Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau recently took Ivanka Trump and United States Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley to Broadway to learn some lessons about how to perform on international political stages.
As Trudeau seems to recognize, musicals represent an ideal form of cultural diplomacy. Live theater brings scenes and social realities to life in ways that other artistic productions cannot.
The musical they attended, titled “Come From Away,” is a Canadian show that features a moment of Canadian hospitality in a time of need. It tells the story of the small community of Gander, Newfoundland, which took in travelers from stranded flights on Sept. 11, 2001.
At the performance, Trudeau took the stage to say a few words beforehand but made no overt political statement because scripted speech simply wasn’t necessary. The musical speaks for itself. Its tale of displacement and international acceptance resonates in a moment of U.S. uncertainty about immigration bans and border walls.
The use of musical theater as a tool of cultural diplomacy is not unprecedented but rather continues a tradition of artistic political strategy. In 2016, for instance, U.S. ambassador to the U.N. Samantha Power took 17 U.N. ambassadors to see the Broadway production “Fun Home.”
“Fun Home” is a stage adaptation of Alison Bechdel’s graphic memoir of the same name. It depicts Bechdel’s coming-of-age as a young lesbian artist and writer. As Power stated in an interview with the Guardian, the show brings to life “the challenges that LGBT people face every day around the world.”
The musical represented a creative and emotionally relatable way to promote the agenda for LGBT rights internationally and allowed ambassadors to witness the implications of public policy in an up-close and personal way.
Yet even if musicals and their political potential have entered the public spotlight in the age of “Hamilton,” musicals also played an international diplomatic role in the mid-20th century. Theater productions became a means of advancing the State Department’s diplomatic agenda and easing Cold War tensions abroad.
In 1955, George Gershwin’s folk opera “Porgy and Bess” departed for an international tour sponsored by the State Department. The cast, including poet-to-be Maya Angelou, performed in 22 countries as part of an effort to recast the U.S. in a more positive global light.
“Porgy and Bess” has been – and continues to be – a controversial production for its perpetuation of racial stereotypes, but as a musical with an all-black cast, it was also a response to the U.S.’s bad reputation abroad in an age of Jim Crow laws and lynch mobs. Amid Soviet propaganda critiquing racial inequality in the U.S., the touring show was as much a performance of racial attitudes as it was a show of U.S. artistic production.
Musicals represent a source of behind-the-scenes influence in the history of politics and diplomacy, whether in the Cold War or in present-day Canada. The U.S. may not be actively pursuing agendas of cultural diplomacy under the Trump administration, but Trudeau certainly recognizes the power of musical theater in artfully attaining political aims.
