Gay broadway

The definition of an ensemble show, director-choreographer Michael Bennett’s psychological group portrait of Broadway dancers pulls back the curtain on the audition process for a Broadway musical. (In an interview shortly after the musical debuted on Broadway, Madjus said portraying the character was an adjustment: “I had to go buy heels at TJ Maxx for my audition.

But My Son's a Queer, (But what can you do?) is there to tell the wonderful story of Rob Madge and their childhood attempt to stage a Disney parade in their living room for their parents.

Originally set to run on Broadway during the current season, the play has sadly been postponed to the 2024-25 season instead.

(The actual Anglo-American writer upon whose autobiographical writing “Cabaret” is based, was actually famously gay.) But even this is treated coyly:

SALLY: Are you homosexual in any way? In the world that Escola has created on stage, Abraham Lincoln is — not what you could call out and proud, most definitely not a role model for the community.

But that central aspect of Alice Walker’s 1982 novel—as adapted by playwright Marsha Norman and a team of three pop songwriters—emerged more clearly in the musical’s smaller-scaled 2015 revival, which intensified The Color Purple to bring out its deeper hues. Tuneful, touching, tacky and bedazzling, La Cage aux Folles is what it is, and what it is is a sensation.

Musical-theater auteur Michael R.

Jackson turns himself inside out in this shatteringly honest metamusical about queer Black identity, which premiered Off Broadway at Playwrights Horizons and won the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. The Color Purple was originally a novel by Alice Walker that depicted the experiences of several black girls and women in the old South each facing a unique yet interconnected struggle.

The first Broadway musical to put gay characters center stage, La Cage Aux Folles is the fairy godmother of LGBTQ+ musical theater. As the show’s fractured blended family comes together in the face of grief, Falsettos guides us through a scarred but healing depiction of collective loss and purpose.

The defining Broadway musical of the 1990s, Jonathan Larson’s Rent reshapes the Puccini opera La Bohème into a passionate rock-pop tableau of creative artists in the East Village, and its generous field of vision created space for a pointedly diverse dramatis personae: Of the eight main characters, half are LGBTQ+, at least half are living with HIV, and a majority are usually cast as nonwhite.

It’s an actual category… [S]exuality really is a spectrum and not a binary and this is supported by a lot of research and, as a queer person myself with many, many friends of many shapes and stripes and I just would like it to be in the room that you consider taking Naz’s self-identification at face value…”