Whitewashed 'Priscilla' Comes Under Fire For Dropping Sole Aboriginal Character

The Australian theatre scene has often been criticised for under-representing Indigenous performers, but the decision by producers of the hit show Priscilla Queen of the Desert: the Musical to remove the sole Aboriginal character from the production’s current season in New Zealand has sparked outrage. The unpopular move to drop the role of Jimmy was apparently due to a dearth of suitable performers, producers claim.

In the film, Jimmy finds the three hapless drag queens Tick, Felicia and Bernadette, stranded in the desert after their bus breaks down. He helps repair their knackered ride and in return, the trio offers a performance to Jimmy’s tribe – a full drag routine to Gloria Gaynor’s I Will Survive. It’s a hugely touching and very significant scene in the film, depicting an exchange between two very distant cultures and the loss of this important encounter has been criticised by Aboriginal artists as unacceptable.

Australia’s most successful Indigenous opera singer, Deborah Cheetham, said in a Facebook post that the omission was “deplorable,” adding: “What rock do these producers live under?” Sam Cook, CEO of KissMyBlackArtists, an agency representing black artists from Australia, America, New Caledonia and Reunion Island, also took to Facebook to slam the decision, saying: “It’s a bigot’s act to tell an ‘Australian’ story in full whiteness, with the absence of the Aboriginal narrative.”

However, producer Garry McQuinn of Black Row Productions told Daily Review that dropping the scene was in fact driven but cultural sensitivity rather than a lack of respect. In the stage production, white performers have commonly been used to stand in for Jimmy’s family. “We were looking at it and thought, seriously we’re doing a show and we’ve got white performers upstage behind our beautiful drag queens pretending to an Aboriginal community. You can’t do that,” McQuinn said.