* Ben Brantley wrote in The New York Times that “‘Hamilton’ is, among other things, about who owns history, who gets to be in charge of the narrative.”
I don’t think I’ve ever read or heard anything about the narrative like this in public. I know people discuss it on blogs like this. But it is brought up in a negative manner and attributed to the diabolical elite who control it. And those of us discussing the so called narrative are usually dismissed as conspiracy types.
This guy however appears to doing a touchdown dance on the rest of us. He openly acknowledges the narrative and its use in pushing his worldview. I guess we are no longer conspiracy theorists.
* In practice, Broadway casting is race-neutral except for roles where whites are excluded. For example, Charles Schultz was miffed, IIRC, when a black actor was cast as one of the Peanuts characters on Broadway, but that was explained as race neutral casting.
Another example, when Aida was on Broadway, the title role went to a black actress in the original cast (although the other two leads went to whites), and in subsequent castings Aida was black.
I think the cast of the Lion King might be all black.
But, yeah: I’m not sure how it’s helpful to ban specifying race in the casting calls if they’re not going to hire actors of their disfavored races anyway.
* Just a few weeks ago, President Obama also called attention to the symbolic import of the show’s casting choices, saying, “With a cast as diverse as America itself…”
In Obama’s shallow, hate-filled mind, a cast that mostly excludes white people is a cast as diverse as America itself.
Broadway, of course, should be perfectly free to cast people of whatever race they want, but only if they leave producers of shows meant to have white casts free to cast white people. There was a big kerfuffle when the producers of The Hobbit asked for extras to be white, so Peter Jackson wound up throwing in a few colored people in the Lake Town scenes in that movie, meant to be set in a (mythological) ancient Britain. Then they insist on filling other shows set in ancient England (“Merlin”) with “diverse” folk, and they even cast a black woman to play an English queen in The Hollow Crown series of Shakespearean plays.
