The portrayal of East Asians in American theater has been a subject of controversy, similar to their portrayal in Hollywood.
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"Yellowface" is a form of theatrical makeup used by performers to represent an Asian person. It has been called “the practice of white actors donning overdone face paint and costumes that serves as a caricatured representation of traditional Asian garb.” Founded in 2011, an organization known as, "The Asian American Performers Action Coalition" or the AAPAC work in an effort to, "expand the perception of Asian American performers in order to increase their access to and representation on New York City's stages." This group works to address and discuss "Yellowface" controversies and occurrences.
Miss Saigon
Miss Saigon, a musical with music by Claude-Michel Schonberg, lyrics by Alain Boublil and Richard Maltby, Jr. and book by Boublil and Schönberg, is an adaptation of Giacomo Puccini's opera “Madame Butterfly.” Miss Saigon tells the story of a condemned romance involving an Asian woman and an American soldier set in the time of the Vietnam War.
When Miss Saigon premiered at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, London on September 20, 1980, English actor Jonathan Pryce wore heavy prosthetic eyelids and skin darkening cream in playing The Engineer, a French-Vietnimaese pimp.
Once the London production came to Broadway in 1990, Pryce was slated to reprise his role as The Engineer, causing a major rift in American theater circles and sparking public outcry. Tony Award-winning playwright David Henry Hwang wrote a letter to the Actors’ Equity Association protesting this portrayal of a Eurasian character being played by a white actor.
Despite these protests, Pryce performed the Engineer to great acclaim and Miss Saigon became one of Broadway's longest-running hits.
The Mikado
The Mikado is a comic opera, with music by Arthur Sullivan and libretto by W. S. Gilbert, premiered in 1885 in London and still performed frequently in the English-speaking world and beyond. In setting the opera in a fictionalized 19th century Japan, Gilbert used the veneer of Far Eastern exoticism to soften the impact of his pointed satire of British institutions and politics.
Several productions of The Mikado have been criticized for the use of Yellowface in their casting: New York (2004 and 2015), Los Angeles (2007 and 2009), Boston (2007), Austin (2011), Denver (2013), and Seattle (2014) The press noted that the Seattle Gilbert & Sullivan Society cast the 10 principal roles and the chorus with white actors, with the exception of two Latino actors.
In November 2015, the New York Gilbert and Sullivan Players cancelled a production of The Mikado, which was set to feature their repertory company of mostly Caucasian actors, due to complaints from the Asian-American community. The company has redesigned its production in collaboration with an advisory group of Asian-American theatre professionals and plans to debut the new concept in December 2016.
The King and I
The King and I is a musical by Richard Rodgers and dramatist Oscar Hammerstein II. Based on the 1944 novel Anna and the King of Siam by Margaret Landon, the story of The King & I works to illustrate the clash of Eastern and Western cultures by relaying the experiences of Anna, a British schoolteacher hired as part of the King's drive to modernize his country. The relationship between the King and Anna is marked by conflict and constant bickering throughout the musical, as well as by a love that neither can confess.
The Dallas Summer Musical’s production of Rodger and Hammerstein’s “The King & I” has caused recent controversy in the casting of a caucasian actor as King Mongkut. In an open letter to Dallas Summer Musicals, the AAPAC criticizes the choice, saying “the casting of a white King dramaturgically undermines a story about a clash between Western and Eastern cultures;" moreover, "Asian impersonation denies Asians our own subjecthood. It situates all the power within a Caucasian-centric world view.”