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    'Moulin Rouge! The Musical' Wins Tony for Best Musical

    “Moulin Rouge! The Musical,” the lavish stage production about a nightclub in turn-of-the-century Paris, won a Tony Award for best musical on Sunday, notching its 10th win of the night, the biggest haul of any show.Adapted from Baz Luhrmann’s 2001 film, “Moulin Rouge! The Musical” opened on Broadway in July 2019, months before the first whispers about Covid-19, and had more than seven months of performances before the shutdown.“It feels a little odd to me to be talking about one show that’s best musical,” Carmen Pavlovic, a producer of the show, said as she accepted the award. “I feel that every show of last season deserves to be thought of as the best musical. The shows that opened, the shows that closed — not to return — the shows that nearly opened, and of course the shows that paused and are fortunate enough to be reborn.”The musical — which centers on the romance between Christian, who is new to Paris, and Satine, a cabaret performer and star of the Moulin Rouge — features dozens of pop songs, from 1980s Tina Turner to 2008 Beyoncé. After an 18-month hiatus, it reopened at the Al Hirschfeld Theater on Friday.The show won nine Tonys earlier in the night, including best choreography, best direction of a musical, and best lead actor and featured actor in a musical.During the pandemic, the show’s Tony-nominated lead actress, Karen Olivo, quit the show, saying that she was disappointed by Broadway’s lack of response to recently published allegations that the powerful producer Scott Rudin had long been abusive toward staff members. Olivo was replaced by Natalie Mendoza, who appeared in the original film version.Just four new musicals were eligible for this award, and one of them, “The Lightning Thief,” was shut out by nominators. More

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    'A Soldier's Play' Wins for Best Revival of a Play

    “A Soldier’s Play,” Charles Fuller’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 1981 drama about racism in the American military, won the Tony Award for best revival of a play.The play starred Blair Underwood, an Army captain who investigates the murder of a Black sergeant near an Army base in Louisiana in 1944. The play, which opened in January 2020, received seven Tony nominations, the most of any play revival.Accepting the award, the play’s director Kenny Leon said the names of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd, two Black people killed by the police last year, saying, “We will never, ever forget you.” He went on to speak about the lack of diversity among the most decorated playwrights.“No diss to Shakespeare, no diss to Ibsen, to Chekhov, to Shaw — they’re all at the table,” Leon said. “But the table’s got to be bigger.”“We need to hear all of the stories,” he went on. “When we hear all of the stories, we are better.”Earlier in the night, David Alan Grier, who plays the murdered sergeant, won a Tony for best featured actor in a play. After he accepted his award, Grier spoke to reporters about the devastation of the past 18 months and his relief to see Broadway returning.“I lost faith, I gained faith, I lost faith, I gained faith,” he said. “Finally there was a path forward, and I’m just happy for everyone.”Deadline reported earlier this week that “A Soldier’s Play” will get a television adaptation centered on Grier’s character.This award was the only top category for revival of a show this year; there were no musical revivals that qualified. More

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    'Hamilton' Star Leslie Odom Jr. Hosts Tony Awards Concert

    The host of tonight’s Tony Awards concert — the portion of the evening broadcast on CBS — is Leslie Odom Jr., who arrived on Broadway as a replacement in “Rent,” but got his big break when he joined the original cast of “Hamilton” as Aaron Burr.Odom, 40, won a Tony Award in 2016 for “Hamilton,” and this year was nominated for two Academy Awards for his work as both a performer and songwriter for the film “One Night in Miami.”He was also featured in the films “Murder on the Orient Express” and “Harriet,” and will appear in the forthcoming “Knives Out 2.” His work on television has included “Smash” and “Central Park.” Also: he has recorded several albums of music.Raised in Philadelphia and educated at Carnegie Mellon University, he now lives in Los Angeles. He is married to the actress Nicolette Robinson, and they have two children.Odom was an outspoken advocate for profit-sharing by the cast of “Hamilton,” helping to lead a successful campaign to persuade that show’s producers to give a small percentage of the profits to members of the original company. More

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    Adrienne Warren Wins Her First Tony Award, for 'Tina'

    Adrienne Warren is only staying in “Tina — The Tina Turner Musical” for a few weeks. But now, when she leaves, she can take a Tony Award with her.Warren’s performance as Turner, a role she originated in London and then again when the show opened in New York in 2019, has thrilled audiences. Jesse Green, a theater critic for The New York Times, wrote, “In a performance that is part possession, part workout and part wig, Adrienne Warren rocks the rafters and dissolves your doubts about anyone daring to step into the diva’s high heels.”“I really look forward to the day that the bodies and souls and spirits of those that are involved in these shows that we’re celebrating can be invited and join the celebration with us,” she said in her acceptance speech. “Because those bodies, those bodies, those souls, those spirits, they are what makes Broadway.” “And the second we started making this business,” she continued, “and creating the business and working through the business through the lens of humanity and honoring those, those bodies and those souls and those spirits, the more the art will be transformative. The more the art will change lives, the more the art will change this world because the world has been screaming for us to change.”“I am so grateful for this,” she concluded, “it means the world to me, thank you so, so much.“Tina,” which has been closed since the start of the pandemic shutdown, is scheduled to resume performances on Oct. 8 with Warren in the title role; she is planning to depart the production on Oct. 31, and will be succeeded by Nkeki Obi-Melekwe.Warren is starring as Mamie Till-Mobley, the mother of Emmett Till, in an upcoming ABC series, “Women of the Movement,” with a producing team that includes Jay-Z and Will Smith. And she recently signed a development deal with another of the show’s producers, Kapital Entertainment.Warren, 34, grew up in Virginia and studied acting at Marymount Manhattan College. She made her Broadway debut in 2012 in “Bring It On: The Musical,” and then four years later had a breakthrough role with her Tony-nominated performance in “Shuffle Along, Or The Making of the Musical Sensation of 1921 and All That Followed.”In 2016, Warren was among the founders of the Broadway Advocacy Coalition, which seeks to to combat racism. The organization is being honored this year with a special Tony Award. More

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    Aaron Tveit Wins Tony Award for 'Moulin Rouge! The Musical'

    Aaron Tveit is now a Tony winner.This year was the first time Tveit has been nominated, and the circumstances were unusual: he was the only person nominated in the category, best leading actor in a musical.Still, his win was not guaranteed: to claim the prize, he had to win the support of 60 percent of those who cast ballots in that category. And he did.Tveit, 37, won for his performance as Christian, the besotted bohemian at the heart of “Moulin Rouge! The Musical,” which is adapted from the 2001 Baz Luhrmann film.In accepting his award, he said, “We are so privileged to get to do this, to be on Broadway, to have a life in the theater.”He added: “Let’s continue to strive to tell the stories that represent the many and not the few, by the many and not the few, for the many and not the few. Because what we do changes people’s lives. It changes people’s minds. It change’s people’s hearts. We can change the world with this. Let’s not forget that. This means more to me than I can ever say.”Tveit arrived on Broadway as a heartthrob, playing the love interests in “Hairspray” (as a replacement Link Larkin) and “Wicked” (as a replacement Fiyero). His breakout came in 2009, when he starred as a dead adolescent, Gabe, in the hit show “Next to Normal”; he followed that up with a starring role as the con man Frank Abagnale Jr. in the short-lived stage adaptation of “Catch Me If You Can.”Tveit, who is from the Hudson Valley and was educated at Ithaca College, is also known for starring in the “Grease: Live” television special (he played greaser-in-chief Danny Zuko) and for featured performances in a “Les Misérables” film adaptation (as the revolutionary Enjolras), and, most recently, this summer’s Apple TV Plus streamer “Schmigadoon!” (he was the bad boy carnival barker). More

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    'Freestyle Love Supreme' Wins Special Award at the Tony Awards

    The vast majority of the Tony Awards granted on Sunday are honoring shows that have been rehearsed to an excessive degree — every step onstage precisely choreographed, every note and line repeated to perfection.And while the cast of “Freestyle Love Supreme” has undoubtedly put in their share of rehearsal time to do what they do, the show is receiving a special Tony Award for creating something entirely different: an improvised, rapped, beat-boxed musical performance whipped up anew every night from audience suggestions.The honor comes at a fitting time for the industry: It was a production that, by its nature, celebrated the fleeting and constantly reinventive experience of seeing live theater.The show ran for several months at the Booth Theater starting in September 2019, and it is set to return to Broadway on Oct. 7, followed by a national tour starting in San Francisco. But the troupe’s origins go back to the early aughts, when it was established by Anthony Veneziale, Thomas Kail and, most recognizably, Lin-Manuel Miranda — before “In the Heights” and “Hamilton,” both Tony Award winners for best new musical.In his review for The New York Times, Ben Brantley wrote that it was an “exultant master course in the fine art of hip-hop.” Among the fluctuating cast on Broadway were Veneziale and Utkarsh Ambudkar, with a rotating lineup of surprise guest stars, including Miranda and fellow “Hamilton” alumni Daveed Diggs, Christopher Jackson and James Monroe Iglehart.Tony viewers who missed the 2019 run will get a taste of “Freestyle Love Supreme” at the end of the ceremony, when the cast is set to give the evening’s closing performance. More

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    Lois Smith Is the Oldest Performer to Win a Tony

    Lois Smith, 90, is at last a Tony winner. And not just a winner — she is now the oldest performer to win a Tony Award for acting.“I love the processes of the live theater,” said Smith, who won for her portrayal of Margaret, the caretaker of a sanctuary for men dying of AIDS-related illnesses, in Part 2 of Matthew López’s more-than-six-hour epic “The Inheritance.”“I first worked on ‘The Inheritance’ in a workshop where Matthew López was finishing a play about the AIDS plague, and it was partly based on E.M. Forster’s book “Howards End,” which had been my favorite novel for as long as I can remember,” she continued. “E.M. Forster gave us — there’s a famous two-word message from “Howards End,” which is so apt, I think, tonight for all of us who are here celebrating the importance, the functions, of live theater: ‘Only connect.’ ”In his review of the play in The Times, Ben Brantley called Smith’s performance as the show’s sole female character “quietly brilliant.” She beat out Jane Alexander, 81, who was up for “Grand Horizons,” as well as Cora Vander Broek (“Linda Vista”), Annie McNamara (“Slave Play”) and Chalia La Tour (“Slave Play”).Cicely Tyson, who died earlier this year at 96, previously held the record. She was 88 in 2013 when she won in the same category for her role in the revival of Horton Foote’s “The Trip to Bountiful.”In an interview with Variety in March 2020, Smith acknowledged that her performance schedule in “The Inheritance” was pretty, well, cushy. She doesn’t appear onstage until late in the play, which was performed in two parts. So she only performed three times per week.“I think to myself, ‘Now what’s going to happen to me?’” she said. “This may be the end of me. Suppose somebody asks me to do eight shows a week, what am I going to say? It’s hard to imagine at this point!”She was first nominated for a Tony in 1990 for “The Grapes of Wrath,” and she was nominated again, in 1996, for “Buried Child” — both times for best featured actress in a play. More

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    Audra McDonald Will Host the Tonys With Leslie Odom Jr.

    Audra McDonald has won more competitive Tony Awards than any other performer, and tonight, when she is a nominee for the ninth time, she is presiding over the awards ceremony.McDonald is splitting the hosting duties with the actor Leslie Odom Jr. She is hosting the streaming portion of the evening, from 7 to 9 p.m. Eastern on Paramount+, when most of the awards will be bestowed; he is presiding over the concert portion, from 9 to 11 p.m. on CBS.McDonald, 51, is a singular figure in the American theater, revered for her lyric soprano as well as her acting prowess, and last year, following the police killing of George Floyd, she helped found Black Theater United to press for change in the theater industry.How did she rack up her record-setting string of Tonys? She has won at least once in every acting category: leading actress in a musical (“Porgy & Bess”), leading actress in a play (“Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar & Grill”), featured actress in a musical (“Ragtime” and “Carousel”) and featured actress in a play (“A Raisin in the Sun” and “Master Class”).This year, she is again a nominee, for her starring role in the 2019 revival of “Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune.” The play was written by Terrence McNally, who died during the pandemic from complications of the coronavirus.McDonald, born in Berlin, raised in Fresno, Calif., and educated at Juilliard, has long been outspoken on social justice issues — her Twitter username is @AudraEqualityMc — and last year she helped pull together a group of Black Broadway stars to form Black Theater United. The organization has already made progress: This summer it persuaded many industry leaders, including theater owners and producers, to sign an agreement pledging to end the hiring of all-white creative teams, to rename a few theaters for Black artists, and to take many other steps to improve racial equity on Broadway.She also has an active career as a recording artist and concert performer, and she works regularly on television, including in “Private Practice” and “The Good Fight.” She is married to the actor Will Swenson, and has two daughters. More