A Black man is enslaved on a Southern plantation, falls for a white man, and the audience watches it for three hours. That is “Midnight,” the off-Broadway musical Todrick Hall wrote, directed, choreographed and stars in, and some of the Black people who bought tickets have said they cannot get past the premise.
The show opened Oct. 15 at the Daryl Roth Theatre and has been extended through Jan. 3, 2027. Hall plays Rail, who was sold as an infant and grows up serving a white family during the Civil War. TheaterMania’s review describes Rail meeting Richard, a white man who teaches him to read and write, and a friendship that becomes a kiss. In the second act the characters swap races.
The critics who object say the show uses slavery as a backdrop for a romance and exploits Black trauma, and that it softens the brutality of the period for the sake of spectacle. Hall’s answer, in an interview with Page Six, was that he expected controversy, but “not the conversation that it has sparked.” He told the outlet he was “grateful that it has sparked any conversation,” and that he set the story in slavery because he wanted to start “at the very beginning.”
He also pushed back on the idea that the show is not for Black audiences. He said he is not comfortable with people declaring on social media, on behalf of everyone, that a musical is not for them.
Hall has a point, and it should be said plainly: Black audiences are not one audience, and no one gets to speak for all of them. Some will see a love story that nobody tried before. Others will see a stage in which an enslaved person’s desire for his enslaver’s family is the drama, and a record of rape, forced labor and family separation sits offstage. Both reactions come from people with a claim on this history.
The weight of the objection comes from who holds the money and the stage. When a story about slavery chooses romance over reckoning, Black audiences are the ones asked to sit with that choice for three hours, and they are fair to ask what it is for. Hall is a Black writer, director and star telling the story on his own terms, which is the kind of control over our narrative Black artists have long been denied. He also made an artistic choice that Black critics are entitled to reject.
The review, for what it is worth, was less about politics than pacing: TheaterMania called the show “a dazzling spectacle in need of an alarm clock.”
The extension means the argument will run another seven weeks, in the same room, with paying audiences deciding it one night at a time.
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