Casting Controversy Derailed a High School Play. Then Came the Threats.<br />One parent had what was thought to be her home address (it wasn’t) posted online with a comment seeming to encourage harassment: “Do your thing social<br />media.” Another parent received a profane email, assailing her for embracing “anti-white racism,” adding: “I feel sorry for your brainwashed child.”<br />Ithaca High School, in upstate New York, was to stage the musical, based on the<br />1831 novel by Victor Hugo and the 1996 Disney animated film, in mid-April.<br />And while two productions of the new musical — its premiere at the La Jolla Playhouse in California in 2014<br />and one in 2015 at the Paper Mill Playhouse in New Jersey — gave the part to a woman of color, Ciara Renée, the casting calls for those shows invited actresses of all ethnicities to audition for the role.<br />It started as a local debate over a New York high school production of the musical “The Hunchback of Notre Dame.” A white<br />teenager was cast in the lead role of Esmeralda, a 15th-century Roma woman, spurring young student activists to object.<br />Maddi Carroll, a 17-year-old African-American senior, said the high school’s staging of “Hunchback” was initially exciting<br />to her “because we didn’t feel like our high school usually put on productions with women of color in starring roles.”<br />“We were talking about us being younger and thinking about Disney princesses we had to look up to.
