A recent interview with composer Amanda Green and Neil Meron, the executive producer of NBC's upcoming Peter Pan Live, revealed that the showrunners brought on award-winning Chickasaw composer Jerod Impichchaachaaha' Tate as a consultant for the Native American musical aspects of the show.The changes, according to Meron, involved "stripping [the music] down and taking out things that were silly in the day it was written and offensive today." The original show was very stereotypical and racist with its depiction of the Native American characters and the Broadway revival, while improving some aspects of their part in the show, kept almost all of the original, stereotypical lines and lyrics.
In particular, the song "Ugg-a-Wugg" has been dramatically revamped for NBC's upcoming production
. In an interview with Salon
, Tate broke down exactly what changes he and the musical director brought to the song to give it more integrity and remove the offensive material.The first change was a revamp of the opening rhythm of the song. The opening, Tate said,
was given a small adjustment to sound "more like an Iroquois smoke dance, rather than a stereotypical ONE-two-three-four, ONE-two-three-four, ONE-two three-four ... we adjusted the opening rthym so it sounded more authentic."
Tate continued by noting that "most Americans aren't going to know the difference. But at least we do. Intellectually, we know, and musically, we know[.]"The second change involved changing the rhythms of what Tate refers to as the "Indian Breakdown" of the show. "It's this stereotypical, Indian-sounding thing," Tate said. "We were kind of looking for different tunes, but it doesn't matter what tune you use because the flavor of it is that stereotypical Indian sound."
The musical director for the show then made a different adjustment by introducing different rhtyms into the song to, as Tate describings as 'veiling' the original sterotypical music and making it sound more "party like."
The third--and biggest change--was working on replacing the lyrics in the song that were based on racist stereotypes of Native American language.
"Remember, this is a British musical theater piece, so we had people from across the pond who were thinking very stereotypically-and it was very uninformed. I don't think there were any bad intentions or malice or anything like that ... It was just uninformed." Tate wanted to find authentic replacement lyrics for the show, and because the tribe in Peter Pan was heavily inspired by Northeast Indians from North America, he sought out to find a word from one of these cultures for the show.
The replacement is an actually Wyandotte word--although Tate cannot reveal what word was chosen since they haven't been publicly announced.Tate also addressed the origins of the stereotypical lyric, "ugg a wugg." In the show, the word is not just used musically--it comes about when Peter Pan and Tiger Lily are making plans to attack Captain Hook, and Tiger Lily says that the code word for danger will be "ugg-a-wugg."
The new word, Tate says, "works beautifully. So the music doesn't have to change, we just changed the lyric. It's 100 percent authentic Wyandotte language and it's so accurate and it makes sense."Further changes were made to the nonsenstical, stereotypical syllables used throughout the song. These syllables have been replaced with children's nursery rhymes, which Tate describes as "brilliant move" because it hepls the song retain its original silliness while removing the stereotypical material. "I thought that solution was dead-on," Tate said, "because it keeps it chidlike."
Although Tate was only a consultant for the musical portion of the show,
he says that he is impressed with the spirit of the producer's efforts."What NBC is doing," he said,
"I've never heard of, to go into a musical and tidy up elements of it that they felt needed to be addressed. This is kind of a unique event." He also stated that he felt the efforts on part of the NBC team were genuine and not simply a way to avoid criticism.
"I feel like [with the show's producers] it was a natural and genuine circumstance. I don't feel like it was overly political. I don't think they were just trying to save their image. I think it was very genuine."In addition to bringing on Tate as a musical consultant, NBC's specifically sought out actresses with Native American heritage for the role--a move which Sonny Skyhawk, the CEO and founder of American Indians in Television, called a "rare effort." Alanna Saunders, whose great-grandfather was a member of the Cherokee Nation, was cast in the role. According to NBC, the understudy for the role, Kathryn Terza, also has Native American heritage.
Peter Pan Live! will air on December 4th at 8 pm EST on NBC.
source: original interview (other text is my own words) +
source about NBC's casting