David Henry Hwang: racial casting has evolved – and so have my opinions

Stage | theguardian.com: I lied to producer Cameron Mackintosh. In 1991, Mackintosh had announced the Broadway transfer of his hit West End musical Miss Saigon, a retelling of Puccini's opera Madama Butterfly set against the backdrop of the Vietnam war. The brilliant Welsh actor Jonathan Pryce would reprise his starring turn as the Engineer, a Eurasian pimp. Many Asian Americans and others regarded Pryce's casting as an example of "yellow face" casting. While black face – a Caucasian actor applying make-up to portray a character of African descent – was generally considered a relic of a more racist past, yellow face (as well as brown face and red face) remains a more common practice to this day.