In For a Penny: Eyes without a Face

Film

By CharlesAndHisTypewriter on Thursday, 25 February, 2016 • ( 2 Comments )

In which I end Black History Month discussing a very White Oscars and a certain musical about Alexander Hamilton.

*[2022 Update: If the original link (below) no longer works, the entire piece is available in the attached screenshot.]

San Francisco Theater Pub

Charles Lewis III weighs in on some recent controversy.

Can you spot the Oscar-winner under all that shoe polish?

“In 1985, I’m sitting in the casting office of a major studio. The head of casting said, ‘I couldn’t put you in a Shakespeare movie, because they didn’t have Black people then.’ He literally said that. I told that casting director: ‘You ever heard of Othello? Shakespeare couldn’t just make up Black people. He saw them’.”
– Wendell Pierce, interview with The New York Times, 24 Feb. 2016

I don’t watch the Grammys. I mostly attribute that to growing up as a fan of The Simpsons, where both the ceremony and its namesake statuette were regularly mocked as being the most worthless of all celebrity milestones (the Golden Globes being a close second). I can also attribute it to the fact that as I grew up, the Grammys’ recipients rarely ever…

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Categories: Film, Theatre

Tagged as: A Raisin in the Sun, Academy Awards Oscars, Alex Proyas, Black authors, Black Boy, Black characters, Black History Month, Black playwrights, Black theatre Black theater, blackface, Charles Lewis III Charles S. Lewis Charles Simon Lewis III Simon Patterson, Chiwetel Ejiofor, color-blind casting, diversity, Gods of Egypt, Hamilton, In For a Penny, Katori Hall, Laurence Olivier Sir Laurence Olivier Lord Laurence Olivier, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Lorraine Hansberry, Maggie Smith, MLK Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., musical theatre musical theater, Oscars So White #OscarsSoWhite, Othello, race relations in America race relations in the United States race relations in the US, racism racist, Richard Wright, SF Theater Pub San Francisco Theater Pub, SFOlympians #SFOlympians SFOlympiansFest San Francisco Olympians Festival, Shakespeare William Shakespeare The Bard of Avon The Bard Billy Shakes, The Mountaintop (play), White privilege, Whitesplaining, whitewashing