Mandy Patinkin can’t play Tolstoy’s Pierre because he’s a Jew and not black enough. Or something.
I think Patinkin is a great actor and could even play Natasha successfully. But he would be absolutely perfect as Pierre. He is Pierre 100%, and if you’ve seen him and read the novel, you’ll have to agree.
What kind of crap is this?
What I think is really going on: The production is apparently in perpetual danger of shutting down so they keep trying to bring in big names. They pushed out the previous guy playing Pierre in hopes that a bigger name would save their bacon. Patinkin doesn’t want to join in the game of re-arranging deck chairs on the Titanic. So he opted out.
What people are saying is going on because this is 2017 and Right-Thinking People Of A Certain Class can’t shut their goddamn mouths about diversity: People are saying it’s about diversity, with some saying it to make themselves look Woke and others saying it to gin up anti-PC outrage.
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I’m not surprised the play is tanking if they make such strange casting decisions.
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What a hysterical headline. And this is the ‘evidence’ that american theater has a problem with Jews:
“The role of Pierre was originated on Broadway by Josh Groban, whose father was Jewish. Groban was then replaced for a brief while by Dave Malloy, the show’s composer, whose first full-time job was as a teacher in the JCC preschool in San Francisco. Then came Onaodowan. In other words, for a black actor to replace a half-Jewish actor on stage is progress; for another Jewish actor to then step into the same role is racism.”
You’ve previous laughed off stories about how non-white actors and actresses find it so hard to get decent roles in tv/film. ‘Who cares about the lives of these rich, spoiled actors’, you’ve said, or words to that effect.
Never change, Tablet Mag. I’m glad they found time from defending Sebastian Gorka (an actual neo-nazi in the white house) to write this drivel.
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It’s not Patinkin I’m worried about or his capacity to make a living. It’s art. He’d be phenomenal in this role, if a bit old. It’s his psychotype, 100%. And it’s like this is not even a consideration when it should be the only consideration.
I once saw an American version of the Cherry Garden where one of the landowners was black. In the context of the play, this was quite insane. It killed the whole play. What the purpose of that casting decision was is a mystery.
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A conservative literary critic and college professor
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