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Writer's pictureTayla H

What’s A Musical Theatre Body Anyway?

The theatre community went wild when the 2024 cast of Six was announced, but some members were wild for a different reason.

Words by Tayla Ham - Originally written August 20th 2024



When the new “queens” were announced for the 2024 cast of Six: The Musical, it caused significant discourse in parts of the Australian theatre community. Six is well known across the globe for casting without regard to people's race or gender identity and with a wide range of body diversity. However, the new cast of queens lacks any body diversity, as all the new queens are obviously straight-sized.


Unfortunately, the casts of most professional musicals in Australia today lack body diversity. If plus-size performers are present, usually they are either in roles where the characters' weight is vital to the story, or cast purely tokenistically.


“In musical theatre, as there seems to be an assumption that fat people can’t dance or move as well as straight-size people. Not only is that not true, and super limiting, but I’ve also seen straight-sized people be given roles over plus-sized people and then be worse dancers,” say Alice Borthwick-Peters. This assumption means that when fat people are cast in shows, they can be cast tokenistically. Meaning they can are “trotted out when a great vocalist is needed and then shoved in the back line of the ensemble the rest of the time. Casting fat people in your ensemble doesn’t count if you spend most of the time hiding them!”


Borthwick-Peters is an intimacy and wellness coordinator for independent and community theatres in the Naarm/Melbourne area, as well as being on-stage herself as a plus-sized actress. Her most recent role was as Anitchka in Eurobeat: Moldova. She has also been in Chicago, Rent, Sweeney Todd, Anything Goes, Hair, and others. 


This lack of body diversity in professional theatre is trickling down into the community and amateur theatre space. “People can find it hard to picture someone different in a role if they’ve only seen it presented with a very narrow range of body types in professional theatre. That then limits the imagination for what they’re looking for to fill that role,” says Borthwick-Peters. 



Additionally, in community theatre, this lack of body diversity has started to extend to roles that are designed for plus-sized actors. Especially roles where being fat isn’t the main part of the characters life, making them a complicated, nuanced character. “Because the character doesn’t spend the show in some big quandary about being fat, the people casting the role see fatness as negotiable. Even if the role was originated by a fat actor and is specifically designed to be a plus-sized person, unless being plus-sized is central to the character, casting directors will often cast a straight sized person and not worry about it.” says Borthwick-Peters, “the general population also lets production teams “get away with” casting straight sized people in roles created for fat people more than they should. Being fat comes with a very specific lived experience that should be portrayed by people who have actually had those experiences.”


Unfortunately, for plus-sized actors even in community theatre this is a hard business, as body diversity doesn’t seem to be something Australia has come around to yet. However, Borthwick-Peters gives the final advice for actors struggling with rejections, “Fat people deserve to be seen as valued, worthy, lovable and desirable. By auditioning for roles that are traditionally played by straight-sized people, you could become the representation that other fat people are so desperate to see!”

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