Minnesota theatre canceling "too white" production of 'Cinderella' is nothing more than moral grandstanding

I did not expect to start my morning by defending a predominately all-white cast who just lost their jobs due to them being a predominately all-white cast, but here we are.

This morning, it was reported that a dinner theatre in Minnesota has decided to cancel their upcoming production of Rodgers & Hammerstein’s Cinderella due to the cast being too white.

“It was 98 percent white,” Chanhassen Dinner Theatres artistic director Michael Brindisi said. “That doesn’t work with what we’re saying we’re going to do.”

Brindisi considered recasting, but ultimately decided to “scrap this and start fresh with a clean slate.” Some of the actors were disappointed, he said, “but every one to a person said they got it and that they respected the very hard decision we had to make.”

According to local news,

After the killing of George Floyd last summer, Brindisi said he realized it was time to “change our culture and make us more diverse and more equitable as a company. We’ve really dug in on diversity, equity and inclusion, the commitment to social justice and getting more diversity into our business across the board.”

The theatre will now perform later this summer The Music Man: a show that serves as a shining beacon for diversity on stage (eye roll).

Here’s my take: it’s dumb. It’s incredibly unfair to the actors who were previously cast. Even more than that, it’s moral grandstanding that is even more insulting to BIPOC performers. And when looking at the timeline of events, it makes me question Chanhassen Dinner Theatres’ motives.

Let’s start at the beginning of this debacle. Initial EPA auditions for Rodgers & Hammerstein's Cinderella occurred on Nov 4 & 5, 2019. The plan was that rehearsals would start in August of 2020 with opening night on September 11, 2020. Then COVID-19 happened and the theatre shut down operations, pushing back the opening of all their productions.

In the midst of the COVID-19 shutdowns, George Floyd was murdered in Minneapolis, MN on May 25, 2020, by Minneapolis police officers. His death sparked widespread protests and long-needed conversations about race relations. In response, many theatre organizations pledged changes to their operations.

From hiring BIPOC staff to re-examining their casting practices, many have promised that they will make more conscious efforts to increase BIPOC representation once their resume operations.

I’m all for that. But what Mr. Brindisi fails to understand is that this move is not helpful in the progress to better representation on stage; it actually puts a bigger target on the backs of BIPOC performers and creates unfair questions about their potential casting at Chanhassen Dinner Theatres going forward.

As an Asian-American, I do believe that theatres should take steps for better inclusion going forward. However, they absolutely should not fire an entire cast (who were hired seven months before George Floyd was murdered) simply due to the color of their skin and the director feeling guilty about casting the show that way.

By canceling a production with a cast he hired, he’s treating the performers like a problematic tweet from his past while grandstanding he’s changed for the better.

Actors who have been unemployed for a year deserve way better than that.

But Mr. Brindisi might have opened a bigger issue for the theatre: telling a cast member that they are losing their job because they are white could also be a violation of both Minnesota and Federal employment discrimination laws. Given that this is an equity theatre, Actors’ Equity might also have a problem with this as well.

While some of these actors are able to be in future Chanhassen Dinner Theatres productions later this year, others aren’t, which means they lost their job due to their race.

What should Mr. Brindisi have done instead? Perform the show cast the way it was, and then make changes for future productions. Whatever plans their new diversity consultant, Kelli Foster Warder, devised should absolutely be adopted for future productions. I also wonder if Mr. Brindisi is listening to Ms. Warder’s plans because I highly doubt she would have advised this.

There were 1,000 ways Michael Brindisi and Chanhassen Dinner Theatres could have handled this and they chose the absolute worst option.

CORRECTION: The theater is replacing this show with Footloose not The Music Man. The Music Man is listed for later in the year.