nosferdoc:

From the New Yorker:

On a recent weeknight in midtown Manhattan, the Broadway actor Kelvin Moon Loh led a rehearsal of “The Mikado,” one of the most popular works by the nineteenth-century duo W. S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan. The two-act comic operetta, set in Edo-era Japan, is a satire of Victorian culture masquerading as a convoluted and kitschy love story. In the predominantly white world of American and British theatre, its Japanese characters have typically been played by white actors in wigs and kimonos, with tape-stretched eyes and kabuki-style makeup. But the show that Loh is assistant-directing, by the New York Gilbert & Sullivan Players (N.Y.G.A.S.P.), does away with yellowface and exotic costumes, and features Asian-Americans both behind the curtain and onstage. In a baby-pink rehearsal space lined with mirrors, Loh, wearing jeans and a hoodie, led a pianist and forty-odd actors, many of them fresh off day jobs, through a complicated finale number. “What are you doing with those fans?” he asked a dozen women, as they practiced snapping open their props. He borrowed one from a lead and demonstrated. “Hold them like this, in the still position.”