There have of course been all-black theatre ensembles in this country, as well as dance companies, and at least one full-fledged opera company. I’m not quite sure why they are legal, since they are clearly discriminatory, and if they are legal though discriminatory, then I assume a white equivalent would be also. Artistically, any ethnically determined theatre (or performance company of any sort) risks a narrowness of range. But it also promises a stylistic coherence, a shared idiom, and a commonality of cultural understanding in approaching its core repertory. In any case, I’m not against such companies. Neither, however, do I fully agree with Wilson. Even though I believe quality (in this context, we could say “accuracy”) must always take precedence over diversity in the arts, I also do not see how talented artists of color can be excluded from all the riches (in both senses) of the EuroAmerican canons in theatre, dance, and opera. Opera, in fact, has been out ahead of theatre in that respect: the New York City Opera cast African-American singers in leading roles beginning in 1946 with Todd Duncan as Tonio, and from the time of Anderson’s debut the Met has followed suit.^(I) I believe there are two principal reasons for this. One is that opera exists on a different level of reality than spoken theatre. Even operas that are veristic in style and/or less reliant on song per se than most of the standard repertory (this would include much of 20th-Century opera) is still a step beyond the most highly stylized spoken theatre simply by reason of its music, and thus, it would seem, not as dependent as spoken theatre on some of the verisimilitudes for credibility and emotional involvement. The second is that opera’s demand for superior voices of classical cultivation governs the priorities when it comes to casting. Opera audiences have always been open to serious concessions among the verisimilitudes in exchange for a great voice of the appropriate sort. One such concession has been the gradual acceptance of singers of color in roles not of color, even though this does not pass a basic first-impression visual reality check. We don’t like to admit it, but the burden of the double standard is there, just as it was for James Earl Jones as Lenny. And we cannot ask that every actor be a Jones, or every singer a Tibbett.

Some time back, in discussing the Met’s last production of Otello, I groused “We used to have this stuff called makeup” (see my post of 1/18/19). I won’t recapitulate the rest of my grousing here, but it’s obvious that Otello is Exhibit A in the category of great operas about race, and that to send its protagonist out there with his white face hanging out is to announce that it’s not necessary to believe the first thing it is necessary to believe, and therefore not necessary to believe anything. But it’s becoming impossible to even raise this question. “Blackface!” will be the kneejerk choral response (or, quite frequently in opera, from Madama Butterfly and Turandot to The Mikado, “Yellowface!”). For an extreme stance on this usage, see Colorblind Casting and Its Complications by Maya Phillips, a poet and writer on popular culture (NYT, 7/11/20). Except for a couple of high-quality movies, most of what she’s writing about (“. . . from ‘Hamilton‘ to ‘The Simpsons‘”) is not material I’m invested in, but the principles she is trying to establish extend to everything in EuroAmerican theatre, spoken, danced, or sung. Here’s a key statement of Phillips’, quite neo-Wilsonian: “Any casting of a performer in the role of a race other than their own assumes that the artist step into the lived experience of a person whose culture isn’t theirs, and so every choice made in that performance will inevitably be an approximation. It is an act of minstrelsy” (emphasis mine).