Nikki Renée Daniels ‘Never Dreamed’ She’d Become the First Black Actor to Lead ‘Company’ on Broadway

variety.com:

Sasha Urban editorNikki Renée Daniels has been performing on Broadway for 22 years, but she’s never received entrance applause.

That is until Wednesday, when she became the first Black actor to play the lead role in the musical “Company” on Broadway.“And then in the quiet, I sat down in a chair and someone yelled, ‘You got this, queen!” Daniels told Variety. “It just felt so great to know that so many people out there were on my side and cheering me on.

It was truly unexpected.”Daniels, who usually plays the role of Jenny in Marianne Elliott’s gender-flipped revival of the show, announced on Twitter that she would going on as the understudy, which was immediately met with waves of support, including fan art and pleas for a bootleg video of her performance of the finale number “Being Alive.” She accompanied her announcement with the hashtag #FirstBlackBobbie, a reference to the lead character’s name, which is usually a man named Bobby in traditional versions of Stephen Sondheim’s musical, which has been revived several times since it first opened in 1970. (Jennifer Saayeng was the first Black woman to play Bobbie on the West End when she went on in the same production a few years ago, while Olivier Award winner Adrian Lester became the first Black man to lead a Sondheim show when he played Bobby in London in 1995.)Daniels said she has a “unique challenge” in understudying the lead role while simultaneously playing Jenny, the same role Saayeng played.

But she described herself as “Type A,” which means she spends her one day off from the show, every Monday, running through Bobbie’s lines and music.