OnStage Blog: Imagine that you’re a Black performer in Melbourne, Australia and you see that a local theatre is preparing to perform Little Shop of Horrors.
Even more encouraging, the theatre included a beautiful statement of wanting people from all backgrounds, gender, size, and ability, to come and audition. So you do.
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I found the Beaumaris Theatre Company's apology incredibly infuriating. Firstly, it failed to recognize the harm in not casting an explicitly bipoc show, which there are very little of in the theatre world, with bipoc actors. The theatre industry already has very little bipoc representation, so taking away some of the only certain opportunities for bipoc actors on stage is detrimental. Even more frustrating, the company did not seem to understand why white washing Little Shop of Horrors was a bad move. They never acknowledged why it was a mistake, just that is was a mistake. They even was as far to try to justify their mistake, by claiming the casting was made just based on talent, implying the white actors they auditioned were just better, another harmful sentiment. The whole response felt incredibly performative, as the director used it as an opportunity to "call others to action". One cannot ask others to use their mistake as an opportunity to learn when they have not even done so themself.
If a blog can break down your inept performance of inclusion, you know you've messed up. Beaumaris Theatre should have been able to understand what they were doing was wrong. They should listen to the affected community, and even listen to the casted actors who said that they were okay giving up their roles in place for people of color. In it of itself, that is more telling about the company than anything else. It just goes to show that even if a company puts out a social media letter to the community about how inclusive they strive to become, they've got to enact that inclusion. It was literally written out for them to cast black actors in those roles and they couldn't follow that? Their responses to the backlash sound empty and don't even apologize explicitly for their mistake, rather they just offer up how they only casted white people. Like the article says, if the company did their due diligence they wouldn't have been put in this situation. We can only hope this is a learning experience for the casting directors and it won't happen again.
As an echo of the article, once the controversy began more should have been done to right the harm done than making a half-assed apology and canceling the show. It's mildly infuriating that they had the audacity to make a call to action in favor of diverse casting in their apology when instead of setting a trend of righting their wrongs they chose to cancel the show and deprive deserving actors the possibility of getting these roles. When I first read the article I found parts of it a bit harsh until they got to the point where they expressed that if the cast they wanted wasn't possible to get...don't do the show. As someone who has never been involved in the choosing of a season, I sometimes forget that that is an option. The attitude shouldn't be "do the best with what we have" it should be "do the show and the playwright justice."
Considering how explicitly the theatre’s casting call called for “First Nations People, People of Colour, culturally and linguistically diverse actors as well as people of any gender, sexuality, body type, and ability to audition for Little Shop of Horrors”, the resultant cast is suspiciously adherent to the status quo of what a performer should look like--white. In addition to this, considering the context of the show itself, this is even worse. Chiffon, Ronnette, and Crystal are all explicitly African-American. The conversation around colour-conscious casting is important. It is important to actively acknowledge and include non-white actors, particularly First Nations People and Black people in Australia, of all places. Colour-blind casting often disregards existing inequities within theatre, whereas colour-conscious casting attempts to accommodate for those inequities. Clearly, Beaumaris Theatre Inc’s cast claimed to be the latter, but ended up, according to their statement, casting for talent and because they didn’t account for their own biases, ended up casting only white people. I hope Beaumaris Theatre keeps to their word and going forward, emphasizes transparency and accountability, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they didn’t.
It shocks me to see how white washing the entire cast still occurs nowadays. Even more shocking was to read Beaumaris Theatre’s apology. The apology is insincere and reading it, I don’t feel like they truly realised why their casting was so inappropriate. Rather, I feel that they are trying to justify their mistakes, which is ridiculous because they purposely ignored the licensing material and casted BIPOC characters as white. Although I do believe the casted actors are extremely talented, Beaumaris Theatre should have been more thoughtful with their decisions. Also, to just cancel the entire show is a terrible move because it brings more damage to the casted actors by taking away their source of income. As for the BIPOC who auditioned but not casted, cancelling the show also means that they have lost the chance to participate in “Little Shop of Horrors” altogether. What the Beaumaris Theatre committee should have done is recast those wrongly-casted characters and perhaps even go as far as to change the crew to bring more diversity and equity into their productions.
The apologies from Beaumaris Theatre Company hold almost no weight after their hypocritical actions. Weak, vague statements about inclusivity, followed by whitewashing a production that has iconic Black characters is inexcusable. It goes beyond the character description, the lines and the lyrics of Crystal, Chiffon, and Ronette revolve around the experience of being a marginzalied individual, and include phrasing derived from AAVE. Not to mention the music sung by Audrey II (who should be easier to cast since the actor will likely be singing from offstage). I worked on this production this summer, and our director even said that she wanted to make sure to even hire a POC choreographer because the urchins are the primary characters who dance in that show. The frustrations we hear from BIPOC individuals are often that promises are made, but not kept, and it's no surprise when things like this continue to occur in the theatre world.
A point in this article that stood out to me was why was this company doing this show if they had any doubts about diversity in the first place why did they do the show in the first place? If you are not confident that you will be able to cast a BIPOC actor in a BIPOC role, the show should not even be on your radar. This is even more problematic when you think about the Black Lives Matter movement that gained traction in June of 2020 because of the systematic issues that were brought to our attention. Theatre companies should be doing, now more than ever, more to create representation and empower BIPOC individuals. In addition to this, the apology was half-hearted which leads me to believe that they weren’t actually sorry they just were sorry they got caught. They do not acknowledge that this directly affected the BIPOC community which is maddening. There are plenty of shows that tell the stories of white people, they should have picked one that they could do. Or, alternatively, done more to engage the BIPOC community and created a cast that they could be proud of.
Scrolling through Newsquiz, the article caught my eye as I had heard about a Hairspray production just like this. A few years ago (in 2012), Plano Children’s Theatre in Texas produced an “all-white production” of Hairspray which arguably defeated the purpose and obstructed the intentions Mark O'Donnell and Thomas Meehan had when writing the piece. The same could, therefore, be said for the cast of Little Shop of Horrors. Now, despite Beaumaris Theatre Company's apology and decision to cancel the production, controversies arise as producers failed to consider any alternative to scrapping the project in its entirety. In fact, the article points out that various actors committed to willingly resigning their roles in hopes that black performers could “take their spot”. Rather than hearing them out, however, the committee shut down any possibility to continue the season and put in the work to correct the issue within 48 hours of the controversy.
What a disappointment. It is so easy to not cast white people in roles intended for black people, and yet so many theaters seem to struggle with this concept. Writer Chris Peterson gives really solutions to this seemingly difficult problem. Beaumaris could have not picked this show in the first place, if they weren’t going to actually prioritize casting it as intended. They could have not given callbacks to white actors for the roles written for black performers. The way their apologies are written, it makes seem like this casting was a passive accident. As if they went through the entire audition process and didn’t realize until the end that the entire cast was white. This was a conscious choice made by the production at every step in the audition process to continue moving forward rather than stop, acknowledge they had no black actors to play these roles, and go back to the community to find those actors. The director then puts out a call to action for other theater groups to include diversity rep. He is not in a position to be making any kind of decrees. That is not how apologies work.
The anger expressed by the author of this article is both valid and shared with me as well as I’m sure several others in the performing arts industry. I never quite understood why theaters would even propose producing a production that they aren’t able to cast. For the entire cast of ‘Little Shop of Horrors’ to be completely white is incredibly disrespectful to the talented actresses that would have been amazing for these roles, and it is ridiculously disrespectful to the author who made it clear that these roles should be played by Black individuals. Beaumaris Theatre Committee’s “apologies” even made it worse! All I read while reading these letters were excuses. “We tried but we just couldn’t do it.” In the words of the author of the article. That is simply just lazy. It’s lazy and incredibly hard to believe that they couldn’t find three talented, Black actresses to play Crystal, Ronnette, and Chiffon. People always use the excuse that there just weren’t any people of color fit for the roles, but I can’t and won’t accept that. There is no way you can tell me there isn’t a single person of color talented enough for a specific role and have me believe it. And even if there wasn’t, then DON’T PUT ON THE SHOW. I hate when high schools put on these incredible shows that require diverse casts even when they know they don’t have the demographic to fit the cast. It’s disgusting, and I’m angry. Beaumaris Theatre, as well as all those who believe they did nothing wrong, needs to do better.
Whitewashing is a massive problem in the theater industry, but I think this specific case is an especially telling instance of how performative activism in theater can be. I believe that i this company truly did not have enough BIPOC actors to cast this show properly, they never should have put on Little Shop in the first place. It’s performative, transparently pandering, and infuriating to do shows that call for diversity in order to win woke points as a theater even when you cannot fill the requirements for that show. Furthermore, instead of taking responsibility for the mistakes made, or making any attempt to right said wrongs (which they had full capability to do), the theater simply cancelled the show they were under fire for. A theater that would rather eliminate a show from their season entirely than put any effort into casting a single BIPOC actor is a theater that will undoubtedly continue this racist cycle.
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