The theatre industry should beware of revisionist tampering
Broadway is making changes to existing hits. Will the same thing happen here, asks Dominic Cavendish
Arevisionist tendency is sweeping Broadway, tweaking existing musicals and plays to make them answerable to the times, especially in terms of race. Given the points of overlap between New York’s theatre culture and ours in the UK, it’s a significant move.
A New York Times report this weekend led with a restaging decision in Hamilton; Thomas Jefferson’s big number, What’d I Miss? has new choreography, so that Sally Hemings, his enslaved concubine, turns her back instead of flirtatiously dancing, a quiet rebuke to his espousal of liberty.
In The Lion King, the character of Rafiki – tailored to be played by a black actress – is no longer referred to as a mandrill (the world’s largest monkey). The Lehman Trilogy has seen the inclusion of a quick nod to the family’s gainful-shameful involvement with slavery. Perhaps the most surprising changes concern The Book of Mormon, a show that has traded on being unbothered about giving offence, entailing as it does a cartoonish cultural collision between two Mormon missionaries and African villagers. Yet following a letter of concern from cast members past and present last summer, the creative team have worked through the show to “sharpen the satire of Mormonism… and give the Ugandan villagers more agency”.
It’s hard to object to small sensible modifications that help point up Jefferson’s double standards or enable the side-stepping of offence-giving in the case of The Lion King. Still, in the case of the Hamilton fix, is that really going to be sufficient to placate those who argue that the musical doesn’t do nearly enough to address slavery? And might the Lion King revision embolden those who regard its predominantly black cast as problematic given the show’s exotic anthropomorphism?
There’s only so much intervention you can apply before the fundamental nature of the show starts to unravel. In the case of The Book of Mormon, the moves look like a slippery slope to incoherence. How can it function as provocative entertainment if its outlandishness gets neutered?
The broader concern is that this is the beginning of an age of modification mania: creative teams responding to, or anticipating, complaints, whittling away at the whole experience.
So what might end up on the cutting-room floor here in the UK? You need only to look at classic musicals to find examples of lyrics that could fall foul of the concerned and censorious. Oliver! is a musical masterpiece. But how do we feel about Nancy belting out passion for Bill Sikes, her abusive male lover, in As Long As He Needs Me?
The pathos lies in her unswerving, unspoken but also incredibly unreconstructed devotion: “As long as life is long, I’ll love him right or wrong.”
As for plays, what do we do about the casual racism of the tramp Davies in The Caretaker, or the needling misogyny of Jimmy Porter in Look Back in Anger? In the past, both elements have been found challenging; the temptation now might be to snip lines, estates permitting, or consign these modern classics to the shelf. I think either treatment would be an act of vandalism.
Isn’t it better to accept that many great works inevitably reflect some of the circumstances of their creation, even a work as recent as Hamilton?
Society moves on, at a rapid pace; the shows can’t – at least not exactly. But we can still gain from seeing them and perhaps gain most by seeing them warts and all. It should be left to us to react: to wince, be aghast, acquiesce, admire.
Of course, there are vital vexed questions about race to address at the moment; a tactical nip and tuck can perhaps work saving wonders. The worry is that we end up with a world of neurotic rewrites, where material vanishes or gets altered to suit the latest hectic round of concerns.
Rigour and thoughtfulness can strengthen the arts. Panic-catering to the potentially aggrieved is cultural death by a thousand cuts.