Growing up in Norwalk, California, Lindsay Mendez never envisioned herself playing a lead in a Stephen Sondheim musical. “Like nearly all of the stuff I’ve done, I couldn’t imagine it because I didn’t see it. Besides Chita Rivera, there just weren’t a lot of people who looked like me doing this,” said Mendez, an actor who is Mexican American. “And if they were, they were sort of painted into a Latino box. So to get to take on these kinds of roles is an honor for me.”
Now Mendez is nominated for a Tony Award for best featured actress in a musical for her role in Stephen Sondheim’s “Merrily We Roll Along.” She is among an elite group of Latinos who will be competing for the theater world’s highest honors Sunday night at the 77th annual Tony Awards.
Mendez won a Tony Award for “Carousel” in 2018. She recalled feeling “shock and crazy adrenaline” when she was announced as the winner. “I walked up to the stage and I looked out and I saw the entire theater community in that building, many of whom I had worked with. I was just so moved, and I felt so loved. ... It was an incredible feeling.”
Since then, Mendez has starred in the CBS/OWN series “All Rise” and remarried. “Like everyone, the pandemic gave me a lot of down time, time to think about my own life, what I really wanted, how life is kind of fragile,” she said. “It was a scary time for the theater industry, which is still picking up the pieces from that,” meaning the pandemic.
In the aftermath of the pandemic and the Black Lives Matter movement, leaders in the theater industry announced steps to make it more inclusive, and Mendez said she has seen a difference. “It’s an ongoing conversation, obviously, that we’re still having, but I feel like there’s a lot more awareness and effort to tell other people’s stories and to diversify a company, a crew.”
“Even though there is a long way to go, I feel at least more attention has been raised and there are more initiatives, more efforts, to get more [diverse] voices out there,” she said.
'One of the things that you hope for, dream about'
Despite the visibility of Latino performers such as Rivera, Ariana DeBose, Lin-Manuel Miranda and John Leguizamo, Broadway is still largely a white industry. A majority of the overall audience is white, according to the Broadway League, while Latinos accounted for just 3.5% of the active membership in Actors Equity, the union representing theatrical performers.
For Eden Espinosa, being nominated for a Tony Award for her lead role in the musical “Lempicka” “is one of those things that you hope for, dream about.”
“It’s funny that it actually came at a point in my life when, in my spirit, I didn’t need it any longer to feel validated or accepted,” Espinosa said. “But it is an honor to be recognized for something you’ve done in the community.”
In an industry based on approval and accolades, Espinosa said, many performers feel they must win awards to be fully seen or appreciated. “I had actually reached a place of contentment and peace in my career,” she said, “and then, ironically, that’s when things started coming in.”
A veteran of Broadway shows like “Wicked” and “Rent,” Espinosa played Tamara de Lempicka, a Polish painter in 1930s Europe, in “Lempicka.” “We had all sorts of people in roles that, in life, weren’t people of color,” she said, “to show that these particular themes are universal, that they still happen today in different walks of life and different ethnicities and different backgrounds.”
Espinosa, who is of Mexican American heritage, often works with young people and students, and she is honest with them about the realities of life in the theater. “I tell them you’re going to get more noes than yeses, and that doesn’t mean you’re not talented or that you’re not going to be successful," she said. "Each of us are given a certain set of gifts that make us individual and stand out, set us apart from other people. And if we’re true to that, then we are automatically going to be singular.”
Other Latinos nominated this year include acclaimed designer Emilio Sosa, for best costume design of a play (“Purlie Victorious”); David Israel Reynoso, for best costume design of a musical (“Water for Elephants”); and Leslie Rodriguez Kritzer (for her role in “Monty Python’s Spamalot”).
Playwright Kristoffer Diaz is nominated for best book of a musical for “Hell’s Kitchen,” a semi-autobiographical musical by Alicia Keys.
Diaz grew up in the Bronx, but his mother often took him into Manhattan to the theater. A seminal moment, he said, was seeing Leguizamo’s “Spic-O-Rama” in 1994.
“It changed my life,” Diaz said. “He [Leguizamo] played a bunch of different characters, all the members of a Latino family, and it was the first time I saw folks onstage who looked and sounded like my family up there.
“It gave me permission to know, like, oh, I can put myself and my people on the stage, too,” Diaz said. “And from that point on, it took off really quickly what I wanted to do with my life.”
Diaz, an associate arts professor at New York University, is grateful to the Latino artists who paved the way for his generation to succeed. When “Hell’s Kitchen” was in performances at New York’s Public Theater downtown, Diaz would often go to a lobby photo of Raul Julia and “just place my hand on the poster and sort of thank him. ... He was one of the ghosts in our space, and he helped place me in a tradition of Nuyorican artists.”
This season, scenic designer Riccardo Hernández received his third Tony nomination, for “Lempicka.” He is also represented on Broadway by the musical “Suffs.”
Hernández, who was born in Cuba and raised in Argentina, said that for many years he was the “lonely Latin” in his field. He has designed shows for Broadway, the Metropolitan Opera and institutions all over the world. “The way I gravitate towards design, almost in a subliminal way, is rooted in my love of Latin American literature.”
Writers like the late Jorge Luis Borges and Ernesto Sábato from Argentina and Horacio Quiroga from Uruguay have all figured into Hernández’s artistic sensibility.
Hernández cautions his students at Yale University that “the theater is tough” and encourages them to find their own voices. “Don’t be a copy of someone else,” he tells them. “Don’t try to emulate others because you are afraid to find your own voice. Stay on the path to self-discovery and do your work at the highest level that you can, artistically and professionally.”
Looking ahead to the Tony ceremony, Mendez said: “This has been such a huge season, and I’ve been thrilled to be a part of it. There are so many great artists working this year, and it has been such a gift for me to come back to New York, to come back to Broadway, to work on ‘Merrily We Roll Along.’
“Win or lose, I’m really proud of my work,” she said. “It’s been a long, amazing run, and doing it while having a toddler and being pregnant, well, I’m just proud of making it to the Tonys.”
Her 2018 Tony Award, Mendez said, is on a shelf in her home next to her daughter’s medallion for finishing a sports class for 2-year-olds. “All the trophies go together in my house,” she said, laughing. “I rarely take a look at it [the Tony Award], but I know it’s there. And if people come over and want to see it, I always let them hold it.”
For more from NBC Latino, sign up for our weekly newsletter.
