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    in Television

    2025 Tony Awards: What to Know Ahead of the Ceremony

    How is Broadway doing? Who are the top contenders for awards? Our theater reporter, Michael Paulson, has some answers.The Tony Awards are on Sunday night. If you’re new to this season, or to theater, here are some things you might want to know.What are the Tony Awards?The Tony Awards, presented by the Broadway League and the American Theater Wing, is an annual ceremony honoring plays and musicals staged on Broadway. And Broadway, in industry parlance, refers to 41 theaters in and around Times Square, each of which must have at least 500 seats. There are awards in 26 competitive categories, plus a few noncompetitive prizes like lifetime achievement.The main event is on Sunday, June 8, at 8 p.m. Eastern, broadcast on CBS and streaming on Paramount+ with Showtime. Cynthia Erivo is hosting at Radio City Music Hall.Many of the awards for creative teams will be given out at a preshow that starts at 6:40 p.m.; it is streaming on Pluto TV and hosted by Darren Criss and Renée Elise Goldsberry.Here’s more on what to expect, including a 10th anniversary “Hamilton” performance:How is Broadway doing?It’s a mixed picture. The 2024-25 season that just ended was the highest grossing in history, and it was the first since the coronavirus pandemic to outgross the prepandemic peak of 2018-19, although those figures are not inflation-adjusted.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    in Theater

    How to Watch the 2025 Tony Awards

    The ceremony, at Radio City Music Hall, will be broadcast on CBS starting at 8 p.m. Eastern, and livestreamed for Paramount+ with Showtime subscribers.The Tony Awards, the annual event honoring the best work on Broadway, take place tonight (Sunday, June 8). This is the 78th Tony Awards ceremony.Here’s how to watch:What time does the show start?The televised portion of the ceremony starts at 8 p.m. Eastern (5 p.m. Pacific) at Radio City Music Hall in Manhattan. The broadcast is scheduled to last three hours.Where can I watch?The main event, with prizes for plays, musicals and performers, will be televised on CBS. For those without network television, it’s a bit more complicated: In the United States, it will stream on Paramount+, but only Paramount+ with Showtime subscribers can stream it live, via their local CBS affiliate; otherwise it can be streamed on demand starting the next day.Who is hosting?The broadcast ceremony will be hosted by Cynthia Erivo, a powerhouse singer best known for starring as Elphaba in the “Wicked” films. She is a Tony winner herself, for a 2015 revival of “The Color Purple.” The broadcast will feature performances by 11 of this past season’s Broadway musicals, as well as by the original cast of “Hamilton” in honor of that show’s 10th anniversary. The presenters will include Oprah Winfrey, Charli D’Amelio, Bryan Cranston, Samuel L. Jackson, Adam Lambert and Keanu Reeves.Is there a non-broadcast portion of the ceremony?Yes. There is a preshow ceremony, starting at 6:40 p.m. Eastern, at which many of the awards for creative teams will be handed out. That event will be hosted by Darren Criss and Renée Elise Goldsberry, and can be streamed free on Pluto TV (click on the “Live Music” channel in the “Entertainment” category).What’s eligible?The 21 plays and 21 musicals that opened on Broadway between April 26, 2024, and April 27, 2025, are eligible for awards this year. Prizes will be granted in 26 competitive categories. The most-nominated shows are the musicals “Buena Vista Social Club,” “Death Becomes Her” and “Maybe Happy Ending,” with 10 nominations each. More

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    in Theater

    Why Do Broadway Actors Love to Work Summers at The Muny in St. Louis?

    As summer sets in and New Yorkers escape to greener, milder, beachier pastures, Broadway performers are flocking elsewhere: the great, landlocked outdoors of St. Louis, where summers are known for … bugs. Humidity. Unpredictable storms. Oppressive heat.What draws them there is the Muny, a century-old outdoor musical theater nestled in Forest Park that seats nearly 11,000 a night through a rapid-fire lineup of seven shows in 10 weeks. The experience, according to the actors who return year after year, is worth the elements.The Muny will open its season with “Bring It On,” a musical about the world of competitive cheerleading. The cast of 39 includes Equity actors and University of Kentucky cheerleaders.Preparations for the Muny’s 107th season, which begins June 16 with “Bring It On,” are in full swing. A whirlwind week of rehearsals began on Monday, as has been the Muny’s fast and furious way for decades. Only this summer, the process is unfolding with an extra notch in the company’s belt: this year’s regional theater Tony Award.The honor is certainly a nod to the cast and crew members who put up Broadway-caliber shows in an impossible span of time, seven times in a row. But it’s also a recognition of the significant role the Muny plays in St. Louis — a place where generations of families have spent their summer nights, an institution as synonymous with the city as the Gateway Arch or the Cardinals.“Everyone has worked so hard, really worked hard, because we believed in what this could be for our community and our audience,” said Mike Isaacson, the Muny’s artistic director and executive producer.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Five Actors on the Muny: ‘Unlike Any Place I’d Ever Been on Earth’

    The St. Louis theater, this year’s regional Tony Award winner, has drawn Broadway actors to its stage for a century.Cary Grant and Gene Kelly have been there. So have Carol Burnett, Angela Lansbury, Ethel Merman and Debbie Reynolds. Not to mention Jennifer Holliday, and Ben Vereen, and Joel Grey, and Bernadette Peters.The Muny has lured plenty of stars to St. Louis, some who grace the theater’s massive stage in Forest Park as established talents, others who begin long careers there. But perhaps more notably, after spending the summer sweating through breakneck rehearsals, those stars decide to come back.As the Muny accepts its regional theater Tony Award on Sunday, I asked several Broadway actors, including some of this year’s Tony nominees, about what drew them, often more than once, to St. Louis. Their interviews have been edited and condensed.Danny BursteinBurstein, a Tony nominee this year for his role in “Gypsy,” has been in 11 shows at the Muny, starting the summer he was 19.The Muny’s executive producer Ed Greenberg was actually my teacher at Queens College. Ed took me under his wing and became a great mentor and a dear, dear friend. And when I was 19 he said, “Why don’t you come out for the summer?” It was my first Equity contract.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    An ‘S.N.L.’ Secret Weapon Retires After 50 Years

    Stephen DeMaria has overseen the building of “Saturday Night Live” scenery since the show began. At 87, he finally hung up his hammer.The Stiegelbauer workshop, where Stephen DeMaria coordinated the construction of sets for “Saturday Night Live,” is in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, miles from 30 Rockefeller Plaza. Geographically, and in the minds of “S.N.L.” fans, DeMaria’s name was always far removed from the prestige and glamour of the show that has defined American comedy since 1975. But while most viewers have never heard of him, he has spent 50 years setting the scenes for the show’s most memorable moments.And now he is done. DeMaria, known as “Demo” in the shop, retired after the 50th season finale, May 17. The day before, the white-haired, 87-year-old carpenter was leaning over his drafting table, inspecting blueprints and fiddling with the No. 2 pencil usually found behind his ear. For DeMaria and his crew, the show had already begun.Stiegelbauer Associates Inc. is a cross between a shop class and a late-night museum: A Rainbow Room marquee hangs above a workbench; a leftover airplane set sits plastic-wrapped; photos of past sets installed in the show’s Studio 8H are framed on every wall.During show weeks, sets are assembled all over the shop by an eclectic crew of craftspeople, many of whom have worked on “S.N.L.” for decades. As the foreman, DeMaria coordinates the teams assigned to build the sets designed at 30 Rock. Then he oversees the construction, moseying through the shop and kicking up sawdust with his cane as he checks in at the workstations.The cane was the result of an injury he suffered at an end-of-season celebration last year: After a night of tearing up the dance floor, he fell off a curb and broke his hip.“The best time of my life is the ‘S.N.L.’ parties,” he said. “I’ll be on the dance floor when I get there, and I won’t leave until 5 in the morning.” His favorite, he said, was the 2012 end-of-season party, after an episode hosted by Mick Jagger. “He was dancing all over the studio, so I got involved,” DeMaria recalled. “I was dancing with Mick Jagger!”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Test Your Broadway Knowledge, Celebrity Edition

    George Clooney is making his Broadway debut in the stage adaptation of his 2005 film “Good Night, and Good Luck.” In 1994, he had his big break on the popular medical ensemble drama “ER.” Which other “ER” actor also starred in a Broadway show this season? More

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    What to Expect at the 2025 Tony Awards: ‘Hamilton,’ Robots and More

    This year’s annual celebration of the best on Broadway is being hosted by Cynthia Erivo.Singing robots. Undead frenemies. A dead bank robber, and a dying cave explorer. A fumbling group of spies, and a bumbling group of pirates. Also: “Hamilton.”Welcome to the 2025 Tony Awards, which take place on Sunday at 8 p.m. Eastern at Radio City Music Hall, broadcast on CBS.The show is Broadway’s biggest night, because it introduces the latest plays and musicals to a television audience of several million, any of whom might turn into a theater lover, a ticket buyer, or even an artist (so many Broadway performers and producers have stories about watching the Tony Awards as children).Here’s what to expect:The HostThis year’s ceremony is being hosted by Cynthia Erivo, a 38-year-old British actress who won a Tony Award in 2016 for her breakout performance starring in a revival of “The Color Purple.”In the years since, she has focused on movies, television and music — she stars as Elphaba in the pair of “Wicked” films (the second one comes out Nov. 21), and she played Harriet Tubman in the film “Harriet” and Aretha Franklin in National Geographic’s “Genius: Aretha.”After the Tony Awards, she’ll be returning to the stage. In August she’s playing Jesus in a one-weekend run of “Jesus Christ Superstar” at the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles, and then early next year she’ll star in a one-woman version of “Dracula” in London’s West End.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Sunny Jacobs, a Celebrity After Freed From Death Row, Dies at 77

    Her story, fashioned into an Off Broadway play and television movies, was later questioned by an investigator in a 2021 book.Sunny Jacobs, a former death row inmate who was convicted of a 1970s double murder in Florida and later freed, becoming a news media celebrity and a leading subject in an acclaimed Off Broadway play and two television movies, died on Tuesday in rural County Galway, Ireland. She was 77.Her death was announced by the Sunny Center, an anti-death penalty nonprofit organization founded by Ms. Jacobs, with locations in Galway and Tampa, Fla. It said she had “passed away after a fire at the Sunny Healing Center.” The circumstances of the fire were not immediately clear.Ms. Jacobs spent nearly 17 years in prison in Florida, five of them on death row, for the murders of two law enforcement officers in February 1976 at a rest stop near Fort Lauderdale.Her boyfriend at the time, Jesse Tafero, a petty criminal who had been convicted of attempted rape, was also convicted of murder. He was executed by electric chair in Florida in a notoriously botched procedure in May 1990. It took seven minutes and three jolts, and his head caught on fire.Ms. Jacobs, whose death sentence was overturned in 1982, was ultimately freed a decade later, when a federal appeals court found that prosecutors had improperly withheld evidence from the defense. She took a plea deal rather than face retrial and was never legally exonerated.It was this story that formed the basis of Ms. Jacobs’s subsequent, celebrated tale — that she had been an innocent, a “28-year-old vegetarian hippie,” as she told The New York Times in a 2011 Vows article about her marriage to a fellow former inmate, the Irishman Peter Pringle, who died in 2023.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More