After he did hamilton with blacks, the creator tried to do mlk with whites, but the black folks got angry and shut it down.
Kind of ironic ain't it.
Are you talking about this? LMM wasn't in any way involved though.
https://time.com/4107990/white-actor-martin-luther-king-jr-mountaintop-katori-hall/
In a Monday
essay for The Root, dramatist Katori Hall writes about the anger and disappointment she felt after learning that a Kent State University production of
The Mountaintop, a fictionalized account of King's last night before his assassination, double-cast the role of King with both a white and black actor when it ran earlier this year.
The production's director, Michael Oatman, who is black,
said in an interview on his university's website, "I truly wanted to explore the issue of racial ownership and authenticity … I wanted to see how the words rang differently or indeed the same, coming from two different actors, with two different racial backgrounds."
Hall, who says she eventually spoke with Oatman, writes that casting a white actor in the role excluded the few opportunities for black experiences to be told in theater. "The casting of a white King is committing yet another erasure of the black body," she writes. "Sure, it might be in the world of pretend, but it is disrespectful nonetheless, especially to a community that has rare moments of witnessing itself, both creatively and literally, in the world."
She also pushed back against the idea that casting a white actor in the role of MLK or a black character was equivalent to casting non-white actors in traditionally white roles. "Having white actors take on roles written specifically for actors of color will never reset the historical record that 75% of roles cast in the American theater are for white men," she wrote.
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Hall says she has now added a clause to the play's licensing agreement dictating that both roles be played by black actors unless she has given approval for other casting choices.
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So it is a little bit of "rules for thee, not for me" but in this case, it was a specific play presumably owned by Hall, so she might(?) have say in how it is put on. So the play director is essentially recasting racially to highlight the events, but the playwright claims ownership of the experience, plus she dredges up the usual "past sins" of white people in marginalizing her people and feels there needs to be 'reparations through casting'. I'm curious just how black the actors playing MLK gotta be, is she using the paper bag test as her criteria? MLK and his message is gonna persist through the ages, I think, and it's only a matter of time before we get something like this
where it's pretty unanimous that the right actor CRUSHED the role even if he needed a little movie magic to better resemble the man. Though he is half Indian though his father, from the same area as Gandhi no less, so is it another example of "close enough with a little help"?
Or is he ok for that but not for this?
Anyway, I'm a proponent of authenticity in story and casting plays a big part in that. Either stop making european derived historical films or start casting them appropriately, I say. Nolan could have just done "the Odyssey, in spaaaaaaaaace" if he wanted to tell the story but have a more diverse casting. Given the apparently minimal amount of actual historical accuracy in sets, props, and armor, I'm kinda surprised he didn't do this.