(Re) Rehearsing for Broadway Backwards: 20th Anniverssary

There are certain nights in the theatre that feel less like performances and more like communal acts of remembrance. Broadway Backwards has always been one of those nights. For twenty years, this extraordinary event benefiting Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS has gathered artists together not only to celebrate the LGBTQ+ community through the re-imagining of beloved musical theatre canon, but to remind us why theatre matters in the first place: because storytelling can raise money, yes—but more importantly, it can raise one another.

 

So to be invited back for the 20th anniversary celebration at the Gershwin Theatre was already beyond anything I could have dreamed. To be asked to revisit not one, but both of my previous numbers — “All I Need Is the Girl” with the incandescent Robyn Hurder and “One Day More” alongside this glorious company of artists—felt almost impossible to process emotionally. There are moments in a creative life where you feel yourself quietly admitted into the room you spent your entire childhood hoping existed. 

 

This was one of those moments. 

 

And what moved me most deeply was not merely the nostalgia of recreating these performances, but the realization that while the work remains frozen in time, we do not.

 

When Robyn and I first performed “All I Need Is the Girl” in 2019, I had just met Alec—my now-husband—and I could not possibly have imagined the life that was waiting for me. I had not yet endured four life-saving surgeries. I had not yet learned what it meant to rebuild a body, a career, and a sense of self simultaneously. Robyn, too, has transformed beautifully: artistically, personally, professionally. Watching her ascend has been one of the great joys of my life.

 

And when I stood in “One Day More” in 2022, the entire world still felt bruised and disoriented from the ravages of COVID. I was still struggling physically and emotionally in the aftermath of illness and survival itself. We were all, in some way, trying to remember how to gather again.

 

That is the strange and holy magic of theatre. We return to the same material, but never as the same people. Every revisit becomes a kind of archaeological dig into who we once were and who we have become. A lyric lands differently. A harmony carries new grief or gratitude inside it. The body remembers what the heart has lived through.

 

 

For aspiring performers, I think this may be one of the greatest lessons this art form offers us: your work will evolve because you evolve. Life will mark you. Love will mark you. Loss will mark you. Survival will mark you. And if you are fortunate, you will someday return to a familiar stage carrying a deeper humanity than the person who first stepped onto it.

 

What an honor to revisit the past in service of the future. What an honor to stand among this community. And what a privilege to still be growing inside the work.