Alan H. Green on The Reality of Color-Blind Cast
Noah Golden
Alan H. Green is a singer and actor who has appeared in the original Broadway companies of "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory," "School of Rock," "Sister Act" and "Play On." He has toured with "Mis Saigon" (Internationally), “25th Annual…Spelling Bee,” appeared in regional productions ("Broadway Bounty Hunter," "Freaky Friday") and performed concerts across the country. He is a graduate of Rice University. I recently watched him as a guest on Seth Rudetsky's web show "Stars In The House," where he talked briefly to guest co-host Sierra Boggess about the issues surrounding racially-blind casting. I loved his unique views on the subject and asked him to elaborate on them for onstage readers. Our conversation, held over Zoom, has been edited for length and clarity.
NG: When people talk about color-blind casting, "Hamilton" often gets brought up first. What's your reaction to that?
AG: "Hamilton" knows what it is. Other people mislabel it. "Hamilton" is phenomenal; it's just not color-blind. It's color-aware or color-conscious casting. People say color-blind a lot and rarely is there any color-blind casting actually happening. We can get caught up in semantics, but it's important that we're all on the same page. What coloring up the cast did was put the focus on these early Americans as immigrants because that's what the story was about. It wasn't a random thing. They were aware of the optics and how that affected the storytelling.
In the same season as "Hamilton," I was doing "School of Rock." In that show, they didn't care what color those kids were. They just needed kids who could play instruments and act the parts. My son was a mixed-race kid who looked Black, but his understudies were a Korean kid and a blonde, blue-eyed kid. There were performances because of vacations or whatever, where no child and parent were the same race. As it turns out when that child jumped into my arms and I said, "I love you, I've never been more proud," it just didn't matter. For the most part, "School of Rock" was legit color-blind casting.
Alan H. Green
How would you define color-conscious casting?
Color-conscious just means that we're gonna think outside of the box and make these people a certain race. In "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory," they decided that the Beauregardes would be Black. That's not color-blind, that's just them saying, "Okay, we don't need everybody in the story to be white. We'll make the Beauregardes Black 'cause Americans can be any color." That's more color-aware. We want to live in a world where we don't see color. But we all see color. How that manifests in theater is that, a lot of times, people with good intentions want to non-traditionally or color-blind cast something because they think it doesn't matter to the show. But the truth is, sometimes it matters. It's not just about coloring up your show but being aware of the potential effect it will have on the audience and thinking about how that affects the storytelling.
A lot of times, that second part isn't able to be talked about because you have creative teams that are all one color. They don't have another perspective in the room to say, "Oh, wait a minute, this is gonna hit differently for people of color." For instance, in the revival of "Carousel," it mattered in that story. I think that the creative team approached it wishing it didn't. But it was the elephant in the room. It was a missed opportunity because I thought the production was glorious and beautiful. Had they doubled down on the optics - made the police officer who messed with Billy Bigelow white, for instance – I think that could have been a really healing and redemptive experience for all of us in the audience. Clearly, all those people deserved those parts because of their talent. But the optics of "Carousel" made a difference.
Some shows like "Ragtime" or "Hairspray" require specific roles to be played by people of color, but when a character's race never enters into the story, like in "Dear Evan Hansen," for instance, do you think casting a non-white actor changes the experience?
I think that's when you can do it; if it's a show that's just about a family. But that's the thing about this whole idea of diversity. White people, for the most part, are never playing white people. They're just playing people who happen to be white. They're playing human beings. More often than not, people of color play a person who is their race – the fiery Latina, the smart Asian, the sassy Black friend.
At the end of the day, we want to play human beings who happen to be of color. A lot of authors don't even think of people of color unless they're specifically writing the Black mailman part. All the humans in their story just happen to be white. The librarian in "Matilda" is Jamaican and I was talking to somebody who saw the show and he said, "I didn't understand why she needed to be Jamaican." I just thought, "What is wrong with you? Why does there need to be a justification for her to be Jamaican?" But that's how people think.
Here's another example. I did "Freaky Friday" for Disney and they offered me the role of Heidi Blickenstaff's fiancé Mike. I read the script and was like, "Oh my goodness, this man just happens to be Black." There was not one thing in that story about her marrying a Black man. They just wanted me to do it, so in that telling, Mike would be Black. Two actors shared the role of her son. One was a blond, blue-eyed kid and the other one was an olive-colored kid with frizzy hair. It was so interesting, every time the caramel-colored kid played the son and we did a talk-back, somebody would inevitably say, "Oh, was that you and Heidi's kid? Is that why you're getting married?" The story didn't have that in it at all. It was clearly Heidi's child from her ex-husband. The point is that people always want to explain or justify race, instead of realizing that people of all races fall in love with each other.
One argument I've seen recently is that casting BIPOC in a historical show, like "1776," isn't realistic. What are your thoughts on that?
One time, a director friend was so excited to offer me "Jekyll & Hyde" where they'd cast a Black Lucy. She didn't want me to do it because I was Black, she wanted she just thought I would be great at it. A week later, she had to call me in tears and tell me they had to take the job away because the producer said that, at the turn of the century, it's believable that a whore was Black, but not that an educated doctor was Black. That's the insanity. To me, it's always the same argument.
Guess what else isn't believable - People wouldn't have stood in the street and sang or danced their feelings either. We have already suspended our belief system to buy that. To me, it's that simple. Now, what they could be saying is, 'How did the optics affect the story?' But to say that it just doesn't make sense is just internalized suppression of the Black and Brown artist. It's just a justification to keep us out.
How can Broadway and the theater community at large do better at dealing with these issues?
We're certainly seeing more diversity on the stage, but in order for things to really settle, we gotta get more stories produced, written, and directed by people of color. Not just because representation is important, but because there's a lot of ferociously talented people who deserve the opportunity. Broadway is run by a small club. In order for a white person to achieve the heights of Broadway status, they don't need a Black person. But a Black person definitely would need to partner with a white person, whether it's an agent or a music director or whatever, in order to achieve the same heights. We just got to re-stack the deck in a deliberate way.
But, it's also about having honest conversations. It's not just throwing people of color on stage; it's about getting more people and more perspectives, not just in front of the table but behind the table and up in the big offices writing checks - the theater owners, all that kind of stuff. That's when we’ll be able to make a significant change.
You can learn more about Alan H. Green on his website or follow him on Instagram at @alanhgreen.