A Broadway singer and dancer whom the screen has mostly cast as the steady, sensible man in the ensemble. He does that well, and he has rarely been let near the other thing; the one film that tried cut its own dancing to ribbons.
Fi1m perspective
A drum rolls, a bandleader steps to a microphone, and the scene restages itself as a number only Roxie Hart can see. That is Taye Diggs's whole job in Chicago (2002), and it is the hinge the film swings on. Bill Condon's script puts every song inside Roxie's head, and Diggs is the man who opens the door each time. He says little. He announces, steps back, and the theatre appears. We found ourselves waiting for that drum roll, because it meant the film was about to be at its best, and because the man announcing it looked more at home on that stage than anyone the camera then cut to.
He should. Diggs came up through Broadway, in the ensemble of Carousel (1994) and then as the first Benny in Rent (1996), and the singing and dancing have never left him. The screen has not asked for them much. His film breakthrough was as Winston Shakespeare in How Stella Got Her Groove Back (1998), a romantic lead, and Harper Stewart in The Best Man (1999) followed, with Morris Chestnut beside him there and in the sequel. Then television, and a great deal of it: Dr Sam Bennett in Private Practice (2007–2013), Murder in the First (2014–2016), Billy Baker in All American (2018–2024).
What he is asked for, over and over, is steadiness: the intelligent, professional man in a group, the one you would trust with the keys while the louder characters get on with the plot. The parts want a man who can be believed, and he can be. In Better Off Ted (2009), a corporate comedy so quick and cold that our review had eyes mainly for Portia de Rossi, he plays Greg, and the part is small enough that we passed over it. That is the shape of his screen career in miniature: reliably there, seldom the reason you remember the evening.
Some of that was not his choice. Through the 1990s and 2000s he was often the only Black actor in a cast, or the romantic lead and nothing more, and a career built on those offers can show only so much. The stage has been more generous. He has played Hedwig in Hedwig and the Angry Inch, and put the case for it himself: "I can dance and I can sing, and everybody knows I can act."
The cinema has taken him at the last part of that sentence and mostly ignored the first two. Chicago is the one film that put him on a bandstand, and our complaint about it was that Rob Marshall's editing chopped the dancing so fine that the best thing in the film was barely visible. So the bandleader stays the fullest picture the screen has given us of Diggs: a man who announces the number and then stands aside for it.
Biography
Taye Diggs is an American actor and singer. Born Scott Leo Diggs (né Berry) on 2 January 1971 in Newark, New Jersey, he trained at Syracuse University, where he earned a BFA in musical theatre.
He originated the role of Benny in the Broadway musical Rent (1996) and later appeared in Hedwig and the Angry Inch. His film credits include How Stella Got Her Groove Back (1998), The Best Man (1999), Chicago (2002) and Set It Up (2018). On television he has starred in Private Practice (2007–2013), Murder in the First (2014–2016) and All American (2018–2024), and guest-starred as Greg in Better Off Ted (2009).
