Ditto, from Australia.

I think that’s in your mind. There’s no women vs men here as there’ve been men vs women since the beginning of time. Name us the talented creators who’ve been negatively affected by this? Unless, it’s only your own ego.

@@zenobiac Morgan James has been negatively affected by this narrative. She’s wasting her talent trying to figure out how to wedge a brilliant piece of music into a flawed worldview. I’m sure it will still be great since she knows everyone on broadway and she’ll get an awesome cast, but there is no inherent value - creative or otherwise - in assembling an all-female cast to portray a story which has almost exclusively male characters. That aspect of it - and the enormous amount of work that came with it - is a complete waste.

@@alk672 I’m sorry you feel strongly about that. I was in a few of the first National touring companies in JCS when we received bomb threats when our Black understudy to Jesus had to go on. Someone believed that the role of Jesus had to remain white. It was apparent that some folks did not appreciate the visual change. I think Hamilton had an all female cast recently. I may not appreciate the change but it offers me a chance to check my resistance. It’s art but not mine.

@@zenobiac I think the problem here is that by making the cast all-female you’re moving the accent from art to politics. I don’t mind creators having political views, and I don’t mind them expressing their political views through their art (many do), but an all female cast is just an objectively weaker cast. You have just excluded any guy who could have contributed based on their gender. It’s very difficult to see that as anything other than the very thing it claims to fight - sexism.

@@alk672 I certainly wouldn’t want to see an all female cast of “12 Angry Women”, I think theater has been about politics all along. Remembering back in Shakespeare’s day when women weren’t allowed anywhere near the stage, proving man’s control over what women can and cannot do, politics not art. Women weren’t allowed to run marathons, fly a plane, have our own credit cards without the husband’s approval…politics indeed but I think it’s from that repression that a woman would stand up and say that we as women can do anything because we have. I meet every week with my JCS friends from the original Broadway, National Touring and the movie and this hadn’t come up. I will and discuss out of curiosity what their thoughts are. Should I listen to the recording, I’ll consider your thinking on it. Naturally, one may miss hearing the voices of baritones, tenors and basses, I don’t usually consider sopranos and altos as weaker, just different. I’ll see. Thanks for this thought provoking conversation.