The Problem With Casting a White Deloris in ‘Sister Act’

by Chris Peterson

Deloris Van Cartier is one of the great musical comedy leading roles of the past few decades. Made famous by Whoopi Goldberg in the 1992 film Sister Act, Deloris is a nightclub singer who, after witnessing a murder, is placed in protective custody inside a convent, where her entire world collides with the quiet, disciplined lives of the nuns around her. Naturally, she turns the convent choir into a sensation, finds a sense of purpose she never expected, and becomes the heartbeat of the story.

So when I was recently alerted to a Toronto-area production of Sister Act where Deloris Van Cartier was cast with a white actress, I was more than a bit surprised.

Now, before anyone starts reaching for the nearest licensing page, yes, I know. The public character breakdown for Deloris does not explicitly say “Black woman.” It describes her as an aspiring performer trying to find fame, love, and her place in the world. It lists the usual things: age range, vocal range, and personality. So if someone wants to argue that the published breakdown does not technically forbid casting a white performer, sure. There’s your loophole. We’ve seen other local theatres do this recently.

But theatre people know when they are hiding behind technicalities.

Sister Act is not a culturally neutral musical in which race has no relationship to the lead character, the music, the humor, or the show's world. The musical places Deloris in 1970s Philadelphia and builds her around disco, soul, gospel influence, nightclub performance:  aka a very specific cultural identity. The script includes dialogue that suggests Deloris was written with Blackness in mind, including references to her having been in an “all-black version of Funny Girl.”

And once that line, among others, exist in the script, casting a white Deloris creates another question entirely. Either the production leaves the lines in, which makes the casting choice even more glaring, or it changes or removes the lines to make the production work. And if it is the second option, most theatrical licensing agreements are pretty clear about this. You do not get to rewrite dialogue, change lyrics, cut references, or adjust character context because your casting choice made the original text inconvenient. Those changes usually require permission from the rights holder. So if a theatre casts a white Deloris and then edits around the racial references in the script, the obvious question is whether that approval was received.

The issue is not whether a white actress can sing the score. Plenty can. The question is: why would a company look at one of the few big, vocally thrilling musical theatre roles centered on a Black woman and decide that this one also needed to be available to white performers?

Deloris is one of the rare musical theatre roles where a Black woman does not have to fight her way to the center of the story. She already is the center.

So when a theatre casts away from that, people are allowed to ask questions.

This does not mean the currently cast actress is untalented. It does not mean the production was created with bad intentions. Community theatre is filled with people doing their best with limited time, limited budgets, and sometimes limited casting pools.

Did the company actively recruit Black performers? Did it reach out beyond its usual audition circles? Did it ask why Black artists may not feel welcome in that space? Did it consider whether producing Sister Act without a Black Deloris was the right choice at all?

Because at some point, theatres have to stop treating representation as something they support in theory, right up until it becomes inconvenient in casting. If a role is culturally specific, that specificity should not vanish because the audition turnout was easier another way.

Maybe the licensing language allows it. Maybe no rule was technically broken. But theatre should aim higher than “technically allowed.”

If your production of Sister Act cannot find, invite, support, or cast a Black woman as Deloris Van Cartier, maybe the answer is not to cast around the problem. Maybe the answer is to pick another show.