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Wayne Brady in Kinky Boots the Broadway Musical
Wayne Brady in Kinky Boots the Broadway Musical

Wayne Brady to Return to Kinky Boots

Emmy Award and Grammy Award-winning performer Wayne Brady will step back into the heels of “Lola” in the hit Broadway musical Kinky Boots. Brady is set to make his return to the role for a strictly-limited engagement on March 5, 2018 and he will stay with the company through Friday, April 28, 2018. Brady will be taking over for J. Harrison Ghee, who will be temporarily leaving the show for another project.  Ghee will return to Kinky Boots on Tuesday, May 1, 2018.  Brady took over the role once before when Tony-winner Billy Porter departed the role.

To say that I’m thrilled to step back into Lola’s fabulous shoes would be the understatement of the century!” Brady said. “Lola is a role of a lifetime for an actor, a true tour de force. In this current political and social climate, we need more people to see characters like Lola… unafraid to speak her mind and unabashedly true to herself. I can’t wait to join Jake Shears and Kirstin Maldonado onstage with the rest of the Kinky Boots family.”

Wayne Brady recently completed a turn as Aaron Burr in the Chicago company of the Pulitzer Prize-winning musical Hamilton. He hosts the CBS game show Let’s Make a Deal”, earning six Daytime Emmy nominations. He was a regular on the improvisational comedy show Whose Line Is It Anyway? For which he received a Daytime Emmy Award for Individual Performance: Variety of Music Program. On Broadway, he has also appeared as Billy Flynn in the long-running revival of the musical Chicago. Brady will also appear in a recurring role in the third season of USA Network’s hit series “Colony.”

Kinky Boots won the 2013 Tony Award for Best Musical, taking home wins for Cyndi Lauper’s score, Jerry Mitchell’s choreography, John Shivers’ sound design, Stephen Oremus’s orchestrations. Billy Porter snagged a Tony for Best Actor playing the drag queen Lola. The musical features a book by Harvey Fierstein (La Cage aux Folles, Torch Song Trilogy) and is based on the British film of the same name. Jerry Mitchell directed the production which also included Tony nominees Stark Sands and Annaleigh Ashford. Kinky Boots tells the uplifting and heartwarming tale of Charlie Price, a young man reluctantly taking over his family’s struggling shoe factory and looking for a fresh idea. Charlie meets and finds inspiration in Lola and together, they discover that it takes a good friend to make a great pair.

Mark Robinson is the author of the two-volume encyclopedia The World of Musicals and maintains a theater and entertainment blog at markrobinsonwrites.com.

Photo by Joan Marcus.

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