NEW YORK — “Some Like It Hot,” a Broadway musical adaptation of the cross-dressing movie comedy that starred Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon, waltzed away Tuesday with a leading 13 Tony Award nominations, putting the spotlight on a show that is a sweet, full-hearted embrace of trans rights. With songs by Marc Shaiman and Scott […]
“Some Like It Hot,” a Broadway musical adaptation of the cross-dressing movie comedy that starred Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon, waltzed away Tuesday with a leading 13 Tony Award nominations, putting the spotlight on a show that is a sweet, full-hearted embrace of trans rights.
With songs by Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman and starring Christian Borle and J. Harrison Ghee, who all got nominations, the show follows two musician friends who disguise themselves as women and join an all-girl band to flee Chicago after witnessing a mob hit. Like the movie, there are men in dresses trying to pass as women. But this time, the dress awakens something in Ghee’s character, akin to a transformation from a caterpillar to a butterfly.
“The only thing we wanted to do was to be honest and we wanted to treat these characters with dignity,” said Matthew López, who wrote the Tony-nominated book with Amber Ruffin and has a Tony already for the play “The Inheritance.” “Sometimes the best way to treat a character with dignity is to let them be flawed and scared and funny and brave and human. So one of the things that was really, really important to us is just to create human-scaled characters going through some extraordinary experiences.”
The musical comes at a time when trans rights are under attack and its message of self-acceptance and respect for all was echoed across Broadway, from a revival of “Parade” to a Black actor-led “Death of a Salesman” to the new play “Ain’t No Mo’” and new musical “Kimberly Akimbo.”
“I think the pandemic put a lot of things in perspective, both in terms of improvements we needed to make in the community and also just the way that everybody’s feeling about the world and about being a human,” said Ben Platt, nominated for “Parade.” “The art people are making has a real urgency and a real purpose.”
Three shows tied with nine nominations each: “& Juliet,” which reimagines “Romeo and Juliet” and adds some of the biggest pop hits of the past few decades, “New York, New York,” which combined two generations of Broadway royalty in John Kander and Lin-Manuel Miranda, and “Shucked,” a surprise lightweight musical comedy studded with corn puns.
Betsy Wolfe, in her eighth Broadway show, earned her first nomination in “& Juliet,” playing Anne Hathaway, Shakespeare’s wife. The actor had just dropped her daughter, almost 3, off at ballet class on Tuesday morning. “I hope she addresses me properly now when I see her,” she joked.
In the musical, playwright David West Read took an original story using “Romeo and Juliet” as a launch pad and mixed in hits by Swedish super-producer Max Martin, including Brittney Spears’ “Oops! … I Did It Again,” Katy Perry’s “Roar” and Bon Jovi’s “It’s My Life.” The musical imagines a happier ending for Juliet after a journey of self-discovery.
“It’s a beautiful story about second chances, which honestly is is what we’re all going through right now,” said Wolfe.
