Celebrating the PRIDE behind the scenes in the theatre
June is the month in which we celebrate all the contributions of the LGBTQ+ community, and as previously, I have chosen to focus on theatre and specifically those behind the scenes who, in many cases, through their work, showcase, highlight and champion their PRIDE!
I hope you find these people of interest and you take the time to explore the links, and then links there within to learn even more about these amazing professionals!
Clint Ramos is a Filipino-American costume and set designer, best known for his work on the 2016 Broadway production of Eclipsed, for which he won the Tony Award for Best Costume Design in a Play. He has received two additional Tony Award nominations. He was the first person of color to receive the Tony Award for Best Costume Design in a Play. Additionally, he was the Costume Designer who brought his talents to Frozen — Live at the Hyperion at Disney California Adventure.
Fashionista
Design Museum Foundation
Broadway Box
Tina Landau is an American playwright and theatre director. Known for her large-scale, musical, and ensemble-driven work, Landau’s productions have appeared on Broadway (recently SpongeBob SquarePants), Off-Broadway, and regionally, most extensively at the Steppenwolf Theatre Company in Chicago where she is an ensemble member.
Out
Toronto Star
The Interval NY
David Zinn is a costume and scenic designer based in New York. He has been nominated seven times for the Tony Award for both his costume designs and scenic designs, winning one Best Scenic Design for a Play award for The Humans and one Best Scenic Design for a Musical award for Spongebob Squarepants.
3views Theatre
Fashion Week Daily
America Theatre
Tennessee Williams, was an American playwright and along with contemporaries Eugene O’Neill and Arthur Miller, he is considered among the three foremost playwrights of 20th-century American drama. At age 33, after years of obscurity, Williams suddenly became famous with the success of The Glass Menagerie. This play closely reflected his own unhappy family background. It was the first of a string of successes, including A Streetcar Named Desire, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Sweet Bird of Youth, and The Night of the Iguana.
Lorraine Hansberry was a playwright and writer. She was the first African-American female author to have a play performed on Broadway, her best known work, the play A Raisin in the Sun, which highlights the lives of Black Americans living under racial segregation in Chicago. Hansberry’s writings also discussed her lesbianism and the oppression of homosexuality.
America Public Media
Making Gay History
NPR
Edward Albee was an American playwright known for works such as The Zoo Story, The Sandbox, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, A Delicate Balance, and Three Tall Women. Some critics have argued that some of his work constitutes an American variant of what Martin Esslin identified and named the Theater of the Absurd.
Terrence McNally was an American playwright, librettist, and screenwriter. Described as “the bard of American theater” and “one of the greatest contemporary playwrights the theater world has yet produced,” McNally was the recipient of five Tony Awards.
Washington Post
American Theatre
Gay & Lesbian Review
Tony Kushner is an American playwright, author, and screenwriter. He received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1993 for his play Angels in America, then adapted it for HBO in 2003.
NY Times
The Guardian
Vanity Fair
Cecil Beaton was a British fashion, portrait, and war photographer, diarist, painter, and interior designer, as well as a Tony and Oscar winning stage and costume designer.
Gay City News
HyperAllergic
New York Magazine
Florence Klotz was a costume designer who worked with Jerome Robbins, designing costumes for Madama Butterfly for the Lyric Opera of Chicago and the film version of A Little Night Music. Other musicals she designed included City of Angels, On the Twentieth Century, It’s a Bird… It’s a Plane… It’s Superman, Grind, and The Little Foxes.
Broadway Buzz
Live Design
Variety
Lorenz Hart was the lyricist half of the Broadway songwriting team Rodgers and Hart. Some of his more famous lyrics include “Blue Moon”, “The Lady Is a Tramp”, “Manhattan”, “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered”, and “My Funny Valentine”. Rodgers and Hart subsequently wrote the music and lyrics for 26 Broadway musicals during a more-than-20-year partnership that ended shortly before Hart’s early death. Their “big four” were Babes in Arms, The Boys From Syracuse, Pal Joey, and On Your Toes.
George C. Wolfe is an American playwright and director of theater and film. He won a Tony Award in 1993 for directing Angels in America: Millennium Approaches and another Tony Award in 1996 for his direction of the musical Bring in ‘da Noise/Bring in ‘da Funk. He served as Artistic Director of The Public Theater.
Jerry Herman was an American composer and lyricist, known for his work on Broadway. He composed the scores for the hit musicals Hello, Dolly!, Mame, and La Cage aux Folles. He was nominated for the Tony Award five times, and won twice, for Hello, Dolly! and La Cage aux Folles.
HIV+ Magazine
Gay Influence Blog
The Cultural Critic
Kander & Ebb were a highly successful American songwriting team consisting of composer John Kander and lyricist Fred Ebb. Known primarily for their stage musicals, which include Cabaret and Chicago, Kander and Ebb also scored several movies, including Martin Scorsese’s New York, New York. Their most famous song is the theme song of that movie. Recorded by many artists, “New York, New York” became a signature song for Frank Sinatra.
Gay Influence Blog
LA Times
Signature Theatre
David Zinn is a costume and scenic designer based in New York. He has been nominated seven times for the Tony Award for both his costume designs and scenic designs, winning one Best Scenic Design for a Play award for The Humans and one Best Scenic Design in a Musical award for Spongebob Squarepants.
3views Theatre
Fashion Week Daily
America Theatre
Tommy Tune is an American actor, dancer, singer, theatre director, producer, and choreographer. Over the course of his career, he has won ten Tony Awards, the National Medal of Arts and has his own star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. His direction of Nine The Musical in 1982, which also won the Tony for Best Musical, garnered him his first Tony for direction of a musical. He has gone on to direct and/or choreograph eight Broadway musicals.
Dance Magazine
Dallas Voice
Vulture
Michael Bennett was an American musical theatre director, writer, choreographer, and dancer. He won seven Tony Awards for his choreography and direction of Broadway shows and was nominated for an additional eleven. Bennett choreographed Promises, Promises, Follies and Company. In 1976, he won the Tony Award for Best Direction of a Musical and Best Choreography for the musical A Chorus Line. He also directed and co-choreographed Dreamgirls with Michael Peters.
Joe Mantello is an American actor and director best known for his work on Broadway productions of Wicked, Take Me Out and Assassins, as well as earlier in his career being one of the original Broadway cast members of Angels in America. As The New York Times noted: “Very few American directors — Jack O’Brien and Mike Nichols come to mind — successfully jump genres and styles the way Mr. Mantello does, moving from a two-hander like Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune to the huge canvas of a mainstream musical comedy like Wicked, from downtown stand-up (The Santaland Diaries) to contemporary opera (Dead Man Walking) to political performance art (The Vagina Monologues).”
Todrick Hall is an American rapper, singer, songwriter, actor, director, choreographer and YouTuber. He aspires to be a role model for LGBTQ and people of color, and includes his experiences as a Black gay man in his art. Starting with season eight, Hall became a resident choreographer and occasional judge on RuPaul’s Drag Race. And last year, he brought his talents to compose the signature track for the Disneyland Magic Happens parade.
Stephen Sondheim is one of the most important figures in 20th-century theatre, and recipient of eight Tony Awards as a composer — Sondheim has been praised for having “reinvented the American musical” with shows that tackle “unexpected themes that range far beyond the [genre’s] traditional subjects” with “music and lyrics of unprecedented complexity and sophistication.” His best-known works as composer and lyricist include A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, Company, Follies, A Little Night Music, Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, Sunday in the Park with George, and Into the Woods. He is also known for writing the lyrics for West Side Story and Gypsy.
Gay & Lesbian Review
The Guardian
Time
Jerry Mitchell’s first professional credit as a choreographer was for the 1990 Alley Theatre world premiere of the musical Jekyll & Hyde. Mitchell’s first Broadway production as sole choreographer was the 1999 revival of You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown, which he followed with The Full Monty. Mitchell created and for many years directed the annual Broadway Bares benefit for Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS. He also directed and choreographed the Broadway musical Kinky Boots for which he won the Tony Award for Best Choreography and was nominated for the Tony Award for Best Direction of a Musical.
Go Pride Chicago
Advocate
Aussie Theatre
Lisa Kron is an American actress and playwright. She is best known for writing the lyrics and book to the musical Fun Home for which she won both the Tony Awards for Best Original Score and Best Book of a Musical.
William Finn is an American composer and lyricist. He is best known for his musicals, which include Falsettos, for which he won the 1992 Tony Awards for Best Score and Best Book, A New Brain (1998), and The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee.
Jason Sherwood won his first Emmy Award for production designing Rent Live on Fox and his second consecutive Emmy Award in as many years for production designing the 2020 Oscars, and is also the youngest designer in history to ever design on the show. He has also been recognized with nominations for the Drama Desk Award and Lucille Lortel Award. In the live music space, he has designed projects and performances for Sam Smith, the Spice Girls, Sara Bareilles, Camila Cabello, Elton John, Eminem, Cynthia Erivo, Janelle Monae, and more. He has designed dozens of theatre productions, including world premiere new musicals and plays at theatres everywhere including New York Theatre Workshop, Atlantic Theatre, and American Repertory Theatre. Jason also designed the sets for Frozen and Beauty & the Beast for Disney Cruise Line.
New Now Next
Interview
Beyond Fashion
Neil Meron is an American film producer known for producing the 2002 film Chicago and the 2007 film Hairspray. With partner Craig Zadan he ran the production company Storyline Entertainment until Zadan’s death in 2018. Meron continues to run the company which has produced multiple musicals for television including The Wiz, The Sound of Music, Peter Pan, and Jesus Christ Superstar.
Advocate
Playbill
Hollywood Reporter
Ryan Murphy is an American television writer, director, and producer. He is best known for creating and producing a number of television series, such as Popular, Nip/Tuck, Glee, American Horror Story, Scream Queens, Pose. Ryan also produced Long Day’s Journey into Night and Boys in the Band on Broadway.
The New Yorker
The Guardian
Them
Bob Crowley is a theatre designer (scenic and costume), and theatre director best known for Tony Award winning designs for An American in Paris, Aida, Carousel, Once and Mary Poppins.
Playbill
The Guardian
The Independant
John Lee Beatty is an American scenic designer who has created set designs for more than 115 Broadway shows and has designed for other productions. He has won two Tony Awards, for Talley’s Folly and The Nance, and been nominated for 13 more, and he has won five Drama Desk Awards and been nominated for 10 others.
Lincoln Center Theatre
Broadway
Live Design
Cheryl Crawford was an American theatre producer and director and was influential in the early careers of such actors as Helen Hayes, Bojangles Robinson, Mary Martin, Ethel Barrymore, Ingrid Bergman, Tallulah Bankhead, and Paul Robeson, among many others. In 1946, she and Eva Le Gallienne founded the American Repertory Theatre. In 1947, together with former Group Theatre members Elia Kazan and Robert Lewis, she founded The Actor’s Studio.
Irene Gandy has worked on Broadway for over 50 years. She started out as a press intern with the Negro Ensemble Company in the 1960s and then worked on over 40 shows as a press agent, eventually becoming a producer in 2012 with the Tony-winning Porgy and Bess revival and again with Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar and Grill in 2014.
Black Her
Broadway’s Best Shows
Ms. Magazine
Aaron Rhyne is an American video and projection designer for live theater. He is best known for his designs in the Broadway productions of Anastasia, A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder, and Bonnie and Clyde, as well as The Ghosts of Versailles at LA Opera. He also designed media and projections for large-scale musicals for Disney including Frozen Live at the Hyperion and Tangled The Musical, and Frozen — A Musical Spectacular for Disney Cruise Line.
