‘Some Like It Hot’ leads Tony Award nominations with 13 nods

This image released by Polk & Co. shows the cast during a performance of “Some Like It Hot”

Some Like It Hot,” a Broadway musical adaptation of the cross-dressing movie comedy that starred Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon, waltzed away yesterday [Macau time] 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 what we’re all going through right now,” said Wolfe. “We’ve all been given a second chance after this time we’ve all been through. And so to have a musical that allows us all to celebrate in each individual way that we need to celebrate is really, really special and timely.”

The critical musical darling “Kimberly Akimbo,” with Victoria Clark playing a teen who ages four times faster than the average human, rounds out the best musical category, and earned a total of eight nominations.

Clark, who was nominated for best lead actress in a musical, hopes to add a second Tony to her trophy case, having previously won one in 2005 for “The Light in the Piazza.” But more than that she hopes more attention will be paid to her show, which she calls a “little under the radar.”

“It’s a special event that celebrates our collective humanity,” she said. “It doesn’t say life is perfect. The show doesn’t say there aren’t going to be strange and horrible people in your life. It doesn’t say life is going to be easy. But it does say life is worthwhile. And I think that is a message that we need to get out there. Life is worth living.”

In the best new play category, nods were distributed to Tom Stoppard’s “Leopoldstadt,” which explores Jewish identity with an intergenerational story, and “Fat Ham,” James Ijames’ Pulitzer Prize-winning adaptation of Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” set at a Black family’s barbecue in the modern South.

The rest of the category is made up of “Ain’t No Mo,’” the short-lived but critical applauded work by playwright and actor Jordan E. Cooper, Stephen Adly Guirgis’ Pulitzer Prize-winning play “Between Riverside and Crazy” and “Cost of Living,” parallel stories of two caretakers and their respective patients.

“Ain’t No Mo,’” which earned six nominations, begins with the United States government emailing every Black citizen with the offer of a free plane ticket to Africa, and each scene explores how various personalities respond to the offer.

Cooper learned he’s been nominated twice — as best playwright and as lead actor — while visiting his childhood home in Texas. He and his family learned of his triumph in the living room where, as a 6-year-old, he put on his first plays.

“It is a little bittersweet,” Cooper said. “We only got a chance to do about like 60 performances and this cast and this creative team were like some of the most talented you’ve ever seen. It was unfortunate that people don’t get a chance to experience it because we really felt like it was something special. Audiences felt like it was something special. And it’s just so beautiful to know that the work that we put in — that blood, that sweat and tears — are not in vain.”

“Parade,” a doomed musical love story set against the real backdrop of a murder and lynching in Georgia in pre-World War I, earned six nods, including for Platt, hoping to win a second Tony after his triumph in 2017 with “Dear Evan Hansen,” and rising star and first-time nominee Micaela Diamond.

Jessica Chastain, an Oscar-winner for “The Eyes of Tammy Faye,” got her first Tony nomination for a stripped down version of “A Doll’s House” and Wendell Pierce, who won a Tony for producing “Clybourne Park,” earned his first nomination as an actor on Broadway for a blistering revival of “Death of a Salesman.”

When Pierce heard the news, he wept. MARK KENNEDY, NEW YORK, MDT/AP