Lack of Diversity in Damning Numbers

I leave town for a week to get a much-needed vacation away from New York City, and to clear my head. And while I'm gone, what comes out? A continuation of the Asian American Performers Action Coalition (which I wrote about last year here and here) 2012 survey of the racial breakdown of actors on Broadway and in the not-for-profit theater in New York City. The news was the numbers in the 2011-12 season.

And they were not pretty.

On Broadway, the casting breakdown was as followed:

• Caucasian: 74%
• African-American: 19%
• Latino: 2%
• Asian-American: 3%

For the top 16 not-for-profit theaters in New York City, the numbers were:

• Caucasian: 77%
• African-American: 16 %
• Latino: 3%
• Asian-American: 3%
• Others: 1%

The Best Thing About the "Smash" Premiere

Womanizing director Derek Wills, played by Jack Davenport, flipping through what looks like February 2010 issue of "American Theatre" magazine (aka my employer). It looks like he's reading the news section.

Good to know those magazines I sent to "Smash"'s prop department finally made their way onscreen.

And it gave me another reason to re-watch that bore of a two-hour premiere. Well, besides Ivy Lynn (Megan Hilty) belting out "They Just Keep Moving the Line."

I Make a Video

I feel like every time I get ideas for a blog post (so that I could post more on this blog and get some more traffic), I get distracted by this horrible thing called "day job." Then again, my day job is putting together a theater magazine so it's not actually horrible. Unless you count going to see theater for free horrible. Horribly amazing, maybe?

The February issue of "American Theatre" was released online today and I wrote an article in it about plays that utilize multiple languages. An abstract:

The double-sided question of what is being said and how to say it is popping up more frequently these days in bilingual plays, which differ from standard plays in a key respect: They bring in another language to help get the point across.

You can read the entirety of it, in layout, here.

Also in the same issue, I put to use that fancy degree that I got from Syracuse University and made a video about the costume design in "My Fair Lady" at Arena Stage in Washington, D.C. How did I do it? A recorded Skype interview and some fighting with FinalCut.

Watch that video and look at all the pretty costume pictures here.

In non-Diep-being-a-journalist news, I feel like Twitter has become the primary way I connect with other theater artists and get ideas/inspiration for stories. Which is how this post by Erin Quill fell into my lap (seriously it did, she tagged me on Twitter with it). It's about brownface in a Roundabout Theatre production of "The Mystery of Edwin Drood," which led to me asking, "Why do artists have to be so racist?!" I left a comment after reading the responses that, in short, said, "It's a play within a play, so it's okay!" Which shows you how far we still have to go before we can all respectively have the race talk in this country.

There's probably going to be a very belated podcast from this.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have to get back to putting out a magazine.