Alex Newell became the first openly nonbinary actor to win a Tony Award when they claimed best featured actor in a musical Sunday for their scene-stealing turn in “Shucked,' while J. Harrison Ghee took best actor in a musical for 'Some Like It Hot.'
“My mother raised me to understand that my gifts that God gave me were not about me, to use them to be effective in the world to help somebody else’s journey,” Ghee said. “So thank you for teaching me how to live, how to love, how to give. For every trans, nonbinary, gender nonconforming human, whoever was told you couldn’t be seen, this is for you.”
Ghee, 33, plays Jerry/Daphne, a musician on the run in “Some Like It Hot,” a flashy musical adaptation of the beloved 1959 Billy Wilder film. Newell, 30, plays the whiskey distiller Lulu in “Shucked,” Brandy Clark, Shane McAnally and Robert Horn’s musical about desperate corn farmers in a plucky Midwestern town.“Thank you for seeing me, Broadway,” Newell said. “I should not be up here as a queer, nonbinary, fat, Black little baby from Massachusetts.
Toby Marlow became the first openly nonbinary Tony winner last year, when he shared best original score with his “Six” co-composer Lucy Moss. Newell and Ghee were the first nonbinary acting nominees in the show’s 76-show history.victories came four months after Justin David Sullivan, a nonbinary actor starring in “& Juliet,” announced they were withdrawing from Tonys consideration because the American Theatre Wing still uses gendered categories.
“The standard has always been a male is an actor and a female as an actress. And I don’t like that,” Newell said. “I appreciate that the categories are separate to give cis women, and women in general, an actual fighting chance to win awards in such a male-dominated field. If we can create that, we can create more lanes for other people who don’t want to stick to those two categories. I think me choosing actor, I hope, will be a spark to use that word as it was meant to the art of acting.
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