Nominations for this year’s Tony Awards, which each year honor plays and musicals staged on Broadway, are being announced on Tuesday morning in New York.
A few categories are to be made public shortly after 8:30 a.m. Eastern on the Tuesday broadcast of “CBS Mornings.” (CBS airs the Tonys, so it has first dibs on the news.) The full list of nominees will be announced on the Tony Awards YouTube channel starting at 9 a.m. Two previous Tony winners, Jesse Tyler Ferguson and Renée Elise Goldsberry, will read the list of nominees.
There’s an unusually wide-open race for the coveted best musical prize, with 15 new musicals and no consensus front-runner. Five to seven musicals will be nominated: Look for “Hell’s Kitchen,” the musical loosely based on Alicia Keys’s life and featuring her music, and “The Outsiders,” adapted from S.E. Hinton’s classic coming-of-age novel, to be among the nominees.
Film and television stars who appeared in Broadway shows this season and are vying for nominations include Steve Carell, Jessica Lange, Rachel McAdams, Leslie Odom Jr., Sarah Paulson, Daniel Radcliffe, Eddie Redmayne, Liev Schreiber and Jeremy Strong.
The best musical revival category has a clear front-runner: “Merrily We Roll Along,” the reverse-chronological look at the implosion of a three-way friendship. In the current revival, those friends are played by Radcliffe, Jonathan Groff and Lindsay Mendez, all of whom are likely to be nominees.
The best play category is likely to be led by “Stereophonic,” David Adjmi’s fictional behind-the-music drama about a rock band recording an album. Also expected to do well is “Mary Jane,” Amy Herzog’s play about a single mother raising a child with cerebral palsy and other conditions.
Among play revivals, look for two dramas set in the American South to lead the pack: New productions of “Appropriate,” Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s 2013 play about three siblings wrestling with a family secret, and “Purlie Victorious,” Ossie Davis’s 1961 comedy about a preacher seeking to reclaim a church building from a plantation owner.
The nominees were chosen by a group of about 45 people knowledgeable about theater (many are theater artists or administrators) who do not have a financial stake in any of the season’s shows. The nominating committee started with 60 members, but then — as always happens — some had to recuse themselves because they couldn’t get to all the shows or because a conflict of interest arose.
This season, 36 Tony-eligible plays and musicals opened during the eligibility period, which ran from April 28, 2023, to April 25, 2024; nominators were required to see all of them.
This year’s Tony Awards ceremony will take place on June 16 at Lincoln Center’s David H. Koch Theater. The broadcast will begin at 8 p.m. Eastern on CBS; it will also be streamed on Paramount+, and will be preceded by a streaming preshow on Pluto TV at which some awards will be handed out.
Source: Theater - nytimes.com
