Non-Traditional Casting
Rhymes Over Beats has always been dedicated to non-traditional casting, and doing all we can to encourage it.
A few months ago I saw a news article that said Julia Roberts was once being considered to play the role of Harriet Tubman.
What?
Now I may have touched on this issue before, but the fact that someone would seriously think that Julia Roberts should be cast as Harriet Tubman warrants a repeat.
Let me say it again: It is bad when white actors are usually cast when the race of the character is not specified.
It is worse when the work is an adaptation, and a black fictional character becomes white in the film or the play.
It is the worst when someone white is considered to play a historical black individual.
I believe that the casting scales need to be balanced. Don’t you?
Achieving Balance
Balancing the scales does not mean putting items of equal weight on both sides of scales that are already out of balance. We need to go beyond that. Hamilton is a good example of how to start.
As hip hop theater artists, we are committed to considering casting black actors first where the race of the character is unspecified.
When Rhymes Over Beats chooses to adapt a work, we will never change the race of a character from black to white for any reason. We would never cast Brad Pitt as a Tuskegee Airman, no matter how excellent an actor Pitt is or how many seats he would sell.
Our intention is to go out of our way to balance the scale by choosing scripts where the majority of the characters are not white. We encourage other companies to do the same. Part of our mission has always been to increase the number of roles for a diverse pool of actors, in order to win awards and to increase visibility,
I, too, have a dream. Happy Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Day.