Christopher Jackson - OTL 73: Christopher Jackson Excerpt #4 "Generic reviews and misrepresentation" lyrics

Christopher Jackson: One of my favorite lines from the show is that everybody's sorry, but the sh** stay the same. I go back and I see that 14 people got k**ed in Chicago, and over 80 people were shot, and here we are doing a show on Broadway talking about gun violence with a bunch of young black men who are in desperate need of someone saying, "Look, well here's a message in this entertaining show" by someone who is exalted to the top of hip hop, and he died by someone shooting him! You know what I mean? But it's cliched. It's generic. We've seen this story before. Those are reflected in a lot of the reviews that we got, and we didn't even get bad reviews. But my problem is, like when you call someone "crazy", it's dismissing them. When you say so-and-so's crazy, that means you don't have to pay 'em any more mind. They can go jump in the river over there and it wouldn't surprise us, because they're crazy. You know, when they say something is generic, instead of putting attention into the story we're presenting, meaning us, Todd didn't write a specific enough story, Kenny didn't direct us specifically enough to the actors, and we're not acting specific enough to act out a story - it's essentially saying it's a generic thing and you, the critic, didn't pay attention to the fact that these are real stories being told every single day. These are real lives being lived every single day. Why can't Broadway represent that? Why can't Broadway represent that with black faces?