This past weekend we went to go see a production of BEAUTY AND THE BEAST at Seattle’s Fifth Avenue Theatre. Not only do we have a subscription to the theatre, but our eldest son was in the orchestra pit. So of course we’re going to go see anything he’s part of.
Now, while you might have seen the Disney animated version in the theatres or even the live-action version, you’ve never seen a full-scale production like this. For the Fifth Avenue made the conscious decision to cast a completely diverse set of actors, with nearly all the main leads performed by Black actors. (Cogsworth was a white man, and the Mme. De La Grande Bouche was a white woman.) A few other leads were of Hispanic, Asian, or Pacific Island descent, and the supporting chorus was fully diverse. And several actors self-identified as disabled.
Okay, that’s great and intriguing, and props (no pun intended) to the Fifth for their commitment to diversity. It felt like a real representation of who is in the theatre doing all the work. But then, maybe about halfway through, the musical changed for me. I am watching Black actors in a play about their unwanted transformation into domestic objects and their desire for their freedom, and it’s hitting hard.
What sealed the deal was Lumière and his song Human Again. Nicholas Japaul Bernard, the actor performing this role, is brilliant, a queer Black disabled man singing to a largely white audience a song that is deeper and wider than expected in its meaning in our context today:
When we’re human again
Only human again
We’ll go waltzing those old one-two-threes
We’ll be floating again!
We’ll be gliding again!
Stepping, striding as fine as you please
Like a real human does
I’ll be all that I was
On that glorious morn
When we’re fin’lly reborn
And we’re all of us human again.
Songwriters: Ashman Howard Elliott / Menken Alan Irwin
Human Again lyrics © Walt Disney Music Co. Ltd., Walt Disney Music Company, Wonderland Music Company Inc., Wonderland Music Company Inc, Wonderland Music Co., Inc
I talked with the musical director R.J. Tancioco after the show, and he mentioned that one thing the production is trying to do, deliberately, is to use the show as a vehicle for the larger vision of being “Human Again”: we have lost so much of our human experience in these times of Covid with isolation and alienation. So much of our expressions as humans have been shut down. Theatre. Music. Concerts. Assemblies. Church meetings. Work teams. We have been separated by a hidden disease that reaches out to kill more than 3000 of us every day, and at times it can seem like it is just too much for us. We want so much to be human again.
And then to that goal add that layer of representation. To be made back into people. Teachers. Parents. Doctors. Artists. Friends. Lovers. Creators. Carvers. Care-givers. All that has been stolen in the centuries since 1619 when America turned Black Africans into domestic utilities—and after more than a few centuries who wouldn’t want to be made human again?
It was just a lot. A lot to carry inside me. A lot to think about as I try to navigate an America that is so violently racist. A lot to consider when living in the world of whiteness where none of these issues need to matter but when trying to live out a fair and just life means that I must work hard to keep them in my mind as I make choices and live.
Sometimes the arts can entertain us. Disney has surely figured out that formula. But sometimes . . . the arts can open something up to us that we didn’t ever think we needed to see and learn.