Butts Over Broadway

For its 25th anniversary, Broadway Bares welcomes Mitchell, the event’s executive producer, back to the director’s chair. To turn a classic Broadway musical into a sexy gay strip-a-thon starring more than 150 of the New York theater community’s hottest dancers, the Tony winner has joined forces with Tony-nominated writer Hunter Bell and Tony-nominated composer Andrew Lippa. “There’s a diva in 42nd Street who falls and breaks her leg,” Mitchell says. “Our diva falls and breaks her ass.”

Mitchell is very aware that this silver anniversary is a major milestone for the annual benefit, which raises money for Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS. “Fundraising is a difficult thing to do, so when you have an event that almost sells itself, it’s really quite amazing. If anybody would have asked me if I’d be doing Broadway Bares 25 years after the one I first created, let alone seeing it grow from an $8,000 event to a $1.5 million event, I’d have told them they were crazy. But the enthusiasm of the community and the support that it has garnered from everyone has really been what’s propelled it all these years—and the simple facts that sex sells and everyone loves to get naked for a good cause.”