Jayme Deerwester

USA TODAY

Since its off-Broadway debut last summer, one key ingredient of Hamilton has been its diverse approach to casting.

"It's the story about America then, told by America now," director Tommy Kail has said of the choice to cast African-Americans, Latinos and Asians as the Founding Fathers and their female contemporaries. In fact, the only major role played by a white actor is that of Britain's King George III.

The ethnic makeup of the cast was never a divisive issue until this week, when producers posted a casting call announcement for the upcoming national tour stressing it was looking for non-white actors. A social media outcry followed and by Wednesday, producers had issued a statement clarifying their position.

"It is essential to the storytelling of Hamilton that the principal roles — which were written for non-white characters (excepting King George) — be performed by non-white actors," producer Jeffrey Seller explained in a statement. “Hamilton depicts the birth of our nation in a singular way," he stressed, adding, that "we will continue to cast the show with the same multicultural diversity that we have employed thus far."

They say the wording of the original ad is legal and is used by other shows calling for race, ethnicity or age-specific casting, such as The Color Purple or Porgy & Bess. Nevertheless, following a complaint from the Actors Equity union, the production team plans to revise the ad to make it clear that "we welcome people of all ethnicities to audition for Hamilton."

But why are people claiming reverse discrimination only now, several months into Hamilton's run (aside from the fact that everyone wants to be a part of the hit show)?

"The problem here rose entirely from the way the casting notice was written, because it referred to actors themselves, who are covered by labor regulations, as opposed to describing the characters as they are to be portrayed," says Howard Sherman, former executive director of the American Theatre Wing (organizers of the Tony Awards), who now serves as interim director for Inclusion In the Arts. "Every production has the right to determine the characteristics they choose for the people they cast, and that can include gender, age, race and so on. But it was the seemingly exclusionary language in reference to the acting pool which gave someone the opportunity to suggest that this incredibly inclusive show was being discriminatory.”

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Sherman's bottom line? "My position on non-traditional (or color-blind or color-specific) casting is that it is not a 'two-way street,' and that the goal is to create more opportunities for actors of color, not to give white actors the chance to play characters of color," he wrote in a December article on Hamilton's casting for Integrity in the Arts.

After all, Hamilton creator and star Lin-Manuel Miranda has said that he started writing in the first place because he wanted to work in theater and as a Latino, the roles were limited. "In the Heights (his Tony-winning debut) came out of an awareness of, well, 'I don't dance well enough to be Bernardo (from West Side Story) or Paul from A Chorus Line and if you're a Puerto Rican man, that's what you get,'" he told Katie Couric earlier this month.

So, to paraphrase a number from Hamilton, Miranda picked up a pen and wrote his own deliverance.

“My answer is: authorial intent wins, period," Miranda told Sherman in December. "As a Dramatists Guild Council member, I will tell you this. As an artist and as a human, I will tell you this. Authorial intent wins. Katori Hall never intended for a Caucasian Martin Luther King (in The Mountaintop). That’s the end of the discussion. In every case, the intent of the author always wins. If the author has specified the ethnicity of the part, that wins."

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Contributing: Elysa Gardner