Cynthia Erivo

There's going to be tears before bedtime.

"@cynthiaerivo you're in my dream cast for 'The Twit on Twitter.'"

*Twitter explodes.*

Just saw that tweet by Simon Lipkin. Totally agree.

It's a sad thing to watch play out, actually, and it's a shame that the issues couldn't have seen sorted out in a cordial way. Both sides of the argument had good points, but the conversation doesn't seem to actually be going anywhere, and there's so much snippiness coming from all sides, which just isn't necessary or helpful at all. Interesting to see other performers chipping in too.

My problem is she keeps quoting people's tweets for everyone to see and shout at - just reply to tweets like normal people you moron!

Guess she can't do without her minions.

I've just seen some more actors getting in on it in Twitter. Faux outrage at being faux cast.

1. Stage adaptation of the Disney film Hercules got announced.
2. A teenage boy tweeted his dream cast, with Cynthia as one of the Muses.
3. Cynthia took offence to this as she considered it racial typecasting and the role not big enough for her. She quoted his tweet and responded to it quite abruptly.
4. Another person responded saying 'you could have just said thankyou' and her and this person had a public argument for the whole day pretty much.
5. Playbill published an article about their readers dreamcasts for the show, including Cynthia as one of the choices for the lead female role Megara.
6. Cynthia responded to the article thanking them.
7. Daniel Boys tweeted her asking why she was okay with that article, but not the prior dreamcasting.
8. Cynthia took offence again and started arguing with him.
9. Other West End people (Sabrina Aloueche, Ben Forster, Darren Bell, Benjamin Yates, Chris Jenkins, Scott Alan, Dale Evans, Simon Lipkin, Simon Bailey, Scott Garnham etc.) have either tweeted to her or about her, calling her out for her arrogance and noting how she has changed since becoming a big success.
10. Cynthia continues to argue with anyone that has the slightest objection to how she acts on Twitter.

Another young guy got embroiled in it tonight after trying to suggest a different part for her.

Basically what it boils down to is her extremely arrogant and entitled tone on Twitter. She also quote tweets everything which she knows will get her fans to attack the person quoted.

At this point I am almost tempted to tweet her the most stereotypical roles I want to see her do. Just because I know it would annoy her to no end.
But at the end of the day I have more important things to do than bother with Cynthia and her arrogant behaviour (not saying she didn't have a point somewhere deep down - but for me she blew it with her arrogant "I am above all of you" tone).

Its definitely her tone that bugs me. She could have looked at the profile of the person suggesting their dream cast and realised it was harmless and meant as a bit of fun, unfortunately she jumped on her high horse and is still up there.
I can see perhaps that making so much of it in the first place she has made it very difficult for herself to back dowm from that viewpoint, I for one would have more respect for her if she had done so though.

I was one of the people who had a mini argument with Cynthia on Twitter (two tweets backwards and forwards then she blocked me, my @ is MartinBattey if you want to have a look).

To be honest, I think this level of behaviour from a Tony Award winner is astonishingly childish. People dream cast shows with bizarre and totally inappropriate choices all of the time, I've seen everyone from Patti LuPone through to that 12 year old from Britain's Got Talent dream cast as Elphaba, and everyone knows that it doesn't mean anything. These are teenagers who love theatre imagining a cast that's never going to happen, it's not a casting director that's wanting to get Audra McDonald to play Fantine.

This wasn't a racial issue, and Cynthia thought she was making a great point by jumping on it, but what she was really doing was saying that she was too good to play a Muse. As has been mentioned previously upthread, this was a kid who picked his favourite black actresses for roles that he knew had been played by black actresses previously.

Luke came to the defence of this person, and when Cynthia chose to interact with him, he got lots of abuse for it. When Luke pointed out that he was getting a lot of vile comments, a lot saying he had no right to an opinion because he was a white male, she said he was being sexist and racist, and pointed out that she had said nothing of the sort. She was right, she hadn't, but Luke was speaking about the mob that she had unleashed onto him. Cynthia has 40,000 Twitter followers and every time she quoted his tweet and made a snarky remark she was compelling and empowering her followers to be nasty to him. An argument with someone who is popular of social media can never be an equal playing field because of the sheer imbalance in terms of followers between the two people. Cynthia could convince herself that she was scoring a massive moral victory because her tweets were getting more likes, when actually had the shoe been on the other foot and she'd been the Luke in that situation, she would have got the same amount of support.

Her and I only exchanged two tweets each, my first was one saying to remind me never to dream cast Cynthia Erivo in anything and she replied threatening me (she said something along the lines of "you REALLY don't want to start this with me"), and at that point I received a multitude of abuse. Interestingly more than half of it included comments about my ethnicity, things like "this is the literal definition of white trash", "be qwhite", "what is this white nonsense?" and more in that vain. I've noticed as a society we spend a lot of time justifying exactly why it's okay for us to be horrible to a specific group, and less time trying to be generally nicer. It's okay to mention how much we hate white people, because they're white. Plus they've got all that privilege so if they ask us to stop mentioning their race we can talk about how they need to stop kidding themselves that they're oppressed (even if nobody ever suggested that).

This entire situation was blown completely out of proportion by the fact that Cynthia felt the need to make a point that was neither necessary, nor made any sense in the context of what had happened. When people started to point out that her behaviour was erratic, desperate, and immature, she resorted to talking about how she uses her platform to call out people who want to silence her because she's a woman of colour. This a very real issue that the world faces, but it was not an issue that Cynthia had faced in the tweets that had come before that rant. People were calling her out because she was being pretentious and arrogant, and would have done the same if it was Carrie Hope Fletcher, Ben Forster, or anyone else.

She let herself and her fanbase down by sinking to that low level I think.

One question martello736, how did she even see that Tweet? Was she following you?

It's the quote tweeting that I really find problematic. If she just replied to them it wouldn't be OK but it would be better. By now, she knows that her minion-followers will jump to her defence if she uses quote-tweeting.