Theater History and Mysteries
The deepest dives you can find anywhere into the history and backstory of the great musical productions. Dense content...for people who aren't. And, I’ll never miss an opportunity to pursue any mystery, bizarre coincidence, improbable event, or supernatural suggestion along the way because, in the words of Dirk Gentley, it is all connected.
You can contact me directly at theaterhistorypodcast@gmail.com
Released every other Tuesday.
Music by Jon Bruschke and Andrew Howat, arranged, performed, and recorded by Andrew Howat.
Check out the interview on Musical Theater Radio, episode 404: https://www.musicaltheatreradio.com/podcast
Theater History and Mysteries
Hamilton -- Is it cool for actors of color to play old white guys? The case FOR multiracial casting. (Hamilton 8 of 12, episode 45)
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Lin-Manuel Miranda was not the first person to pursue multi-racial casting to make a political point. Heather S. Nathans of Tufts university shares the history:
“On March 5, 1858, around the first anniversary of the Dred Scott decision and on the anniversary of the Boston Massacre, African American abolitionist William Cooper Nell re-staged the massacre as a tableau vivant at Boston’s Faneuil Hall. Nell did it to commemorate the Scott decision and to protest the recent ruling by local Boston authorities who refused to declare Crispus Attucks the first victim of the Revolution. Nell’s restaging of the massacre used all black performers to protest their systematic erasure from the history of the Revolution. It also forecast a day when actors of color might rise up and claim their true rights and privileges.”
Nathans makes a direct connection to Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton; the quote continues: “In that, Nell resembles Miranda, who has said that one of the reasons he became a playwright was because there were no parts for him. Both men literally and figuratively wrote themselves into the archive and the repertoire.”
But, whereas Nell’s staging was all about slavery, Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton was not. It was more about…Hamilton.
And that might be the central question for Hamilton. By casting historically white people with actors of color, Miranda has put race front and center of the production about a founder. But, as we have explored in our past episodes, the show doesn’t entirely avoid race questions, but they are hardly a central point of the plot and, by design, no part of the character development.
What happens when you make race a key feature of the casting but you then don’t take on central questions of race, including slavery. Does that work? Is it cool to play Geo Wash with a black man? Alex Ham with a Puerto Rican/NewYorikan? Does it make the show better or worse, and is it s net step forward for racial progress or not?