Plano Children's Theater Does All-White Version of Hairspray [View all]

[Bolo Boffin]

Rarely has the Fail Train sped so quickly to its destination:

You need two things when you do the musical Hairspray: a fat girl to play the lead character, Tracy Turnblad, and a bunch of African-American kids to play the African-American kids. There are about a dozen roles for young black performers in this show, plus one for a big black lady who closes out the first act with the showstopper "Big, Blonde and Beautiful."

So out at Plano Children's Theatre right now, they're doing Hairspray without those things. The girl playing Tracy is wearing padding to puff up. (This isn't a role like Cyrano where you can slap a big nose on a pretty face and get away with it. Tracy is supposed to be chubbo to start with.) And there are no black kiddos in the show. None. The roles of Seaweed, Mother Maybelle and all the other black Baltimoreans are being played by kids so white they make the Cleavers look ethnic.

...At intermission, I spoke to Darrell Rodenbaugh, president of PCT's board of directors. My question was "Why do you have white kids playing black characters?" "Well, should we deny these kids the opportunity to do a fun show?" he said. "We'd paid for the rights to the show six months in advance. We couldn't cancel it."

...Rodenbaugh said they might do To Kill a Mockingbird with an all-white cast or Othello or The Wiz (three shows I mentioned to him that feature African-Americans either in prominent roles or as a majority of the cast). He said he saw nothing offensive or amiss about having no black actors in a show about racial segregation. I had to ask: Doesn't having an all-white cast ignore the core message of Hairspray - you know, the message about how the black kids weren't allowed to be on a show with white kids until brave little Tracy took a stand?

You'll need to click over for the answer, something involving not bowing down to "political correctness." Absolutely insane.

And it's not a "forget about it, Jake, it's Texas" thing. There are about five other high school productions of Hairspray going on in the area, and they all managed to cast it correctly. At least PCT got the memo that blackface = bad, possibly because there's a $13,000 fine per infraction in the contract from the rightsholder.

It's so nutty I want John Waters to make a movie about this whole thing.