The show featured a white actress portraying Harriet Tubman, the American abolitionist who was born into slavery.
The Montreal International Jazz Festival has canceled performances of “SLAV, a theatrical odyssey based on slave songs” featuring a predominantly white cast, and apologized “to those who were hurt,” the National Post of Canada reported.
The show featured a white actress portraying Harriet Tubman, the American abolitionist who was born into slavery. The musical also includes a scene of white actors picking cotton in slave costumes.
Protesters, who said the show amounted to white people appropriating a black cultural form, gathered outside the venue in Montreal last week when the show opened, the Post reported, and patrons had to pass through a police cordon to enter the theater.
The festival described the show on its website as “a highly visual music-theater show, a tribute to music as a tool for resilience and emancipation” and says cast members “offer a remarkable interpretation of the songs, laments and lullabies that united these human beings dispossessed of everything.”
The musical was selling out performances when the Jazz Festival decided to cancel it after the protests.
