So, the lesson here is "don't have a black understudy?"

Seriously, we had this debate for Miss Saigon. If Denzel Washington can play Hamlet and Sir Laurence Olivier can play Othello, I don't think the race of the lead actor matters in a play; just whether people will pay money to see the actor in the play.

And people will pay money to see Mandy Patinkin. Who will fork out their hard-earned money to see Okieriete Onaodowan? When Oak makes a name for himself and becomes a box office draw, then he can shove Mandy Patinkin aside.

Actress Cynthia Erivo, who won a Tony in 2015 for The Color Purple, also took exception, tweeting, “This has been handled badly. Ticket sales shouldn’t override a person doing his job” and “Oak worked extremely hard for this.”

So, she'd be satisfied with Oak playing lead in an empty auditorium and the play closing down? Would Oak? Advanced ticket sales had tanked without the lure of Josh Groban in the lead. Or would Oak prefer to make money? Patinkin puts butts in chairs and the cast gets paid.

And that Oak "worked extremely hard for this" is immaterial. Ever had a millennial on your staff. They'll tell you "I worked very hard at this." And you have to explain to them that results matter, not effort. They don't get it.

Exactly. So many starving actors have worked their asses off on plays. Some don't have the star quality that say, a Lawrence Fishburne (on Broadway in "A Lion In Winter") or an Idris Elba does, so they remain in community theater while working as accountants or dog walkers.

"Ticket sales shouldn't override a person doing his job."

I chuckled at this too. They are in the entertainment business, it is ALL ABOUT the ticket sales, it is ALL ABOUT butts in the seats. It matters little how well the "artistic" bits of it are done, when the show's over everyone gots to get paid.

How about this: Offer to keep Oak in the cast, but to do so they have to give up their paychecks. Give the little socialists a taste of their own wealth-redistribution. I'm guessing Mandy would be just fine after that.

They live in a town run by socialists, a town where a lot of people make money by moving money. Everything they consume is imported from beyond the city limits, and it's all out of sight. It may as well be magic. Turn on the light switch and the lights come one. How does that work? Who knows and who cares. It just does. Where do grass-feed, antibiotic-free beefsteaks come from? Presumably there is a steak factory somewhere, maybe in Jersey, where they have steak machines that stamp out steaks all day. What do grass-fed and antibiotic-free actually mean? Well, grass is natural so that must be good. And "antibiotic" sounds like some kind of chemical name, and chemicals are icky and bad, so antibiotic-free must be good.

Theater people pay high taxes on (for most of them) meager incomes. They are surrounded by union and government workers who have cushy jobs for life and generous pensions awaiting them when they retire at 55. (We'll ignore the math for purposes of this discussion...) The MTA tells them that, due to a half-century's worth of deferred maintenance, it will be necessary to conduct a rolling campaign of line and stop closures and that trains will be delayed indefinitely, and they will just have to get used to it. They get accosted on the streets by cartoon characters and desnudas engaged in aggressive panhandling, and the government tells them that the panhandlers are "undocumented" and therefore have more rights than citizens do.

In short, they live in a world that is fucked up. I'm certainly not making excuses for them, but irrational behavior is to be expected in an irrational environment.

Their job is to drive ticket sales. If they total screw up the acting part and ticket sales are still strong then they have done a good job. If the acting is great and the sales are poor then they have done a poor job.

Producer: I want you to back my production of Arsenic And Old Lace.

Investors: That old chestnut? Who would go?

Producer: I'm staging it with a twist: all the characters are gay!

Investors: Wow. Between the women and gay men who will attend, we'll make millions!

Producer: Great. We can use some of those profits to fund a movie I've written about Thomas Jefferson.

Investors: You racist, classist, homophobic piece of crap. Get out!

A bit OT, but...

Last night I saw a free outdoor performance of Romeo and Juliet. Disappointing. Why? Every actor was YELLING! They all had microphones, so why did the director make them do that? (I only went because I'd heard they were actually using Elizabethan costume, for a change - so I figured they were taking it seriously enough to spend some real money on it. It wasn't enough.) I think it's just the common American style of acting Shakespeare. Very annoying.

Not that Franco Zeffirelli's 1960s movie wasn't loud and exaggerated at times - but there was far more subtlety and gentility in THAT production.

Also, there were a couple of gender switches (the Prince, for one, plus the men's lines at the end were given to the mothers - obviously, they cut the line about Lady Montague being dead, as well as other lines, to save time). Gender switches work well enough in S's comedies, such as when Dogberry was a woman (same company) in "Much Ado About Nothing." Not so well in his tragedies.

To a large extent, reversing the races in historical dramas like Othello results in it not making sense. Part of Othello is about the racism. Plays about MacBeth etc are about a particular time and place with a particular ethnicity involved often in struggles against other ethnic groups. Making them all ahistorical (like complaints that Dunkirk had no black actors) removes much of the context and therefore story.

"a free outdoor performance of Romeo and Juliet. Disappointing. Why?"

Because by not charging for the tickets they can't hire competent talent.

In college, I was friends with a woman getting a music degree, with the objective of becoming an opera singer. She told me most people speak from their chests, not their diaphragms. That means to increase volume, they have to yell. Properly trained stage actors (and opera singers) are taught to vocalize from the diaphragm, getting volume with out yelling.

So they Shatnered the hell out of that performance. ;)

Well, to be honest, donations ARE always expected at that venue. Preferably at least $10 each. (When it comes to indoor theaters, I don't know how much of a ticket goes toward rent.)

Oh, and at the same venue, I saw "The Tempest," "Much Ado About Nothing," and "All's Well That Ends Well." All were quite good, as I remember. No, they didn't yell, aside from those who were playing broad comic figures anyway. Like Dogberry.