Being Beautiful, Bailiwick Repertory. McKinley Johnson and Stephanie Newsom’s musical (somewhat revised since its premiere last summer at the Chicago Theatre Company) succeeds on the strength of its offbeat subject and lively performances. Johnson himself plays Afton, a black sharecropper’s son transformed into gender-bending nightclub star Aftrina in 1940s Chicago under the tutelage of gay grande dame Lonette (Duwane Pendarvis) and his proteges, Ellen (Langstan Smith) and Leslie (Eric Jorgensen). Aftrina’s reckless youth–and the tragedy that forces him back into the closet–is recalled in flashback in 1970 by the middle-aged Afton (Sanford E. Gaylord), a spinsterish fusspot forced to confront his past by his inquisitive college-student niece (Sophia Hinshelwood, wearing the world’s worst Afro wig) despite the disapproval of her proper mother (Chavez Ravine).
