this musical featuring white people picking cotton & singing slaves songs just closed due to protests

White folks in Montreal must have temporarily lost their minds when they decided to put on a production of a show called “Slav” by acclaimed Quebec theatre director Robert Lepage, which premiered at Montreal International Jazz Festival last week to, uh, fierce backlash. The reasoning? The play described as a “theatrical odyssey” inspired by “traditional African-American slave and work songs” featured a nearly all-white cast of performers. Two of the seven cast members are black, which frankly doesn’t seem like quite enough.

But by Wednesday at the festival, after a throng of protests from attendees–one of which held a sign that read, “Is there nothing y’all won’t steal? White culture is theft”–and festival performers like Moses Sumney cancelled their scheduled performance in protest of the festival’s choice to run the play, “Slay” was pulled from the line-up after 2 performances:

[swipe] MTL — Our Jazz fest show has been canceled, and we’ll now be playing La Sala Rossa tomorrow. Ticket link in bio! 🖤

A post shared by • Moses Sumney (@moses) on Jul 2, 2018 at 7:03pm PDT

But, thankfully, a spokesperson for the Montreal International Jazz Festival has since come forward to express an apology “to those who were hurt.” That “was not our intention at all.”