Aladdin and Appropriation
When you’re young, brown and Halloween rolls around, your options are limited. Admittedly, it’s easier for young Arab and Indian-American boys to pick a costume—Batman, Spiderman and the Power Rangers all feature a mask as part of their costume design. For young girls who make the annual trip to Party City, however, two options present themselves: Pocahontas (after all, an Indian’s an Indian) and Jasmine.
Now, you may be wondering why your Halloween costume has to match your race. And by all means, it doesn’t. Or, more accurately, it shouldn’t. But in Virginia, where I grew up, an Indian girl dressed in full Cinderella garb from blue dress to glass slippers would be met with confused stares at the doors of surrounding houses. To them, the simple fact that the girl’s ethnicity did not match the princess’ would be enough to make her costume unrecognizable. And so Disney’s “Aladdin,” with its fezzes and genie pants, was embedded in the hearts of many a young, brown Americans.
I had the privilege of seeing “Aladdin” performed on Broadway this summer. It was exciting for me, my mother being of Indian descent, to see a show that portrayed my culture—one that, especially in the entertainment industry, is caricatured, exaggerated or simply overlooked. The last time I saw the movie was in Spanish class, my freshman year—the last time I had seen it in English was years before that. While some of the details were hazy, I was excited for a magnificent, over-the-top Disney show à la “The Lion King.” And if that had been the only thing I was hoping for, I would have been delighted by what I saw.
The scene is set by a short monologue by Genie, portrayed by the talented James Monroe Iglehart who won a Tony for his role. He’s hilarious and delivers an outstanding, high-octane performance all the way through, and he is one of the cornerstones in the show’s commitment to diversity. He is one of several black actors featured in the show’s 34-member cast, along with many Latino and Latina actors as well. The two leads, Aladdin and Jasmine, are played by Adam Jacobs (formerly Simba in “The Lion King,” of both Filipino and European ancestry) and Courtney Reed (also of mixed-race ancestry). Yet as the play progressed and more of the ensemble had made their way to the stage, there seemed to be a dearth of Middle Eastern and South Asian actors. A quick look through the playbill and some research later confirmed this; in a cast of over thirty people, no one of the culture the play was centered around had actually been on cast.
I’m not saying that every character in “Aladdin” should have been played by an actor of Middle Eastern or South Asian descent. An actor should, first and foremost, be cast based on merit, and the performances of both Aladdin and Genie were quite good. In an extensive ensemble cast, however, to not have one such actor shifts the play from one of cultural appreciation to cultural appropriation. Imagine if a Broadway adaptation of “The Princess and the Frog” had been released and Tiana was cast as anything other than black. Or if a production of “Mulan” was cast without a single Asian actor. Both of those seem outrageous—on some level, race is, and should continue to be, a part of casting calls, especially for roles that are both emblematic and singular for any given community.
When trawling through CollegeConfidential forums, I stumbled across the terms ORMs and URMs: over and underrepresented minorities. Asians, both South and other, are considered to be ORMs; blacks and Latinos, URMs. On Broadway, the trend is reversed. Increasingly, black and Latino cast members make up a large part of the Broadway crowd, both leading plays as well as featuring heavily in ensemble groups. Yet Asians—and in particular South Asians and Middle Easterners—are completely hidden from view. When an entire play set in Arabia fails to incorporate a single brown person, the dreams of aspiring South Asian and Middle Eastern actors around New York and the country are crushed. Mainstream white princesses are a dime a dozen—but not a single brown actor was deemed good enough to play the only brown princess (or her attendants or friends or dancers).
The cultural appropriation was furthered by the near constant jokes that were made at the expense of the culture of Agrabah. Within the first few minutes of the opening song, we heard Genie both make fun of Sufism (“See the dervishes dance in ridiculous pants”) as well as maintain the controversial line from the original movie, “It’s barbaric, but hey! It’s home.” The culture—so exotic, so colorful and so alien to so many viewers that night—is there to be laughed at, not understood. And that made me a bit sick.
The closing scene of “Aladdin” was no different. Just before the final kiss of the play, Jasmine, overcome with emotion, declares, “I love you, Aladdin.” The crowd cooes, and ahhs, and waits for the upcoming kiss. Instead, Aladdin responds, saying, “Call me Al.” Then they kiss, the curtains drop, the lights turn on and the show is over. But referring to Aladdin as Al is something that happened throughout the play (and original movie) and something that has continued to bother me. Whether it was put into place originally as a reference to the Paul Simon song released in 1986 (“You Can Call Me Al”), as a cutesy one-liner that the director felt they needed to break the romantic tension or as a way to make Aladdin—a very Muslim-sounding name—more palatable to the Western audience (and it was probably some combination of all three). To me it smacks of the various westernizations of my name that I have had to deal with my whole life. Those who can’t, or won’t, learn to pronounce my fairly intuitive, two-syllable name will often ask me what my ‘American’ name is. They expect me to have a Joe, John or Jason on hand, to make life easier for them, never mind that one’s name is at the core of their identity. From the looks I get from the Starbucks barista to the struggle of many a Spanish teacher when trying to find an appropriate "Spanish" name for me, the pressure is real for me and others like me to divide our identity (remember when the reporter told Quvenzhané Wallis he would “just call her Annie”?). And Aladdin acquiesces to this, over and over again, with a nickname that is completely nonsensical in Arabic. It is a bastardization of the culture in which he was created, all for the benefit of the child that has been taught that the Middle East is a dangerous, scary, “other” place.
“Aladdin” was spectacle, that’s for sure. There were fireworks and trapdoors and tap-dance routines and, indeed, lots of laughter. An effort was made to appease the Arab-American population through the cutting out of the blatantly offensive lyrics, “Where they cut off your ear if they don’t like your face,” as did all DVD/VHS copies of Aladdin. All in all, however, it was a typical Disney show. And, as a New York Times op-ed from 1993 is titled: “It’s Racist, But Hey, It’s Disney.”