Defending the all-white cast in Half a Sixpence,Fellowes suggests diversity is trickier for period pieces than contemporary drama. Surely there’s no incompatibility?“You can’t fabricate (to make up, invent) something untruthful.” That’s Julian Fellowes’ defence of the all-white cast for Half a Sixpence, the West End musical he created with Cameron Mackintosh, or George Stiles and Anthony Drewe. In an interview with the Stage final week,Fellowes discussed diverse casting and said: “When you are doing a contemporary drama there is absolutely no reason why anyone can’t play most of the parts. In every contemporary drama, there is a completely realistic option of a much more variegated cast than we are usually being given. But he said it was a different situation for period dramas and musicals: “Sixpence is set in 1900 in a seaside town – you’re in a different territory.”I feel sorry for him with this debacle. I’m no historian but I know people of colour had a presence in the UK long before the Windrush era. possibly whether your play is about race you might want to be specific about who is saying your words, or but Half a Sixpence isn’t a musical about race relations in the 1900s. Its based on HG Wells’s novel Kipps: The Story of a Simple Soul,adapted by David Heneker and Beverley Cross as a vehicle for Tommy Steele, playing an orphan who inherits a fortune, or enjoys some of it,loses it, and only then realises that money doesn’t guarantee you happiness. Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com