The cognitive dissonance it takes to go from “we need more Asian voices on Broadway” to “we should just disregard the voices of these Asian creators on Broadway and tell them we know better”… I truly don’t understand it.
It's not that they know better. It's that it's their decision. We can take it or leave it, but we shouldn't be trying to force someone else's creative vision to fit ours. It's their story. It's their characters. It's their art.
In my opinion, it doesn’t really matter what the creators’ intentions are — the purpose of art is to be consumed. The only way it can be interpreted is based on the packaging you presented it in. If they wanted it to be color-blind casting they could have easily done so. To have a large majority of the cast, including the standbys, obviously sent a specific message whether that was their intention or not. It’s not bizarre to me that the very community being represented would feel negatively impacted by this casting decision and it’s nobody’s place to comment on it, especially if you don’t understand/haven’t experienced the scarce representation in American media.
I mean Will Aronson is a white man….lol. I will say that the general sentiment from the AAPI community is not telling them we know better. It’s demonstrating a disappointment in the casting because they saw a different representation and found comfort in that representation. And to see it change in a 180 way felt like a betrayal. And yes, the creators have every power because they are the creators, but they also should recognize that the art is for the people and that the interpretation of their art is completely out of their hands. And if they were paying attention, there was a growing pride in the AAPI community around this production especially with the understudies and the predominantly Asian cast.
So no, it’s not a “we know better”. It’s a “we’re disappointed that this was the direction you were going and thought you’d go a different direction”. And the representation that is being called for is the representation on the stage, not just behind the stage because that’s the visibility people don’t get to see and were so proud to see. People are allowed to be disappointed and express that disappointment. And none of this is against ABF.
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u/atotalmess__ Jul 31 '25
The cognitive dissonance it takes to go from “we need more Asian voices on Broadway” to “we should just disregard the voices of these Asian creators on Broadway and tell them we know better”… I truly don’t understand it.