Anything Goes - Barbican / U.K.Tour

I made enquiries from the access team at the Barbican and was told that there was legroom but that the stage was quite high so they recommended that I book Row B end of aisle which I did.

Some people on here need to fill their own lives with purpose and stop nosing into other peoples and becoming their unofficial spokesperson. Faux outrage about something they’ve read on SM and know nothing about is just vacuous attention seeking. There’re enough problems in the world without ‘inventing’ something out of nothing. Go back to sleep, we’re not interested in your misguided moral outrage.

It seems that by maintaining a silence regarding the matter (of which the producers and Sutton Foster must have been made aware), the incident seems to have blown over, so they did the right thing. I think raising her hands up and admitting "guilt" would have led to people asking for her to pay some sort of reparation or experience some sort of "punishment" such as pulling out of the show, which would have been a shame all around.

The angry mob will move on next week to someone who makes sushi but isn't actually Japanese or something.

I guess the big difference these days is that nothing is judged on it’s intent rather how it is viewed and interpreted. If someone has been offended the creator is guilty regardless.

No one is saying that you should make fun of black performers. What is being said is that a decade-old video clip taken out of context is not really a strong enough piece of evidence to denounce someone as a born and bred racist and have them "cancelled".

And was it necessary to say "nicest" in air quotes?

And thank you sir for assuming what I am and telling me what I should or shouldn’t think

Just like people are jumping to conclusions and telling Sutton what she should and shouldn’t sing based on what she did 10 years ago. Except they are taking the next step and demanding her to be cancelled

I agree the lack of reflection is troubling

You’ve just exemplified this culture that has been bred over the years. All this white privilege labelling and demanding we rethink our attitudes (‘or else’ in some cases), is very tiring when all we’re doing is having a conversation about the issue at hand

Would you be surprised that there might be minorities who have concerns about this whole situation as well? Should they check their white privilege?

This isn’t going to solve the problem of racism any sooner. It’s making things worse and dividing people further and further

Any idea how bad is the restricted view on the side in row B/C/D? I'm really tempted by the price.

Putting air quotes around "nicest" implies he thinks she is anything but.

He's calling out Mark publicly, but nothing for Sutton?

What I find sad about all of this is that our ability to debate and discuss things rationally as humans seems to have been diminished by the need to have an immediate position, soundbite, stance or opinion. These days, I half-expect to be shot down as a hetero white guy in his forties for simply offering my perspective on a particular topic. I would much rather discuss, consider, acknowledge and change, than be pressganged or humiliated into a public retraction or shift in position. THIS is where I think people are getting it wrong. Everybody has a voice whether we like it or not, and the constant suppression of views or badging of people is often as offensive and divisive as whatever the hot subject matter of the day happens to be.

We should not be cancelling anything. We should be learning, developing, improving. We should have enough confidence in ourselves irrespective of colour, identity, sexuality to be able to have coherent and progressive discussions about really important subject matters. Cancelling history, dredging twitter, or furiously looking for faults in archive materials placed in a 2021 context, can only lead to universal dissatisfaction where every person feels like the victim of some kind of retrospective cleansing of social ideology. This is where social media is still in its infancy and needs to grow up. For adults to have adult conversations requires patience, tolerance, acceptance and a willingness to live, learn and hopefully be a better person.

Too many decent people are degrading (sometimes shaming) themselves and the ideals they stand for by placing greater value on social media virtue signalling and posturing rather than instigating proper dialogue and meaningful debate. For this reason, Trevor Dion Nicholas both wins and loses in this instance, for although Shenton has removed his post, it has also shut down any kind of healthy debate. Shutting down the conversation does not progress it, and for this reason the better person is the one that champions the opportunity to discuss perspectives through the lens of as many different people as possible, so that white/privileged/hetero/middle-aged/boomer/gammon/out-of-touch folk like myself can truly understand what is at the heart of such issues, rather than get deafened by the empty-barrel of noise that is the social media echo chamber. I'm willing to learn, and to be taught, but a thousand different views crossing before my eyes often leaves me bewildered and frustrated by the frenetic process and speed of social media interaction.

When it threatens to destroy careers or even people, then we all need to take a look at ourselves and ask how the whole evolutionary process is going.

In my case the silence is because I want to know what people who are affected by this think and what they want me to do. It is not for me to prejudge that and give an opinion where frankly I don't think my opinion matters or is warranted. It is not for me to say people should or shouldn't be affected by or "cancelled" for something like this.

Please tell allies what you would prefer us to do so we know how to react in a way that will help move things forward in the right way, not cause the circular debate that this thread seems to have become. I'm not asking to be spoon fed, just conscious that a white person jumping in can inadvertently make things worse, so I'd rather take direction from those whose views on this actually matter.

I'm waiting for you to understand that these things aren't comparable. If Sutton had just sang the song there'd have been nothing wrong for most people. She'd be singing it outside of the context of the show, there's nothing explicitly about being black in the song, it's all subtextual, and pretty much no one would bat an eye. The issue was the impersonation - the lowering of the voice, the mimicry of the vocal infections - Holliday's way of singing is distinctive but also rooted deeply in African American culture and to mimic and mock it as a white woman is racist and is basically what minstrels did but without the black face. There is not that history of extreme oppression behind an impersonation of a French or German accent that would make such an impression remotely comparable to what Sutton did. Maybe if you were talking about someone putting on an exaggerative Indian or Chinese accent for laughs then you might say they're comparable and I think most people would find that offensive, and the same is true for what Sutton did whether she realised it at the time or not.

But is she doing for laughs? Or perhaps an imporsonation / tribute?