This is just kind of strange, on several levels... Last month in Beijing, the National Theatre of China produced a play about the life of Martin Luther King, Jr. The drama is in Chinese, and the cast features a Chinese actor in the role of King (thankfully not in blackface—the only real resemblance being a thin mustache and a stern look), accompanied by black American gospel singers:
Martin Luther King's Story Plays on Beijing Stage. Kind of weird, right? Somehow it seems to work. But the strangest thing to me is, according to the article, the play's themes of civil rights and religion didn't trigger any sort of government censorship. Like I said, weird on multiple levels. And yet, the production appears to have been pretty successful.
