I thought this was a joke when I saw this photo.
https://i.ytimg.com/vi/ZqHNzDQBPuQ/maxresdefault.jpg
I was proven wrong when I did the research and saw the video.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ZqHNzDQBPuQ
Why do they keep adapting the same Shakespeare plays? They ought to film his sillier action packed ones. Richard III is boring. And yeah, this casting is crazy.
shareBroadway often likes to revive the same plays over and over. They even have a Tony award for best revival. But I guess this casting was their attempt to try something different with old material.
shareWhat's the problem with it? Theater is an expressionistic artform, and it's not as if anyone is saying 'Richard the Third was actually a Black man.'
I suppose one could argue that there is a double-standard, since casting a white man as Othello would be frowned upon *these* days, but that's largely because Othello is a character defined by his race (Richard III isn't, although I suspect one day disability rights campaigners will, reasonably, argue that Richard III should only be played by a hunchback), and Blackface has a particularly pernicious history (that said, I doubt any white actor would play Othello in *Blackface* if given the chance to play the Moor).
Like I say, there's a BIG difference between expressionistic plays like this and Hamilton, and 'documentaries'/docudramas that erroneously claim that a historical figure belonged to a different race to the one most/all historians agree they belonged to.
I think there's a problem with doing this to someone who is dead and can't give approval.
shareEh?
Richard III, the play, is already a hit-piece on the real king. I doubt the real king would give his full approval to the play. Being played by a Black woman is the least of the issues (which is not to decry the play, which is brilliant, but simply to say that it isn't a fair portrayal of the actual man).
You can have a hit piece as long as it's factually correct. But they're one step away from making Richard III a talking dinosaur.
Actually, maybe that I'd watch.
There are people, and even a society, that dispute the way Richard III is portrayed in the play and the negative reputation he has: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ricardian_(Richard_III)
shareThere's quite a long history of women playing the male roles in Shakespeare by this point. I remember Helen Mirren as Prospera (Prospero). Glenda Jackson has played Lear. There are other examples too that don't immediately spring to mind.
And the RSC seems to be doing quite a lot of this kind of thing at the moment, although mostly with secondary characters such as Mercutio.
Shakespeare himself would be utterly shocked though. Women weren't allowed in Elizabethan/Jacobean theatres. So all the roles were played by men.
So maybe in another couple of hundred years it will have all balanced out.
I get that, but women are now allowed to watch and act in plays. It just seems ridiculous to change both the sex and gender of a real life person just for the sake of it in today's era.
shareI dunno. I've seen people do weirder things with Shakespeare than swap the genders of characters. I think it's interesting to reinterpret this stuff, give some overly-familiar material some new angles, play with our preconceived notions, find new insights into the text.
As long as no-one's rewriting the text books and trying to tell me 'new research indicates Ol' Crookback was really a woman', I'm fine with it. It's theatre. It's art, not history.
Honey, theater is a for-profit enterprise... at least it's intended to be!
If people will pay to see her in the role, it's their money.
I doubt they'll pay. Most people don't like the race swapping thing and they also gender swapped it.
shareDanai Gurira is a brilliant actor. I see that the production actually took place last year, so I don't know if anyone else will now get a chance to pay to see it live, but I can certainly see the appeal, particularly for Shakespeare/theater buffs (I'm a fan of Shakespeare/the theater, but not a die-hard devotee).
sharethe left has gone full retard, never go full retard...
shareDemocrat*
There's nothing "left-winged" about this corporatism bullshit. They know you can't legislate kindness, and to distract from Amazon (and many other companies) with all the things left-wingers are against (child labor, exploitation) and to then cheer Bezos because he posted #metoo
This is all business. Just like the media, which has a financial bias. Trump was just on CNN. Quid Pro Quo.
I agree with the general ethos of your post, about the hypocrisy of the establishment 'left' (e.g. the DNC), but I'm not sure what it has to do with this production.
share