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Washington Post

DEI in Broadway theaters is beyond Trump's reach

Richard Zoglin is a New York-based writer and critic. The announcement of Tony Awards nominees last week included one for 'Pirates! The Penzance Musical' as best musical revival. For me, that antic update of the Gilbert and Sullivan operetta, with its jazzy New Orleans vibe, featured the signature moment of the Broadway season. All the cast members — a rainbow mixture of races, ethnicities, body shapes and sizes — face the audience and (cribbing a song from 'HMS Pinafore,' with rewritten lyrics) deliver a rousing closing anthem: 'We're All From Someplace Else.' The message is impossible to miss. As the Trump administration wages war against diversity, equity and inclusion programs, everywhere from federal agencies and universities to law firms and even the Kennedy Center, the Broadway theater world may well be the last place in America where DEI is not under fire. Indeed, it is still being celebrated, loud and proud. Look at the chorus line for almost any new Broadway musical and you'll see a carefully assembled mix of Black, White and Asian faces. Interracial couples are no longer the exception onstage, but seem more like the norm. Rare is the revival of a classic play, whether by Shakespeare or Arthur Miller, that doesn't feature 'nontraditional' casting in at least one of the major roles. This season we've had a Black Mama Rose (in the revival of 'Gypsy'); a Black Betty Boop (in a new musical based on the vintage cartoon character); and a Black 'shiksa goddess' in Jason Robert Brown's musical two-hander about a failed marriage, 'The Last Five Years.' Broadway's answer to Trump's crackdown on immigrants? 'Real Women Have Curves,' a spirited musical about Latina seamstresses in Los Angeles, circa 1987, trying to stay one step ahead of the immigration cops. Never mind 'drag queen story hour': In 'Oh, Mary!,' a raucous comedy hit, drag performer Cole Escola plays Mary Todd Lincoln as a foulmouthed alcoholic who cares less about the Civil War (or her husband, Abe, who's having sex with his footman) than becoming a cabaret star. Little chance that one will wind up at the Kennedy Center. Follow Trump's second term Follow As anyone who has watched a Tony Awards telecast in recent years can attest, Broadway is in many respects another country. Acceptance speeches celebrating diversity, LGBTQ pride and 'body positivity' abound. Luckily for Broadway, Donald Trump isn't much of a theatergoer. (He claims he 'never liked 'Hamilton' very much' — though there's no evidence he has actually seen the show.) Nor is Broadway nearly as vulnerable to a vengeful president as, say, a TV network subject to FCC oversight, or a local arts institution dependent on federal grants. It still can largely march to its own drummer. But you don't have to be a MAGA crusader against 'woke' culture to be just a little uneasy at the way the theater world now seems encased in a bubble of like-minded creators, critics and fans: a self-feeding loop of virtue signaling and moral certitude. Good intentions don't necessarily make good drama. (See — or rather, don't see — 'Good Night and Good Luck,' George Clooney's lumbering play about Ed Murrow's takedown of Red-baiting Sen. Joe McCarthy.) Diversity casting can often be confusing for an audience. Worse, it's a topic seemingly too sensitive to even be discussed by most critics and others who cover theater. Audra McDonald, for instance, won rave reviews (and is favored to win a Tony — her seventh) as the first Black actress on Broadway to play the domineering stage mother in 'Gypsy.' But the casting (her daughters are also played by Black actresses) creates an odd disconnect: the unlikely prospect that a Black entertainment family would have any realistic hope of making it big in the segregated vaudeville world of the 1920s and '30s. Similarly, in this season's revival of Thornton Wilder's 'Our Town,' the casting of Black actors as one of the two central families introduced a nagging ambiguity. Was this simply color-blind casting, or are we to assume that Black and White neighbors (soon linked by marriage) would not have raised an eyebrow in a small New England town circa 1900? Diversity casting, of course, is to be welcomed; it has given talented Black and other minority actors a shot at major roles that have been denied them for decades, often introducing new perspectives and interpretations. The real problem is the cone of silence that seems to prevent any discussion of how such choices can affect an audience's reaction — or, in many cases, to even acknowledge the nontraditional casting at all. In shows like these, Broadway is presenting an idealistic, aspirational view of America, where racial differences are miraculously ignored or overcome. It's not all that different, I fear, from the complacent insularity that allowed Democrats to ignore the rise of Trumpism, or what now seem like the excesses of the cancel-culture era that helped enable its return.