Everyone associated with The Great Comet will soon be out of work if the show doesn’t find a way to boost ticket sales.
There are times when watching progressives try to grapple with their own conceptual contradictions is like watching a blind man with Crisco on his hands trying to juggle chainsaws. Broadway theater, an aggressively leftist institution, is today presenting the following spectacle: A white actor has been shamed out of playing a white character in a Broadway show because it would have been hurtful to black actors.
Mandy Patinkin, a reliable box-office attraction on Broadway going back to the 1970s (Evita) and a star of television (Criminal Minds, Homeland) and film (The Princess Bride), was set to take over the lead male role in the musical Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812, replacing Josh Groban, whose popularity is widely credited with making the oddball show a success.
Great Comet, with original songs and a story based on (a small slice of) War and Peace, wasn’t an obvious candidate for box-office glory, but Groban’s huge fan base filled the seats. “It wasn’t Leo Tolstoy who turned out the crowds,” notes New York Post theater columnist Michael Riedel, the definitive Broadway observer. “It was Josh Groban.”
Post-Groban, advance ticket sales for late summer and fall were “catastrophically low,” the show’s composer, Dave Malloy, said. When Groban left the show on the expiration of his contract on July 2, the boyish baritone was temporarily replaced by an unknown, Okieriete “Oak” Onaodowan, whom Patinkin would have replaced. Onaodowan is black. Patinkin isn’t. So an utterly routine fact of Broadway life — star replaces non-star — was dressed up in racial outrage.
Social media seethed. The Daily News headline read “‘Great Comet’ actor Okieriete Onaodowan shoved aside for Mandy Patinkin, causing outcry.” One actor, Rafael Casal, tweeted, “Telling lead actors of color to #makeroom? Really? @greatcometbway #makeroom is the new code for ‘still not your turn.’”
Actress Cynthia Erivo, who won a Tony in 2015 for The Color Purple, also took exception, tweeting, “This has been handled badly. Ticket sales shouldn’t override a person doing his job” and “Oak worked extremely hard for this. Which makes this occurrence distasteful and uncouth.” Patinkin withdrew from the show, groveling. The producers who hired him also scraped and begged forgiveness, as did the composer. All did much agonizing about how they should have better understood the “optics.” Then Onaodowan himself quit, announcing that August 13 would bring his last performance. Trump and Mexican president clash over who's building the wall
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http://www.nationalreview.com/article/450068/great-comet-broadway-mandy-patinkin-josh-groban-okieriete-onaodowan-race-hysteria-progressives
