In the Broadway community, the announcement that the six-time Tony Award winner Audra McDonald would be taking on the role of Rose in “Gypsy” this season was seismic news. Advertisements blared “AUDRA. GYPSY,” heralding a beloved figure stepping into what many regard as the best of American musicals. I was as ecstatic as everyone else, but with one concern: I hoped that McDonald, who is Black, would play the role — a stage mother in the 1920s, yearning for her children to be vaudeville superstars — as white.
For a Black Rose, I wrote last year, “to think her kids had even a chance at becoming America’s sweethearts — that they could achieve a position akin to the one Shirley Temple occupied — would be a delusion so quixotic that it would have to be the story’s central tragedy.”
Well, I have now seen the new revival, and McDonald plays the role as identifiably Black, clear especially in the vocal cadence and inflections she has chosen.
McDonald is, as always, a spellbinding artist; her seventh Tony is imminent. And as for me, I have revised my skepticism.
One reason is that there is generally nothing wrong with a little willful anachronism. I like that “Moulin Rouge” (both the film and the stage musical) uses modern club music despite taking place in the bohemian Montmartre of fin de siècle Paris. This music is the only way to give us a sense of how the actual music of the period felt to people of that time. And I love the interracial casting in the production of “Our Town” soon to depart Broadway, because the setting of that play has always been meant as an abstraction rather than a specific place. It took me a while to get used to the television show “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel” using the slang of our times, but I eventually realized that this was the only way to make the characters in this exquisite confection come across to us as genuinely funny human beings.
Besides, musicals are inherently fantasies. “Gypsy” takes place in a specific context — vaudeville dying between the world wars — but with few sociohistorical particulars. Asked in a radio interview about my criticism, McDonald pointedly replied that if playing Rose as Black strains credulity, “How do you square that people just burst into song?” A good question.
My second reason for revising my opinion is trickier. McDonald happens to be able to play “white” — or maybe raceless — convincingly. She wasn’t playing her role as unmistakably, culturally Black in “Carousel” in 1994, nor in a 2007 production of the musical “110 in the Shade.” Even in that recent radio interview, someone who had just tuned in might not have been able to tell the race of the person who was speaking. Or at least I couldn’t.
But not everyone is as fluid as she is. Even some accomplished artists with effortless range may, in the shape of their vowels and their timbre, sound identifiably Black. These racial cues, which can also extend to aspects of body language, are subtle, but they mean that many actors, no matter their training or what roles they play, will always read onstage as not just visually but culturally Black. It’s true for every ethnicity and race: All people can be deeply imprinted by the speech patterns we grow up around and the people we feel most comfortable with.
In this light, yes, Rose can become a Black character. So could Babe, the lead in “The Pajama Game.” That is a 1950s musical about a strike at a factory in a working-class white town, but Blackness could lend the role interesting notes. Perhaps Babe could handle her love interest, the new superintendent, with a bit of “R-E-S-P-E-C-T.” In fact, a Black actress (Barbara McNair) did play this role in a Broadway revival in 1973 (against Hal Linden as the superintendent!), and the world didn’t turn upside-down.
And Terri White, a Black actress and singer, played Stella Deems in the 2011 Broadway revival of the Stephen Sondheim musical “Follies.” Her dance routine included angular moves and vocal punctuations that were more Black tap than Ziegfeld Follies. No matter — that theatricality elevated the show.
There is a third reason I am revising my position. When I previously weighed in, I wrote that “recoding characters, at least historical characters, as Black just because Black people are playing them is just another kind of denial of racism.” I meant that in works about the past, having Black characters live untouched by the bigotry and segregation of the period can look like an attempt to whitewash this evil from the historical record.
But I realize now I was writing more out of duty than belief, a bit of the kind of performative wokeness I usually decry. If the sight of a Black actor in an old white musical convinces any audience members that America was never sullied by racism, they are too few to justify limiting the chances for great Black actors to play great roles.
There are limits to this approach, of course. It would make no sense to play Leo Frank — the Jewish factory manager accused of killing a young girl in Jason Robert Brown’s musical “Parade” — as Black. In the searingly racist ambience of the show, set in Atlanta in 1913, the Black characters live with the knowledge that their race is always a looming death sentence. If Leo were Black, the depth of the community’s hatred, revealed over the course of the show, would come as no surprise to him.
But in general, especially with older musicals, written when substantial roles for Black actors were rare, bending reality does not necessarily destroy the piece but can even enhance it, opening up opportunities for Black actors and in no way fostering ignorance about America’s past. I don’t like changing my mind any more than the next person — but sometimes one must.
