Billy Porter Says He's Leaving Kinky Boots for a New Broadway Musical | Playbill

News Billy Porter Says He's Leaving Kinky Boots for a New Broadway Musical Tony Award-winning Kinky Boots star Billy Porter is planning to leave the 2013 Best Musical in January to take a role in a new Broadway tuner, according to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

The interview with Porter, published in connection with his appearance in his home town as Lola in the national tour of Kinky Boots, said Porter, "won’t be playing Lola indefinitely. His Kinky Boots contract is up in January [2016], and he’ll be back on Broadway next year but with a new, original musical–it’s all hush-hush until an official announcement is made, he said."

No further details were listed, though Porter has several other performing, writing and directing projects underway. His semi-autobiographical play, While I Yet Live, premiered at Primary Stages in 2014, and he directed a production of George C. Wolfe's The Colored Museum in Boston.

Porter also reportedly is developing a TV series titled "SoHa," about a group of black, gay friends in their 40s who live in Harlem, according to the New York Daily News.

Porter, who lives in Harlem in a new building on Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Blvd., is shopping around the idea, which began as a play he described as a mash-up of "Six Feet Under" and "Girls."

Porter told the Daily News, "[It] follows a character that's loosely based on me and my archetype — that being a black, out, gay man that's not on the down-low… It follows that character and his sort of four best friends as they try to figure out how to close the chasm between sex and intimacy." He added that he chose Harlem as the project's backdrop because the culture in that area is inherently homophobic, and he thinks "it turns that idea on its ear."

 
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