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Who Tells Your Story Who Tells Your Story
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Visibility in Absence Visibility in Absence
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Somewhere, a Place for Us Somewhere, a Place for Us
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On Belonging On Belonging
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How Can We Act? How Can We Act?
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Notes Notes
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Bibliography Bibliography
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32 ‘Who Tells Your Story’: A Reflection on Race-Conscious Casting and the Musical
Get accessHannah Thuraisingam Robbins is an assistant professor of popular music and the director of Black Studies at the University of Nottingham, UK. Their research focuses on the interactions between ‘identity’—race, especially Blackness, gender, and queerness—and the Anglophone stage and screen musical. Hannah has contributed chapters to Adapting ‘The Wizard of Oz’: Musical Versions from Baum to MGM and Beyond (Oxford University Press, 2018), The Oxford Handbook of Musical Theatre Screen Adaptations (Oxford University Press, 2019) and Paris and the Musical: The City of Light on Stage and Screen (Routledge, 2021) and has published essays in Studies in Musical Theatre and Arts. Their current projects explore how intersectionality and race are positioned in the stories we tell about musical theatre. https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8812-9615.
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Published:23 October 2023
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Abstract
This think-piece reflects many of the current conversations on race-conscious casting in stage and screen musicals in 2022. Drawing on the author’s lived experience as a ‘mixed-race’ fan and researcher of musicals, they consider how we position the questions we ask about diversity and inclusive casting through racist precedents. They argue that conversations about historical authenticity and inclusion are framed in the assumption that performers who are racialised cannot inhabit British or American roles in historically informed performance. Meanwhile, the monopoly of storytelling that privileges white fantasies has fundamentally shaped sector and audience expectations of commercial musical theatre. Our dialogues about race-conscious casting assume whiteness as the default identity and do not seek to address the absence of our stories and histories in the United Kingdom and the United States. Meanwhile, the underlying influences of racist entertainment in musical theatre history allow creators to mine cultures they don’t belong to for stories—without consequence. Minoritised creatives and performers are forced to accept representations of self and of our cultures through the lens of the other in the name of progressive storytelling.
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