AIDA

I grew up in a town in Northern Michigan that had very little diversity. A predominately white town, which led to my high school of about 1,500 students being predominately white. We had a thriving music department, and so my choir director liked to do new and popular shows for our musical every year. My senior year, he chose Aida. It is a rock musical, set in Africa, about a Nubian princess, Aida, who is captured and enslaved by Egyptians. Aida and the Egyptian Captain fall in love, though he is engaged to the Egyptian Princess. An interesting choice for our group. We had a big enough group that the show was double cast. However, even though we had a very large group, we only had three African American students. Two of them were sisters, and they both played Aida. The rest of the Nubians were played by white students, including Aida’s father, the Nubian King. Imagine a group of white high school students from Northern Michigan singing The Gods Love Nubia. Here is a clip of it, if you are unfamiliar with the musical:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VmgG6CjnNFI

We did NOT do black face, thank God. But we were told to use bronzer, and most of us wore scarves over our hair. Even as a high school student, not immersed in a diverse culture, the choice of this musical seemed a bit absurd. Now looking back on it, it was not just a bit of absurd; it was absolutely ridiculous. Our version had to be color-blind cast, because we simply didn’t have the choice. I take that back, there was a choice: we shouldn’t have done it. It is a great musical, and we gave it as much heart and soul as we, a bunch of angsty white teenagers from Northern Michigan, could, but don’t do it unless you have all the people to pull it off. It was a color-blind casting gone wrong!

            With that being said, I think there are many examples of successful color-blind casting. I think Shakespeare is a great example of this. There is a lot of freedom to play with Shakespeare: color-blind casting, gender-bending, switching time periods. Which is why I think Shakespeare is still done so often; his plays often deal with issues that are still relevant and are issues that cross barriers of race, heritage, struggle, and time. Romeo and Juliet is a wonderful example of a play that almost begs to be color-blind cast. Originally set in Verona with two feuding Italian families, but for most of us now-a-days, two feuding Italian families doesn’t really hit home. It is a still a heart wrenching, tragic story, but moving that feud to something closer to home allows the story to have significantly more impact. Aida, mentioned above, is a Romeo and Juliet like story between Nubians and Egyptians. West Side Story is a contemporary musical version of R&J pitting a white gang and a Puerto Rican gang in New York against each other. What would hit closest down here in the South? What would the reaction be to a version of R&J set during the Civil Rights Movement with the Montagues and Capulets divided black and white? An age-old play can have very different affects when brought into a new context, especially when that context is very much a part of our country’s history.