Todrick Hall Sensitive Slave Plot In ‘Midnight’ Play Hit A Few Nerves

Reviews are in for multi-hyphenate Todrick Hall's new musical, 'Midnight,' and some aren't too keen on the play's taboo slave plot.
Over the span of the past two decades, Todrick Hall has created a lively world of entertainment for himself that includes a stint on American Idol, choreography and guest judging on RuPaul’s Drag Race, one of the creative minds behind Beyoncé’s 2013 music video for “Blow” and a VMA win for work alongside Taylor Swift. All things considered though, his story begins with and has always found a way to incorporate the theater.
His latest act comes in the form of a new musical titled Midnight, which made its off-Broadway debut in NYC last Thursday (October 15) at the Daryl Roth Theatre. However, the sensitive plot at the center of it all has caused division amongst early attendees, particularly from those who can’t wrap their heads around spending three hours watching an enslaved Black man falling in love with his white owner.
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Midnight sees Hall, who wrote and directed the musical, also star as lead protagonist Rail. The young enslaved Black man eventually catches the eye of another enslaved woman, Lily Rose. Amidst a standout musical number with the original song “Pretty Eyes,” and his initial surrendering to the romantic advances of Lily Rose that results in marriage and pregnancy, things soon shift as Rail embarks on an affair with a white man who just so happens to be his owner’s fiancé.
For Kristin Hopkins, entertainment lawyer for A+E Networks, the performance proved to be a triggering experience from the moment she walked in the venue. Sharing her thoughts recently via TikTok (seen below), Hopkins summed it all up as “three hours of Black trauma.” While simultaneously giving praise to the actors and their performances, she pointed to details like costumes on mannequins hanging from the ceiling by ropes, a triggering death scene within the first five minutes and a shift that happens in act two that rides the wave of caricature.
Todrick not only responded in her comments section, but also recorded his own video to break down why Midnight deserves a respectable run even though it might not be for everyone. “I’m a proud Black artist, and I think that if I’m making art then it’s Black art,” he explains in response to the idea that his play wasn’t made for a Black audience, going on to add, “I see Black and Brown people, queer people, coming to me at the stage door everyday [and] DMing me, telling me that this touched their lives, they’ve never felt so seen in a musical, they love the representation [and] they love that the enslaved characters in the show seemed nuanced — that they experienced joy, they experienced happiness, they fell in love, they laughed and they smiled. That’s something that we oftentimes don’t see in shows that depict us in the 1800s.”
“There are not a lot of people who look like me who have written scores,” he asserted to close out his statement, also adding, “and I would like to encourage any creator to not discourage people from coming to see one of the few pieces of art that shows Black people that are respected in this industry, that I believe have enough integrity that they wouldn’t be performing in this show night after night and giving the jaw-dropping performances they give if they didn’t stand by the show’s message.”
There’s an argument to be made for accepting art in the form of its creator, but there’s an interesting field of criticism you enter whenever it comes to the topic of race play. It’s perfectly fair to demand an openminded approach from theatergoers, which some may be more mentally prepared for than others, but we also understand the pushback against a plot where the sensitive subject matter of slavery is once again touted as art. Thoughts?
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