The Rob Guest Endowment – Australia’s largest single Musical Theatre scholarship, with a first prize of $50,000 – has announced changes to the way it will operate following the backlash to its unveiling of an entirely white cohort of 30 semi-finalists earlier this year.

The scholarship came under fire both for the lack of diversity in its line-up of semi-finalists, which was described as a “white wash”, as well as for its statement in response to criticism, which claimed “the only metric considered by our judging panel was talent. They did not consider race, colour, religion or gender when choosing a semi-finalist. We clearly need to work harder at encouraging entrants from the BIPOC community because we are seeing few entries from that community.”

The RGE has now announced changes, to be implemented over the next six months, to the way the endowment will operate moving forward. “We accept unreservedly that the leadership committee should have done more to ensure that contestants in the competition were drawn from a much more diverse cross section of emerging musical theatre performers across Australia. We apologise for our omissions and failures in the 2020 competition....