Listen. Learn. Refocus.

At the beginning of this semester, I posed two questions for the students to engage in after the first unit. In Unit 1, we looked at the actual numbers of gender disparity on Broadway. Once you see the numbers, you realize that this gender gap is much much bigger than you think specifically on creative teams.

And when you look even closer, you realize this gap is even wider for People of Color and other underrepresented groups.

Below you will read the reactions from the students. What is your reaction? What do you believe? You can respond in the comments to join the conversation if you would like.

Culture shifting stories and voices that encompasses BIPOC, transgender, queer, disabled, and other under represented stories and writers.

Broadway still has a lot of work to do. Its cake is still vanilla, albeit with more sprinkles of color than in the past, but it’s still very much vanilla. And this also includes its history. I’ve seen first-hand the white-washed telling of musical theatre history and specifically the lack of coverage of black musicals of the 1970s. Some incredibly successful black Broadway shows were produced in the 1970s against the odds of whiteness, the racism of the white critics, and the struggles of seedy 1970s Times Square.