I'd say that you're fine performing those songs in a revue, as long as you aren't representing yourself as a person of color. If you darkened your skin or changed your voice to sound more black, then I would say you were being inappropriate. The issue here is that they were performing the material as it is seen in the original show, with a white woman playing Asian. I'd be curious to see if there would have been the same reaction if all three leads in this scene had been Asian (or even non-white), with the dancing ensemble fully diverse. |
|
| reply to this message | reply to first message |
| re: Protest during St. Louis "Jerome Robbins' Broadway" | |
| Posted by: mikem 11:53 pm EDT 06/20/18 | |
| In reply to: re: Protest during St. Louis "Jerome Robbins' Broadway" - Singapore/Fling 10:22 pm EDT 06/20/18 | |
|
|
|
| As Singapore/Fling said, everyone will have different answers, but I agree with his general premise that there's a big difference between a white person singing a song as himself/herself vs singing it as a person of color. For me the issue with the King and I excerpt is the weird accent. If the white actress playing the role spoke in her normal voice, there would be a discussion about whether actors of color should be given the opportunity to play people of color, but that's a different conversation. Having the white actress play the role with this weird accent is much more problematic. As we talked about down below, the broken English of the text makes it difficult for any actress to play the role using her normal voice, so the simple solution here would have been to hire an Asian-American actress. | |
| reply to this message | reply to first message |
| re: Protest during St. Louis "Jerome Robbins' Broadway" | |
| Posted by: Singapore/Fling 12:16 am EDT 06/20/18 | |
| In reply to: Protest during St. Louis "Jerome Robbins' Broadway" - chrismpls 10:43 pm EDT 06/19/18 | |
|
|
|
| It's interesting - I think they went in the right direction by casting it diversely, but they didn't go far enough. A cast that was predominantly non-white, in which no white person played a person of color, may well have actually worked. Clearly they have it some thought, and they put out a very nice statement. | |
| reply to this message | reply to first message |
| re: Protest during St. Louis "Jerome Robbins' Broadway" | |
| Posted by: mikem 12:50 am EDT 06/20/18 | |
| In reply to: re: Protest during St. Louis "Jerome Robbins' Broadway" - Singapore/Fling 12:16 am EDT 06/20/18 | |
|
|
|
| I'm a little surprised how provincial the Muny management seems to be. The official statement that they eventually put out was very nice, but the initial response was clueless. The show could have put together differently. Not only was there the choice to have a white actress play Tuptim using some weird accent, during the sailors' jaunt through New York in "On the Town," the sailors put on Native American headdresses and make whooping gestures to show that they are having fun. Maybe that was how it was done in 1944 (and 1989), but I would hope we've moved beyond that in 2018. It was very jarring. When St Louis's Public Radio station discussed these issues with Mike Isaacson, the Muny's executive producer, his initial response was dismissive, saying that the protesters had a "shallow understanding" of the show, and saying about the headdresses and whooping gestures that it was just "drunken sailors doing a series of silly acts." I'm glad that he now seems to understand that these issues are complex and could have been handled differently, but it's surprising that even after people protested, he didn't seem to understand what was troubling. |
|
| Link | http://news.stlpublicradio.org/post/visiting-theater-pros-cite-yellowface-hurtful-stereotypes-muny#stream/0 |
| reply to this message | reply to first message | |
| re: Protest during St. Louis "Jerome Robbins' Broadway" | |
| Posted by: Singapore/Fling 01:05 am EDT 06/20/18 | |
| In reply to: re: Protest during St. Louis "Jerome Robbins' Broadway" - mikem 12:50 am EDT 06/20/18 | |
|
|
|
| Thanks for the deeper dive. I did not know about the accent or the headdresses, both of which are inappropriate. I do appreciate that he can listen and learn, which is difficult. This board is a regular reminder of how easily people can dig in their heels around these questions. | |
| reply to this message | reply to first message |
| re: Protest during St. Louis "Jerome Robbins' Broadway" | |
| Posted by: mikem 01:15 am EDT 06/20/18 | |
| In reply to: re: Protest during St. Louis "Jerome Robbins' Broadway" - Singapore/Fling 01:05 am EDT 06/20/18 | |
|
|
|
| To give them a little bit of slack, the accent thing is a bit tricky, because the text is not in grammatically correct English, so it would sound a bit strange to read the text in a standard accent. I'm guessing that's how they ended up with the weird accent. The accent would have been less off-putting coming from an Asian or Asian-American actress, though. | |
| reply to this message | reply to first message |
| re: Protest during St. Louis "Jerome Robbins' Broadway" | |
| Posted by: AlanScott 02:16 am EDT 06/20/18 | |
| In reply to: re: Protest during St. Louis "Jerome Robbins' Broadway" - mikem 01:15 am EDT 06/20/18 | |
|
|
|
| One of the funny things is that Tuptim's dialogue and lyrics elsewhere are in pretty much perfect English. It's only in "Small House," which she's written, that she goes all pidgin. Still, she's probably never been outside Burma and Siam. Should she speak English with RP or Standard Stage or General American? What's the correct accent? Perhaps in 2018 it's best for an American production to go as close to General American as possible, but as you say, it's a tough question. |
|
| reply to this message | reply to first message |
| ^ typo - "they *gave it some thought" | |
| Posted by: Singapore/Fling 12:28 am EDT 06/20/18 | |
| In reply to: re: Protest during St. Louis "Jerome Robbins' Broadway" - Singapore/Fling 12:16 am EDT 06/20/18 | |
|
|
|
| And also maybe just hire a third Asian lady for the lead in that dance. | |
| reply to this message | reply to first message |
Time to render: 0.058079 seconds.