Thoroughly Modern Millie - Podcast Transcript

Drew Cohen: Welcome. This is Drew Cohen. I'm the president of Music Theatre International. We're here in New York City at the offices of MTI. We're very pleased to have a panel here for our discussion today, which will be moderated by Jack Tchen, who is a professor at NYU. We have a number of the artists who have been involved in the creation of Thoroughly Modern Millie, including the authors: lyricist and co-book writer, Dick Scanlan and composer Jeanine Tesori. We also have two of the actors who originated roles in Thoroughly Modern Millie, Ken Leung and Francis Jue, who originated the roles of Ching Ho and Bun Foo, respectively. Welcome everyone.

Everyone: Thank you.

Drew Cohen: Jack ...

Jack Tchen: Let's get started. I thought it would be useful ... I'm a historian so I think it's useful to maybe to put a little bit of this in context. I'd love to hear from Dick and Jeanine how they came up with the Broadway version of this after a film had already been done. Also, what's clear to me is that, you were also not accepting some of the incredible racist stereotypes of the film itself, and you wanted to tweak them. It'd be good to hear what was going through your heads as you were coming up with the music, but also the lyrics, and the lines themselves, and the characterizations, as well.

Dick Scanlan: Thoroughly Modern Millie was an idea that I had when I first began writing in 
the late 1980s. At the time that I had the idea, I wasn't aware that several people before me had actually conceived Thoroughly Modern Millie as a Broadway musical and had tried to make that happen. The man who had written the movie, who became my co-book writer eventually, Richard Morris, who's no longer living, was a rather cantankerous, rather wonderful, opinionated fellow and he had not responded to the people who'd come before me. It was a little like Mary Poppins, they had all blown away and when I eventually flew into his life in 1993 to present my idea that I write it, he took to me and suggested that we co-write it together.

I knew a great deal about the history of the movie. I understood how it had come about, which was basically that there was a film producer who wanted to do The Boyfriend as a movie and who had never seen the show The Boyfriend, and mentioned that to Richard, but those rights were taken. Richard said, "Well, you know, The Boyfriend is just a spoof of twenties musicals. If what you want to do is a story set in the twenties, we could write anything, right." He ... they came up with this story. Richard, as an aesthetic, was sort of obsessed with chinoiserie and was obsessed also with the incredible popularity of chinoiserie during the 1920s, as is often common in a decade where there's tremendous phobia. Simultaneous with that is an obsession with the aesthetics of the culture about which people are phobic.

Richard, in a very, very superficial and kind of, you know, throwing-things-against-the-wall way came up with those choices. There was no political idea behind it, because of course in the mid sixties, people's consciuonessses were very different. When I decided to approach it to turn it to a stage vehicle, I instantly recognized that the, amongst many of the problems in the show, one of them was a huge amount of racism around the idea of white slavery, which white slavery is what we now call, human trafficking. White slavery in fact, is and was a real thing but it was also often used as a smoke screen for fear of sex and certainly a smoke screen for xenophobia and a lot of other things. Racism around that, but specifically around the characters of Mrs. Meers, who in the movie is portrayed by the brilliant comedienne, Bea Lillie as an indeterminate ... you're not exactly sure what she's doing. She actually had Alzheimer's during the filming of the movie and actually didn't know, but never learned anyone's name.

The way that they filmed this, Julie Andrews would say Bea's line, squeeze Bea's hand, and then Bea would repeat it, and they would just cut out ... She honestly didn't know the plot of the play. The other aspect was the role played by Pat ... Jack Soo and Pat Morita, who were her henchmen and called "Oriental #1" and "Oriental #2". I really struggled with how to attack it, because the obvious idea was to get rid of it. Literally to make them mafia, right? An acceptable stereotype. Make them Louie and Victorio [crosstalk]

Jeanine Tesori: ... haven't seen enough of that.

Dick Scanlan: Exactly. Or to make them the henchmen, just the guys who are there and one's fat and one's skinny, one smokes a cigar, whatever. I found it very... I was confused, because I kept saying to myself, "It seems so odd to right this wrong that was done specifically to Asians and Asian Americans, but really, racism is a wrong done to all of us because it's just bad news for humankind to right that by eliminating roles for Asian American actors." It just seemed peculiar to me. I was like, "There must be a way to solve this so that I can sort of subvert or turn the racist, the egregious racism movie on its head and preserve these employment opportunities."

It was a bifurcated solution. The first thing I conceived was a backstory, which first of all individuated the characters; two characters. They are brothers, they're recent immigrants, they are here because this awful woman - who is not Asian - keeps promising them that she will bring their mother over once they've done a certain amount of bidding for her, but they have fundamentally different moralities. One brother is a pragmatist - like the character of Millie actually - who believes that the end justifies the means, period. The other, is a complete poet/dreamer who has an inherent sense of ethics and obviously wants his mother to come, but wonders what toll it's taking on his soul and their soul in order to do it. I thought okay ... I understood that, but there was still something wrong.

At this point I approached director Michael Mayer. Michael, who was very excited about the idea of the play, kept saying, "I can't sign on to do this until I understand how to attack the Asian characters. I can't ..." Mike was a very politically oriented artist and he's like, "I just simply can't do it." After a few months of discussion about it, we screened the movie as a benefit for Broadway Cares, a new print, and the next morning Michael called me and said, "I know what to do. I know exactly what to do. I don't know how you're going to feel about it and if you don't like it, I'm not the guy for you, because it's a whole aesthetic for me."

He told me the idea and I immediately loved it, which was that the two characters would speak in Chinese. They're recent immigrants, how would they possibly be able to speak English? At that moment, they became liberated to speak as much or as little as we needed them to, to articulate whatever they were thinking or feeling. I immediately said, "In order to do that, they need to become much bigger characters. If we're going to make such a bold theatrical choice, they have to be an intricate part of the narrative in a way that they aren't in the movie at all." That's how the idea came about.

The second aspect, Mrs. Meers, my memory is, and I don't mean to monopolize this so, I'm trying to make it quick, forgive me, my memory is that we were a little bit more stumped about that. The idea that we came up with, which is effectively that Mrs. Meers is a failed actress, who is using her act, what she perceives to be her acting abilities, to create an alternate persona so to hide her criminal activities.

That really came about when Harriet Harris came aboard as our Mrs. Meers. Harriet came aboard for a reading in 1998 and then really joined the company in an official way at the end of our La Jolla production. Harriet felt very strongly and Harriet, being an actress, wasn't articulating it from a political perspective, she was articulating from a creative one, that the way to do this was to walk headlong into the stereotype. That rather than evoke it a little bit here and evoke it a little bit there, go for it and have it be as offensive and extreme a version as the stereotype as can be imagined. She didn't really articulate a reason, it was an impulse.

Michael and I and Jeanine at this point, because Jeanine was very much a part of it, what excited us about this was the opportunity to present the most extreme version of a stereotype on stage next to Asian American actors who were portraying their roles as completely human. Thereby, we felt, completely in-authenticating, disempowering, busting, and delegitimizing the stereotype and revealing it to be a creation out of other people's phobias and desires and all kinds of things that creates this monster that actually looks nothing like what an Asian or an Asian American actually behaves like. We thought it was a theatrical way to bust a stereotype without being didactic.

To me, the Broadway production and the tour, and the London production, I felt did that very successfully. One of the ways that I always thought that was very clear that was happening, there's a moment they show where Ching Ho is trying to communicate to Miss Dorothy, and remember he doesn't speak English, he's trying to talk about Mrs. Meers but she can't understand what he's saying. He uses Mrs. Meers' line, "Sad to be all alone in the world," but the brilliant choice that Ken made, and this was an actor choice, was Ching Ho imitates Mrs. Meers who is imitating what she perceives to be Asian.

The audience would freak out. They would always laugh and sometimes clap because they knew in that moment that what they were watching was this hall of mirrors at the end of which they had clarity about something that they didn't come to this show expecting to have clarity about. That was really ... That was the intention behind the choices we made, is my memory.

Jeanine Tesori: Dick I can't ... That was like a filibuster. That was fantastic. It's also, I think, very accurate to how I remember it because you know when we were creating those characters they became important, really important people who had a conflict, who had something in their way. They started ... These two men started the reprise, they finished the opening number that Millie sets forth. That was a really important thing sung in a language that we also collaborated with both of you on. The movie is filled with those terrible parallel fourths, tack, ack, ack, gunk, gunk, gunk, gunk. I thought, "Oh my god, really?" That's what we had witnessed and then, what we decided to do was to treat everyone ... to make the villain ... I think the villain is quite clear in that there's one.

I recall all of these conversations, hours and hours, the intentionality of it, what are we doing and how are we doing it? What can be the pitfalls of it? What are we subverting? Following from your lead to Michael's and then going along with that and then, including both of you in that.

Jack Tchen: Jeanine, as someone who is very literate on musical history, it would be useful for you to kind of talk a little bit about the dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah. Right? Tell us a little bit about what that means for you and how it was a problem for you.

Jeanine Tesori: It's like a ... For me, when you are not doing due diligence on a show, it's that you're the ... The playing field isn't level. Anything that is a leitmotif, that's a shortcut to where it actually obliterates the humanity of the character; it's repellent. I don't even know where ... There's a pentatonic scale in those communities and I was, when I was in China on a cultural exchange, there was nothing like a section of Erhus to really ... whew! The language itself is tonal and the idea of A 440 is non-existent, that's the beauty of it. It is not ... You cannot reduce the culture to a bah, bah, bah, bah, bah, bah, bah, bah, bah. It offends.

Just like in Millie or ... What was available to us was the world of music in the 1920s, which is a spectacular world, and that should be available to everyone. As with many things, it's rooted in something identifiable in terms of the pentatonic scale, but it is not that. We went on an investigation for hours and hours, for every character to just say, "What is this world? What is this airtight world? Who are they? How should they sing? Is it Cantonese? Is it Mandarin?" That debate, I don't ... You guys remember, we were talking about why it would be one versus the other. I don't know if you want to join in because I think ...

Dick Scanlan: I don't know if you remember originally when the very first reading we did, because the first reading we did where the language was Chinese, it was Mandarin, and it was you and Alec Mapa, it was Ken Leung and Alec Mapa, because you were unavailable.

Francis Jue: Actually, I said no. 

Dick Scanlan: You were saying no because of the movie.

Francis Jue: Totally.

Dick Scanlan: That's right. Ken, you came to me after that reading and said, "Cantonese is a much more fun language to speak as an actor...

Jeanine Tesori: It's harder.


Dick Scanlan: ... and to listen to and it's more appropriate for immigrants. It's got more...

Francis Jue: It is more appropriate.

Ken Leung: Usually when people say, some people say, "Chinese people talk so angrily." I'm like, "Oh, you're listening to Cantonese." Cantonese has more tones; has like seven tones versus Mandarin, which only has five, four or five. It's more ... What do you call it? It reaches more peaks and lower ... reaches lower lows. It's expressive, it's more emotional, which is why it seems angry a lot of the times because it's loud and people talk with their hands. It's like the Italian of Chinese people.

Francis Jue: It's the Brooklyn of Chinese people. [crosstalk]

Jeanine Tesori: That comes with the cuisine, I'm sure.

Ken Leung: That's why I chose that. It's a relatively short scene between the brothers and I thought that that would be better than ... Mandarin is more fitting for singing. It's inherently lyrical and it's pretty. You could be cursing somebody out and it sounds beautiful. It wasn't a disconnect for me because my parents, who speak Cantonese, have spoken Cantonese, they know Mandarin songs and they sing ... There was no disconnect for me, so that's where I was going with that.

Dick Scanlan: That was the conversation ...

Jeanine Tesori: I remember it exactly.

Dick Scanlan: ... we had where it went from being all Mandarin to speaking Cantonese and singing in Mandarin. That's exactly sort of the dialogue ...

Ken Leung: Cantonese is kind of funnier. It's got so much slang and phrases.

Jeanine Tesori: I think that was the ... Well we could get to it, but I think it's a slippery slope because I think some people thinking ... You want people to be laughing at the language. We were saying, "We want people to be laughing at the actors who are speaking this wonderful language." I could see that it's a very slippery slope if you're not...

Ken Leung: Yeah, I can see that. I can't ... It's like ... I think we had ... We start off with an argument. Right?

Jeanine Tesori: You guys remember it?

Francis Jue: Yeah. I don't like that woman ...

Ken Leung: Right, I don't ... You're like, "Behave yourself because we need her."

Francis Jue: She's got a head for business.

Ken Leung: Right. I just hear that in Cantonese because it's so, it's so cut-to-the-chase funny, whereas in Mandarin it would be, it would be like ...

Francis Jue: More of an intellectual exercise, yeah.

Ken Leung: ... poetic. It wouldn't be the heart of what that scene was trying to say in very short ...

Jack Tchen: Mandarin is a court language, whereas local dialects of Shanghainese, or whatever local dialect there may be would be more of that kind of sharper, more down-to-earth language.

Francis Jue: More like family.

Jack Tchen: I can see playing with that for that reason. It does make sense. If I could ask, Francis, why did you say no initially?

Francis Jue: I think that the movie is racist and I couldn't imagine how they could fix that. It wasn't until I saw a new draft of the show, the second time that Dick very loyally came back to me and asked me to do a reading of the show, that I understood ... There's a part of me that really understands why there'd be controversy around the portrayal of the Chinese characters in Millie. In particular, the portrayal of Mrs. Meers in the show because I had those same concerns. Even though, I was really, really poor at the time, I refused to do it. Even for a hundred bucks, I was like, "I'm not going to put myself [crosstalk]"

Dick Scanlan: I paid a hundred and ten.

Francis Jue: ... "through that." We always got a little extra because we had to learn the Chinese. The irony for me is that, what Dick and Jeanine have achieved is actually a subversion of the racist stereotypes in the movie and actually provides the most progressive, most subversive part of the show in the Chinese subplot of the show.

I will admit that while working on the show, I begged for more, a little more dialogue, a little more time on stage, a little more opportunity to judge Mrs. Meers because I wanted, anticipating controversy with the future rights of the show, I wanted it to be crystal clear to anyone reading it on the page that the intent of the authors and the intent of our original production was to subvert those expectations ... That we were going to come on as people speaking Chinese, as laborers, as recent immigrants and everyone in the audience was going to expect certain things from us because it was a musical, because it's mainstream American media, and we were going to subvert that. I just wanted a little more.

I think that it's ... I think that all we needed was there and that our productions were successful. I can understand how people reading it on the page might go, "How do we do this?" I get asked on Facebook all the time by people doing the show, "How do we do this?" I get approached by strangers all the time asking me, "Our school is doing this, what do we do?" All I can do is describe what we did. Harriet Harris was brilliant as Mrs. Meers and she got a Tony for it for her bravery, partly because she did go whole hog for this stereotype. She dared people to enjoy her downfall. Her accent was nothing ... She was not trying to do a Chinese accent. Her accent was closer to a Texan accent than to a Chinese accent.

Jeanine Tesori: By way of the North Pole.

Francis Jue: Yeah. [crosstalk] It was so bizarre. She afforded Ken and me so many opportunities to judge her, to ... even to caricature her. I don't know if it's in the stage directions or not, but Harriet and I came up in this chase scene towards the end of the show, this opportunity for me to actually caricature her as a mirror of what she was doing when she was trying to communicate with me, communicate with me. She allowed me to make fun of her to her face. It's this brilliant moment of her Asian stereotype and a Chinese actor's character's imitation of an Asian stereotype that I think encapsulates how truly subversive and fantastic this show is at busting these stereotypes.

Jack Tchen: I think everybody's probably heard of blackface, but very few people, fewer people have heard of yellowface. It'd be useful to talk about that a little bit to give folks a context, a theatrical context for how that has worked because in fact, I think the history and the practices of yellowface, history of Chinese exclusion for example, and for that matter since this is supposed to take place in the 1920s, 1922, also the history of eugenics, which is very much of this moment as well in which Italians and Jews are being basically told they're inferior Europeans and excluded from this country after 1924. Right? There's a context to this moment that quite frankly, most Americans don't know about. It'd be useful to talk about that a little bit. So, yellowface ...

Francis Jue: I think many people know yellowface if we refer to shows like, The King and I, Flower Drum Song, where many of those roles were originated by non-Asians. What most people don't know is this long tradition of minstrelsy that included blackface, but also included many Asian stereotypes. Some people were very successful illusionists, magicians, other people with acts that where they imitated Asian people. The point was always that they were exotic, mysterious, that they were nefarious, that there was something ... White slavers, and the point was to judge them and to defeat them.

Jeanine Tesori: Wasn't there the ... I think the thing that we really were ... I remember discussing a lot with the idea of Asian men not being men;  no agency. That there was something ... And to make them ... how do we turn that?  I think that's what had to be addressed. And you end up with the woman who desires you. You end up ... The two people who end up ...

Francis Jue: I end up with a guy.


Jeanine Tesori: Right, you end up with a guy, and heroically.

Francis Jue: ... the job and foiling the plot.

Jeanine Tesori: Right, but I could see if it's not specifically lined up where if you're ... It's a sophisticated subversion because there must be a context. I did see in one of the schools, they were saying, "The contents of this show, we do not agree with. They are offensive." I thought, "That's tricky" because we are not putting something on, but I could see that at that kind of thing inside musical comedy, it's unexpected and perhaps has to be clarified in that way. That was not the intent. What we tried -I think our best - to have the knowledge of was what the thing is that we wanted to, starting with Dick, to Michael, to me, to reveal. Reveal the thing, dramatize the thing, but on face value. As you said, I can see where you would need to ... I was very taken that there was a program note saying, "The material inside this show is not something that the school stands by."

Dick Scanlan: It's also the ... There's a ... The creative process is elusive. In hindsight, we can sort of formalize it, step-by-step, but in the moment it happens on so many different levels all at once. Specifically, the choice to have Ken's character, Ching Ho, end up with Miss Dorothy, it did not arise from a kind of intellectual conversation of, "We would like to fight the yellowface stereotype of emasculated Asian men." Honestly, it emerged from the profundity and authenticity of Ching Ho's love for Miss Dorothy as dramatized by Ken, and how perfectly suited those two characters are for each other. They have to be together, they must, they absolutely must. It just ... It was so clear to us, it was like, "Well of course, they're soul mates."

Jeanine Tesori: As a side note, another MTI show, Violet, is exactly ... in the short story. The soldier who was white, they end up together. As we're rehearsing, I call the author and I said, "In our version, she has to go to the African American soldier. It can't go any other way and I understand if you pull the rights, but it has to do that." She said, "If that's how it's going, that's where you must go."

Dick Scanlan: You follow the road.

Jeanine Tesori: You follow the road that the character leads you on.

Dick Scanlan: By try... I think... I mean, honestly, I think sort of inspired by the truth of what you were bringing to it, we re-conceived the plot of the play, right, which in effect then has ... The by-product it's addressing a yellowface stereotype. That wasn't ... We got there through the backdoor. You know?

Jeanine Tesori: I do hear that the yellowface is very painful and I have said it's been very enlightening for me because I don't think I understood what we were playing with as deeply as I do now. That's the humility of, to me, round-tabling...

Ken Leung: You know the thing is offensive about it along the lines of what you're saying like, take Mickey Rourke in Breakfast ... Breakfast at Tiffany's, right ...

Jack Tchen: Mickey Rooney.


Ken Leung: [crosstalk] Mickey Rooney. I just saw Mickey Rourke in a movie this afternoon.

Jack Tchen: There's another movie of Mickey Rourke that is also problematic, but that's another discussion.

Francis Jue: Oh really?

Ken Leung: The Rainmaker was on this afternoon. What was I going to say? If you have a white actor in yellowface and he's portraying a human being, I don't think it would be so offensive. It's not the appearance that we take offense with, it's when you put on ...

Jack Tchen: There's, The Good Earth, for example, the movie version of, The Good Earth, which has lots of yellowface in it. They're meant to be noble characters ...

Ken Leung: They're meant to be human beings. Right. It's that, it's how they're portrayed ... It's where ... If I were to put on a mask of ... a Jack Tchen mask and behaved like a fool, that would be offensive to you. If I ... If there was reason for me to put on a Jack Tchen mask and be a human being, you would not ... You know what I'm saying?

Francis Jue: Yul Brenner, Juanita Hall, they've turned in beautiful, complex performances; human portrayals. The Asian American acting community has real problems, too, with anyone playing an Asian role with an accent, speaking not in English, playing somebody of lower class. From my point of view, a coolie is a person, too. They were coolies ... There were coolies, but they were people. Speaking ... Tagging onto what Ken is saying, as long as you're playing ... have the opportunity to play somebody who is an actual human being, I don't see the problem with it. People with accents are people, too.

Ken Leung: It's as if you're watching and you can't get past the appearance, then that echoes your own stuff, I think. Right?

Francis Jue: Right. Ken and I would have these conversations while doing the show a lot because friends of ours would come to see the show and they'd say, "I think you guys are hilarious. I only had problems because I wasn't sure whether the audience was laughing at the same thing I was laughing at." This bugged me a lot. I would ask Ken, "How can we make sure that the audience is laughing at what we want them to laugh at?" I learned this from Ken: we can't control that. All we can do is intend what we intend. For anybody looking at this show perspectively and reading it on the page and has problems with it, I only have to say ... My response is that, "You're looking at it and projecting onto it what you expect to see. What is actually on the page is exactly the opposite of racial ... of stereotypes in the characters of Ching Ho and Bun Foo."

Jack Tchen: Part of what's really amazing and perhaps this is on purpose, or perhaps this is just kind of in the tradition of doing the music and the characters, is that it's full of mix-ups. That's a deep tradition, certainly in New York musical tradition, musical theater, and theater traditions, in which there'd be people, you know the Irishman, and the China-man, and the black laundry lady, whatever, mixing it up in all sorts of ways that were intended for comic effect. I think sometimes it was done in a very racist way, no doubt, but also it was done in other more complex ways, in which a black man in blackface created a different kind of connection that perhaps wasn't possible. Right? There's all sorts of pushback and ways of going. I'm just curious if the mix-up, including the romance, right, which is against what expectations, the audience expectations, were just what made sense in terms of, the writing and the fun you were kind of communicating.

Jeanine Tesori: I have to say, as I've gotten ... I feel like in Millie, Dick gave me a real gift by Millie, bringing it to me and asking me to do it, it was only my second show so there was a lot of guesswork. I'm surprised at how much we got right. I think one of the things in a piece where you're dealing with metaphor is we're telling Millie's story all the way through, and that's one of the reasons. There some things in Act One I would like to change rhythmically but otherwise, I think the show is very successful. Everyone is coming to seek love, and everyone has a mask of identity that hides their essence. I think the mix-ups and the farce, if it's done correctly and with a deft and human hand, can understand that what she thought she wanted she ... it ends up much deeper a journey than she thought when she looked inside the mirror. I think what we try to do is take that central journey and apply it rigorously to every single person.

The villain in musical theater is always really tricky because you ... if it's a dragon, or in these terms it's a dragon lady, and what she does, I think, it's interesting because I think if you don't go far enough, the villain is not clear. If you're a touch of it and people don't understand what's happening, everybody has to tell the central journey, the central hunger, to be seen for who they are, villain, ingenue, hero, and to get what they want in the end is the connection to someone else.

I think that's why the payoff of Act Two, that's why I knew that we had done something correct when ... You can't have a payoff of Act Two unless you have an Act One that's set itself up. The reaction to the heroes, strangely enough, of the musical turned out to be these two men. It was a great surprise that the characters told us that and we wrote I think to that. It's interesting to hear you say about, "What are they laughing at?" I think sometimes when people make fun of languages, that's where you get into a very slippery slope. That's why we made those tapes to say the Chinese must be completely accurate. It's not being done for comic effect, but they're funny, they're festive, they're clowns, in a sense and that is ...

Ken Leung: Bickering is funny.

Jeanine Tesori: Bickering is funny.

Dick Scanlan: And subverting the expectation of pidgin English, which is what the audience is expecting is, "Me no likey." They're partially laughing at their own expectations. It's funny in terms of, the mix-ups, I want to piggyback on one thing you said before I get to that, that there's four heroic characters in this piece. Millie, Muzzy, she puts her life on the line to participate in that charade of who's African American [audio cuts out] ... very personal.

I think the reason I was attracted to this story, when I first got the idea is, I had occasion to watch it; I had a house and a videotape and people kept watching it and so I watched it too many times. I was struck with how at the core of this very, very flawed and bloated and racist movie was a character whose fundamental objective was to reject the life she'd been born into and create a life that reflected who she felt herself to be inside; a life that actually matched her experience of her essence. I thought, "How interesting, in the middle of this not very good movie is actually a journey that I had lived as an aspiring artist, as a gay man, as all sorts of things." I thought, "Wouldn't it be interesting to put it on stage, but really make that in a conscious way, the anchor." We extended that to every single character.

Certainly for Bun and Ching, it went way beyond ... They were born in China and they want to re-imagine themselves as Americans. They're very different characters but every single character is examining identity. Who am I? How can I create a life that really expresses and reflects that? Part of knowing, who am I, is knowing who are you? You know what I mean? You also have to figure that out to know who I am. I think the mix-ups partially come from these people; Jimmy, Dorothy, Bun, Ching, Millie, and Muzzy has already done it, and Trevor in a sense in his attempt to be modern in business. They're all trying to reinvent some aspect of themselves and only Mrs. Meers is stuck, really stuck in a fixed idea of who she is or who she should have been and that's where bitterness takes over her and turns her into the monster that she is when the play begins; that's happened long before our play begins.

I think those identity issues were partially what informed those mix-ups. Then there is a DNA from the movie and the movie has a farcical quality to it and part of what's challenging is the DNA for the movie because regardless of the choices we made, there is a DNA of a movie that made other choices and choices that are egregious and hurtful. That's wrapped into the show's legacy in a complicated way.

Jack Tchen: Part of what's tricky about this play, as it's now being licensed by performers all across the country is the ability of school administrators, the school directors, the theatrical directors, the actors themselves, to actually understand this ... What you're talking about. I think within a New York context, and perhaps within the theater tradition, among theatergoers there may be some awareness, a greater awareness of this, although of course the issue of racism and combating it and limited roles and all that is an ongoing kind of struggle that's happening not only in New York, but of course in many other places. I think in a high school level ... I'm from the Midwest so I'm kind of very sensitive to these questions in terms of how these things get translated and played out, misunderstood. Part of the challenge now of groups performing it in 2016 is, how do they understand this? One of the challenges is the language question. Does that high school have the ability to understand the sophisticated points you're making about language? What are the ways in which maybe that could be communicated in an effective way? Yeah, Francis.

Jeanine Tesori: It is one of the reasons we're also here, I think, discussing it. I think for me, and I'm sorry ... I wanted to give the schools tools and to understand we are in it together. There isn't this idea, Dick and I have never been that way, and frankly Francis and Ken are quite famous at this point as actors and I think there's a risk to always saying what you think and having it live on tape and being sent out. I think that if there is something that needs to be done, I would like the show to reveal something and have an agency to it as opposed to, "Well you just go out and do it and figure it out. If it's problematic, sorry." It's just not who we are. I think for me, it's the beginning in effort and actually I'm learning a lot of something, revisiting the conversations and now looking back how many years ago to see what it's like for us now in 2016, you know, how it is.

Francis Jue: I think any show that a school or anybody is considering doing, can be done racist. It would be very easy to do Millie in a racist way. It would be easy to do The Crucible, in a racist way. The difference between ... that I've experienced when faced with portraying Asian people on stage is that for some reason, suddenly they're being evaluated as representatives of their culture or of an entire society that is other, as opposed to simply looking at them as fellow characters in the play. Suddenly, we're looking at Millie and we're looking at these Chinese immigrant characters and evaluating them in ways that we're not looking at other stereotypes in the show. There's a black female cabaret singer. There's a young woman who's relegated to be a stenographer and that's her highest ambition. No one is talking about those stereotypes because we experience them as fully fledged human beings. For some reason there are people who look at these Chinese characters and put the burden of them representing the full range of human experience for a billion-and-a-half people on the planet.

I would just say that with those Chinese characters as with every other protagonist in Millie, there is an opportunity to do what Jeanine and Dick have said, which is explore. This is really appropriate for kids in school, too. Explore the desire to invent yourself, to create who you want to be and test the boundaries of what that is. Every single character in the play shares that ambition. It's no different for the Chinese characters than for Millie and Miss Dorothy. Play them the same way that you're playing all of the other characters and I think that you'll answer any questions that you have.

Jack Tchen: I appreciate what you're all saying. Let me just push a little harder because I think we're in a very different moment in time than certainly when the film came out and also when you first premiered it on Broadway. We're at a moment now in which finally the racial quotas from exclusion, Chinese exclusion, but also eugenics exclusion where whole groups were kept out of this country have changed ...1965, ok? Since that, we finally have many more people from around the country not based on racial quotas, but coming in a variety of ways. We also have many Asians coming from well-to-do backgrounds, highly educated, making a lot of money, confounding any stereotypes there may have existed about Chinatown. These new people arriving are often times paying lots of money to go to private schools that are putting on these plays or in public schools that are really not aware of the history of stereotypes or the history of racism.

They encounter this stuff, they encounter the Chinese laundrymen, which is historically is absolutely accurate, but has also become a kind of primary representation historically of Chinese characters and a stereotype in some ways, right? They're saying, "Wait a minute, what's going on here?" They have a hard time distinguishing the parody or the satire or the confounding that you're offering because they're actually not familiar with that American tradition. They're not sufficiently submerged in that history to know the difference in some way. They see "Something's weird. What's going on here? Why's this happening?" How would you respond to those folks?

What's in interesting for example, is when the character of Bun Foo jumps into the arms at the very end. Now, it's kind of wonderful now especially since gay rights and transgender rights are being kind of blown wide open in American culture and court cases have kind of blown it wide open. I would say, I would guess in 2002 it was still somewhat, maybe not in New York theater ...

Francis Jue: I think it was a big surprise.

Jack Tchen: It was a big surprise, right? It's a big deal. Right? Now, it's not such a big deal perhaps for high schoolers to be dealing with it, but how do they deal with it. You're right, there's many different many kind of confoundings, as Dick is pointing out, but what kind of stereotypes do they hold? How clear are they about history? How can ... what do they need to learn, in some ways, to be really prepared to do these characters justice?

Ken Leung: I don't know that they need to learn anything. I think they need to come from their truth. I don't think they need to be schooled in satire or history of things. These are kids who just are in [audio cuts out]

Francis Jue: ... Asian representations. If this is the only representation you have, I wouldn't say that there's something inherently wrong with Millie, I'd say that there's something ... A larger question to the programming, and the casting, and the creative opportunities that you're creating at your school. I don't think that one show can answer the larger question of representations of peoples at an entire institution. If you have a problem because there aren't enough representations of Asian men in other than laundrymen roles, then create opportunities for other representations of Asian men. There isn't something necessarily wrong with Millie because of that.

Ken Leung: I want to add a small, kind of tangent thing where, when I first told my parents I wanted to be an actor, it was as if I told them I had cancer. They kind of still ... [crosstalk] With today's parents, for them to even allow their kids in the theater program at their school ... I say "You're going in the right direction." Progress is already being made. For them to find problems or ... I think as long as it keeps the conversation going, it's great because in my house, there's no dialogue. It's why I became an actor, to learn what dialogue is all about. I think there's this feeling, "Oh, there's a big problem." I see this as kind of a great thing as far as what I know from my upbringing.

Dick Scanlan: My response is so process oriented because it's just my nature. I don't know exactly what to say to the parents. I see all kinds of work that provokes me, offends me, upsets me, and the next week I'll go back and see another kind of thing that I know is going to do it all over again because it makes me think and it makes me ... As a gay man I see all kinds of representations of what it is to be gay. I've lived through the years where any suggestion that a gay man was ever a hairdresser, ever. Ever a gay hairdresser is offensive. I would be like ... Actually I, for a while I toyed with being one and I've never had a straight one so that's odd. [crosstalk] but I've also seen ... I understand how complicated it is.

I also know it's ... There are even people who will be angry that I'm making it analogous, my sexual orientation, with being a part of a race. I understand how loaded it all is but I can only bring my own experience in my lifetime, this time around, to the questions, and what I've learned from the dialogue of the people I talk to. From a process standpoint, the thing I would say would be two-fold ... Number one, never forget that if you're working on Thoroughly Modern Millie, that truly, the characters of Bun and Ching are really meant to be very much aligned with Millie and Dorothy.

Jeanine Tesori: Completely. A hundred percent.

Francis Jue: A hundred percent.


Jeanine Tesori: Absolutely.

Dick Scanlan: They are ... What they want, and the way that they move through the world, 
isn't meant to be depicted in any ... with anymore of an exaggerated attack or any kind of comment on it, anymore than the young people who, next to, the next person who's playing Millie and the person who's playing Miss Dorothy. However, it's all meant to be tonally in that sense the same. The other thing is, in terms of the language, the easiest way to do it is learn it, learn it in English, play the scenes in English until you really have your intentions, if you're not a Chinese speaker; and most kids who are doing the show arguably are not. Then you have to rehearse what you say now, play the exact same intention ... You know what I mean, and use these words. It's not meant to have anymore ... If the line is, "May I have a glass of water," it's not meant to have anymore urgency in one language or anymore heightened kind of commentary on it than it does in the other, and let the audience's experience of the subversion of their expectations be the thing that makes it funny; you don't have to do that.

Jeanine Tesori: I would say along with that, they are the only ones who are not speaking English. I think alongside that, that's the slippery slope that that language inherently has a bounce to it. You don't need to put a hat on a hat, that's what I would say. Perhaps we should put some things in our scripts for Millie to remind everybody that it is ... I can see where you would overdo and turn it into something it's not. This is true. That's why MTI took such pains to get exactly their speaking in a language that has ... it can be confused with something else that's only filled with empty gesture, vocal inflection to make people laugh; that is not what it is.

Dick Scanlan: It's a tricky thing because right, right, you try to remind, especially young actors, that it's not unusual to Bun Foo and Ching Ho that they're speaking Cantonese; that's what they speak. They have no sense that there's anything unusual about the language. What's going to happen is, you say your first few lines, the audience response is going to be huge ... You can't go with that response. You can't ride that. You have to stay in your, the truth of your intention. The thing is if you do that, it will actually get funnier because the audience is more and more liberated from their own expectations. It only works if you stay really disciplined about it.

Jeanine Tesori: Right. There's nothing exaggerated about it.

Dick Scanlan: That's right, you don't.

Jeanine Tesori: That's where I think is a very interesting teaching point is to say, "Do it in English." These are holistic men who are in a pickle, they want something, there's someone in their way, there's a heinous person in their way. We all work together, the five of us and Michael here, to make sure that that was right up there. I think Francis what you were saying was really important that the real estate is in the stage and if anything to err on, keeping, making sure that that's not truncated, exaggerated, buffooned ... That's where I could see where you would say, "What is happening here?" Well, the wrong thing.

Dick Scanlan: Especially when you have Mrs. Meers on the stage who is ...

Jeanine Tesori: Who is the buffoon.


Dick Scanlan: That's right.

Jack Tchen: So maybe we should talk about Mrs. Meers. How's that? You were mentioning the dragon lady stereotype, which is really the common representation even to this day on TV, for example, the aggressive Asian woman who is emasculating men, et cetera, et cetera, whatever. What's ... Just to be clear about Mrs. Meers ... She's impersonating that dragon lady stereotype.

Dick Scanlan: That's right.

Jeanine Tesori: Badly.

Jack Tchen: Badly.

Dick Scanlan: She is a failed actress who is using what she perceives to be her acting ability to dawn a disguise that she thinks is convincing so that because the police are actually looking for her, right, for the actual person. It's a ... What do you call when someone [crosstalk] ... Yes. It's a ... I can't think of the word.

Jack Tchen: Oh.


Jeanine Tesori: Masquerade? [crosstalk]

Jack Tchen: An alias or an ...

Dick Scanlan: That's right, it's an alias. It's a whole different, you know ... That's what she's doing. That is exactly right. She's actually proud of the performance. She has no sense, by the way, that it's a stereotype. She has no sense that it's offensive. She actually thinks that what she's doing is convincing.

Jeanine Tesori: That's why we included that scene where she says, "Hello, Buddha?" And it drops. I remember the day that that was and I said, "Oh, there has to be ... Just to make crystal clear there has to be that one time where she drops the whole thing, becomes the tough, Brooklyn whoever she is, so we understand that she's assuming this identity that's not coming from us, it's coming from her.

Jack Tchen: And she's the character who doesn't transform.

Everyone: At all.

Jack Tchen: At all. Muzzy [crosstalk] started out with her but Muzzy has really transformed and done really well [crosstalk] and the two henchman have transformed as well, but she's remained the same. In some ways, in that way, she's really the not so, not a caricatured villain but she's the kind of failed human being in some way. Right?

Jeanine Tesori: Yeah, she's filled with styrofoam s’s. There is nothing to her but maquillage and bad intention and greed. I think that she ... What we really intended, all of us, is sort of that it represents the ugliness of stasis. If you really want to fail and go behind bars, be like her. Everybody else moves. Everybody gets love ... a partner ... it's like the end of a ...

Dick Scanlan: It's Shakespeare, yeah.

Jeanine Tesori: ... Shakespearean romp where everyone's linked up ... except for that one person who ends up really being the clown. She's the one.

Dick Scanlan: She doesn't have the courage to develop or change her identity based on the information she's getting from the world. That's part of developing an identity. It's who you feel yourself to be and then how that's reflected back at you. You sculpt in a sense, "I'm beginning to understand who I am." As a young person arguably, we don't see any of this in the show. The information she was getting back was clearly that her dreams of acting greatness ... perhaps that's not where her abilities were. One could argue her abilities were to probably become a great businesswoman or what have you but she was so fixated on this thing of what she had to be and she held on to that and as a result she's eroded, she's a completely eroded, rusted person. There isn't one aspect of her in the show that's presented as positive.

As a matter of fact, we had a song ... there's still a song “They Don't Know,” but the first version of it which was a heartbreaking song where you really felt the despair of her failure. She was left alone literally mending a dress. You remember this with Miss Dorothy? And it was like you were really meant to feel for ... And it was the reason we cut it was because no ... you don't want to feel for Mrs. Meers, she's past redemption. It's that totality of her erosion, of her strangled bitterness that we felt gave us permission for her to present such an offensive stereotype because nothing she does is sanctioned.

As a matter of fact, by definition if she's doing it, it has a big line through it, it has a big "don't do this!" because everything about her is bad news including what she perceives to be her wonderful performance as an Asian woman.

Jack Tchen: Thank you. This has been a great discussion. I think it's really useful and hopefully this will be something that the high school performers and college performers and anybody else doing it will really be able to work with. Great.

Dick Scanlan: Thank you Jack.

Everyone: Thank you. [crosstalk]

Drew Cohen: Thank you all for participating in this and we hope it gives people a lot of discussion that they can have in connection with their productions or in contemplating doing the show.

Jason Cocovinis: Yeah, it was very interesting just from an outside perspective [crosstalk]

Drew Cohen: We're not done yet. [crosstalk] Call now. 2-1-2 ... [crosstalk]


Dick Scanlan: ... you just jumped right in there.


Jeanine Tesori: Oh my God, that's funny.

Drew Cohen: It is very interesting because we've talked about it, Jeanine and Dick and I have talked about this but I haven't heard from you guys and I didn't know all the history. It is true and I mentioned this to Dick, and you don't need to record this part if you don't want to [crosstalk] ... I mentioned to him [crosstalk] who's opinion I value and I think I may have told you this earlier in an email that this person said ... I explained to them when the school in New York had an issue I explained, "See, it's not" ... Maybe it's not a perfect comparison but I was equating it to the, when Archie Bunker first went on TV and people were outraged because, "How can you put a racist on television?" It's like, "Don't you understand? We're making fun of this person. He's the fool."

Francis Jue: How do you debunk racism without representing racism?

Drew Cohen: Right. I [crosstalk] said, "It's sort of like that [crosstalk]. You have Mrs. Meers who, yes, at the audience's first view she is doing yellowface stereotype and everything but then you realize she's just a failed performer the way Dick just described." The person said, "I get it. I get it." Then he said, sort of cynically said, "You know? When you go to more than one level you lose the political correctness police." It was a reaction to what he's seen in certain, in New York schools and whatever that ... it's Ragtime if they use the N word, it's a racist show.

It's like, "There's a purpose for that", but I'm saying there are people who respond that way. [crosstalk]

Jeanine Tesori: ... there's ... I ... Just being on the ... The Yale thing, just watching it from afar I thought, there are ... It's ... There are two things. I'm finding students don't want to be uncomfortable in the same way. I didn't mind that I was raised on it and you guys were raised on it and there is an editing process that's really very tricky. It often stands for something else that, as you guys were talking about, it's absent at that school. It's not about the thing. The thing that happened at Yale is about what it was like. These students feel pressure to be the African American student at Yale, that's you, and they can't bear it, they have no way to sort of express that confusion. "I don't stand for black America at Yale, I'm just me trying to learn," and that's what I got from that. It escalated because it wasn't the correct discourse. It was this pressure.

There is a sort of editing process that's happening with, we don't want to upset the apple cart. Well, then just keep doing Music Man. What are you going to do? What's [crosstalk]

Francis Jue: ... It's what an institution of learning is supposed to do [crosstalk]

Jack Tchen: ... don't do it well.

Dick Scanlan: I have a very good friend, an actor,  Daniel Watts who is in Whorl Inside a Loop [inaudible] and is crazily gifted at it and he, the last piece I saw he did, he had a new piece in where he's trying to process Bill Cosby and he keeps coming back to [crosstalk] pondering because [inaudible], I think a standard probably thirty, thirty-one, he grew up with Bill Cosby as a real hero and he's trying to understand how he feels about all this. The piece is kind of thrilling but it's very much not done. We were talking about it and he's like, "I keep thinking there's something missing." I said, "There is." He said, "What is it?" I said, "Well, it doesn't have to be specifically like this but if you really want this piece to blow people's minds, why don't you liken ... There's Bill Cosby, which you're struggling with, and then there's Woodrow Wilson, right, which everyone wants taken off the names of Princeton buildings [crosstalk]."

Maybe it should, I'm not saying it shouldn't be because he, you know, had a lot of racist tendencies. Isn't it the same issue? Isn't the question, "Can people have stood for reprehensible things and also stood for extraordinary things?"

Jeanine Tesori: That's [crosstalk]

Dick Scanlan: If you put Woodrow Wilson and Bill Cosby together in this piece right now, the whole room is going to explode because no one's going to know where they stand on it in the best way because it's really hard to understand. It's very difficult. It's complicated. Then you're suddenly ... you're going to have them and then you're going to completely upend them in the best way because they ... these things are hard.

Jack Tchen: We’re in the context of the Republican debates so everything is a caricature.

Dick Scanlan: Yes, yes.

Jack Tchen: How do you talk about complexity within that in which when mistakes are so huge? Right? It has to be done. It has to be done. Yeah.

Francis Jue: I do get, though, how burdensome having to have those conversations and that pressure is. As much as I'm like, "Well, why aren't you willing to be the representative at Yale?" White actors don't have to look at every role that they're offered and say, "Is this going to represent white people in a positive way?" They don't have that pressure. They don't have the pressure of saying, "I'm representing all German people or all Italian people anymore probably. But we do. We still ... We can say, "I'm not going to put that pressure on myself right now" or "I'm going to take that up," we still have to answer that question. It's just an added, sort of, obligation.

Jeanine Tesori: I can't imagine it because I know writing for women characters that, I can't write anymore. I never was, but was able to label. I would not feel comfortable putting in the world someone who I didn't understand was a subject and not an object. It would be very hard for me.

Dick Scanlan: That's why the song, “Gimme Gimme,” has the pronoun I, me, my 97 times and has the pronoun he or him twice. We wanted the climax to be a woman claiming her power and realigning her values, not sublimating what she wants for the guy. It's not about him it's about the way I'm going to direct my life now.

Jeanine Tesori: It is comical and I do love the play Yellowface with David [Henry Hwang] was [crosstalk]

Francis Jue: ... his best play ever.

Jeanine Tesori: Best play because he was like, "Wait a minute." It may not work if I'm doing ... That may not work to be ... Racism might work a little bit for the part that needs to be what ... And it's very com ... It's represented in the complications as opposed to ... But then I think we look to David so much like the Asian American writer [crosstalk]

Francis Jue: And he takes that mantle really seriously.

Jeanine Tesori: Oh my God!

Dick Scanlan: You have that amazing scene in Keeping The Faith, right? Where ... Aren't you the salesman, the TV salesman [crosstalk]

Jeanine Tesori: Oh, I love that scene.

Dick Scanlan: That crazy scene where he comes in. This is the first time we've ... I don't remember what ... But I remember the scene and you do ... Like it is absolutely stereotypical like Lower East Side Chinatown salesman trying to sell [crosstalk]

Ken Leung: ... I use it as a selling tactic.

Dick Scanlan: And it doesn't work so then, okay, you completely drop it, okay, let me tell you. [crosstalk] ... you drop it.

Jeanine Tesori: Yeah. That moment. I didn't know you were in that [crosstalk]

Dick Scanlan: ... really fantastic and it's playing with some of the same ideas. The first part of the scene we have no idea.

Jeanine Tesori: It's the same thing in Big Short when he says to the camera, "Look, my name's John." [crosstalk] It helps him but I do this. I go, "Oh my God!"

Dick Scanlan: That's right. [crosstalk]

Jeanine Tesori: Right? You play ... There's the Asian man, you think, "Math", and then he's like, "Look, I'm just [smuggling]." Oh my God!

Drew Cohen: I have a question for you guys. What is your response as performers when you think about a school somewhere in America where they don't have any Asian performers and they have other performers, probably white performers, playing those two characters with as much integrity as we've described today? Is that the same as, why shouldn't a black person play Harold Hill or is it different? This is a minority group that is being represented here.

Ken Leung: I've not thought about that. I think if they ... It would depend on how they approach it. Right? If they ... I wanted to respond to what Francis ... Maybe I can connect the two.

Drew Cohen: Yeah, no, that's fine.

Ken Leung: What Francis was saying about how, as Asian American performers were always looking at material and sometimes we say no to it because it's stereotypical or something. I've always been of a mind where just because something, just because the box is stereotypical, you don't have to be stereotypical in it. You don't have to play it stereotypically. That is the offensive thing. The box is just the box, it's just the clothes that you wear. Right? I've always been of a mind where you go out of your way to take those parts out of the hands of somebody who might play it stereotypically, play it truthfully and the inherent racism or whatever that may be in there will be evident. If you just play it truly they'll be like, "Oh, that's not funny at all."

The reason is that ... I'm on a network television show and I get a lot of kind of these "for humor's sake" jokes and stuff. There was a very telling moment a couple of seasons ago where there was a racially insensitive joke. I didn't get it. I was like, "I don't even know what this means." Someone said, "Oh, it's a joke." The script had it so that my character was making the joke of myself, which is why I didn't get it. It wasn't that somebody's made the joke and then my character could kind of respond to it and could be kind of funny or whatever. But when I brought it up I got the sense that it didn't even occur to the writer what that would be for me. He just, "Oh, this is empirically funny. It was just to give you ..."

Dick Scanlan: "Empirically funny." I'm going to use that as a writer.

Ken Leung: I think ... Don't assume bad intentions, assume that they don't know and inject it with a dose of whatever.

Francis Jue: That is if you're allowed, which is why I kept asking these guys and then before Broadway I asked Michael Mayer, "I need to talk to you before we do this." I don't want to get in there and be in a position where I have to withdraw from the show. With schools, I think that's what school is for. I got to play a busker in My Fair Lady. I got to ... I got to play a Cossack and a Jew in Fiddler On The Roof. That's what school is for. Let's experiment with who we are and let's add as much humanity ... I got to do Ain't Misbehavin'. Let's put as much humanity of my humanity, my particular humanity in each of those roles and see how it works.

Jeanine Tesori: Where it is an interesting line, just like the first amendment is not so clear, there's the outer limits here of a school that has no, or very limited, or perhaps none of the Asian community who want to do it but they are there. If you have ... You were saying before about if they understand the character, are they ... Do you feel okay with having them do it?

Francis Jue: Yeah. Sure. Absolutely. But don't just make the available actors of color only, their only opportunity being the coolies.

Jeanine Tesori: Yes. Right.


Francis Jue: If you have a limited pool of ethnically specific people, then open everything up. Why couldn't Millie be black in that case?

Dick Scanlan: We've seen it. [crosstalk]

Jeanine Tesori: There's that new ... I read on The HowlRound about color conscious as opposed to color blind, which is really interesting. There was this dramaturgical lines of reasoning of if you're going to, for instance, Caroline, or Change ... Caroline just can't be white because the piece is about whiteness and blackness. It just is. Jewish, black, the relationship therein. It's color is the drama so you can't switch it around, it is the thing. There are others that it's not the thing. It's not the thing. Then this sort of questions that arise of what the opportunities are so that you cast it in a way that makes it an even richer experience but doesn't deny ... Ragtime you can't do it like that because it is about what, how we divide up.

Francis Jue: Could you do Ragtime if it was an all-white school? Could you do Ragtime and have a play where everyone wearing red hats was white? Everyone wearing blue hats was black and everyone wearing yellow hats was Jewish? ... Then use that as an opportunity for the students to learn about these people in their context, in their time.

Jeanine Tesori: Yeah, absolutely. You're absolutely right.

Drew Cohen: It’s something that happens to West Side Story a lot where they do it by based on their attire, based on their costuming. There could be an all black version of West Side Story and you could tell by what each gang is wearing and the dialogue, which group is which.

Francis Jue: If you're Yale rep or you’re ART or ACT whatever other professional theater is attached to a school, I would say, "Why are you doing that show if you're not going to cast it appropriately?"

Drew Cohen: Right.


Francis Jue: Then you're not just talking about aesthetic you're talking about employment.

Jeanine Tesori: Yeah. Yes, yes.


Francis Jue: That's just another issue. [crosstalk]

Drew Cohen: There's another element to that which is that schools have a certain amount of freedom in that they aren't commercial institutions in terms of the theater. They're going to sell the tickets to the four, the two parents, maybe four parents or the grandparents, the whole modern family, anyway. It doesn't matter. There's an expectation that Broadway has, unless it's an experimental production of ... There was once an all black version of Guys and Dolls. If you're doing West Side Story, My Fair Lady, Flower Drum Song, you better be casting the right character, the right actors in that for the right reasons but also because the audience will be disappointed or confused unless you're really making an artistic choice and taking an artistic perspective on it.

High schools ... Everyone knows the practical limitations. There's no consequence to a failed production commercially or anything like that. Those are the great contexts in which I think you can have that freedom of casting, both ways.

Jeanine Tesori: What you said to me is a great distinction of what I've really ... among the many takeaways from this for which I'm so grateful is, it's school. In the context of a learning institution to develop empathy is to walk in the shoes of another. If that means that you say the lines and understand what racism is, you can hear it, that's why it's there and that's different than employment. That is such a different way of maybe about thinking the theatrical experience in terms of the profession and the way that kids go to Math and English and dah, dah, dah, and Theater. They're going to the class of making theater. That's a whole other, which is a great way to think about it because you absolutely could do and should do Ragtime like that.

Francis Jue: That's why high schools do King and I all the time. [crosstalk] why they should be. The first live musical I ever saw was a high school production of King and I; my brother was playing Chulalongkorn and the only other Asian person was playing the king. As far as I was concerned they were all Siamese, it was beautiful. They were played with such dignity. They actually learned the Jerome Robbins choreography; I remember it really vividly.

Drew Cohen: One of the other limitations or aspects of high school is that you don't have the benefit of a lot of commentary about the production. When you have a show like Hamilton and this ... Well there's been a few things written about it but
[crosstalk] everyone has their own perspective and it's an intellectual exercise. One of the reasons why we were really excited about doing this today is we don't have that for Millie and that's why it's great that you have the letter that you've given to give people ...

Francis Jue: Great letter.

Drew Cohen: ... a stepping stone to have that conversation. We licensed Hairspray and one of the things that the authors did was they wrote a letter saying ... Because they didn't want to, A, limit the commercial possibilities for the show, but they also didn't want to limit the casting opportunities for any race. They said ... There's a letter that says to the audience, "In the show you're about to see tonight, some of the characters' ethnic backgrounds will not match that of the actor performing it. We hope you will suspend your disbelief much the way we have come to expect a male performer to play Edna." It's not that that's ever revealed that it's a man, it's just a man playing that role the same way a white person could play a black person. If they're referred to in a certain way, "We hope you'll take the script for the way it was written."

In a show that's about not looking only skin deep, we want to afford people the opportunity to play any role in the show if they're qualified for that role. I think that's been well received by the licensees who have done the show. Without that, hopefully that gives people an opportunity to discuss the issue as opposed to wondering, "Oh, what are we supposed to do about that", and really being afraid of knee jerk reactions or [crosstalk] judgments. Of what?

Jeanine Tesori: Of offending.

Drew Cohen: Of offending.

Jeanine Tesori: Right, right.

Dick Scanlan: I want to be sensitive to Jack's time [crosstalk] you've got a son at home. [crosstalk] Guys, I just wanted to say that when you were talking about the lack of commentary, it's why I actually thought of you because I had a strong, intuitive feeling, just from our brief ... We chatted for like four minutes at intermission and I don't know if you remember this ...

Jack Tchen: Yeah, I do. [crosstalk]

Dick Scanlan: ... a very good feeling about it. I just thought, "Jack is going to know how to frame this in a way so that it's a substantive hopefully provocative conversation but that it's an actual discussion that then can stimulate other discussions and conversations. I think ... I really appreciate your doing it.

Everyone: Thank you so much.