ABSTRACT
The trend toward multiracial casts emerged in the mid-1970s with the seminal hit A Chorus Line, and came to dominate Broadway productions from the mid-1990s to the present. Seventeen dancers, facing forward and standing in a row, make up the quintessential stage picture of the 1975 musical A Chorus Line. In Broadway’s twenty-first century economic boom, the retrospective revue has largely passed out of fashion, replaced by the jukebox musical. The multiracial cabaret-style revue faded from Broadway in the twenty-first century Individual choices anticipate an ensemble casting practice that can be documented on Broadway since the mid-1990s: the inclusion of one or two performers of color in an otherwise white ensemble. A show with few black performers in an otherwise all-white ensemble can, serendipitously, allow for musical blackness to emerge, leaving a trace that remains after a select black ensemble member departs the show.
