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    How ‘Her Story,’ a Feminist Comedy, Came to Rule China’s Box Office

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    “Her Story” touches on sensitive topics in China, like censorship and gender inequality. But its humorous, nonconfrontational approach may have helped it pass censors.The movie calls out stigmas against female sexuality and stereotypes about single mothers. It name-drops feminist scholars, features a woman recalling domestic violence and laments Chinese censorship.This is not some indie film, streamed secretly by viewers circumventing China’s internet firewall. It is China’s biggest movie right now — and has even garnered praise from the ruling Communist Party’s mouthpiece.The success of “Her Story,” a comedy that topped China’s box office for the last three weeks, is in some ways unexpected, at a time when the government has cracked down on feminist activism, encouraged women to embrace marriage and childbearing and severely limited independent speech. The film’s reception reflects the unpredictable nature of censorship in the country, as well as the growing appetite for female-centered stories. Discussion of women’s issues is generally allowed so long as it does not morph into calls for rights. “Her Story,” which some have called China’s answer to “Barbie,” cushions many of its social critiques with jokes.The director of “Her Story,” Shao Yihui, has emphasized at public appearances that she is not interested in provoking “gender antagonism,” an accusation that official media has sometimes lobbed against feminists.At a time of sluggish growth and anemic ticket sales, movie producers — and perhaps government regulators — have been eager to attract female audience members, an increasingly important consumer base. Other recent hit movies have also been directed by and starred women, including the year’s top box office performer, “YOLO.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Chris Brown’s Concerts Draw Protest in South Africa

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      Women’s rights activists have petitioned for the singer to be denied a visa for two shows in South Africa, where gender-based violence is high.After Chris Brown announced that he would be performing in Johannesburg, tickets for the city’s 94,000-capacity FNB Stadium sold out in under two hours. A second show was swiftly added.Nearly as quickly came a protest against Brown, who has faced allegations of violence and harassment of women including his guilty plea on charges that he assaulted Rihanna, his then-girlfriend, in 2009. Women for Change, a South African nonprofit, started a petition to block Brown’s performances on Dec. 14 and 15. The organization presented the petition, which received over 50,000 signatures, to the country’s Departments of Home Affairs and of Sports, Arts and Culture, asking that Brown be denied a visa.The singer’s planned return has particular resonance in South Africa, where women are killed at a rate five times higher than the global average, with 60.1 percent of those murders committed by an intimate partner, according to a study by the South African Medical Research Council. “We aim to send a clear message that South Africa will not celebrate individuals with a history of violence against women,” Sabrina Walter, the founder of Women for Change, said in an interview.Brown and his representatives have not addressed the protest, but in October, as the group spread the #MuteChrisBrown hashtag on social media, the singer seemed to troll the organization by writing, “Can’t wait to come,” under one of its Instagram posts. Walter said the reply triggered a wave of online harassment from Brown’s followers, including death threats against her and her team. It was not the first time Brown used his fame to rally against detractors. He has challenged other celebrities who refer to allegations made against him, and in February used Instagram to accuse the NBA of bowing to sponsor pressure to disinvite him from participating in an event related to its All-Star game. In 2019, Brown was released without charges after being accused of aggravated rape in France. He then sold T-shirts that read “This Bitch Lyin’” online.In the years since his 2009 arrest, Brown has been accused a number of times of violence against women, including throwing a rock through his mother’s car window in 2013 and punching a woman at a Las Vegas nightclub in 2016. In 2017, his ex-girlfriend Karrueche Tran obtained a temporary restraining order, citing harassment, physical violence, intimidation and death threats during and after their on-again-off-again relationship, which lasted from 2011 to 2015. In 2022, a judge dismissed a lawsuit that accused Brown of drugging and raping a woman on a yacht owned by Sean Combs.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Claire Daly, Master of the Baritone Saxophone, Dies at 66

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      She was celebrated for both her playing and her love of the jazz community. “My life in music,” she said recently, “is the smartest thing I’ve done.”Claire Daly, who was regarded by both her fellow musicians and critics as a standard-bearer on the baritone saxophone, died on Tuesday on a friend’s farm in Longmont, Colo. She was 66.The cause was squamous cell cancer of the neck and head, said the saxophonist Dave Sewelson, a longtime friend.Thanks to her flexibility on an ungainly instrument and her expressive precision as a soloist, Ms. Daly was a frequent winner of critics’ polls from the Jazz Journalists Association and DownBeat magazine.Thanking the journalists’ group when she received its 2024 award for best baritone saxophonist, she wrote in May on Facebook: “Kudos to all the baritone players — we get to play bari! We are the lucky ones. My life in music is the smartest thing I’ve done.”She spent many of the early years of her career playing both jazz and rock in all-female ensembles. Her sturdy playing formed the foundation of the original Diva Jazz Orchestra, which from its founding in 1992 established itself as one of the most potent big bands in jazz, gender notwithstanding.She left Diva after seven years, tending thereafter toward small ensembles. She collaborated frequently with the pianist Joel Forrester in the quartet People Like Us, with the experimental pop vocalist Nora York, and with Mr. Sewelson in the bottom-heavy trio Two Sisters Inc. (its other member was the bassist Dave Hofstra).We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      A Play About J.K. Rowling Stirred Outrage. Until It Opened.

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      The muted reaction to the Edinburgh Fringe show “TERF” suggests that when activists engage with potentially inflammatory art, offense can quickly vanish.There are more than 3,600 shows in this year’s Edinburgh Festival Fringe and most will struggle to get even a single newspaper review. Yet for months before the festival opened on Friday, one play was the subject of intense global media attention: “TERF,” an 80-minute drama about J.K. Rowling, the “Harry Potter” author, and her views on transgender women.Before anybody had even read the script, a Scottish newspaper called the play, which imagines Rowling debating her views with the stars of the “Harry Potter” movies, a “foul-mouthed” attack on the author. An article in The Daily Telegraph said that “scores of actresses” had turned down the opportunity to play Rowling. And The Daily Mail, a tabloid, reported that the production had encountered trouble securing a venue.On social media and women’s web forums, too, “TERF” stirred outraged discussion.The uproar raised the specter of pro-Rowling protesters outside the show and prompted debate in Edinburgh, the city that Rowling has called home for more than 30 years. But when “TERF” opened last week, it barely provoked a whimper. The only disturbance to a performance on Monday in the ballroom of Edinburgh’s Assembly Rooms came from a group of latecomers using a cellphone flashlight to find their seats. About 55 theatergoers watched the play in silence from the front few rows of the 350-seat capacity venue.The play imagines a showdown in a restaurant between Rowling and the stars of the “Harry Potter” movies.Andy Buchanan/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesGiven the regular disagreements between some feminists and transgender rights supporters, the uproar around “TERF” was not unexpected.But the muted response to the show itself suggests that fewer British people are riled by the debate than the media coverage implies — or at least that when activists engage with potentially inflammatory art, outrage can quickly vanish.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Theater

      A Queer Mountain Lion Leaps From the Page to the Little Island Stage

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      Henry Hoke’s 2023 novel, “Open Throat,” narrated by an animal in peril in the Hollywood Hills, is adapted for a staged reading.The concept behind Henry Hoke’s 2023 novel, “Open Throat,” is an eyebrow-raising one: It’s a story about overdevelopment and climate change narrated by a mountain lion who muses on the lives of hikers and loved ones.Hoke was loosely inspired by the mountain lion known as P-22 whose regular sightings in the hills surrounding Los Angeles’s Hollywood sign, successful crossing of two freeways and eventual death captured the public’s attention in 2022. In “Open Throat,” according to the book’s publisher, the animal identifies as queer, and uses they and them pronouns.The book is “what fiction should be,” the novelist Marie-Helene Bertino wrote in her review for The New York Times, and it made several end-of-year best-of lists and awards shortlists.With an internal monologue that has poetically broken stanzas and a fluid sense of time and reality, “Open Throat” does not immediately call for theatrical adaptation. Yet a staged version of the work is premiering Wednesday as part of Little Island’s ambitious summer series of live performances at its outdoor amphitheater.The narration is divided among three performers, including Chris Perfetti, who is holding the book, and Calvin Leon Smith. “I think the beauty of it, and the reason we’re intentionally having three different voices, is making it universal,” Perfetti said.Jeenah Moon for The New York Times“It reads beautifully,” Zack Winokur, Little Island’s producing artistic director, said of the book. “The way it’s placed on the page is visually interesting. The way the voice exists is not like anything else. I kept thinking that it being so voice-driven would make an amazing show, and I didn’t know how to do it, which is the greatest thing in the world.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Movies

      The Broad Appeal of the Elsa Dress from “Frozen”

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      Wearing a costume from “Frozen” in daily life has become a pastime for many children who identify with the character, regardless of gender.Dressing up as Elsa, the blond queen with magical powers from Disney’s animated film “Frozen,” wasn’t necessarily Jeff Hemmig’s idea of a good time.​​“It was well outside of my comfort zone,” Mr. Hemmig, 43, said.But he knew it would make his son, Jace, happy. So Mr. Hemmig, who lives in Killingly, Conn., squeezed his shoulders into a dress his mom made for him, which matched an Elsa costume she had made for her grandson. Mr. Hemmig then performed a rendition of “Let It Go,” choreography and all, as Jace watched.“He loved it,” Mr. Hemmig said. “He was filled with joy.”Mr. Hemmig wasn’t thrilled about wearing the dress: He said it was tight in the armpits and it made him feel vulnerable. But he loved how it delighted his son, then 3. “Seeing Dad do it, too, felt like a big moment,” Mr. Hemmig said.Like the Hemmigs, countless parents have gone to great lengths to satisfy their Elsa-obsessed children since “Frozen” was released in 2013 and became the cornerstone for one of Disney’s most successful franchises. And Mr. Hemmig is far from the only father to dress as Elsa with his son.Such instances have happened enough that the actor Jonathan Groff, the voice of the character Kristoff in “Frozen” and “Frozen 2,” thanked the films’ directors at a 2022 event for “creating space for young boys to dress up as Anna and Elsa,” the franchise’s sister protagonists.Jacqueline Ayala had been a preschool teacher for five years when “Frozen” came out, and it quickly infiltrated her classroom. For a time, Ms. Ayala recalled, there was only one Elsa dress in its dress-up chest. “That’s why the kids started wearing their own costumes to school,” she said. “So they wouldn’t have to share it.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Music

      Wiener Festwochen Says ‘No Excuses Anymore’ for Inequality

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      In Vienna, a series of concerts and summits will highlight women and nonbinary composers, as well as the dominance of the dead, white, male canon.In the world of classical music, progress toward gender parity can seem incredibly slow.Recent big wins have included women of the New York Philharmonic being allowed to perform in pants, and the appointment of the second woman — ever — to a music director role at one of the 25 largest orchestras in the United States. The Berlin Philharmonic, one of the world’s great ensembles, hired its first female concertmaster last year.Frustrated by the stubborn gender imbalances in classical music, the directors of the Wiener Festwochen, a prestigious arts festival in Vienna, have this year formed the “Academy Second Modernism,” an initiative that will showcase works by 50 female and nonbinary composers over five years.This season, less than 8 percent of approximately 16,000 works staged by 111 orchestras worldwide were composed by women, according to a report from Donne, Women in Music, an organization working for equity in the classical music industry. Of those works, the vast majority were composed by white women.According to the report, three of the 10 orchestras that performed the highest proportion of works composed by women were in the United States: the American Composers Orchestra in New York, the Chicago Sinfonietta and National Philharmonic in North Bethesda, Md. But at the New York Philharmonic and the Boston Symphony Orchestra, two of America’s top orchestras, only about 10 percent of the music programmed was composed by women.“There are so many of us,” said Bushra El-Turk, a British-Lebanese composer who often merges Western and Eastern musical traditions in her work. “Whether we’re given opportunities is the problem.”Rehearsing El-Turk’s opera “Woman at Point Zero,” in Vienna last month.David Payr for The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Music

      Fever Ray’s Karin Dreijer, Behind the Mask

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      The musician, whose new album was released in March, discusses disguises, recording and why they find karaoke so off-putting.Karin Dreijer’s is a face of many masks. Around 20 years ago, when the Swedish musician first began releasing songs with the eerie, beloved electronic duo the Knife, Dreijer and their brother, Olof, were often photographed wearing black, face-obscuring beaks — a little bit bubonic plague doctor, a little bit “Eyes Wide Shut.” The solo project Fever Ray, begun in 2009, offered Dreijer more opportunities for striking visual imagery and character work. They once accepted an award from Sweden’s Sveriges Radio wearing an eerily realistic mask that made it look like their flesh was melting.As Fever Ray, Dreijer invents another uncanny guise on the cover of their latest album, “Radical Romantics,” which finds them embodying a kind of zombified office drone character with thin, stringy hair and eyes and mouth rimmed with a sickly yellow. That image, Dreijer said in a recent Pitchfork interview, was influenced by a seminude self-portrait of the 79-year-old Norwegian figurative painter Odd Nerdrum. “I thought of it as a Grindr pic,” they said of the Nerdrum piece. “It contains so much longing: throwing yourself out there, head over heels. I tried to do a face like his.”Dreijer and their longtime friend and collaborator Martin Falck, taking their daily lunchtime walk in the wilderness.Rebecka UhlinDreijer is, by contrast, barefaced and bundled in a nondescript, oversize black hoodie when I reach them by video call in their studio in Stockholm. Their white-blond hair is cropped artfully, and they sit in front of a white wall as blank as a primed canvas. They would be leaving for the States in two days to embark on the five-city North American leg of the “Radical Romantics” tour, but they were looking further ahead, too. “I am thinking about what I will do next,” Dreijer says. “Which is a good thing, so you don’t just drop after the tour. Touring is intense and a lot of fun — there are so many people around. I am planning what I’m going to do afterward.”Fever Ray’s music is somehow both brooding and ecstatic — a sonic kaleidoscope that explodes with infinite variations of gray. Throbbing synthesizers and driving electronic beats provide a steady backbone for Dreijer’s bracing, shape-shifting vocals and restless experiments in genres as varied as punk, ambient and industrial-tinged psych-rock.Some sketches and visual ideas illustrating the mood of the latest Fever Ray album, “Radical Romantics.”Rebecka Uhlin“Radical Romantics” finds Dreijer working with some familiar collaborators (like Olof, for the first time since the Knife released its final studio album, “Shaking the Habitual,” in 2013) and some new ones, like Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, who add an edge of industrial menace to two of the album’s boldest tracks. The visual language of “Radical Romantics” was, like much of Dreijer’s work, developed with longtime friend Martin Falck. “We’re always sending each other pictures and film clips and stuff on Instagram,” Dreijer said. “‘Look, we should do this next time! This looks amazing, we should try this!’ We collect everything in a folder and then try to organize it, which is almost impossible.”For all its imaginative character play, “Radical Romantics” is Dreijer’s most vulnerable album — an open hearted exploration of love and its possible failures. “I think we started to really work on a gut feeling for what we find fun,” they said. “And then we talk about what we find fun in relation to what we are really, really afraid of, what we find scary.”“Me and Martin, we are afraid of everything,” they add. “I think we are both the world’s most scared people. But then I think we have become quite brave, as well.”A banally patterned tie, one of the key accessories of the zombified office drone character that Dreijer embodies in some of the album’s visuals.Rebecka UhlinMakeup — and lots of it — is another important visual tool in Dreijer’s many transformations.Rebecka UhlinWhat time of day do you work?I have two kids, so I’ve had to work proper office hours, because that’s when you have child care. And I think also, to have a good routine, to go [to the studio] in the morning and you work during the day and then you go home and you have a social life, you can meet friends and hang out with your kids. I think that has been quite important for me. Then I also do really like to go there on holidays. Like for Christmas, or in the middle of the summer. Because that’s when you feel like you get so much time and nobody interrupts. And everybody thinks you’re away doing Christmassy stuff, but you’re actually there working.My oldest kid is turning 20 this year, so I have had that routine for a long time. But now I feel like when they are about to move out, and they also don’t need me the same way in the evenings and weekends and stuff, then yeah, I think I started to enjoy going there in evenings and nights, as well.A shocking pink jacket makes the familiar a little uncanny.Rebecka UhlinAre there set hours that you sleep?I have understood that I need to sleep, eat and work out to be able to function properly. Which is a bit annoying, because it doesn’t feel like fun stuff when the only thing you want to do is just continue working. But it’s not so helpful to skip those three things.What type of exercise do you do?It’s a good biking distance to my studio, so I try to bike there. I really do like hot yoga. Going to the gym is really boring, but I do that, especially now, when I’m on tour, I have to do that. In the winters, I ski a lot.What embarrasses you?It’s interesting what embarrasses people. I don’t like to sing to a small group of people. [Laughs.] I really find it difficult to do karaoke. It’s this idea of authenticity that I find very difficult. Maybe it’s not embarrassing, it’s more like, it’s really frightening.Planning the many component parts of the “Radical Romantics” experience.Rebecka UhlinHow is that different from performing your own material onstage?Because then it becomes a performance, and I can play around much more with the ideas of authenticity and what’s a natural voice. It’s easier, I think, to play with those ideas than it is if you can’t use props or lights or effects. If I say, “This is the authentic me, this is authenticity,” then people will believe you.There’s something uncomfortably sincere about a lot of karaoke.And you’re also supposed to sound a specific way. You’re supposed to sound like the original. That is at least what people are striving to do. And I have never been able to sing in that classically “good” way of singing. I don’t know how to do it.I was reading another interview with you that said on one of the effects machines you use to process your vocals, there’s actually a knob that says “gender” on it, that you can twist.Yes, there is a machine that has that. It’s fun. [Laughs.]Driving beats provide a sturdy backbone for Dreijer’s shape-shifting vocals and restless experiments in genres as varied as punk, ambient and industrial-tinged psych-rock.Rebecka UhlinHow do you think of music as a place to play with gender?I think I have found out that making music, for me, is to create spaces where I feel free. And playing around with gender is one aspect of it. Early on, when working with the Knife, we tried to find this space where you couldn’t exactly tell what kind of voice this is, if it’s male or female or something in between. To find that space, for me, is a very freeing thing. And it can be done in so many different ways. It also has to do with how you perform the vocals, if the vocalist sounds very close or far away or [like] whispering or screaming. All these things work together to find this space.What are you reading right now?I have it here because I got it for my birthday a couple of weeks ago from my brother, actually. [Holds the book up to the screen.] “Dear Senthuran” by Akwaeke Emezi. I think it’s amazing. It’s a way of seeing a nonbinary identity from a place that I didn’t know about. It’s more of a spiritual way of seeing gender. I’m also into reading a lot of poetry about love. I have a new favorite writer called Chen Chen, who also writes really amazing poetry.The striking album cover was inspired by the work of the Norwegian figurative painter Odd Nerdrum. “I thought of it as a Grindr pic,” Dreijer said of the Nerdrum self-portrait they tried to emulate here.Rebecka UhlinYou’ve also mentioned that bell hooks was a big inspiration on this album. When did you first encounter her work?I was so enthusiastic on the last Knife tour, 10 years ago, that I gave [hooks’s 1999 book] “All About Love” to all the band and the crew to read. It’s been with me for a long time. And I still think it’s great. It’s so strange when everybody has some kind of relationship with love, but there are so few people who have a definition of what it is they mean when they say they are in love. What does it mean to say, “I love you”? I think it’s really important to share a definition with the people you want to have close relationships with. What do I need to feel loved? And what do you need to feel loved? And I think she writes about that really well.I’ve found your music to be so referential to other texts in a way that is rare. It seems like books are an important part of your musical world. Is it difficult to incorporate that in a way that doesn’t feel too academic?When we did the last Knife album [“Shaking the Habitual”], it was pretty academic, I would say. Even though I have never studied at the university, we read a lot and we had a lot of literature lists and stuff like that. And I think after that, both me and Olof talked about how we’re not so into that kind of process anymore, that starts through the head and then into the body. I am more interested in things that go into the body directly. But I think I’ve been as inspired by film and images because I normally have a clear feeling of a song when I start. It’s more of a feeling or an emotion. And then I know the colors of it and what kind of setting it should take place in.Martin Falck’s notebook — one of six he kept during this Fever Ray project.Rebecka UhlinDo you consider yourself a visual artist? You’re a musician, but there’s such a visual component to Fever Ray.I think I’m still trying to find out what I am, or what I do. I know I do music, and I’m very involved in making the visuals. The music is sort of the hard, difficult work that I have to do. I work mostly by myself for a really long time, and then when I have the sketches and I know what the tracks are about, then I invite people to collaborate. Then when the music is finished, we get to do the fun stuff, which is the visuals. I work with Martin on those.Is it easy for you to invite new collaborators in and figure out how to work with them?I ask people who I think do interesting and fun things. You never really know how it will turn out. So I did start a couple of collaborations with people that didn’t really work out. During Covid and the pandemic, I didn’t meet anybody in person except my brother. We have built studios just next to each other.Dreijer’s shoes also blend the flashy with the banal.Rebecka UhlinIs it important for your creative process to have your brother close by?I don’t know if it’s important. It was just a practical thing that he moved back from Berlin like five years ago and we both needed studios, so we decided to build together. Because I was just renting different rooms here and there. So it’s my first studio that’s my own. With a window, so I can see the sky. I’ve only been in basements before.Tell me more about your studio space.First it was a huge sort of industrial space, and then we built this cube in the middle with two studios in it. It’s a wooden cube inside this huge space. And in the big space, I think the most important thing, because it’s so dark here most times of the year, is that we have daylight light tubes. I don’t know what they’re called in English. It’s like full daylight — to go there is a bit like having light therapy. Or just having proper daylight, which I think helps a lot. To be able to be here in the winter. So I think that is the best thing about the studio. In my little work studio room, it’s not full daylight. Then it’s more cozy.Early in the process of dreaming up the “Radical Romantics” aesthetic, the Knave was an important character for Dreijer and Falck. Rebecka UhlinWhat’s the worst space you’ve ever worked in?I’ve rehearsed and recorded in really, really [expletive] places. I think one of my first rehearsal spaces, with one of my first bands — this is like early ’90s — we were sharing a space with another band with only guys. They peed in glasses and left them in the rehearsal space, because there was no real bathroom around. That was very disgusting, but it also tells a lot about the time, how it was when I started to make music. It was super male-dominated and it was really difficult to find a space where you felt safe and free.How do you know when a song is done?That is a very difficult thing to know — but when you listen to it in many different places and leave it for some time and can come back to it and still feel like it makes sense. But then if you listen to it one year later, you probably would feel differently and want to redo a lot and change things because you are in a different place yourself. This time I worked with 10 tracks: To have them all done at the same time, that is a bit of a challenge.What is your relationship to deadlines?I set my deadlines myself. And then when I’m completely done with everything, I start to work with my management and the different labels. I’m very happy not to have anybody involved in the musical process that tells me, “Oh, you have to be ready now.” That would never work for me.This interview has been edited and condensed. More

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      in Theater

      J. Harrison Ghee and Alex Newell, Gender Nonconforming Performers, Earn Tony Nominations

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      Even as gender identity has become an increasingly politicized subject in a polarized America, Broadway shows are featuring a growing number of gender nonconforming performers, and two of them scored Tony nods Tuesday morning.J. Harrison Ghee, one of the stars of a musical adaptation of “Some Like It Hot,” was nominated in the best leading actor in a musical category. And Alex Newell, who plays a whiskey distiller in the country musical “Shucked,” was nominated in the best featured actor in a musical category.Both performers use he/she/they pronouns, and both agreed to be considered as actors (rather than actresses) for Tony purposes.Another gender nonconforming performer on Broadway this season, Justin David Sullivan of “& Juliet,” opted out of awards consideration, rather than choosing between the actor and actress categories. More