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      In ‘Corsicana,’ Will Arbery Puts Art, Family and Down Syndrome Onstage

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      Arbery, a Pulitzer finalist in 2020, is back with a play inspired by his relationship with his sister. But don’t call it an “issue” play.In 2019, Will Arbery scored an unlikely hit with “Heroes of the Fourth Turning,” his darkly comic, boundary-pushing play about young Catholic conservatives debating God, love, friendship and Donald Trump at a late-night party in a Wyoming backyard. A finalist for the 2020 Pulitzer Prize, it won praise both from the heavily liberal New York theater world and from traditionalist Christians who often feel caricatured by it, if they are depicted at all.“Heroes” was a play that, for all the idiosyncrasies of its characters, was hailed as being very much About Something. But on a recent morning, Arbery, 32, was sitting outside a cafe near his apartment in Brooklyn, alternately wrestling with and resisting the question of just what his new play, “Corsicana,” was about.Most simply, “Corsicana,” which runs until July 10 at Playwrights Horizons, is about four people in that small city in Texas, including a young woman with Down syndrome, her aspiring filmmaker brother and a reclusive self-taught artist who comes into their orbit. Inspired by Arbery’s relationship with his older sister Julia, it’s the rare play to feature both a lead character — and a lead actor — with Down syndrome.But it’s also, Arbery said, a play that “very stubbornly defies about-ness.”Will Dagger, left, in “Corsicana” with Deirdre O’Connell, center, and Jamie Brewer. The play, Arbery said, “very stubbornly defies about-ness.”Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“When you first walk in, you might say oh, this is a couch play, or an artist-on-the-edge-of-town play, or a Down syndrome play,” he said. “But it’s more of an accumulation. It’s not like any of those things are false — they’re all there — but something else is operating that can’t be named.”The goal, he said, was a “widening complexity.” If audiences could “categorize the play too easily, then they could categorize Julia too easily,” he said. “And that’s the opposite of what I want to do.”“Corsicana,” directed by Sam Gold at the same theater that first staged “Heroes,” is something of a homecoming for Arbery, who since 2019 has been living the life of a hot young playwright. There have been multiple productions around the world of “Heroes” and his previous play, “Plano,” also inspired by his family. Another play, “Evanston Salt Costs Climbing,” from 2018, will have its New York premiere in the fall with the New Group. And Hollywood has been calling. In February 2020, he spent a month in London consulting on HBO’s “Succession,” immersing himself in the acid-bath dynamics of a very different clan.“I just sat there and made a vow to myself to say at least one thing a day,” he said of the writers room. “It was an intimidatingly brilliant and funny group of people.” (Evidently, he passed muster. He recently wrapped work on Season 4, on which he’s credited as a co-producer.)“Corsicana,” which Arbery started before the pandemic, was inspired in part by an artists residency in the same small Texas city as the play is set. But it’s also, as he puts it, a play he has been writing his whole life.Arbery, who grew up in Dallas with seven sisters in a conservative Catholic milieu similar to that of “Heroes,” had always wanted to write a play about his relationship with Julia, who is two years older (as she likes to remind him). But he didn’t want to write, as he puts it, an “issue play.”“I wanted to do it in the way it felt like growing up,” he said, where Julia “was just part of the fabric of daily life, a member of the family and the team.”Julia Arbery, shown with Will in 2016, said they have always been able to talk “about our feelings, excitement, sadness” and “about our hearts.”via Will ArberyIn “Corsicana,” the young filmmaker, Christopher (Will Dagger), has put aside his own ambitions to come home and live with his sister Ginny (Jamie Brewer) after their mother’s death. Through their mother’s best friend (Deirdre O’Connell, a 2022 Tony winner for “Dana H”), Christopher arranges for Ginny to spend time with Lot (Harold Surratt), a reclusive self-taught artist who makes kaleidoscopic sculptures out of junk, and who bristles at the idea that people might see him, like Ginny, as “special.”Lot also makes tapes of his strange, homespun songs (reminiscent of the “outsider” Texas songwriter Daniel Johnston). The hope is that he and Ginny — whose tastes run more to Whitney Houston, Hilary Duff and the Chicks — will write a song together, to pull her out of her funk.“Corsicana” explores art, grief, privacy, gifts, family and community, and how the meanings of creative acts change depending on who witnesses them — and whether some things should have an audience at all. There are pop-culture one-liners and bigger philosophical talk, along with surreal riffs on dinosaurs, ghosts, history and books that never get read.Arbery described Julia, an ardent music fan who sings with a choir, as “a natural performer.” But like Lot in the play (whose work we never see), he said, she does much of her creation in her room, for “an audience of no one.”“If you’re lucky to walk by and the door’s ajar and you see her busting these moves that are just unbelievable,” he said. “I felt like that’s the most honest place to write from, outside that door, and having the audience outside too, but with the terms clearly set — you’re not allowed to look back there.”If Ginny mostly sings behind closed doors, Jamie Brewer, the actress who plays her, is a seasoned professional. Brewer, who has performed since she was a child, has appeared in several seasons of “American Horror Story.” In 2018, she became what is believed to be the first actor with Down syndrome to play the lead in a Broadway or Off Broadway play, in Lindsey Ferrentino’s “Amy and the Orphans.”“Amy” was about a group of siblings learning the fuller story of their sister, who had been institutionalized as a child and neglected by the family. “Corsicana,” which Brewer described as much “wordier” than “Amy,” offers a different window on the experience of living with Down syndrome, depicting Christopher and Ginny’s relationship as emotionally equal and ordinary, down to their private jokes and fights.“I love being part of a play that shows everyone who we are,” Brewer, 37, said in a video interview. “We’re all the same as everyone — we have the same wants and needs, the drive, the desire, the individual sense of self.”Julia Arbery in “Your Resources,” a 2016 short film by Will Arbery. The film “is a little embarrassing,” Will said. But Julia “is really good.”Will Arbery Julia Arbery, who turns 35 in July, lives with her parents in Wyoming, and works in the dining hall at Wyoming Catholic College, a small conservative liberal arts institution where their father, Glenn, is president, and their mother, Virginia, teaches political science.In a joint video interview with Will, Julia described him as “my favorite brother,” which wasn’t the only time they cracked each other up. (He’s her only brother.) She said they have always been able to talk “about our feelings, excitement, sadness” and “about our hearts.”Julia was about to make her first trip to New York, to see “Corsicana” — the first time she’s seen a professional production of one of his plays. Julia, a country music fan who used to sing in a choir, doesn’t know many details of the play. But she said she was especially excited to hear Ginny and Lot’s song (co-written by Arbery and the indie musician and artist Joanna Sternberg).There’s a scene in the play where Christopher, the would-be hipster auteur, asks Ginny (a “High School Musical” fan) if she wants to be in one of his movies. “Is it going to be good?” she shoots back. (So much of “Corsicana,” Arbery said, “is a tug of war about taste.”)In real life, Julia has acted in some of her brother’s short films, including the sci-fi-tinged “Your Resources,” shot in 2016 at their parents’ ranch-like home, starring Julia as a young woman who enters a contest to win a brain implant developed by a sinister futuristic corporation, so she can be “different” and help her ailing father (played by Glenn Arbery).“The short film is a little embarrassing,” Will said later by email. But “Julia is really good.”They have also been talking about making a hybrid documentary-feature, about Will filming Julia directing a mash-up of “The Princess Bride” (one of their favorites) and Liam Neeson’s “Taken.”Julia, he said, inspired not just this play, but his approach to writing.“From a very young age, she keyed me into this idea that a way a person uses language is a fingerprint,” he said. “It always felt very clear to me that she was the reason I was doing some of this.” More

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      ‘Topdog/Underdog’ to Star Yahya Abdul-Mateen II and Corey Hawkins

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      The 20th anniversary Broadway revival will be directed by Kenny Leon. Previews begin in September at the John Golden Theater.Corey Hawkins and Yahya Abdul-Mateen II will star this fall in a Broadway revival of Suzan-Lori Parks’s Pulitzer-winning comic drama “Topdog/Underdog.”The play, first staged on Broadway in 2002 after an Off Broadway run at the Public Theater, is a portrait of two brothers: One, named Lincoln (Hawkins), is an Abraham Lincoln impersonator and the other, named Booth (Abdul-Mateen), aspires to play three-card monte the way his brother once had.In 2018, The New York Times declared “Topdog/Underdog” the best American play of the previous 25 years. Explaining that choice, the critic Ben Brantley wrote that the play “plies the fine theatrical art of deception to convey the dangers of role-playing in a society in which race is a performance and prison.”Hawkins, 33, has been featured in a string of films, including “In the Heights,” “The Tragedy of Macbeth” and “Straight Outta Compton.” He has two previous Broadway credits, and picked up a Tony nomination in 2017 for his starring role in a revival of “Six Degrees of Separation.”Abdul-Mateen, 35, is best known for his work in the HBO series “Watchmen,” and he recently was featured in the films “Ambulance,” “The Matrix Resurrections” and “Candyman.” “Topdog/Underdog” will be his Broadway debut.The original Broadway production starred Jeffrey Wright and Yasiin Bey, who was known at the time as Mos Def.This 20th anniversary revival, scheduled to run for 16 weeks, is to begin previews Sept. 27 and to open Oct. 20 at the John Golden Theater. It will be directed by Kenny Leon, who in 2014 won a Tony Award for directing a revival of “A Raisin in the Sun.” The producers are David Stone, a lead producer of “Wicked,” as well as LaChanze, Rashad V. Chambers, Marc Platt, Debra Martin Chase and the Shubert Organization.This season is shaping up to be a big one for Parks. In addition to the Broadway revival of “Topdog/Underdog,” the Public Theater on Tuesday said it would stage productions of two new works she has written: “Plays for the Plague Year,” a series of playlets Parks wrote during the early pandemic, and “The Harder They Come,” a musical adaptation of the 1972 film, with a book by Parks and a score that includes songs by Jimmy Cliff. More

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      City Center’s Season to Feature an International Fall for Dance

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      The festival welcomes foreign troupes for the first time since 2019; other City Center highlights include Twyla Tharp and “The Light in the Piazza” at Encores!“Oliver!,” the return of the National Ballet of Canada and a Twyla Tharp program are among the offerings for New York City Center’s 2022-23 season, the theater announced on Tuesday.“Coming off the pandemic we had a really strong season,” said Arlene Shuler, City Center’s president and chief executive, adding, “I want audiences to take away that City Center is as strong as ever.”The 2022-23 season, Shuler’s last, opens with the Fall for Dance Festival, which for the first time since 2019 will have an international lineup, including the Kyiv City Ballet from Ukraine, as well as companies and artists from France, Germany, India and the Netherlands.Fall for Dance, which Shuler initiated in 2004, remains central to her legacy at the theater. The festival’s eclectic mix of dance companies and low-cost tickets has expanded accessibility to the public and solidified relationships with artists.Also in fall, Twyla Tharp returns to the theater, Oct. 19-23, with two works: “In the Upper Room” (1986) and “Nine Sinatra Songs” (1982), which Shuler called “masterworks — not just for Twyla but for the 20th century.” The program follows last year’s “Twyla Now.”The National Ballet of Canada will take the City Center stage for the first time in 15 years. The program, with live music by the National Ballet of Canada Orchestra, features three performances, including Crystal Pite’s “Angels’ Atlas.” It is set to run from March 30-April 1, 2023.City Center’s Encores! will present “The Light in the Piazza” (Feb. 1-5), Jerry Herman’s “Dear World” (March 15-19) and Lionel Bart’s “Oliver!” (May 3-14). And “Parade,” starring Micaela Diamond and Ben Platt in Alfred Uhry’s Tony Award-winning musical about the 1915 lynching of Leo Frank, a Jewish American in Georgia, will be City Center’s annual gala production, on Nov. 1-6.Dance programming at City Center will also include Sara Baras and her company at the annual Flamenco Festival (March 23-26), and Ballet Hispánico, which will perform “Club Havana 18+1” (June 1-3).This year’s City Center Dance Festival, titled “From the Street,” will celebrate the diversity of forms in contemporary hip-hop. The year will close with “Sugar Hill: The Ellington/Strayhorn Nutcracker” (Nov. 15-27), a jazz-infused retelling of the holiday classic, and the annual season of Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater (Nov. 30-Dec. 24), with new works by Kyle Abraham and Jamar Roberts. More

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      ‘Quince’ Review: A Mexican American Tale That Explains Too Much

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      The new play, about a 15-year-old girl and her impending quinceañera, creates a fitting party vibe. If only the script didn’t clarify every cultural reference.In the backyard of a modest house with a thriving garden, a woman in a brimmed hat festooned with streamers bends over the flowers, tending to them silently. Her face a mask, she pays no attention to the pair of teenage sweethearts in the midst of a private talk.“That’s my grandma,” says Cindy, whose yard this is.“I thought your grandma was dead,” Kaitlyn says.She is, Cindy confirms: buried in Mexico and everything. But after her grandmother had a fight with her cousin, who was interred in a neighboring grave, “she left there, came here.” Now she hangs out in the garden, looking after the greenery.“This is why I don’t invite you over,” Cindy says, unsurprised by her girlfriend’s confusion; Kaitlyn is white, after all. “I can’t explain all this stuff all the time.”The creators of “Quince,” the shimmery immersive production that inaugurates the Bushwick Starr’s new theater in a former dairy plant in Brooklyn, have the opposite impulse. Written by Camilo Quiroz-Vázquez and directed by Ellpetha Tsivicos, this too-educative play — presented with their company, One Whale’s Tale — wants to invite all of us into its story of Cindy and her impending quinceañera, a coming-of-age celebration to mark her 15th birthday. To achieve that, it is more than willing to explicate Mexican and Mexican American culture for its audience every step of the way.To be fair, white American theatergoers have come to expect that kind of coddling, and no one wants to parade the complexity of their heritage in front of people who don’t understand it. But I’m with Cindy on this. Constant footnoting is exhausting — a drag on the festivities and also on the drama. Of which, in her life, she has plenty.Raised by her strict single mother, Maria (Brenda Flores), in a family so devoutly Roman Catholic that the parish priest is a regular presence in their home, Cindy (Sara Gutierrez) is squeamish about more than just explaining her grandmother’s ghost. She’s also embarrassed by her family’s lack of money, uncomfortable with her queerness and terrified of how Maria would react if she found out about it.Performed mostly in English, partly in Spanish, “Quince” traces Cindy’s journey toward self-acceptance — and Maria’s, too. Overworked and short on patience, Maria is carrying her own unwarranted shame that needs exorcising: the spiritual damage of having been branded sinful when she was 15 and pregnant with Cindy, half a lifetime ago.Salomon (José Pérez), Maria’s anxious brother, gives Cindy the gift of gentle allyship when she comes out to him, while the affable Father Joaquin (a charming Quiroz-Vázquez) tries to facilitate reconciliation all around. (When, over a beer in the kitchen with Salomon, this seemingly decent priest nearly violates the sanctity of the confessional by divulging what Cindy said to him there, his recklessness goes mystifyingly unremarked.)Gutierrez, center, with Saige Larmer, who plays her girlfriend. Drinks are for sale, and the audience sits at tables in a tinsel-curtained space. Maria BaranovaDuring the pandemic-stricken, pre-vaccine summer of 2020, when there was almost no live theater in New York, an earlier, much shorter version of “Quince” had a handful of open-air performances at the People’s Garden in Brooklyn. In the current incarnation, a Mexican food cart sits outside the theater preshow, and ticket holders are welcome to buy meals that they can eat during the performance. Drinks are for sale inside, where the audience sits at tables in a tinsel-curtained space decorated for Cindy’s celebration. (Scenic design is by Tanya Orellana; Tsivicos is credited as the creative director.)With a stage at one end of the long room for the terrific band (Marilyn Castillo, Andrés Fonseca, Juan Ospina and Sebastian Angel), an aisle down the center that lets the actors move among the audience and three mini-sets scattered throughout, it is a good-looking production, beguilingly lit by Mextly Couzin, with costumes by Scarlet Moreno.But the show feels inorganic and at odds with itself, straining toward mystical expression and physical abandon yet tethered to an earthbound script that meanders for too long before arriving at Cindy’s party. Occasionally it has the tone of an after-school special — albeit one that breaks into cumbia music and includes, toward the end, a Selena impersonator (Tsivicos). This play doesn’t dance nearly as much as it wants to, and its ghosts and apparitions (in beautiful masks by Quiroz-Vázquez, Zoë Batson and Courtney Escoto) fit awkwardly alongside the sometimes groan-worthy comedy.The romance between Cindy and Kaitlyn (Saige Larmer) is sweet; the healing that Maria eventually finds is a benevolence. But the show feels dumbed down, its magic dulled and focus diluted by a determination to be understood at an elementary level by people from the broader culture — even the ones who gravitate toward new work in industrial spaces in Bushwick.Trusting the audience is a risky undertaking. But we’re more curious, and more comfortable with artful ambiguity, than “Quince” gives us credit for.QuinceThrough June 26 at the Bushwick Starr, Brooklyn; thebushwickstarr.org. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. More

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      Original ‘Spring Awakening’ Cast Reunites for 2022 Tonys Performance

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      More than 15 years after they stormed Broadway as an angsty set of adolescents, the original cast of the musical “Spring Awakening” reunited Sunday night at the Tonys and offered a special rendition of one of the musical’s most enduring songs.One of the show’s stars, Lea Michele, introduced the cast alongside Zach Braff who, not coincidently, introduced the show to Tony audiences in 2007 when it won the award for best musical. Led by Skylar Astin, the cast sang a soulful edition of “Touch Me.”The 2006 Steven Sater musical, an adaptation of the Frank Wedekind play from the turn of the 20th century, is about German teenagers grappling with sexual desires, secret pain and parental pressure. It vaulted several of its stars — such as Michele, Jonathan Groff, John Gallagher Jr. — to wider fame, won eight Tony Awards, and played more than 850 performances.A scene from “Spring Awakening” in 2006.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe Tony performance on Sunday appeared to book end a reunion that has played out over the last several months. In November, the original cast reunited for one night at the Imperial Theater for a 15th anniversary concert benefiting the Entertainment Community Fund (previously The Actors Fund). The performance was recorded by HBO and released earlier this year as a film: ‘Spring Awakening: Those You’ve Known.’ More

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      Ratings for the Tony Awards Rebounded, but Remained Low

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      The Tonys drew an audience of 3.9 million viewers on CBS on Sunday, about a million viewers more than last year. It was the second-lowest viewership on record. The Tonys bounced back.The 75th Tony Awards drew an audience of 3.9 million viewers on CBS on Sunday night, about a million viewers more than last year’s ceremony, according to Nielsen.The ratings comeback follows a monthslong trend where award shows, at least for now, have been rebounding from record lows. This year’s Oscars drew 16 million viewers, up from last year’s low of 10 million viewers. And the Grammys had a small ratings bump to over 9 million viewers this year.Even with the rebound, Sunday’s ratings performance was still significantly lower than the 5.4 million viewers that tuned in for the 2019 Tonys. This year marks the second-lowest viewership total since records have been kept.The Tonys likely benefited from a return to its traditional June time slot, when viewers are accustomed to watching the show. There was also significantly less competition on Sunday night, with most of the broadcast networks airing repeats. Last year, the delayed Tonys ceremony aired in September and had to go head-to-head against a prime-time Green Bay Packers and San Francisco 49ers nail biter.Sunday’s Tonys broadcast, which was hosted by Ariana DeBose, was a chance for Broadway to put on a show for millions at a moment when ticket sales are still significantly down from before the pandemic.New York was the highest rated market in the country, with San Francisco and West Palm Beach right behind it, according to Nielsen. More

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      Kevin Spacey Charged With Sexual Assault in London

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      The actor will appear in a London court on Thursday to start what could be a lengthy trial process over multiple allegations of sexual assault.LONDON — The actor Kevin Spacey was charged with four counts of sexual assault on Monday in London, the city’s police force said in a news release.Mr. Spacey, 62, who was also charged with one count of causing a person to engage in penetrative sexual activity without their consent, is scheduled to appear in court in London on Thursday where he will confirm his identity and that he understands the charges. A date for a full trial has not yet been announced.The offenses, which involve three men, are alleged to have occurred between March 2005 and April 2013, the police said in the news release. Mr. Spacey’s representatives did not immediately respond to a request for comment.The British authorities last month authorized the indictments against Mr. Spacey, which only took effect when Mr. Spacey traveled to England to be formally charged.Mr. Spacey told ABC News’s “Good Morning America” that he denied the charges and would travel to Britain to defend himself. “While I am disappointed with their decision to move forward, I will voluntarily appear in the U.K. as soon as can be arranged and defend myself against these charges, which I am confident will prove my innocence,” he said in a statement to the show.The charges detailed in the news release relate to incidents alleged to have taken place in London and in Gloucestershire, England. They date from the time when Mr. Spacey was the artistic director of the Old Vic theater in London, the playhouse he led from 2003 to 2015.The first person to publicly accuse Mr. Spacey, a two-time Academy Award winner, of sexual misconduct was the actor Anthony Rapp, who said in 2017 that Mr. Spacey made unwanted sexual advances toward him at a New York party in 1986, when he was 14 years old.Soon after Mr. Rapp’s allegations appeared in an article published by BuzzFeed, multiple men who worked with Mr. Spacey at the Old Vic also accused him of inappropriate behavior. An independent investigation, commissioned by the theater, said that Mr. Spacey’s “stardom and status” might have stopped people from raising accusations when they occurred. The investigators’ report added that they could not independently verify the allegations, and Mr. Spacey did not participate. More

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      ‘A Strange Loop’ Wins Best Musical as Tonys Celebrate Broadway’s Return

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      “A Strange Loop,” a scalding story about a gay, Black theater artist confronting self-doubt and societal disapproval, won the Tony Award for best new musical Sunday night, giving another huge accolade to a challenging contemporary production that had already won a Pulitzer Prize.The soul-baring show, nurtured by nonprofits and developed over many years, triumphed over two flashy pop musicals, “MJ,” a jukebox musical about the entertainer Michael Jackson, and “Six,” an irreverent reconsideration of Henry VIII’s ill-fated wives, in a six-way race.“A Strange Loop” garnered widespread praise from critics; on Sunday night, Michael R. Jackson, the writer who spent nearly two decades working on it, acknowledged how personal the project was as he collected his first Tony Award, for best book of a musical.“I wrote it at a time when I didn’t know what I was going to do with my life,” he said. “I didn’t know how I was going to move forward. I felt unseen. I felt unheard. I felt misunderstood, and I just wanted to create a little bit of a life raft for myself as a Black gay man.”The ceremony — the 75th Tony Awards presentation — provided an opportunity for Broadway to celebrate its return and its perseverance, hoping that a dash of razzle-dazzle, a dollop of contemporary creativity and a sprinkling of nostalgia will help lure theatergoers back to a pandemic-scarred industry now in full swing but still craving more customers.The season that just ended was a tough one: It started late (most theaters remained closed until September), and was repeatedly disrupted (coronavirus cases obliterated its old show-must-go-on ethos, prompting cancellations and performer absences). With tourism still down, it was also short on audience.Patti LuPone won the Tony Award for best featured actress in a musical for “Company.” It was her third Tony.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“Our industry has been through so much,” Marianne Elliott, who won a Tony Award for directing a gender-reversed revival of the Stephen Sondheim musical comedy “Company,” said in her acceptance speech. “It felt at times that live theater was endangered.”But in the glittering ceremony at Radio City Music Hall in Manhattan, a parade of performers celebrated all that went well: Theaters reopened, long-running shows returned, and an unusually diverse array of plays and musicals arrived to entertain, provoke and inspire theatergoers.The best play Tony went to “The Lehman Trilogy,” a sweeping saga about the rise and fall of the Lehman Brothers banking business. Using three shape-shifting actors, contained within a spinning glass box of a set, the play journeyed all the way from the Wall Street giant’s humble origins in 1844 to its ignominious collapse in 2008. The show, written by Stefano Massini and Ben Power, picked up not only the Tony for best play, but also for the play’s director, Sam Mendes; its set designer, Es Devlin; and the great British actor, Simon Russell Beale, who thanked audiences for showing up, despite pandemic protocols and public health concerns.“You trusted us,” he said. “You came with open arms. It wasn’t easy at that point to come to the theater because of all those regulations. But you welcomed us.”“The Lehman Trilogy” won out against four other contenders, “Clyde’s,” “Hangmen,” “The Minutes” and “Skeleton Crew.”“Take Me Out” emerged victorious in the best play revival category, a particularly strong field that included productions of “American Buffalo,” “How I Learned to Drive,” “Trouble in Mind” and “For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow Is Enuf.”Written by Richard Greenberg, “Take Me Out” first ran on Broadway in 2003 and won the best play Tony that year; this year’s revival, presented by the nonprofit Second Stage Theater, was directed by Scott Ellis. It is about what happens when a baseball player, portrayed in this production by Jesse Williams, comes out as gay; Jesse Tyler Ferguson picked up his first Tony for his portrayal of the player’s investment adviser, who is also gay.“Company,” a musical first staged in 1970 that wittily and sometimes bitterly examines married life, won the Tony for musical revival, besting a much-praised revival of “Caroline, or Change,” as well as a starry revival of “The Music Man” that, thanks to the appeal of leading man Hugh Jackman, has been the top-selling show on Broadway since it opened.The award for “Company” reflected not only admiration for the reimagined production but also respect for Sondheim, its composer and lyricist, who is revered as one of the most important figures in American musical theater, and who died in November. The “Hamilton” creator Lin-Manuel Miranda, who was mentored by Sondheim, introduced a tribute to him, saying, “I stand here on behalf of generations of artists he took the time to encourage.”The ceremony was hosted by Ariana DeBose.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe Tonys, hosted by Ariana DeBose and broadcast on CBS, honored not only shows, performers, writers and designers, but also the understudies who saved so many performances this season. And DeBose, who this year won an Academy Award as Anita in the Steven Spielberg remake of “West Side Story,” paid tribute to the season’s extraordinary diversity, saying, “I feel like the phrase Great White Way is becoming more of a nickname as opposed to a how-to guide.”She noted the season’s high volume of work by Black writers, which came about as producers and theater owners scrambled to respond to demands for more representation and opportunity for Black artists after the national unrest over racism during the summer of 2020. This year’s class of Tony nominees featured a large number of Black artists, reflecting the fact that work by Black writers led to more jobs for Black performers, designers, directors, and more.The season being honored — the first since the coronavirus pandemic forced theaters to close in March of 2020 — featured 56 productions, including 34 eligible for Tony Awards because they opened between Feb. 20, 2020 and May 4, 2022. (The others were returning productions, many of them long-running hits.)The Covid challenges were costly: 6.7 million people attended a Broadway show during the 2021-22 season, down from 14.8 million during the 2018-19 season, which was the last full season before the pandemic; total grosses were $845 million, down from $1.8 billion.The Tonys served as a chance for Broadway to try to entice television viewers to become Times Square visitors. But one challenge: Viewership for all televised awards shows has been steadily falling. The Tonys audience had a recent peak in 2016, at 8.7 million viewers, when “Hamilton” was a contender; in 2019, there were 5.4 million viewers, and last year, when the Tonys held a ceremony in September to coincide with the reopening of theaters, just 2.6 million tuned in.Michael R. Jackson won the Tony for best book of a musical for “A Strange Loop.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThis year’s winners featured some Broadway veterans, including Patti LuPone, picking up her third Tony Award for her ferocious turn as an alcohol-addled married friend of the chronically single protagonist in “Company”; and Phylicia Rashad, winning her second Tony for playing a factory worker in “Skeleton Crew.” Among the other performers who collected Tony Awards: Joaquina Kalukango, for her starring role as a 19th-century New York City tavern owner in “Paradise Square”; Matt Doyle, who played a groom with a zany case of wedding day jitters in “Company,” and Deirdre O’Connell, who won for her remarkable lip-synced performance as a kidnapping victim in the play “Dana H.”“I would love for this little prize to be a token for every person who is wondering, ‘Should I be trying to make something that could work on Broadway or that could win me a Tony Award, or should I be making the weird art that is haunting me, that frightens me, that I don’t know how to make, that I don’t know if anyone in the whole world will understand?’” O’Connell said. “Please let me, standing here, be a little sign to you from the universe to make the weird art.”“A Strange Loop” tells the story of a Broadway usher, named Usher, who is trying to write a musical about a Broadway usher trying to write a musical; his thoughts, many of them self-critical, are portrayed by six performers, who each appear in multiple guises. The musical began its life Off Broadway, with a 2019 production at Playwrights Horizons in association with Page 73 Productions. After winning the Pulitzer, it had another pre-Broadway production at Woolly Mammoth Theater Company in Washington, D.C. It had support throughout those nonprofit runs from the producer Barbara Whitman, who is now the lead producer of the commercial run on Broadway; she was also a lead producer of the Tony-winning “Fun Home.”The Broadway production, which opened in April, has seen an uptick at the box office since being nominated for 11 Tony Awards (it won two), but has room for growth: During the week that ended June 5, it filled 89 percent of the 912 seats at the Lyceum Theater, grossing $685,772, with an average ticket price of $105.“Six” and “MJ,” although unsuccessful in the six-way race for best new musical, are doing substantially better at the box office, and did notch some big victories at the awards ceremony.“Six” picked up the Tony Award for best score during the first minutes of the ceremony. Its music and lyrics were written by two young British artists, Toby Marlow and Lucy Moss, who came up with the idea while undergraduates at Cambridge University, and who were discovered by a commercial producer following a buzz-building first run at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. The musical’s costume designer, Gabriella Slade, also won a Tony for her Tudor-style-meets-contemporary-clubwear outfits.“MJ” also landed key prizes, including for the lead performance by Myles Frost, a 22-year-old in his first professional stage role, and for the crowd-pleasing choreography by Christopher Wheeldon, who also directed the musical.The other contenders, “Girl From the North Country,” featuring the songs of Bob Dylan; “Mr. Saturday Night,” starring Billy Crystal as a washed-up comedian; and “Paradise Square,” about race relations in Civil War-era New York, appeared to be less of a factor in the competition.Simon Russell Beale won the Tony Award for best actor for his work in “The Lehman Trilogy,” which won best play.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThat first hour of the awards ceremony, viewable only on the streaming channel Paramount+, was hosted by Darren Criss and Julianne Hough, both of whom are currently starring in Broadway plays — he in a revival of “American Buffalo,” and she in a new farce called “POTUS.” They began the evening with a Broadway-is-back tribute, written by Criss, extolling the virtues and challenges of theater (the song included a plea for no slapping, in a dig at the Oscars).A lifetime achievement award was given to Angela Lansbury, a beloved star of stage, film and television who was also a five-time host of the Tony Awards, more than any other person. Lansbury, who is 96, was not able to attend in person, or even to accept by video; instead the actor Len Cariou, who starred with Lansbury in the original production of “Sweeney Todd,” for which they both won Tony Awards, paid tribute to her and introduced a video of career highlights. Then the New York City Gay Men’s Chorus performed the title song from “Mame,” which was the show in which she won the first of her five competitive Tony Awards.The Tony Awards, named for actress Antoinette Perry, are presented by the Broadway League, a trade association that represents theater owners and producers, and the American Theater Wing, a theater advocacy organization. The awards have been presented since 1947; there was no ceremony in 2020, and last year’s September ceremony honored shows from the truncated prepandemic season.This year’s awards were spread among 11 shows, with none coming anywhere near the record 12 prizes picked up by “The Producers” in 2001. The biggest hauls went to “Company” and “The Lehman Trilogy,” each of which won five awards; “MJ” won four, and “A Strange Loop,” “Dana H.,” “Six” and “Take Me Out” each won two. Taking home one prize each were “Girl From the North Country,” “Paradise Square,” “Skeleton Crew” and “The Skin of Our Teeth.” More