You know, they’ve been fooling around with this kind of this for decades in the theater. Seting Shakespeare plays in different times and locales, reversing genders in roles, etc. Whoopi Goldberg played Pseudolus (a male part, originally done on stage and screen by Zero Mostel) in a Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. The theater group at Wellesley (all-female school., of course) did Waiting for Godot and Taming of the Shrew with complete gender reversal. (The latter was a hoot – all the jokes about Kate/Cat became jokes about Peter. )
As for the title, I’m surprised that no one has mentioned the movie Blackenstein. In the novel, as has been noted on this Board many times, there’s no suggestion that the monster was a stitched-together corpse animated by electricity, so he could be any color. (His lips wrere black, b the way, and his skin a leprous white), so the monster could easily be any color. In the Classics Illustrated adaptation, he was gray.
And as for Catwoman, don’t forget the Frank Millr-scripted Batman: Year One, in which Selena Kyle is cearly black. (Although in his Batman: The Dark Knight Returns she’s white.)
Ah! Here we go. Othello was a moor. Apparently moors aren’t black, just perceived to be. Therefor I would be perfectly reasonable and honest to history to cast a non-black person as Othello. Would there be an outrage? Should I have to go on TV, with charts and historical maps and explain where the moors came from?
Or should I protect, the few roles that non-whites have in classical art, which is more important truth or art?
What? You’ve never seen Blackenstein?
And I was distracted and irritated by it the whole time. It felt to me like a forced attempt to include every skin shade and ethnicity possible, not that they were casting the best actors for the role. And I couldn’t get over the gentic impossibility that was Jason Alexander + Whoopie Goldberg = hot Latino. So YMMV.
In Much Ado About Nothing it didn’t bother me that Denzel Washington and Keanu Reaves were cast as (half-) brothers. Keanu’s performance was dismal, but the casting didn’t bug me. Because the brothers were supposed to be so different, it worked.
The was Othello black or not debate has ranged for decades, and I think we could argue it indefinitely, with plenty of citations on both sides. The fact is, Elizabethian English refered to “Black Moors” (African) and “White Moors” (Arab) but Shakespear wasn’t specific in his script. All the references to “Dark” and “Black” and “Sooty” and “Thick lips” make me pretty convinced that he was and that the “Othello wasn’t black” argument is thinly disguised racism and cultural rewriting, but there are always those ready to make the argument. Whether he was African or Arabic, it’s clear from the script that he was unsuitable for Desdemonia based on his race.
Sure, but since Shakespear wasn’t specific in script and this is where the ‘wiggle’ room comes in, could I have an Arab play Othello, instead of a African? Would I be out of line? How far apart does the skin color have to be to fulfill the requirements of the script?
Jerri, not Candy. And the production was not all-white. There were a number of blacks in the cast. They played trees.
(and to further the hijack a bit, the white “students” playing the black characters were all given last names like “Snow” that denoted whiteness)
Hey, you could have a hippo play the role if you could find tights to fit her. Would it be what Shakespear had in mind, or who he would have casted or “true” to his vision? Maybe not so much. It’d make Desdemona’s death scene rather bulbous. Will people come to see it? Probably, for opening night at least. 
That’s the thing about the arts: legal issues aside, you CAN do whatever you feel like doing. Making enough money at it to fund your next project is the tricky part. Who decides what’s out of line? That depends on what’s important to you. If you’re tring to get money, then the producer decides. If you want to make money, then the paying audience decides. If you’re a rich kid with an agenda and a message, but no need for funding, then the critics decide. If you don’t care about anything other than expressing yourself, then you decide.
Me, I vote at the box office.
CalMeacham. In Miller’s Batman: Year One Selina Kyle’s white. Look again.
holmes. IMO, Othello could be played by an Arab and still be historically accurate.
Blackenstein is a big part the horror blaxploitation subgenre; includes such splendid examples as Blackula and its sequel, *Scream, Blackula Scream! * and to a lesser extent, The Thing With Two Heads. None of these are really colorblind casting, but merely racially inspired variations set in the 1970s.
This thread got me thinking about Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?. At first blush, I agree that it’s a good example of a work that pretty much calls for an ethnic other to play the Dr. Prentice role.
But I really agree with WhyNot’s comments about how emotionally non-shocking the premise is to today’s audience. So then I was thinking that a production with an all-white (or other ethnic group, as long as it was homogenous) cast might be interesting. If we, the audience, can’t visually identify what makes Dr. Prentice “other,” we might react differently to the reception he is given by the Draytons. It could be more unsettling if we can’t give it historical context. It would take away the intellectual “ahhh yes, in 1967 the idea that a white woman would marry a black man created discomfort” and put us in more of a questioning, abstract mindset “What about this man could possibly generate such treatment?” and could underscore the idea that perceived differences are often more key than actual differences.
Clearly this would be an adaptation, as the director would need to vague up the references to Dr. Prentice’s ethnicity. Heh, I’m not saying it would be a good production, but I think it could be done. As this relates to the OP, I think such a casting decision needs to be part of the director’s overall vision for this work, there has to be a thoughtfulness driving it.
As monstro said, casting is often much more flexible when it comes to stage productions than film/television ones. I think the audience may be more willing to suspend disbelief because they know the pool of available qualified actors is limited. From a few rows back it’s probably not obvious that Juliet is Chinese rather than Italian anyway.
Japanese productions of Western stage musicals (and there are tons of 'em) almost always have an all-Japanese cast. In Japan it would be fairly difficult to round up a full cast of first-rate non-Japanese actors, and even more difficult to find ones able to do all the dialogue in fluent Japanese. But as long as the costumes are right, it’s easy to recognize famous characters even if they’re not the same race as they were in the original productions.
It may be easier to get away with a monoracial cast than cast just one or two actors against ethic type, though. I know that even some pretty small-time directors are hesitant to go that route. One of my best friends in college was an aspiring actress who was a light-skinned (about Halle Berry’s complexion) African-American with long, straight black hair. She appeared in two of our school’s major theatrical productions, once as a character whose race didn’t really matter to the story and once as the only Italian character among a bunch of rich WASPs. She was not cast in a third play that was about four sisters. She was told by the head of the theater department that he didn’t want to get “creative” with the casting. I thought this was a poor decision on his part, especially since my friend was one of the best actresses at our school, but from what I heard he had delusions of grandeur about his shows anyway.
She certainly looks black to me. I thought, in fact, that that was one of his more interesting twists.
Interesting, and I like it, but it is an overhaul of the theme in the work as written. If you’re changing the theme, then you can change the casting to match. But you’re still casting to support the theme - this time, a different theme than existed in the Poitier version. Not that it’s a bad idea, and if carried out with skill and consistency, it could be an interesting (new) work. Would people pay to see it, or would you close after two weeks of dismal reviews? I don’t know. If I could predict that, I’d be a hugely successful Broadway producer.
I saw a production by the Royal Shakespeare Company which did have Othello as an Arab. Well actually it was Ben Kingsley who’s not terribly Arabic (half Indian, I think). It was just fine. here are the views of a few actors on black Othellos. It includes some thoughts by Patrick Stewart on a production where he played Othello with an otherwise black cast.
Unless race is specified (and I think in Othello it is primarily that he is of a different race rather than because he is a Moor) there is no problem. So I’d happily watch Romeo and Juliet with, say, a Chinese Juliet. However, a Chinese Shylock might be a bit odd, not that I’d particularly expect a Jewish caricature, either.
I’ve heard of a production of Miss Julie, set up in New orleans in the 50’s, where Jean was played by a black guy. Trust me - there were no black guys in Sweden, working as servants in the late 19th century.
As for Guess who’s coming to dinner - why not have the boy in the house bring home another boy. That’d stir things up.
I do think Romeo and Juliet has to be played by teenagers, experiencing te first puppy love and thinking that this is for life. Ethgnicity and gender doesn’t matter, but I really liked Baz Luhrman’s version, because it was as feverish and testosterone driven as I always imagined it.
I remember years ago hearing about a performance where a black man was to portray Jesus (JC Superstar??). Many people called in to complain about this casting and one quote I recall was something like “when you get a proper person to play the part I will see the play” from an older woman. I believe that if Jesus existed, his skin tone would likely be darker than the usual people who play him in the movies.
Wasn’t there also an uproar when a rumor floated that the next Lois Lane would be black? I would have absolutely no problem with it and think it would be a positive change.
Jesus is a very interesting person to mention in this discussion, Zap, considering the likely revisionism of his appearance. Considering his time and place of birth, it is exceedingly unlikely that he was a blue eyed, dirty blonde caucasian but since that is the ideal of most of his followers, he has been reimagined that way. If you want to be accurate though, which do you go with? The unpopular but likely more real Arabic actor or someone Teutonic?
Also, delphica, I like your remimagining of Look Who’s Coming to Dinner. I imagine it would make a lot of us squirm now like Poiter’s version in the sixties made our parents and grandparents.
And that goes to my original thought. Let’s use Thor for now. His race IS specified. We have myth and I had 1000 comics, all with Thor portrayed as a white guy. The public image of Thor is that of a Blonde Viking God. Is it a problem to change that? Realistically speaking, the Rock comes in, reads for the part and is great. Everyone agrees, he’s THE guy; but he ain’t no white guy. My partner’s say, “No, he’s not white… c’mon Thor is white.”
I know what his hammer says, the “rules” so speak of his existence. Most people familiar with Marvel’s Thor knows that as well, including my partners. There’s no modifier that says, only white guys can have access to this power, however for the past 40 years 99.9% of the images of Thor have been of white guys.
My question is, is it ‘dishonest’ to say, “Whoa guys, the hammer says Whomever and this person who just walked in has the look that a God should have; he’s my Thor.” When I know damn well, he’s never seen Norway in his life and without the “rules” of the hammer, there’s no way I could cast him in the role.
You’re my partners, Yay or Nay?
Speaking of Jesus, he’s been depicted in art as every ethnicity (and perhaps even as a woman) in both religious and parody pictures.
I once was very amused to see a version of Jesus calming the waves done as a Chinese watercolor with a very Confucian-esque Jesus, indistinctly Asian disciples, and a giant wave towering over them a la that famous Japanese print.
Re Thor:
As I recall, in the old “Marvel versus DC” series (1996), Wonder Woman picked up Thor’s hammer. It transformed her … interestingly.
And re Othello (quite a segue, I know):
In act one, Iago calls out to Brabantio: “Even now, now, very now, an old black ram is tupping your white ewe.” All very metaphorical, I know, but still …
Meh. It’s been done.