Rodgers and Hammerstein on Revivals (Question)

[OlBlueEyes]

In the last century it was much easier, I think, to cast a play The intent was for the production to be a hit, with long lines at the box office. Casting was a major way of attracting an audience. If Hepburn was available, you grabbed her. G. B. Shaw, as class conscious as anyone in England, did not offer the role of Eliza to a twenty one year old unknown, but selected two established stars, Mrs. Patrick Campbell and Wendy Hiller, to fill the roles on stage and screen.

Referring back to the story of the casting of the role of Tommy in the Music Man revival. If a black were cast in that role, it would seem to go against appealing to the audience. No one is going to see the show due to that casting, but there will be some percentage of the audience that finds that casting so bizarre that this will be their principal response to all who ask them about the show. Attendance might suffer. Why run the risk? To please the critics and the message board posters? What about the investors?

So it appears that I'm in the midst of a group of people who think that racism is running rampant in the country now. I don't see it. Just two generations ago we had segregated schools. One generation ago we had "white flight," where the first black family moving into a white neighborhood soon had crosses burning on their lawn while many of the whites around them quickly put their homes up for sale to try to beat the expected decline in home values. There were race riots in Watts and other cities. 

How was it that under the Democrats Kennedy and Johnson one of the worst discriminations against blacks occurred: the student draft exemption that allowed hundreds of thousands of whites to hide from the Vietnam War by enrolling in college while blacks were drafted and sent to that muddy, disease-ridden jungle in numbers far out of proportion to their actual percentage of the draft population?

So what offenses do we have today that measure up to these other fairly recent ones? Don't tell me that it's "go back to your island" as I think that this is more elementary school playground talk. If everyone is a racist than no one is a racist. The public will just become immune to the word.

Not to be too much of a bore, what we are not doing is addressing the problem of lower college attendance by white and black boys. We know that educated and employed people have less prejudice and greater tolerance. Those on the bottom rungs of the social ladder are envious, bitter and angry. They want to find someone to blame and the males can easily go violent.