When yesterday’s classics have become offensive to today’s enlightened audiences, there are a few ways to go:
• Revisit them and appreciate how far we’ve come.
• Abandon them as time capsules of the way we were.
• Revitalize them for modern audiences.
In the case of “Thoroughly Modern Millie,” which closes the Pittsburgh CLO 2018 summer season this week, the creators of the stage production chose option No. 3.
“Thoroughly Modern Millie” arrived on screens in 1967 as an homage to the Roaring ’20s, with Julie Andrews and Mary Tyler Moore as aspiring actresses and husband hunters who stumble onto a white slavery ring. Henchmen scripted as “Oriental #1” and “Oriental # 2” work for ringleader Mrs. Meers — a failed white actress pretending to be Asian.
Singing, dancing, romance and heinous stereotypes ensue.
In the more enlightened 2000s, composer Jeanine Tesori (“Fun Home”) and writers Richard Morris and Dick Scanlan, brought “Millie” back as a tap-dancing Tony-winning stage musical.
Mr. Scanlan rewrote the Asian characters as immigrant Chinese brothers Ching Ho and Bun Foo, who are forced to help Mrs. Meers with the promise of bringing their beloved mother to the United States. They speak in their native Mandarin, projected as English dialogue for the audience, with lots of verbal jabs at their ridiculous boss.
In his production note for the licensing company Musical Theater International, Mr. Scanlan addresses the presumed pitfalls head-on. It reads in part:
“I want to clarify that from the authors’ perspective, there is only one stereotype: Mrs. Meers. She is a Caucasian woman using her ‘acting skills’ to impersonate a Chinese woman in an effort to avoid police detection and does it in a highly offensive way.”
That’s just the setup, points out Mark Fleischer, CLO associate artistic director and the guy “in the day-to-day trenches” of a production. But it’s not where you start, it’s where you finish, when the perpetrator gets her comeuppance.
If the character of Mrs. Meers offends along the way to justice, that’s the point.
“Musical theater has addressed contemporary American culture throughout its history,” Mr. Fleischer said. “What’s exciting is we are having this dialogue. Artists are discussing what they are comfortable portraying, and producers are having those conversations as well.”
Such discussions date back to musical theater’s earliest days, when Oscar Hammerstein II was building a hallowed career of what he called “musical plays,” many that put racial prejudice in the spotlight.
The great writer of “Show Boat,” “South Pacific” and “The King and I” also is responsible for “Carousel,” the 1945 musical that this year has been revived on Broadway to great acclaim and also to a discussion of whether it should be revived at all.
“Carousel’s” heroine, Julie, is a victim of spousal abuse who tells her daughter it is possible for “someone to hit you — hit you hard — and not hurt at all.” In his New York Times review of the current “Carousel,” Ben Brantley wrote that Julie’s justification of abuse “is delivered quietly and unconvincingly, almost as if hoping to pass unnoticed.”
“Thoroughly Modern Millie” has fared somewhat better in its evolution. It debuted in 2002 to a long Tony-winning run on Broadway, more than 900 performances, with choreography by Rob Ashford of Point Park University.
Mr. Brantley wrote of the production, “It’s possible that some theatergoers may object to perceived racism in the portrayal of Mrs. Meers’ Chinese assistants ... but Mr. Morris and Mr. Scanlan have made them virtuous chaps, after all, who have a worthy place in the New York melting pot.”
When choosing “Thoroughly Modern Millie” as its season-closing show, there were many considerations, including its connection to Sutton Foster, who made her Broadway debut and won her first of two Tonys as Millie.
“ ‘Millie’ is something that is close to the organization’s heart,” Mr. Fleischer said, “because it was one of the first Broadway shows we invested in, and it’s where Van [Kaplan] met Sutton Foster, during the out-of-town tryouts, and brought her here to do ‘South Pacific’ [in 2001]. And she went on to become the Broadway star she is now.”
Then as now, the Asian characters and how they would be portrayed and received by audiences is part of the conversation of putting on “Millie.” When Goodspeed Opera House in Connecticut had the show as part of its season last year, the extensive program notes included sections on “Race, ‘Millie’ and Musical Theatre” and “Chinese Immigration and Exclusion in the 20th Century.”
Those who come expecting the movie’s “Oriental” characters and get the musical’s brothers are in for a jolt of reality. The script calls for casting native speakers of Mandarin.
Along with Mr. Scanlan’s licensing note, “there is a letter from the original actors there as well, and how well they felt treated by that. We take it very seriously,” Mr. Fleischer said, adding that in “a zeitgeist discussion” about the show, you have to include the white slavery plot line, which is resonating today.
“Millie” was previously on Pittsburgh CLO’s 2003 season as a national tour, but this is the first time it is creating its own production. The show has become a favorite of regional theaters and high school programs, and for these productions, writer Scanlan has said in his notes that the villainous Mrs. Meers does not have to be pretend to be Asian. However, casting the Chinese brothers can be a challenge, particularly for schools.
The New Yorker chronicled one such case in 2014, when “Millie” was scheduled to be performed by the students of Dalton, a private college prep school on NYC’s Upper East Side. Parents expressed alarm at the presumed stereotypes in the show, and school administrators eventually decided that it would be performed as a concert version.
“A few days after the announcement went out, a group of students approached the faculty with proposed revisions,” Michael Schulman wrote in The New Yorker. “All references to China and prostitution would be dropped, and Ching Ho and Bun Foo — renamed Brian and Charles — would be kidnappers from an unnamed land. Scanlan approved the changes.”
The writer even created new lyrics to make the show more student-friendly.
From the earliest days of musical theater to today, there are choices to be made about theater works that “hold a mirror up to us” in their own time, as Mr. Fleischer said, paraphrasing Shakespeare.
In the original lyrics of “Old Man River” for “Show Boat,” Mr. Hammerstein included the n-word, which he argued with singer Paul Robeson was a more powerful way to show the plight of the black men who “work while the white folk play.” The reference was later changed to “darkies” and then left out all together in ensuing revivals.
As times and minds change, how we choose to perform classic works is not so much a minefield if looked at as an opportunity.
Mr. Fleischer wondered allowed what we do with children’s works such as the portrayal of Native Americans in “Peter Pan” — which Pittsburgh CLO has on its 2019 schedule.
“There are bubbling up these great conversations,” he said. “You have those choices: Museum piece? Ignore it? I think the braver choice and more exciting choice is to try to figure out what the show means today, and how to reflect the current age plus the age that the piece came from.”
Sharon Eberson: seberson@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1960. Twitter: @SEberson_pg.
First Published: August 6, 2018, 10:00 a.m.
