Mm.

A lovely friend of mine who's now in his own version of the Heaviside Layer.

I investigated his title, because if you know the first books of the Holy Scripture, Deuteronomy is the last, and it is when the second time, uh, the law is delivered.

So I take on that special activity with this group of people.

I've come back to lead the Jellicle Ball so that another person, another cat, can be chosen to experience what I know.

[audience applauds]

[slow piano music] You've heard of several kinds of cat.

And my opinion now is that you should need no interpreter to understand our character.

Wow.

And I did know that I would continue on my path.

And I had already in 1980, before there was an acronym HIV, that I had had an infection of my lymph nodes, and not any one of three doctors on two continents could answer the question, what is this? Now, in 1979, when I had gone to London for the first time to perform in Ain't Misbehavin', there was already a friend of mine who caught a cold, and three days later, he was dead.

So the mystery was already in the air.

How can someone die from a cold? There's something going on that nobody understands.

So when my lymph nodes blew up in 1980 in Los Angeles on the tour of Ain't Misbehavin', I clocked it immediately.

Whatever that mystery is, I'm beginning to decode it.

Um, but what was their reaction wh- when they learned that you were really serious about being a performer? Did they encourage you?

And, and also as a Black actor, there aren't necessarily a whole lot of opportunities now either for Black actors, but there's more than there were, yet you managed to be in two of the shows with Black casts, Ain't Misbehavin' and, um, The Wiz.

Well, you've explained it in a nutshell.

In the early '70s, Broadway was an inhospitable terrain for Black actors and Black audiences.

And with the advent of The Wiz, that all changed.

Part of the change had to do with the decision by the producer, Ken Harper, to take some of the money and invest it in live action TV commercials so that we could lean into the living room and speak to our brethren who are sitting on the couch and say to them, "Don't sit there and become a couch potato.

There's something that represents you playing on Broadway.

You no longer have any reason to avoid it.

But what was their reaction w- when they learned that you were really serious about being a performer? Did they encourage you?

Mm-hmm.

It's not about spilling blood or anything like that.

But when there's an intersection such as the first 25 years of the 21st century has presented with us, this intersection between history and evolution, and finally the change that's been sitting on the horizon, the paradigm that says, "Come, it's my turn.

Let me in," the power of the feminine.

There's now a generation of people who have been traditionally m- marginalized to the edges of society who can do exactly that.

[cheers] [applause]

[piano music] You've heard of several kinds of cat.

And my opinion now is that you should need no interpreter to understand our character.

When you heard that it was coming back and they were using ballroom, why did you want to be part of it?

I wanted to be part of it because my formative years are the 60s.

My very first professional show was Hair.

That was another attempt at mixing generations that had been so far apart for so long.

And now, right here, beats the heart of an unreconstructed hippie.

So...

So I am constantly looking for the next revolution because I want to be on the front lines.

What does this song mean to you?