Billy Porter came prepared to accept the Tony Award for best actor in a musical on Sunday, which he won for his first nominated role, as the flashy drag queen Lola in “Kinky Boots.” He told the audience at Radio City Music Hall that his journey to that moment had started as an 11-year-old watching TV in his East Liberty kitchen and seeing the “Dreamgirls” cast performing at the Tonys.
He revealed a powerful voice of his own to a TV audience at age 22, when he was named the male vocalist grand champion on Ed McMahon’s “Star Search,” then got to live his dream in local productions of “Dreamgirls” at the Pittsburgh Playhouse in 1994 and for Pittsburgh CLO in 2004. It was around ’04 that Billy — who early in his professional career was credited as W. Ellis Porter — found a theatrical home at City Theatre on the South Side. That’s why you heard him give a shout out to City’s producing artistic director, Tracy Brigden, when he had so much to shout about Sunday night. It was at City that he developed his one-man show, “Ghetto Superstar.” And just before heading to Chicago last year to get “Kinky Boots” on its Tony-winning trajectory, he was on the South Side to choreograph the new Andy Warhol musical “POP!”
Stylish Billy, who wore an ascot as he dashed onto the stage to accept his Tony, is a Pittsburgher through and through, graduating from Pittsburgh CAPA High School and Carnegie Mellon University before working as a director, writer, producer and recording artist who also has appeared on television and film.
His Broadway musical credits include “Miss Saigon,” “Five Guys Named Moe” and “Smokey Joe’s Cafe,” and he was Teen Angel in “Grease,” with fellow Western Pennsylvanian Jeff Calhoun as director. The assistant choreographer on that show was Jerry Mitchell, the director and Tony-winning choreographer of “Kinky Boots.” Now that he’s a Tony winner, Ms. Brigden said, “It remains to be seen” if he’ll be back on a stage here, although, “he knows he has a solid artistic home here as a writer. But my hope for him is that he is fully embraced by the theater community, as he should have been long ago, and that might mean he has so many offers he has to turn some down.” And wouldn’t that be a dream come true for the kid with the big voice?