Performing in a Practically All-White 'Hairspray' Was As Bad As It Sounds
Lora Korpar
Recently, the creators of the hit musical “Hairspray” announced that from now on, the roles in the musical must be cast “as written.” Gone are the days when non-black actors could play iconic roles like Motormouth Maybelle and Seaweed.
And as someone who once starred in a mostly-white production of the show, I say it’s about time!
I grew up in a predominantly white suburb of Chicago and went to an almost all-white middle school. When I was in seventh grade, I took a musical theater class. The idea of the class was to pick a musical, spend the trimester rehearsing it, and do a performance for our families at the end of the class.
My teacher gave us two options and we had to vote on which one to do. And for some reason, she decided that the best two musicals to pick for a class of almost all white kids (and the three non-white kids all being of Southeast Asian or Middle Eastern descent) were “Hairspray” or “West Side Story.”
After deciding we didn’t have enough boys to do “West Side Story,” the class chose “Hairspray.”
And so the nightmare began.
We had to cut the musical down because we didn’t have enough class time to do it all and my teacher decided that she was going to cut most of the race plot and focus on the body image aspect of the story instead.
Yes, she decided to cut out the “race part” in a musical almost entirely about race relations in the 1960s!
The character of Motormouth Maybelle was completely cut out and Seaweed was played by a white boy.
Now, this is problematic enough, but also my teacher decided to focus the show on body image despite the fact that all of us were skinny. This meant that all the girls playing Tracy stuffed pillows under their clothes as makeshift fat suits, which is a whole other incredibly horrifying situation that I could write a separate article about.
I thank my lucky stars every day that I was just in the ensemble and thus didn’t play a black character or wear a “fat suit.” I’m ashamed enough that I was in this production at all.
Of course, the production was a hot mess and none of us was really happy we were in it after it was over.
I tell this story to point out the fact that not only did no one in our class speak up about how problematic the whole situation was, but our teacher actively encouraged it.
We were 12 or 13 years old, which should have been old enough for us to realize how bad this was, but the argument can be made that we didn’t know how offensive and damaging what we did was, especially those who had lived their whole lives in a sheltered, predominantly white environment.
However, my teacher was a grown woman pushing onto children the idea that white people can take a story about black empowerment, take it for themselves, and completely warp it and make a mockery of the whole thing.
As an adult encouraging this performance, she was teaching us that this behavior is okay. Whether she was aware of it or not, she was teaching us that black perspectives aren’t important.
I’ve seen a lot of people complaining about the “Hairspray” creators’ decision, saying things like “How are people supposed to learn about race in predominantly white communities if they can’t perform shows like this?”
My answer is you learn about race by opening up your ears and actually listening to people of color, whether that be people in your community or on the internet. There is no reason for white people to try to tell that story themselves. It’s not our story to tell.
And the last thing educators should be doing is encouraging these kinds of productions. It’s productions like the ones I was in that encourage racial insensitivity and general apathy toward anyone who’s different from them.
It’s way more than some fun music and dance numbers. It shapes the way we think whether we know it or not. So let’s step aside and let underrepresented voices be heard.