Ngofeen Mputubwele: Just a quick heads up. Our next story contains its share of rough language. You know what I mean? Who are you?

Britton Smith: Who am I?

Ngofeen Mputubwele: You can answer however you want.

Britton Smith: I am Britton Smith. I am a son. I am a gay, Black mega pastor.

Ngofeen Mputubwele: Britton Smith is not really a pastor, but you can tell he likes an audience.

Britton Smith: I'm an artist, I'm an advocate and I'm a troublemaker.

[music]

Ngofeen Mputubwele: Last year he won a Tony Award. The most prestigious award there is on Broadway.

Britton Smith: This is an incredible honor. Oh, my God.

Ngofeen Mputubwele: Britton didn't get his Tony for his singing or his acting.

Britton Smith: The vision to make an industry better that wasn't even built for us.

Ngofeen Mputubwele: He got it for this organization he and his peers started called BAC, Broadway Advocacy Coalition. At the heart of the organization was the desire to fuse art and activism to make the policies around us more humane. One of their goals was to address the way Broadway treats Black people.

Britton Smith: [crosstalk] standing here because George Floyd's murder and a global pandemic stopped all of us and brought us to our knees and it created this beautiful opening for Black people to unite around rage, around hope, around redesigning this very room.

[applause]

Ngofeen Mputubwele: The year is 2020, it's June and there's a lot of conversation about changing the status quo inside institutions, and one of those institutions was Broadway.

Britton Smith: A lot of theaters were posting things on Instagram saying, "You know, what happened to George Floyd was ridiculous. We completely stand for Black Lives Matter and we do everything in our power to make sure that our team and our staff feels protected." Motherfuckers at home are like, "Are you fucking kidding me? You did this, you said this, you are a white-ass man with a white-ass staff who doesn't allow people of color to even work for you because of a two-year internship. You want motherfuckers to do two years of free internship and that's the norm?"

That system is drenched in racism. People were getting called out. Major directors, major white figures in our industry were being called to task by masses of people.

Ngofeen Mputubwele: Britton and his colleagues convened this giant three-day Zoom meeting of actors, producers, theater owners, to talk about what it was like to be Black in the Broadway machine.

Speaker 4: A few years ago. I was in the second day of rehearsal for a show and a white stage manager, who I do not know, walked up to me and he reached out and touched my hair and said, "Woo, your hair is looking wild today. Do you need a brush? Are you going to leave it like that?" I was the only Black woman in the entire space. I told Cody, and I just remember Cody's eyes.

Britton Smith: Playing the game for a lot of us is silencing ourselves.

Speaker 4: You don't know what to do. You don't know who you can talk to. Because you're scared. I don't want anyone from the creative team to know because then I might lose a job. Which I actually did because when word got out that I was not being silent about what happened to me, it was told to a room of producers that I was a loose cannon who couldn't be trusted.

Speaker 5: George Zimmerman. I will never forget when I said, "Hey, did you all mind posting this for me? Company management telling me it's too much of a political hot-button. That boy dying was too much of a political hot-button. In the middle of the show, I found out that George Zimmerman wasn't indicted and I broke down. I broke down under the stage management office. Ariana Debos put her arms around me and I had to go back on stage with this sea of people who I don't know if they care about me.

Speaker 4: Tell me how many theaters are owned by people of color. Now tell me how many successful commercial producers there are of color.

Speaker 5: Meanwhile, I have to look them in the eye and trust them on stage but knowing when we walk outta that door, you don't have my back because saying Black lives matter is a hard thing for you to say.

Speaker 4: Because it might mess with your money.

Speaker 5: Because it might mess with your money. I don't want diversity, I want equality.

Ngofeen Mputubwele: Amber Iman, Cody Renard Richard, and Daniel Watts were among the speakers who shared their experiences at this three-day conference organized by Britton and his organization, BAC.

Britton Smith: I think in my years of auditioning, which is probably 10 or more years, I have seen two casting directors of color, two of colors. Most of my jobs are jobs where I'm in an all-Black cast. Imagine what it feels like walking into a room, all your friends are Black, you're all warming up, you're getting ready, you're doing a Black show and you are charged to call on your ancestry as Blackness. Call on what you know, call on who you are, call on your family. Call on this role, what this is, and bring all that Blackness into a room where you walk in and you're ready to do your role, you're ready to do your thing, and it's an all-white creative team and an all-white casting.

I have felt like cattle. I feel like I'm bringing in something that there's no way you understand fully.

Ngofeen Mputubwele: Britton has had a whole career of experiences like these. Both he and I trained in college as classical baritones. I wanted to ask him about his experiences from training to graduating and performing on stage on Broadway. Did you go to a predominantly white university to study too?

Britton Smith: Yes. All of that checking our Blackness before or listening to edits, my voice teachers were like, "You sound-- Try it like-" Oh my God.

Ngofeen Mputubwele: Give me an example.

Britton Smith: I started off singing in the church and my voice is large and it is free and there's a lot of joy and rage in my natural sound.

[music]

I was trained to be a classical baritone because I had a nice timbre, but they had to strip a lot of my soul from that so that I could sound competitive.

Ngofeen Mputubwele: Give me industry successful tone and then give me your tone.

Britton Smith: My tone is, "Hey, how are you? Yes, absolutely. Okay. Yes. Here we go." The industry tone is more, "Yes. How are you? How are you doing? Absolutely." There's a lightness to it. My voice went through a lot of transition and singing more forward like really allowing your sound to be more forward. They tell you this for health. On a Broadway career, you have to be able to sing the same way eight shows a week.

There is a level of care and health for the voice that if you singing in a church, you don't have to have, because you're letting it out one day a week and you get to just like let the Lord use you and open up and just like sing to the heavens and use God to get through. You can't really use God to get through alone eight shows a week. You're going to be sounding like, "Oh, he running out of God. That ran out of God."

Ngofeen Mputubwele: He is running out.

Britton Smith: You have to rely on many things. I was taught that I had to place my voice in a certain way to sound a certain way, which I ended up sounding so thin, no color. It wasn't until I got out of school that I started seeing people like Billy Porter and Brandon Victor Dixon and Joshua Henry sing healthy and sound Black.

Ngofeen Mputubwele: I'm thinking about, what was the spiritual I sang, Were You There? It was like you used your classical tone. Were you there? You also know that it's a spiritual, but you're in classical land, so you can't church sing it even though literally that song you've sung at church before.

Britton Smith: There's a container.

Ngofeen Mputubwele: Yes.

Britton Smith: There's a way of training that black body to be able to do that container and make the container ancestrally sacred.

You can say, "Yo, you can't make what you're doing gospel because this song was in this time period where it was written." Let's dig deep about what was happening during that time period and what Black people had to contain, and just lock into, "This isn't about me. I am a vessel for my ancestors and how they sang this, and I'm going to use my craft and how they did it to latch onto them while I'm doing this." Nobody white can say that to a young Black artist or to me. Nobody in my program had that ability to go, "I need you to do it like this."

Ngofeen Mputubwele: That's not a conversation you even have. You can't even have that conversation.

Britton Smith: Because the traditional musical theater canon doesn't offer anything but the great whites.

[music]

In 2020, when the pandemic happened and we were all shut down, George Floyd's murder allowed people who normally wouldn't say things out loud to just feel erupted and feel broken enough to yell in a way. We got like 5,000 people to show up on a live YouTube version of a sexy Zoom meeting. We curated speakers to be a part of this. The first day was just Black people saying, "Yo, this is really what it is."

Knowing that like on this Zoom call watching people who are going to probably hire you or not hire you, these are theater owners who have the keys to the kingdom, everybody watching this got to witness and listen to the stories of Black people in this industry. We got our Tony Award. I believe that it was because we were able to take that fire and that anger and place it in a space where people could process, "This is why people are mad," and then because we're awesome and because we actually care about this work, we're going to pay our team and you're going to help us pay our team to make you better.

Ngofeen Mputubwele: As Broadway reopened, BAC embedded with show, after show, after show, nearly 10 Broadway shows to lead workshops on how to improve working conditions. The night at the Tony Awards in many ways recognized all that work. Describe that room and that night.

Britton Smith: The Tony is, it's the community of Broadway. It's like the crème de la crème. I think they're like four nominees per category, maybe five per category. It's mainly producers and theater owners, which there are, I think, five theater owners. It's something like four or five, who own all of the real estate of Broadway, which means everybody in that space can only be there if those four or five people say their show can be there because you can't get an award unless you are a part of a production. These people are like the kings.

Ngofeen Mputubwele: Britton gets on stage to accept the award and makes a speech.

[video playback starts]

Britton Smith: My biggest worry is that when we come back to the machine, when Broadway comes back, that that opening will close and push out empathy and push out challenge. I've been thinking about power and change and where it lives and where it comes from, and it's in this room right here. It's in this room right here. Oh man.

[applause]

When this room decides to move beyond design and say, "We want this room to look different. Let's design this room for next year and the year after," that's when we'll earn the phrase Black Lives Matter. That's when we'll earn the phrase Black Lives Matter. That's when we'll earn the phrase Black Lives Matter. Thank you, industry, for letting us vision with you and guide you to redesign this room and our community. Woo. Woo.

[applause]

[video playback ends]

Ngofeen Mputubwele: When Broadway theaters reopened after the shutdown and after the protests of 2020, they announced a slate of seven plays by seven Black playwrights, all new plays, including Clyde's by Lynn Nottage, not Revivals of August Wilson. It was historic and it got a lot of press. Where are we now?

Britton Smith: The fire was loud and the reckoning was very visible to everyone. The fire crumbled into ashes, and now the ashes are starting to settle and it is what it is now. It's just like, "Oh, you made a choice to keep your office all white." That's weird, man. Then you have to go through a process of just peace, that like some people are horrible. Some people want to learn, some people don't. Some people want to keep their power, some people don't. What if we had the chance to break down Broadway and start it all over again, what would we do? Oh my God. That's amazing. The possibilities are endless.

I think I get cynical of like, "We have to break it down." How? Now, I do believe there are ways of chipping away at a building and over time it gets weak. Over time, after that kuh, kuh, kuh, kuh, it breaks, but whose hand is in that hammer and how long are they hitting that? Can we not make people feel like they gave up if they decide to not have that hammer in their hand and go to a space where they're just going to be treated fairly, and well, and paid like they should be?

Ngofeen Mputubwele: Seven Broadway shows, is that what we wanted?

Britton Smith: That moment was very special, and very harmful, and very rushed, and very unfair, and very lucrative for some of them. That moment is layered. It's still, even in understanding it's layered, something to celebrate. Things are changing but at a speed that has not yet met my standard, but I do think across the board, I would say, motherfuckers are looking in the mirror. Or at least when they talk to me, they sound more able to admit, and see, and question, and unpack. Before they'll be like, "What do you mean? Absolutely not." Now they're like, "Huh. I never thought about that. I can't really talk about it right now because I'm confused and maybe a little offended, but I'm going to come back to this." There is a capacity built to listen.

[singing starts]

Ngofeen Mputubwele: Amen. [laughs]

Ngofeen & Britton: Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen.

Britton Smith: Everybody now.

Ngofeen & Britton: Amen.

[laughter]

Britton Smith: Amen. No.

Ngofeen & Britton: Amen. Amen.

Britton Smith: Amen. Amen. Amen.

[singing ends]

[laughter]

Ngofeen Mputubwele: Britton Smith, he's the president of Broadway Advocacy Coalition, and he performs in the band Britton & The Sting.

[music]

[00:17:48] [END OF AUDIO]

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