The awards show honoured several history-making Broadway productions
On Sun, June 19, the 70th Annual Tony Awards in New York made Broadway history by awarding all four musical acting awards to black actors and actresses. The awards show followed a season filled with shows featuring diverse casts and crews, including best musical winner Hamilton.
The 2015-2016 Broadway season was abundant in leading roles for people of colour. Lea Salonga headlined Allegiance, a story of a Japanese internment camp in Wyoming during World War II. Hispanic actors were featured front and centre in On Your Feet!, the story of Emilio and Gloria Estefan. Revivals of The Color Purple and Shuffle Along included many leading roles for black actors, while Eclipsed was written, directed, and performed by black women.
Other ground-breaking works included a revival of Spring Awakening performed using American Sign Language combined with song; and Waitress, the first Broadway musical to have an all-female core creative team, including its writer, director, composer, and choreographer.
With so many successful and diverse shows being featured at the Tony Awards, the lack of representation at the Academy Awards this year is even more jarring. In February, the hashtag “OscarsSoWhite” went viral and sparked debate and discussion over the entirely white list of acting nominees.
A cursory glance of the nominees for the Tonys versus the Oscars easily leads to the assumption that Broadway is by far a more diverse enterprise. However, the diversity displayed at this year’s awards is quite uncommon. Historically, the two awards shows have had very similar rates of representation. According to a 2016 Forbes article, since its inauguration in 1947, 95.3 per cent of Tony nominees have been white. In comparison, since 1929, 96.4 per cent of Oscar nominees have been white.
When the Oscar nominations came out the idea of “universal appeal” was discussed at large. Theories suggested that big budget studios fund movies with a majority white cast under the belief that everyone can relate to a story about white characters, but not everyone can relate to a story from a person of colour’s perspective. The same marketing tactic, it seems, has been applied to Broadway funding in the past.
Unlike movie audiences, Broadway audiences are predominantly white, and based on the cost of tickets, regular attendees usually have a high amount of disposable income. According to Forbes, the price of a Broadway ticket has risen 117.3 per cent over 20 years—twice the rate of inflation. In order to keep those able to pay for these tickets satisfied, producers shy away from stories that they feel could isolate their audiences.
With this season’s lineup of celebrated works featuring immense diversity, that thought-process may begin to change. Shows such as Hamilton—which was nominated for a record 16 nominations and won 11—have shot their actors to stardom beyond that of the usual Broadway fan base. Without the creation of more diverse roles on Broadway, however, there may not be space for them to develop their careers further on the aptly nicknamed “Great White Way.” This season marks a spectacular achievement in Broadway history, but it will be the years that follow that will shape how the industry values diversity.