Wearing a brocade tuxedo jacket and gold bow tie, André De Shields ascended the stairs to the stage of Radio City Music Hall to accept the 2019 Tony Award for Best Performance by a Featured Actor in a Musical for his role in Hadestown — a moment over 50 years in the making.
The crowd leaped to its feet, keenly aware they were in the presence of a theatrical legend. De Shields, in his typical, thoughtful manner, drank it in, then delivered a spiritual wallop that left the room speechless.
“I would like to share with you just three cardinal rules of my ability and longevity,” De Shields said. “One: surround yourself with people whose eyes light up when they see you coming. Two: slowly is the fastest way to get to where you want to be. And three: the top of one mountain is the bottom of the next, so keep climbing.”
De Shields made his Broadway debut in the short-lived Warp! My Battlefield, My Body, part of a sci-fi trilogy that had originated in Chicago. The show only lasted 15 performances but launched his New York theater career, which has included 15 Broadway credits, including performing in plays and musicals and even choreographing Bette Midler’s first self-titled solo show.
The Tony Award — Broadway’s highest honor — remained elusive, despite bring-down-the-house performances in shows such as The Wiz, Ain’t Misbehavin, and The Full Monty (in which De Shields and his co-stars dropped their pants as a misfit band of unemployed steel workers).
Through it all, De Shields has resiliently weathered an often unforgiving industry and also survived the height of the AIDS crisis, losing friends, colleagues, and lovers. De Shields has been living with HIV for over 30 years, recently saying in an interview with The Body, “That’s what you have to understand about HIV. You can’t be fatalistic about it.”
He titled his solo show Confessions of a P.I.M.P., which stands for “positive individual making progress” — aptly named as De Shields continues to work on both stage and screen.
Earlier this season, De Shields appeared in a Broadway revival of Death of a Salesman, representing three generations of Black queer actors alongside Sharon D Clarke and McKinley Belcher III.
When asked about the intersection of Black and queer identity and how it relates to Miller’s classic, De Shields told INTO, “It has always been our white counterpart who was defining who we are, even as inclusive as the word gay is. This distinguishes us, the melanin in our skin. So we have to be soldiers. We have to raise the bar, and we have to remind people that the fear, the intimidation, and the biases that you are experiencing, you must stop projecting [them] onto us. They’re your insecurities that you have to deal with. And now that we have this term, Afrofuturism, which I think is the most inclusive of all those terms, I have no use for the term gay except to say, ‘Without a care in the world.’”
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De Shields is also bringing his queer “je ne sais quoi” to Uncoupled as Jack, Michael’s (Neil Patrick Harris) wise elder neighbor. The comedy was recently picked up by Showtime for a second season, and we hope that Jack makes the jump, too.
Regardless, De Shields continues to move through life with grace and gratitude. Having lived through the Civil Rights Movement and the Stonewall Riots, he has experienced and witnessed acts that could weigh heavy on one’s shoulders. Yet he chooses to see things differently.
“We are in this together; we have to celebrate our differences, not curse them; we have to look at the universe around us and imagine, if the universe were uniform, if the universe were monolithic, if the universe were homogenous, if the universe were one thing, it would be the most boring experience,” De Shields said in an interview with Oprah Daily. “The universe is diverse. The universe is inclusive. We are reflections of the universe, and we should surrender to that.”
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