At the 76th Tony Awards in New York, two winners made LGBTQ history on Sunday evening (local time). J. Harrison Ghee won Best Actor in a Musical for his role in Some Like It Hot, and Alex Newell picked up Best Supporting Actor in a Musical for Shucked. The two artists are the first openly non-binary performers to be awarded Tonys. Previously excellent actors had only later made their gender identity public.
LGBT is the English abbreviation for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender. The variant LGBTQ is also often used. Like the Oscars, the Tonys only have gender-specific categories. Ghee and Newell had agreed in advance of a potential nomination for the Actor category. The audience responded with standing applause, tears flowed in the hall.
The drama “Leopoldstadt”, which tells the story of a Jewish family in Vienna over several generations, was awarded the best play. Author Tom Stoppard himself escaped as a child with his family from what was then Czechoslovakia and ended up in Great Britain, where he largely abandoned his Jewish identity and did not know how many family members had been killed in the Holocaust.
The trophy for best musical went to comedy Kimberly Akimbo by writer David Lindsay-Abaire and composer Jeanine Tesori. The play is about a lonely but bright teenager in New Jersey who is made to look like an old lady because of an illness.
The Tony Awards are considered the most important award for musicals and plays in the USA, but only consider productions that were newly performed in one of the approximately 40 Broadway houses in New York’s theater district in the past year.
