![]() ![]() The outrage over Hale’s blackface routine has resurfaced, according to Luna and others, because of the troupe’s recent response to the issue on social media. But because they’re a powerful theater that pays their actors, people are afraid to speak up, afraid they’ll be blacklisted.” ![]() They did it for West Side Story, The Little Mermaid - and that’s just characters written for people of color. Like in Hairspray, they cast Latinx actors in Black roles. “They only ever cast Black and Indigenous People of Color if it’s required. Luna says Hale has a longstanding reputation among local theater professionals for what Luna calls “certain casting practices.” The company routinely miscasts people of color, she claims. It got swept under the rug because they were gaslighting the people who were upset, saying, ‘It’s the way that play was written, so it’s okay.’” “But the Hale people brushed it off and said the complainers were being overly sensitive. “There was some outrage when this happened five years ago,” says Alejandra Luna, a member of the artistic ensemble of Latinx theater company Teatro Bravo. The play is a backstage sex farce about a production of Verdi's Otello, and includes a blackface riff on Shakespeare's famous Moor of Venice. Hale Centre Theatre, a professional playhouse located in Gilbert, has come under fire after issuing an apology for a blackface routine in its 2015 production of Ken Ludwig’s Lend Me a Tenor. ![]()
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