sebastienne (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
sebastienne) wrote2019-10-07 10:15 am
sebastienne) wrote2019-10-07 10:15 am
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So I don't know if any of you watched Pose - if not, I think it's still on BBC iPlayer. It's from the guy who did Glee, but don't hold that against it; it's written and performed by the biggest collection of trans and gender-non-conforming people of colour, and it's wonderful and real and heartbreaking and Dawson from Dawson's Creek plays a horrible 80s-Trump type character and gets punched in the face.
I can't have a favourite character - too many people's stories and selves and lives reached out and grabbed me by the heart. But MJ Rodriguez as Blanca made me cry more often than anyone else (though Billy Porter as Pray Tell - for which he rightfully took an Emmy and a Golden Globe - came a close second).
When we first meet Blanca, it's a Cinderella story; she's very much exploited in the shadow of someone else's house.
And now I find that she's been cast as Audrey in a production of Little Shop of Horrors (opposite Guillermo from the What We Do In The Shadows TV series, no less) and my heart can't contain how much this role needed to be sung by a black trans woman.
At first I thought, maybe, is that too on-the-nose? "you don't need no make-up / no need to pretend" "learn how to be more / the girl that's inside you"? But Galaxy Brain says: Audrey was ALWAYS trans. I think I might even have had that headcanon about Ellen Greene's performance when I was a teenager? And maybe this representation isn't even that bad for its time, given how it predates RENT where the audience identification character *misgenders Angel at her funeral*...
I can't have a favourite character - too many people's stories and selves and lives reached out and grabbed me by the heart. But MJ Rodriguez as Blanca made me cry more often than anyone else (though Billy Porter as Pray Tell - for which he rightfully took an Emmy and a Golden Globe - came a close second).
When we first meet Blanca, it's a Cinderella story; she's very much exploited in the shadow of someone else's house.
And now I find that she's been cast as Audrey in a production of Little Shop of Horrors (opposite Guillermo from the What We Do In The Shadows TV series, no less) and my heart can't contain how much this role needed to be sung by a black trans woman.
At first I thought, maybe, is that too on-the-nose? "you don't need no make-up / no need to pretend" "learn how to be more / the girl that's inside you"? But Galaxy Brain says: Audrey was ALWAYS trans. I think I might even have had that headcanon about Ellen Greene's performance when I was a teenager? And maybe this representation isn't even that bad for its time, given how it predates RENT where the audience identification character *misgenders Angel at her funeral*...
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My favourite characters were
Blanca
Pray Tell
Angel
although Ricky and Lil Papi also grew on me in Season 2.
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I am DELIGHTED by this news! ^_^
Also I would love to see her sing opposite Lin-Manuel Miranda one day. I think they would work great together.
and my heart can't contain how much this role needed to be sung by a black trans woman.
I read this and went "Wait, what? I thought she was Latina?"
So I looked up her bio on wikipedia and "Mj Rodriguez was born on January 7, 1991, in Newark, New Jersey to an African-American mother and Puerto Rican father."
So she's black AND Latina, for double the awesomeness.
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& yes I thought her blackness was particularly relevant here because of how LSoH is often staged, with three black women as a chorus/backup to white leads - definitely didn't mean to erase or decentre her Latina identity so thanks for this comment :-)
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Oh, yes! ^_^
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<3
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