Non-Traditional Casting: Part Eight of Days of A Christmas Carol Past
My Thirty Year Relationship With Victorian Ghosts
The first non-storybook version of the Cinderella story my daughter ever saw was The Wonderful World Of Disney’s 1997 TV movie, starring Brandy as Cinderella and Whitney Houston as her Fairy Godmother. Bernadette Peters played her stepmother. Whoopi Goldberg played the prince’s mother and Victor Garber played his father. Cinderella’s stepsisters were each a different color.
My daughter was two years old at the time. I’m sure she didn’t notice the different colors of characters. Because that’s all they were to her — different colors of people. My husband and I did not raise her with any racial bias and she hadn’t come into contact with racist talk or ideas at her school or church yet.
She had no idea what a revolution she watched on TV that day. My first awareness of what they used to call “color-blind casting”, or now more commonly, “non-traditional casting” was my director dad’s productions of A Christmas Carol.
If you look up “color-blind casting’ on Wikipedia, there is a long list of “examples” dating from the 1960s, with “Eartha Kitt was cast as Cat Woman” as the first television-related entry. The Google entry for “non-traditional casting” makes it look like it…
