{"id":5389,"date":"2019-09-30T00:54:58","date_gmt":"2019-09-30T07:54:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.billymasters.com\/custom\/?p=5389"},"modified":"2019-09-30T00:54:58","modified_gmt":"2019-09-30T07:54:58","slug":"making-broadway-history","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.billymasters.com\/custom\/blog\/2019\/09\/30\/making-broadway-history\/","title":{"rendered":"Making Broadway History"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Someone I saw at&nbsp;<strong><em>Little Shop<\/em><\/strong>&nbsp;was an ebullient&nbsp;<strong>Alexandra Billings<\/strong>.&nbsp; The trans actress has reason to celebrate.&nbsp; She\u2019ll be joining the&nbsp;<em>Broadway&nbsp;<\/em>cast of&nbsp;<strong><em>Wicked<\/em><\/strong>&nbsp;as Madame Morrible.&nbsp; The press release announcement states, \u201cAlexandra is the first openly trans actress to play the role.\u201d&nbsp; Her first night will be January 20<sup>th<\/sup>.<\/p>\n<p>On the flip side,&nbsp;<strong>Erika Jayne&nbsp;<\/strong>is going into&nbsp;<strong><em>Chicago<\/em><\/strong>.&nbsp; This, too, could be seen in a historic context, because I believe Jayne is the first openly discussed possible transgender performer to play the role of Roxie.&nbsp; And if you think I\u2019m going to get into the \u201cis s\/he or isn\u2019t s\/he\u201d, no dice.&nbsp; That\u2019s between her and her gynecologist and\/or proctologist.&nbsp; What I got a kick out of is that her press release goes to great pains to state that this will be Erica Jayne&#8217;s first appearance on&nbsp;<em>Broadway<\/em>.&nbsp; Really?&nbsp; You mean she never did&nbsp;<strong><em>The Cherry Orchard<\/em><\/strong>, or&nbsp;<strong><em>Elektra<\/em><\/strong>?<\/p>\n<p>Making real history, playwright&nbsp;<strong>Charles Busch&nbsp;<\/strong>will lead an all-star&nbsp;<em>Broadway&nbsp;<\/em>benefit performance of his play&nbsp;<strong><em>The Tale of the Allergist\u2019s Wife<\/em><\/strong>&nbsp;and he\u2019ll take over the titular role, originally played by&nbsp;<strong>Linda Lavin<\/strong>.&nbsp; But Lavin will still be performing \u2013 filling in for the late&nbsp;<strong>Shirl Bernheim<\/strong>, who was the original Frieda.&nbsp; The rest of the original cast will also appear \u2013&nbsp;<strong>Michele Lee<\/strong>,&nbsp;<strong>Tony Roberts<\/strong>, and&nbsp;<strong>Anil Kumar<\/strong>.&nbsp; This is an&nbsp;<em>Actors Fund&nbsp;<\/em>benefit and will take place on November 18<sup>th<\/sup>&nbsp;at the&nbsp;<em>Friedman Theatre<\/em>.&nbsp; Grab your tix at&nbsp;<a href=\"http:\/\/www.ActorsFund.org\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"><strong><u>ActorsFund.org<\/u><\/strong><\/a>.&nbsp; See you there (God willing).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Someone I saw at&nbsp;Little Shop&nbsp;was an ebullient&nbsp;Alexandra Billings.&nbsp; The trans actress has reason to celebrate.&nbsp; She\u2019ll be joining the&nbsp;Broadway&nbsp;cast of&nbsp;Wicked&nbsp;as Madame Morrible.&nbsp; The press release announcement states, \u201cAlexandra is the first openly trans actress to play the role.\u201d&nbsp; Her first night will be January 20th. On the flip side,&nbsp;Erika Jayne&nbsp;is going into&nbsp;Chicago.&nbsp; This, too, could<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5389","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-breaking"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.billymasters.com\/custom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5389","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.billymasters.com\/custom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.billymasters.com\/custom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.billymasters.com\/custom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.billymasters.com\/custom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5389"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.billymasters.com\/custom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5389\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5390,"href":"https:\/\/www.billymasters.com\/custom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5389\/revisions\/5390"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.billymasters.com\/custom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5389"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.billymasters.com\/custom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5389"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.billymasters.com\/custom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5389"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}