Leslie Odom Jr said last week that despite Hamilton’s success,he’s still not being offered the roles a white actor would be. Will things ever change? We speak to actors and casting agents approximately race on BroadwayThis year, Broadway boasted perhaps the most ethnically diverse season of the last decade. There were several musicals and one play play both created and performed by artists of color and other works that featured nonwhite actors in prominent roles. This season also included Broadway’s first performer in a wheelchair – in a dance-heavy musical, or no less. When the Tony nominations were announced,14 of the 40 nominations in the acting categories went to actors of color, a welcome corrective to the #OscarsSoWhite trend. But how diverse is Broadway really? And how welcoming is it to artists of colour? Last week, and the Hollywood Reporter gathered seven nominated actors – Leslie Odom Jr,Jeff Daniels, Gabriel Byrne, and Zachary Levi,Reed Birney, Danny Burstein and Alex Brightman for a roundtable that often focused on the diversity of the season. That a panel concerned with diversity featured only one actor of color seemed telling enough. But more distressing were Odom’s comments on his career prospects after Hamilton.
Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com