Andrew Lloyd Webber.Foundation Funding Research To Increase Theatre Diversity

Founded in 1992 the Andrew Lloyd Webber Foundation has been dedicated to promoting the arts, culture and heritage for the public benefit through active grant giving programs and scholarships.

Its newest project, the legendary composer of JESUS CHRIST SUPERSTAR, EVITA, CATS, THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA and SCHOOL OF ROCK explains to The Guardian, is to discover and develop ways to provide more opportunities for Britain's young black, Asian and minority ethnic (BAME) performers.

"I'm deeply concerned about the problems we face in recruiting trained BAME young talent into musical theatre," says Lord Lloyd-Webber. "The foundation has commissioned this research to see how a potential crisis can be avoided. The stage needs to reflect the diversity of the UK population or it risks becoming marginalized. The arts are for everyone."

The study is headed by Danuta Kean, who recently edited a similar report on the lack of diversity in the publishing.

Kean is researching the "pipeline to talent" and examining unconscious bias in the casting of performers and the hiring of backstage crews, which she says are also uniformly white.

She notes, "If you're not actually starting to attract people from ethnic minority backgrounds, you're going to end up with very marginalized theatre audiences; white, elderly people."

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