| 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. |
