These are the faces of Australian musical theatre. They need you to see them

For Vidya Makan, realising she was an outsider in her industry wasn’t a lightning bolt moment. “It’s just always been a part of it,” says the 26-year-old musical theatre performer.

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“My whole life I have been seeing shows where you just go in accepting the majority of people you see on the stage will be white. It’s just the way things are,” she says. “My own family had to sit me down and say, ‘Hey, is there room for you here? You have to think about this.’”

Vidya was starring as Catherine Parr in Australia’s production of the smash hit show SIX! when the national tour was cancelled due to coronavirus. Two months later, in May, the Black Lives Matter movement had galvanised the world. With it came renewed urgency of conversations around race and representation.

As a woman of colour in an almost exclusively white industry, these conversations had been part of Makan’s entire career. But this time it felt like everyone was listening.

Well, perhaps not everyone. On 20 August, the shortlist of Australia’s most lucrative musical theatre scholarship program, the $65,000 Rob Guest Endowment, was announced. The all-white judging panel had handpicked 30 artists between the age of 18 and 25 who they believed to be the most promising in Australia. The announcement was shared with a grid of headshots. The headshots were all-white too.

What could have been a moment of celebration for an industry in dire need of one quickly turned toxic.

“The only metric considered by our judging panel was talent. They did not consider race, colour, religion or gender,” the Endowment said in response to allegations of racial bias, before announcing quotas and initiatives for the future. “We clearly need to work harder at encouraging entrants from the BIPOC [Black, Indigenous and People of Colour] community.”

The backlash was swift, including from the finalists themselves, who were on the verge of walking out on the prize in solidarity – before the Endowment cancelled it themselves.

For Makan, this was nothing new. “We hear the same rhetoric over and over again. Statements like, ‘There aren’t many people of colour in the industry; not enough people applied’” – or, worse, that they’re not good enough, she says.

“In that moment I went, ‘Do you know what? I’m going to prove those excuses aren’t good enough.”

Makan posted a story to Instagram: “Calling all BIPOC performers aged 18 to 25. Slide into my DMs please. The revolution is happening.”

Within just a few days, more than 100 performers had replied – and a few weeks later, Makan is launching the result: a song she composed, recorded by the performers, inviting the entertainment industry to “stop making excuses”.

The song – I Need You To See Me – is a showcase of emerging talent and big names including Shubshri Kandiah (Jasmine in Aladdin) and Marty Alix (Sonny in In The Heights). Like all the best big musical numbers, it’s also relentlessly earnest and emotive, building up to a montage of choruses you’ve heard before.

The song isn’t about the Rob Guest Endowment. “This isn’t a new conversation,” Makan says. “It’s always existed. But in the midst of current events, I wanted to change the focus of the conversation. I wanted it to be about championing these voices.”

The problems with the industry run deep, she says. “I’ve walked into big new Australian musicals where I thought I would be going into a space that’s new and fresh and representative – and seen the only people of colour on that stage be completely dehumanised, playing into racial stereotypes. I’ve come home and sobbed. Cried my eyes out. Because if that’s what’s happening with newer shows, what hope do we have?”

She sees the Covid crisis – and upcoming productions of Hamilton and Moulin Rouge, which both demand diverse casts – as an opportunity for reset. “People in charge will see that this is how we have to move forward in order to exist,” she says. She’s hopeful. “People have really taken the time this time around to listen, to have these uncomfortable conversations.”

A blueprint for equity

I Need You To See Me is the latest drop from a movement which has been building in the industry for weeks. Inspired by their peers in the UK and the US, and created and fostered by young people of colour, it offers a blueprint for other industries of how minority voices and their allies can work together towards inclusivity.

The movement has called itself the Quarter – a word reclaimed from a quote given by the chair of the Rob Guest Endowment committee: “We are not seeing a high number of entries from that quarter” – and one of its lead advocates is Jarrod Draper: a 24-year-old Wiradjuri performer who himself applied for the prize.

Born and raised in Orange, NSW, Draper escaped bullying in his early teens by way of a full scholarship to a Sydney boarding school. He scored 100 in music in his HSC, was the first Indigenous person to be accepted into Waapa’s prestigious musical theatre program in its 40-year history (“indicative of the wider industry,” he notes), and he won another scholarship in 2017 to keep studying there.

The following year, Draper was cast – and acclaimed – as the titular lead of his cohort’s final production, Sunday in the Park with George. He’s worked consistently since then, and had shows booked at the Hayes and Qpac before Covid shut them down.

Draper seems a fair contender for the 30-person shortlist. But he didn’t expect to be picked. “Seeing an all-white panel, I go, OK … My fate is in the hands of white people who don’t understand my experience in this industry.”

He wasn’t surprised, but he recalls the semifinalist announcement as “a stomach drop moment. Honestly, it was gut-wrenching.

“After all the work we’ve been doing during Black Lives Matter, it was the first opportunity to see if [the industry] was really paying attention. And for them to produce the whitest top 30 that they’ve had in 11 or 12 years in the competition’s history – I think it speaks volumes.”

Draper praises the shortlisted artists, but knows many BIPOC people who applied too, and calls them “some of the most talented people in the industry”.

‘“I felt erased – and that hit so hard because I am Aboriginal, and Aboriginal people have been erased from this country time and time again.”

Growing up, Draper rarely saw himself represented on stage, and he has never had an Indigenous role model in musical theatre. “I never thought about my Aboriginality being something that stopped me from getting anywhere until I entered this industry,” he says. “It’s now at the point where, when I book a show, I constantly question: am I here because of my talent or am I ticking a box? I will battle with that forever.”

But something encouraging – and empowering – has sprung from this moment: a collaborative way forward.

Since the Endowment announced their shortlist, Draper says, the Quarter’s leadership – which includes theatre director Dean Drieberg – has been in constant dialogue with the semi-finalists and the union’s Equity Diversity Committee, which Draper and Drieberg also sit on.

Together, these groups have been brainstorming short- and long-term solutions; they drafted and sent a log of claims to the Endowment, and workshopped effective allyship with the finalists and other white people in the industry, who have been prolifically sharing messages of support across social media.

When the Endowment cancelled the 2020 prize this month, the organisation claimed they wanted to protect the semi-finalists from “bullying and intimidation” – an allegation that Draper says was unfounded, and fed into the narrative of the BIPOC community “as the angry minority”. In response, the semi-finalists released another statement: “We categorically refute any claim … that the competition had to be cancelled in order to protect us,” they said. “We fervently denounce the actions of the Endowment.”

‘We have always been here’

On Thursday, the Quarter launched the next step of its plan: a website that includes links to resources, initiatives, and a pledge of allyship. By Friday morning, it had amassed 1,380 signatures.

“This conversation is nothing new, but this moment of revolution is,” reads the accompanying open letter, which praises the Endowment’s semi-finalists and implores the wider community to adopt the same approach. “Never have we seen this industry stand together in such a powerful and unanimous way. We must not let this moment slip by.

“We refuse to accept the false narrative that there’s not enough of us here. We have always been here.”

Draper says, “This is our moment, as young people, BIPOC and white people, to shape it as we want it to be. In 10, 15, 20 years we’ll be the ones producing shows and casting. So why not start now and use this moment as young people to change the course of the industry into what we want it to be?

“You don’t have to just listen – you have to hear,” he continues. “And I feel so empowered in this moment because it’s like we’ve been heard.”