Award-winning actor and singer Billy Porter sparked controversy while promoting his new lead role in the revival of “Cabaret” on Broadway when he stated that “Black people have replaced the Jews.”
The revival of Cabaret, the 1966 musical about the fate of a Berlin nightclub and its patrons during the rise of Nazism, will for the first time feature three Black actors in its starring roles, Porter said in an interview on “CBS Mornings” on Monday.
“This is the first time in the 60-year history that all three of those characters have been African-American in a commercial production,” he said. “And with what’s going on in the world right now, Black people have replaced the Jews in this sort of configuration of what we’re going through.”
The comments by the Emmy, Tony, and Grammy Award-winning actor have drawn criticism online, with TikTok Broadway influencer Ben Lebofsky saying in a video that Porter’s statements imply that “Jews no longer face discrimination.”
“As we all know, antisemitism is alive and well, and to me, it feels like Billy’s comments here [are] dismissing,” said Lebofsky. “Which becomes even more problematic when you consider that he is about to step into a musical that is first and foremost about Jewish trauma.
“I think what he is trying to say is that, in today’s day and age, Black people face a lot of discrimination, and you can draw a lot of parallels to the discrimination that Black people face and the discrimination that Jewish people face, which I think is a true statement,” said Lebofsky in the video.
A spokesperson for Porter did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
In April, Porter appeared alongside Holocaust survivors in a photo project titled “Borrowed Spotlight” that was designed to draw attention to survivors’ stories by posing them alongside famous celebrities.
“I was honored to meet fellow New Yorker Bella Rosenberg for a photoshoot with @brycethompson and the @borrowedspotlight project,” wrote Porter in an Instagram post about his experience with the project. “Her story is a powerful reminder of what can happen when hate goes unchecked and why we must remain vigilant in protecting the most vulnerable in our society.”
In 2021, Porter was among 200 celebrities who signed a letter rejecting efforts to boycott a Tel Aviv International LGBTQ Film Festival and condemning cultural boycotts against Israel.
A year earlier, along with actor Tom Hanks, he agreed to help lead a fundraising campaign to help turn Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue into an anti-racism center. A gunman killed 11 Jewish people at the synagogue in 2018.
Porter replaces Eddie Redmayne, a British actor, in the role of Emcee in the revival. The actor who originated the role on stage and screen was Joel Grey, a Jewish star of Broadway who more recently directed the Yiddish production of “Fiddler on the Roof.”
Grey wrote last year in a New York Times essay that he had been disquieted by learning about an audience reaction during the revival to an antisemitic lyric that, in his day, caused audiences to gasp and recoil.
The lyric “If you could see her through my eyes, she wouldn’t look Jewish at all,” had reportedly received laughter from its audience, a reaction that Grey said potentially underscored a “collective shrug of indifference” during the Trump era.
“In the late 1960s, we softened the line because the truth was too hard to hear,” he wrote. “Today, it seems the line is playing exactly as the Nazi-sympathizing Emcee would have intended.”