In what’s sure to become a trend, a University of Bristol (England) student production of Tim Rice and Elton John’s “Aida” has been canceled for fear of “cultural appropriation.”
The musical, based on the Verdi opera, tells the story of an Egyptian general who falls in love with an enslaved Ethiopian princess. Some complained that white students would be cast in those leading roles; the furor prompted Music Theatre Bristol to yank the show from next year’s lineup.
“It’s quite simple, really: If you are going to put on a production set in a particular place with a particular cultural context, then you need to reflect that with the ethnicity of actors,” one student whinged to local media.
No. No. No. This is how culture works.
Authors step outside their own experiences; actors play people wholly unlike themselves. And theater, especially student theater, is about making do with what you can get — using limited resources to cast a veil good enough to pull the audience in.
No school should fear to stage “Fiddler on the Roof,” “Hamilton” or even “A Raisin in the Sun” just because they don’t have the “correct” ethnic actors: Do it right, and the message comes across.
Letting demands of “diversity” silence art isn’t justice, it’s rank fascism.