Donatella Galella grew up in New York City, where she loved seeing plays and musicals.
“It was amazing,” she said. “I miss having theater so accessible.”
An associate professor of theatre, film, and digital production at UC Riverside, Galella recalls attending as many as 100 performances a year when she was a graduate student at The Graduate Center of the City University of New York.
Donatella Galella
In 2012, she saw the Broadway revival of “Anything Goes” and enjoyed the performance so much that, six months later, she took her sister to see it. The second time around, however, she felt a discomfort she hadn’t experienced before and left the theater feeling troubled.
Cole Porter’s musical comedy, which first opened in 1934, is set aboard an ocean liner, where a young stowaway schemes to win the heart of an ingénue engaged to an English aristocrat. Toward the end, several white characters impersonate Chinese characters, adopting stereotypical mannerisms, accents, and dress.
The depictions struck Galella, who is of Italian and Chinese descent, as racist. From that point, her enthusiasm for Broadway began to give way to a more critical perspective. She became increasingly aware of racial stereotyping of Asian characters onstage as well as racial disparities in casting.
In her forthcoming book, she coins the phrase “feeling yellow” to describe the profound sense of anger, sadness, and racial alienation Asian Americans can feel when encountering yellowface: the use of makeup, costumes, gestures, and accents by non‑Asian performers to portray characters of East Asian descent. The reaction can feel particularly acute when other audience members appear to be enjoying the show, she said.
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