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Transparent Actress Alexandra Billings Readies Autobiographical Show for Broadway
The acclaimed transgender actress and activist will bring her life story to the stage in S/He and Me.
Transgender actress and activist Alexandra Billings, who’s appeared on TV shows including Transparent and The Conners and in Wicked on Broadway, is getting ready to take her life story to the Great White Way.
Billings is preparing the autobiographical musical S/He and Me for an industrial workshop in March ahead of a Broadway production. It will tell the story of Billings’s youth, when the concept of being trans was largely unrecognized and far from accepted, through drug addiction, sex work, and homelessness, to her transition, her success in show business, and a happy marriage.
“I know that when I was 12 years old, had there been a show like this, it would have saved me three separate suicide attempts,” Billings, who was born in 1962, said in a press release. “S/He and Me is a reminder of our responsibility to humanity – trans or not. Our story resonates with a truth that needs to be told. This time for us!”
Billings, who has been acting since 1968, made her Broadway debut in 2018 in The Nap and joined the cast of Wicked as Madame Morrible the following year. Billings has lived with AIDS since 1995, and her LGBTQ+ and AIDS activism stretches across the continent and culminated in her moderating a panel on transgender rights in America at the White House during President Barack Obama’s administration. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including a Visibility Award from the Human Rights Campaign, and she holds an MFA in acting and is a tenured professor at the University of Southern California. She is married to her high school sweetheart, Chrisanne Blankenship, whom she met in 1976.
S/He and Me will be directed by Billings’s longtime collaborator Joanne Gordon, who coauthored Billings’s memoir, This Time for Me. “S/He and Me is a love story,” Gordon said in the release. “It is a love that transcends gender, time, and place. It is the story of the love of two individuals (Alex and Chrisanne) — but just as much a story about the love of self (Scott and Alex). It is a story of parental love, young love, and old love. It is a homage to the glorious love of the Broadway show tune, and it is an affirmation of that idealized love. In a life of pain and suffering, illness and death, drugs and dissolution, the spirit triumphs. Love does conquer all, and we celebrate our happily-ever-after ending. And it is all true!”
The score, composed by Andre Catrini, the recipient of the 2014 ASCAP Foundation Cole Porter Award, harkens back to the Golden Age of Broadway and pays homage to the Hollywood musicals and the original cast albums Alex grew up listening to at home. “S/He and Me takes the story of a marginalized community and gives it a proper, big musical theater treatment with an eclectic score that honors the humans it is about, and the theater community at large,” Catrini said in the release.
Producers Tom D’Angora and Michael D’Angora (Harmony, How to Dance in Ohio, Walking With Bubbles), known for socially relevant stage productions, offered this joint statement: “S/He and Me is not just a musical; it is a movement. It invites audiences to embrace diversity, celebrate the human spirit, and challenge preconceived notions about identity. It is a testament to the power of storytelling and its ability to foster empathy and understanding.”
Additional information on the production, including casting announcements, show dates, and ticket information, will be available soon.
