NEW YORK CITY: Actors’ Equity Association has announced that Once on This Island will receive the Extraordinary Excellence in Diversity on Broadway Award for the 2017-18 season. The award, now in its eleventh year, recognizes a Broadway show that exemplifies and promotes the union’s values of equity, diversity, and inclusion. The award will be presented to representatives of the show on Aug. 8 in New York City.

“We are thrilled to honor the Broadway production of Once on This Island with this year’s Extraordinary Excellence in Diversity on Broadway Award in recognition of their diverse and inclusive multi-cultural and gender fluid casting and the many other ways in which the archetypes of the original production were broken,” said Christine Toy Johnson, chair of the Equity’s National Equal Employment Opportunity Committee, in a statement.

Past recipients include 110 in the Shade and Les Misérables (2007), Billy Elliot (2009), American Idiot (2010), The Merchant of Venice (2011), A Streetcar Named Desire (2012), Cinderella and The Trip to Bountiful (2013), If/Then (2014), It Shoulda Been You (2015), Hamilton, Spring Awakening and Waitress (2016) and A Doll’s House, Part 2, Come From Away, and Natasha, Pierre & The Great Comet of 1812 (2017).