The curious death of a black actor

https://www.nydailynews.com/2015/08/30/les-miserables-cast-member-kyle-jean-baptiste-dies-at-21-after-fall-from-fire-escape/

By A Longtime Reader
to: add1dda@aol.com <add1dda@aol.com>
sent: tuesday, march 25, 2025 at 11:07:08 a.m. edt

The curious death of a black actor

Dozing to the television, I woke up to discover that it was showing the 2018-19 bbc miniseries of the French classic Les Misérables. I knew immediately that it was a fairly recent adaptation since Inspector Javert, among several other cast members, was played by a black actor. Not my cup of tea, this negrification of historical dramas: I certainly didn't care to see Anne Boleyn portrayed by a black woman, as JodieTurner-Smith did in 2021.

Anyway, to find out more about the cast I searched online for "black actor" and Les Misérables and instead came up with Kyle Jean-Baptiste, who played Valjean for a month between July 23 and August 27, 2015 during the second year of the Broadway revival of the musical version. K J-B was temporarily replacing the iranian-born Ramin Karimloo, who had gone on vacation.

It turns out that Jean-Baptiste rates a wikipedia entry for dying at age twenty-one from falling off a fourth-floor fire escape in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn the day after his final performance as Valjean. wikipedia notes delicately that he fell "at the residence that his family were temporarily relocated to after a fire at their primary residence. he went out to view a full moon with a friend, and at around 4 a.m. . . lost his balance on his way back into his room."

Whoever thought that viewing a full moon from your home could be so hazardous? The New York Daily News adds that K J-B occupied the fourth-floor apartment immediately above the one with his parents, and that he had been "hanging out with a woman on the fire escape outside his apartment at 303 Greene Ave. when he lost his balance and fell to his death." The newspaper helpfully includes a photo of the fire escape in question, which looks ordinary and in no way dangerous.

https://www.nydailynews.com/2015/08/30/les-miserables-cast-member-kyle-jean-baptiste-dies-at-21-after-fall-from-fire-escape/

How exactly could this have happened? What had KJ-B been trying to do on the railing? For that matter, what caused that fire at his previous home?

One last note: Jean Valjean during most of the story is a middle-aged man, not a youth. Yet the producers chose a twenty-one-year-old as understudy for the role. It seems that race trumps age, along with everything else, in casting.

N.S.: In case ALR wasn't blunt enough, the official story on Kyle Jean-Baptiste (I had to go back in ALR's story to find the name, which I'd never heard before) cannot possibly be true. If he had lost his footing while seeking to re-enter his room, he would have fallen back onto the latticed fire escape floor. In complete contradiction to the official story, he could only have fallen to his death if he was sitting on the fire escape's outer railing--extremely reckless behavior--and leaned back (probably under the influence of drugs and/or alcohol), or someone pushed him over. If there's a third possibility, I don't know it.

As for the fire in his previous apartment--and that of his parents, since the two parties seemed to be a package deal--that had to be either arson or extreme negligence (e.g., someone who, while under the influence fell asleep).

In the matter of the loss to the artistic world, there was none. If you are an audience member during a production with affirmative action casting, either you are there for the purpose of virtue-signaling, in which case you split your consciousness between completely ignoring the bizarre casting and patting yourself on the back and glowing with your moral superiority for appreciating said casting (because you don't care at all about the aesthetics), or your enjoyment of the production is ruined by the perverted casting.

Thirty-odd years ago, when new york magazine theater critic John Simon criticized the communist founder and boss of new york's public theater Joseph Papp (I used to refer to him as Joe Smear of the Pubic Theater) for his completely improper, affirmative action (under the euphemism, "non-traditional," which, of course, only went one way) theatrical casting, Papp's response was to demand that new york magazine fire Simon. Imagine that! Even when Papp didn't put black actors in White roles, he engaged in incompetent casting. The only production of Papp's that I saw live on the stage was one of Hamlet, in 1986, starring Kevin Kline. The supporting players were wonderful, but Kline was terrible. Mel Gibson was much better, in his movie Hamlet. Earlier, circa 1972, Nana and I had watched a videotaped version of Papp's Shakespeare in the Park production of King Lear, starring James Earl Jones, on Channel 13 (PBS). I still remember all the bodies running around on the screen, around James Earl. I recall nothing but long shots.

Aside from the ridiculousness of casting a black man to play Lear, I later realized a lesson from that botched production that I've carried to today: a filmed play must shun long shots. There is an intense immediacy to watching a play live in the theater. One of the ways (the only way?) to come close to giving the TV viewer such immediacy is through intense close-ups of the protagonist, assuming one has a protagonist who can dominate the stage.

I saw an episode of a filmed, dramatic TV series that did that. The show was an early-to-mid-1970s Western, The High Chapparal. The episode was entitled, "No Irish Need Apply," and the guest star was the great John Vernon, the secret star of Animal House (1978). Vernon played Sean McLaren, the leader of striking Irish coal miners. The director framed Vernon in such intense close-ups, and the dialogue was so strong, that it was like sitting in a seat in the orchestra section!

Someone used to post "No Irish Need Apply" at youtube every few years, I would re-post it here, and then the kk would come along and terminate the guy "with extreme prejudice."