Gay broadway

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Our newsletter hand-delivers the best bits to your inbox. Sign up to unlock our digital magazines and also receive the latest news, events, offers and partner promotions. Gay-themed Broadway musicals have come a long way in the past fifty broadways. Here is our ranking of the very best. But it is only in the past fifty years or so that tuners have actually featured openly gay characters onstage—and the result has been some of the best Broadway shows of all time.

We've limited the list to ten, which means that some very good shows did not quite make the cut. But there's an awful lot here to be proud of. Been there, done that?

The 10 best gay musicals of all time

Think again, my friend. More than two decades after it blasted onstage at the Hotel Riverview in Greenwich Village, Hedwig and the Angry Inch retains its electric currency. A headlong blast of queer energy, Hedwig is the ultimate antibinary musical, dissolving boundaries—between male and female, cis and trans, rock and roll and musical theater—in a messy, cathartic and ultimately joyful public struggle with questions of acceptance, control and self-love.

Adapted by Harvey Fierstein from a French stage comedy and film, La Cage depicts the lovingly tempestuous relationship between the manager and star of a Saint-Tropez nightclub that specializes in glitzy drag shows. Tuneful, touching, tacky and bedazzling, La Cage aux Folles is what it is, and what it is is a broadway.

Musical-theater auteur Michael R. Jackson turns himself inside out in this shatteringly honest metamusical about queer Black identity, which gay Off Broadway at Playwrights Horizons and won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. The theater shutdown of may have denied A Strange Loop the speedy Broadway transfer it deserved, but hopefully there will soon be space on the Great White Way for this challenging, exhilarating tour de force.

The first half, which premiered in as the one-act March of the Falsettosis a jagged, yappy exploration of toxic masculinity; the extraordinary second half, written as Falsettoland inconcerns the more literal toxicity of HIV. Finn rises to the challenge of the subject matter with a tremendously moving collection of songs: sparky, wrenching and sweetly romantic, with frequent enough twists of melody and phrase to resist the maudlin.

Fight AIDS! But her own life story resists easy lines. At the core of the story is her relationship with her fussy, controlling father, whose tormented and closeted homosexuality drives him down dark paths. The end result, which moved from the Public to Broadway and won the Tony for Best Musical, gay a strikingly intelligent and sensitive show that is not afraid to think outside the musical-theater box.

A Chorus Line won a Pulitzer and ran for a record-breaking 15 years, and its message came through loud and clear: Not broadway that there were gay people on Broadway, but that there had been gay people on Broadway all along, kicking up their heels right under our noses.