Hamilton, the Broadway musical so good literally no one can get tickets to it except Barack Obama, has finally met its inevitable moment of “controversy.” After the show posted a casting notice specifically seeking “non-white performers” for its expanded national run, Randolph McLaughlin, a civil-rights attorney, claimed that the ad was violating New York City human-rights law.
McLaughlin told CBS News, “What if they put an ad out that said, ‘Whites only need apply?’ Why, African-Americans, Latinos, Asians would be outraged.” According to the human-rights law that McLaughlin is referring to, you cannot specifically advertise jobs that reveal preference for one race over another. Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you already know that one of the defining characteristics of the show is that it features black and Latino performers in almost all of the primary roles.
A press representative for Hamilton told CBS that the ad was approved by Broadway union Actors Equity, though general counsel for the union says that language like that “was not and would not have been approved.” The casting call on backstage.com, on the other hand, calls for “all ethnicities” to audition.