BWW Flashback: Look Back at KINKY BOOTS Opening Night to Celebrate Stark Sands' Birthday!

Everybody say yeah! We're celebrating the birthday of Broadway's original Charlie Price, Stark Sands, by looking back at his opening night in Broadway's Tony-winning musical Kinky Boots. Check out the video to see Stark alongside his co-stars Billy Porter, Annaleigh Ashford, and more as they raised audiences up at Broadway's Al Hirschfeld Theatre.

The winner of six 2013 Tony Awards, including Best Musical, Kinky Boots features a Tony Award-winning score by Cyndi Lauper, a book by Tony® Award-winner Harvey Fierstein and direction and choreography by Tony Award-winner Jerry Mitchell. Kinky Boots tells the uplifting and heartwarming tale of Charlie Price, a young man reluctantly taking over his family's struggling shoe factory and looking for a fresh idea. Charlie meets and finds inspiration in Lola and together, they discover that it takes a good friend to make a great pair.

The Broadway production of Kinky Boots opened on April 4, 2013 and played its final performance on April 7, 2019. At the time of its closing, the musical was the 25th longest-running production in Broadway history, having played 2,507 regular performances and 34 previews.

Stark Sands most recently appeared on Broadway in Aaron Sorkin's adaptation of To Kill a Mockingbird opposite Jeff Daniels. Prior to that, he was nominated for a Tony Award and received a Grammy Award for originating the role of Charlie Price in the Tony Award-winning musical Kinky Boots. His recent film credits include Steven Spielberg's The Postopposite Tom Hanks and Meryl Streep, the Coen Brothers' Inside Llewyn Davis with Oscar Isaac and Carey Mulligan, and Clint Eastwood's Flags of Our Fathers opposite Ryan Phillippe and John Slattery. He was most recently seen on television as the lead of the FOX series Minority Report. He made his Broadway debut in Journey's End, for which he received his first Tony Award nomination and won the 2007 Theatre World Award before going on to star in Green Day's rock musical American Idiot.