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Wednesday, April 13, 2022
Broadway-Bound ‘1776’ Announces Female, Non-Binary And Trans Cast
Deadline: The Broadway-bound revival of the musical 1776, which begins a pre-New York engagement at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, MA, next month, has announced a cast comprised fully of performers who identify as female, non-binary and trans.
3 comments:
Philip Winter
said...
1776 is such an iconic musical and I’ll never forget when my freshmen high school history teacher put it on to analyze how the declaration of independence and continental congress was formed. To say the least, 1776 represents an incredibly skewed representation of history, but this new version seems incredibly promising. Every signer of The Declaration of Independence was a white male, and each signer except John Adams also owned slaves. The Declaration of Independence is often looked at as one of the founding documents of our nation, but I believe it is important to look at it more with a critical eye and outlook. Therefore, I think it is absolutely genius to remake it with a Female, Non-Binary, and Trans Cast. This show hopefully will shed light on all the sexist and racist beliefs that were perpetrated by this document. Silence is violence and it is no coincidence that this document boasted about freedom yet did not mention anywhere the systems of systematic enslavement happening across the nation being done by the very signers. While I loved Hamilton and thought it was quite groundbreaking to incorporate such a diverse cast to talk about this period, I also disliked it as it did not address the many issues that occurred during this period of history. In fact, I have seen numerous shows including Bridgeton that have attempted to almost rewrite history by making it appear more diverse when the reality is that people of color have been systematically oppressed for centuries and that stories need to stop focusing on the white elitist history and more on the everyday stories of people at that point in time.
This is awesome, I hope they are able to continue having a non cis-male cast if it makes it to Broadway. The one thing I was disappointed about was, in the very last sentence of the article, the author reveals that the design team does not follow this same pattern. Three of the designers and one of the two directors are cis-male (according to a quick look at their social media pages). To me, this is an instance of the larger conversation about the discrepancy of representation onstage and offstage. It is true here at CMU’s School of Drama: our design and production students are not as racially diverse as our performance counterparts. While it may be difficult to have everyone involved in a production not be cis-men, I hope that in the future there will be productions where everyone involved will identify as female, non-binary or trans.
This is certainly a step in the right direction, and I’m extremely excited to see if this starts happening at more and more productions across the country. 1776 is an iconic musical about the founding of the US, one I grew up watching with my political science loving mother, and to see these very traditional roles being gender bent and entirely female or gender non conforming is quite inspirational to me. One of the things that concerns me is whether or not this casting will stick around to Broadway. While this might stick, there is concern that because this casting is only for the pre-Broadway American Repertory Theatre that once it gets to Broadway that the gender bending won’t stick around. I think that this casting style staying for Broadway is critical to bringing this show forward to the modern era. We frequently have to wrestle with how to bring old productions into the current cultural zeitgeist and values, and this is one of the ways to do it.
3 comments:
1776 is such an iconic musical and I’ll never forget when my freshmen high school history teacher put it on to analyze how the declaration of independence and continental congress was formed. To say the least, 1776 represents an incredibly skewed representation of history, but this new version seems incredibly promising. Every signer of The Declaration of Independence was a white male, and each signer except John Adams also owned slaves. The Declaration of Independence is often looked at as one of the founding documents of our nation, but I believe it is important to look at it more with a critical eye and outlook. Therefore, I think it is absolutely genius to remake it with a Female, Non-Binary, and Trans Cast. This show hopefully will shed light on all the sexist and racist beliefs that were perpetrated by this document. Silence is violence and it is no coincidence that this document boasted about freedom yet did not mention anywhere the systems of systematic enslavement happening across the nation being done by the very signers. While I loved Hamilton and thought it was quite groundbreaking to incorporate such a diverse cast to talk about this period, I also disliked it as it did not address the many issues that occurred during this period of history. In fact, I have seen numerous shows including Bridgeton that have attempted to almost rewrite history by making it appear more diverse when the reality is that people of color have been systematically oppressed for centuries and that stories need to stop focusing on the white elitist history and more on the everyday stories of people at that point in time.
This is awesome, I hope they are able to continue having a non cis-male cast if it makes it to Broadway. The one thing I was disappointed about was, in the very last sentence of the article, the author reveals that the design team does not follow this same pattern. Three of the designers and one of the two directors are cis-male (according to a quick look at their social media pages). To me, this is an instance of the larger conversation about the discrepancy of representation onstage and offstage. It is true here at CMU’s School of Drama: our design and production students are not as racially diverse as our performance counterparts. While it may be difficult to have everyone involved in a production not be cis-men, I hope that in the future there will be productions where everyone involved will identify as female, non-binary or trans.
This is certainly a step in the right direction, and I’m extremely excited to see if this starts happening at more and more productions across the country. 1776 is an iconic musical about the founding of the US, one I grew up watching with my political science loving mother, and to see these very traditional roles being gender bent and entirely female or gender non conforming is quite inspirational to me. One of the things that concerns me is whether or not this casting will stick around to Broadway. While this might stick, there is concern that because this casting is only for the pre-Broadway American Repertory Theatre that once it gets to Broadway that the gender bending won’t stick around. I think that this casting style staying for Broadway is critical to bringing this show forward to the modern era. We frequently have to wrestle with how to bring old productions into the current cultural zeitgeist and values, and this is one of the ways to do it.
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