Speak about a plot twist: Within the early Nineteen Eighties, whereas learning for her BFA in theater at Rutgers College, Bianca Leigh’s performing professor instructed her that popping out of any closet can be the demise of her profession. Minimize to 2025—Leigh, now 62, is the scene-stealing star of Broadway’s runaway hit comedy, Oh, Mary!
Leigh performs a prim 19th-century chaperone to first woman Mary Todd Lincoln, whose confession of unintended autoeroticism involving ice cream brings on a number of the greatest laughs in what’s been universally hailed as one of many funniest performs in a long time, along with being named a Pulitzer Prize finalist.
Cole Escola’s play has already garnered Outer Critics Circle Awards, a Drama Desk Award, and three Drama League Awards. The outcomes of 5 Tony nominations will probably be determined when Broadway honors the perfect of the season on June 8.
How about we take this to the following stage?
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The second isn’t misplaced on Leigh.
After a profession that originally noticed a long time of indie movies and underground theater, Leigh’s Broadway breakout is a triumph of timing: The business that she was as soon as warned would sideline her now can’t get sufficient. For Leigh, the punchline is nice—and the final snicker, unmistakably hers.
Leigh’s early profession is a lesson in perseverance. Within the 80s and 90s, she scraped by in New York Metropolis’s fringe theater scene, taking roles Off- and Off-Off Broadway, indie movies, and odd jobs to outlive that may make your mom blush. But Hollywood remained off limits—till Transamerica (2005), the place she lastly secured a task in a significant movie.
Although director Duncan Tucker solid cisgender actor Felicity Huffman because the movie’s central character, Leigh’s presence because the chief of an underground transgender assist group proved to be a standout.
Different notable large and small display screen appearances that adopted included a featured function alongside one other well-known Bianca (Del Rio) within the camp comedy Hurricane Bianca and a memorable flip in a Regulation & Order: SVU episode during which she performed a psychiatrist mourning a trans teen—a uncommon second of actual coronary heart in a present not at all times identified for getting it proper.
Final August, Leigh returned to her theater roots in an engagement at NYC’s famed Laurie Beechman Theater, the place she moonlit on her Broadway gig in Oh, Mary to current her raucous one-woman present Transvestigation.
The manufacturing was pure Leigh: a hilarious and soul-bearing mixture of stand-up and sketches that tackled every thing from gender norms to mortality along with her signature attraction and wit. Half comedy particular, half theatrical confessional (with serving to of some sassy track requirements), Transvestigation displays on Leigh’s journey with the identical steadfast humor that’s stored her getting into an business the place she’s carved her personal path.
From ‘career-killer’ to Broadway thriller, Leigh’s story is greater than only a victory lap—it’s a mic drop. Proving the haters incorrect by no means regarded so good, sounded so sharp, or sparkled so vibrant.
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