Miriam Margolyes accuses West End producers of 'overt appropriation' for not casting Jewish actors

Miriam Margolyes and Maureen Lipman have accused West End producers of "overt appropriation" after they cast non-Jewish actors in a musical about a Jewish family.

They are among a group of 20 Jewish artists who signed an open letter to the team behind Falsettos, which opens at The Other Palace Theatre in Westminster on August 30.

It claims that the UK debut of the award-winning show - which has a plot centred around a boy's bar mitzvah - features no Jewish talent.

The letter describes the casting of the play as "at worst, overt appropriation and erasure of a culture and religion increasingly facing a crisis".

It also uses the term "Jewface" to refer to non-Jewish performers playing Jewish roles, and compares the practice to blackface.

The row was ignited when the message, backed by Harry Potter actress Ms Margolyes, 78, and Coronation Street star Ms Lipman, 73, was published by The Stage website on Wednesday.

"To the best of our knowledge no one in the cast of the UK premiere is Jewish, and neither is the director or anyone on the team," it states.

"Jewishness is easy to caricature and this seems all the more disappointing when Jewish representation is absent and the ability of Jews to tell or contribute to their own stories is dismissed."

The producers of Falsettos did not respond to The Daily Telegraph's request for comment.

They reportedly said they were "hugely disappointed" by the letter and believe that "discrimination, whether intentional or not, has no place on or off stage".

The Evening Standard said the producers could not confirm if its company members were Jewish because it would be discriminatory to ask them.

Falsettos, written by US playwrights William Finn, who is Jewish, and James Lapine, won two Tony awards after it debuted on Broadway, New York, in 1992.

It featured actors from Jewish and non-Jewish backgrounds during its last run on Broadway three years ago.

The Other Palace production will run until November 23.

In recent years, many West End theatres have tried to be more sensitive to the needs of some audience members.

The National Theatre and The Old Vic are among those who now publish "trigger warnings" about potentially offensive or upsetting content in plays.

In 2017 The Hackney Empire stopped a run of an opera called The Golden Dragon after members of the east Asian community complained about it featuring some Asian characters portrayed by white cast members.