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      The Tony nominations are being announced right now.

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      As the theater industry continues its attempt to rebound after its lengthy pandemic shutdown, the industry this morning began its effort to celebrate the best work on Broadway by announcing a new set of Tony nominees.The first nods, to designers, are being followed by nominations for performers and shows.The nominations are being announced, on YouTube, by the actors Adrienne Warren and Joshua Henry.We have an updating list of all the nominees here.There are 34 eligible shows, all but one of which opened after theaters reopened. (The exception: “Girl From the North Country,” a musical that opened just before the shutdown.)The shows were all hoping to win nods in some of this year’s 26 competitive categories. Producers hope that nominations will lead not only to awards, but also to a bump in the box office, which has not recovered to prepandemic levels. And for artists, a nomination or a win can lead to more job opportunities and higher salaries.The nominees were chosen by a group of 29 nominators who saw all eligible shows and voted last Friday. Next, the 650 Tony voters have until June 10 to cast their ballots, and the Tony Awards will be announced on June 12. More

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      The Tony nominations are being announced this morning. Here’s how to watch.

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      This year’s Tony Awards nominations, honoring work on Broadway as the industry tries to bounce back after the long coronavirus shutdown, are being announced at 9 a.m. Eastern today.The nominations will be announced by the actors Adrienne Warren (she won a Tony Award for portraying Tina Turner in “Tina”) and Joshua Henry (he’s a three-time Tony nominee, most recently for “Carousel”).We’ll have news and reaction throughout the day, and you can stream the announcement here.The Tony Awards, formally known as the Antoinette Perry Awards, honor plays and musicals staged on Broadway. They are presented by the Broadway League and the American Theater Wing.The nominations were determined by a committee of 29 people who saw all of the eligible shows and then voted on Friday by secret ballot. The nominators are not allowed to have a financial interest in any of the eligible shows.This is the first Tony Awards for which shows that opened after the start of the coronavirus pandemic will be considered — all but one of the eligible shows opened after theaters reopened following the lengthy pandemic shutdown. (The exception — “Girl From the North Country” — actually opened in 2020, but theaters shut down so soon afterward that not enough Tony voters were able to see it for it to be considered during last year’s awards ceremony.)This year there are 34 shows vying for awards in 26 categories; to be eligible, the shows had to have opened between Feb. 20, 2020, and May 4, 2022. (Last year, there was a delayed Tony Awards ceremony honoring shows that opened during the abbreviated 2019-2020 theater season.)This year’s awards ceremony will take place on June 12 at Radio City Music Hall; a three-hour performance-heavy segment will be broadcast on television by CBS, preceded by a one-hour awards-focused segment streamed on Paramount+. The ceremony will be hosted by Ariana DeBose, who earlier this year won an Academy Award for “West Side Story.” More

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      What’s playing on Broadway right now?

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      From new shows like “MJ” and “A Strange Loop” to long-running Tony Award winners, our guide breaks down everything you need to navigate Broadway.Our guide offers an overview of the productions onstage now — including the bounty of comedies of all stripes this spring, from “POTUS” to “Plaza Suite” — along with some tips on planning your experience in a time of continued uncertainty, including how to buy tickets, for which refunds and exchanges are often possible, and navigating Covid-19 protocols. LAURA COLLINS-HUGHES More

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      Most Broadway theaters have ended vaccination checks as coronavirus cases are rising.

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      A man had his photo I.D. out and in his hand as walked up to the Gerald Schoenfeld Theater on Broadway to see “Come From Away,” but no one checked it. The families streaming in to see “The Lion King” were told to have their tickets out and their masks on, but there was no mention of vaccine cards. And the Covid safety officers in neon yellow vests who used to patrol outside “Six” were gone.Most Broadway theaters stopped checking the vaccination status of their patrons last week for the first time since they began to reopen last summer, easing safety protocols the same week rising coronavirus cases placed New York City into a higher risk level.The industry hopes that doing away with vaccine checks — which have also been eliminated at New York City restaurants, movie theaters and other venues — will make theatergoing more attractive, and that the remaining mask mandate will help keep audiences safe as cases have risen, but hospitalizations and deaths remain low.While some patrons welcomed the change, others said they felt uneasy about going into crowded theaters without the assurance that their seatmates were vaccinated, and several nonprofit Broadway theaters continue to require proof of vaccination.“I just don’t feel as safe as I have the past several months,” said Lauren Broyles, 44, an executive assistant from Hershey, Pa., who visited New York to see shows several times last winter but said she had stopped planning a summer theater trip after reading that Broadway dropped its vaccine mandate. “I’m waiting to hear what’s next.”But Michael Anderson, 48, of Hudson, N.Y., who was standing in line the other day to see “Hangmen,” said he thought that while vaccine checks had made sense earlier, he felt they were no longer necessary. “At this point, I’m vaccinated and boosted,” he said. More

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      What to expect from this year’s nominations.

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      Here’s what to expect today:There were nine new musicals this season, and just five of them will be nominated for the best musical Tony Award, which is generally the prize with the biggest financial upside.Four of the best musical spots are likely to go to “A Strange Loop,” which is an outré metamusical about an aspiring writer making a musical about an aspiring writer making a musical; “Girl From the North Country,” which uses the songs of Bob Dylan to tell a story about a Depression-era boardinghouse; “MJ,” which is a biographical jukebox musical about Michael Jackson; and “Six,” which imagines the wives of Henry VIII competing at a pop concert. What else will be nominated? That is harder to predict; stay tuned.In the competition for best play, one contender looms especially large: “The Lehman Trilogy,” which is a sprawling exploration of the rise and fall of the Lehman Brothers financial empire. This season was also noted for its historically high number of plays by Black writers, and watch for a few of them to score nominations, possibly including “Pass Over,” “Skeleton Crew” or “Clyde’s.” Also in contention: “Hangmen” and “The Minutes.”There were only four musical revivals this season, and three or four of them will score nominations. Two of them are sure to be included: “Caroline, or Change” and “Company.” The two others — “The Music Man” and “Funny Girl” — though selling more strongly, were not well reviewed by critics, and it is not clear which of them will get nominated (if the nominators are closely divided, it could be both).There were nine play revivals, many praised by critics. Among the best reviewed were “Trouble in Mind,” “How I Learned to Drive,” “For Colored Girls,” “American Buffalo” and “Take Me Out.” More

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      When are the Tony Awards?

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      This year’s Tony Awards ceremony will take place on Sunday, June 12.The four-hour ceremony will take place at Radio City Music Hall. The first hour, starting at 7 p.m. Eastern, will be focused on awards, and will be streamed on Paramount+; the other three hours, which will be dominated by performance numbers, will be broadcast on CBS.The ceremony will be hosted by Ariana DeBose, an actress who earlier this year won an Academy Award for playing Anita in last year’s remake of “West Side Story.” DeBose has also appeared in six Broadway shows, and was nominated for a Tony Award for her role in “Summer — The Donna Summer Musical.” More

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      What happens next?

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      Once the nominations have been announced, the spotlight shifts to the voters.There are about 650 people who cast ballots for the Tony Awards, and most of them have some kind of stake in the theater industry: producers and performers, directors and designers, and even some journalists (though none from The New York Times, which views such involvement as a conflict of interest).The deadline for the voters to cast their ballots is Friday, June 10, just two days before the awards ceremony. The voting is electronic, and the voters are only supposed to vote in categories in which they have seen all the nominees.Between now and then there is a bit of campaigning. Shows often send voters scripts, or cast recordings, and sometimes a souvenir book or other form of promotional merchandise. And many of the nominees try to stay in the public eye during the voting period, by granting more interviews, performing at nonprofit galas, and presenting at theater-related conferences. More

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      Interview: Hopping on the Kindertransport to the Little Angel

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      Smoking Apples’ Molly Freeman on Kinder at Little Angel Theatre

      Kinder is an immersive new show for children, hitting the stage of the Little Angel Theatre this May. Set just before WW2, it tells the story of a small Czech-Jewish girl called Babi, who is sent away from her home on a journey to safety in the UK.

      We had a chat with Director Molly Freeman of Smoking Apples, the award-winning puppetry and visual theatre company, who have created this intriguing production, to find out more.

      So Molly, Kinder is about the Czech Kindertransport rather than the more familiar German one. Did they both happen at the same time? Why have you chosen to explore the Czech one?

      The Kindertransport in Germany and Czechoslovakia, took place at the same time, yes. This was all just before the outbreak of WW2, in 1938. The catalyst for this movement was Kristellnacht, where the Nazis undertook violent acts against Jewish people and businesses in Germany.

      A lot of people are familiar with the German Kindertransport, but Europe and the Jewish communities were very connected so word got out elsewhere that these violent acts were taking place. As a result, the British authorities allowed minors to seek refuge and enter Great Britain from Germany and German-annexed territories, which Czechoslovakia fell under.

      We wanted to explore the Czech Kindertransport for a number of reasons. Firstly, there can often be a sense of compartmentalisation with these stories, as in, ‘oh that happened in Germany because that’s where the war started’. But we wanted to reflect that the repercussions of the early situation in Germany had a ripple effect across Europe, impacting and affecting a huge number of people elsewhere. Secondly, the Czech Kindertransport was instigated by Sir Nicholas Winton, a British man, and myself and my co-artistic directors, Matt and Hattie used to live in Prague, so it felt like we would be able to tell this story from a place of understanding, in terms of the locations and cultures.

      I understand you have rather an unusual immersive space for the show. Can you tell us a bit about it and how the audience fit in?

      The space is a freestanding, self-sufficient box structure. The audience are seated inside and the performers play from the outside of the box inwards, through a series of hatches and openings. The set allows us to be completely in control of the show environment and to reflect the visceral nature of Babi’s journey; her excitement, bombardment and, at times, fear of it all. It also means that wherever we take the show, the audience can always have the same experience, whether that’s in a theatre, a community centre or a school hall.

      Smoking Apples are renowned for their fabulous puppetry work: I was very impressed with your giant walking tree last summer! What kind of puppets are in this show? And why use puppetry rather than just do a straight play?

      Ah yes, that was our Arbor, the tree! He’s pretty hard to miss! Kinder uses a combination of table-top bunraku-style puppetry, shadow puppetry and object manipulation. We are a puppetry company but we always ask ourselves ‘why puppets?’ at the start of every show. For Kinder, it allows us to jump backwards and forwards in the timeline of Babi’s story, but the form itself allows us to bring new resonance to actions. Across her journey, the actions that both Babi and the people she encounters around her are magnified and this helps the audience to focus on them as catalysts. When an actor performs an action, you read it as a whole but you may miss the importance of it because it is natural and already in human form. When a puppet performs an action, it is magnified because of the effort and care that has to be taken in order for it to do it.

      Are there any other interesting or unusual production features you can tell us about?

      In Kinder we are, for the first time, using a combination of shadow puppets, silhouette and OHP puppetry to form our overall shadow puppetry strand. This is a fairly new system of working for us but enables us to have a more film-like quality to the work.

      We’ve also taken inspiration from Czech illustrators, such as Miroslav Sasek, to create illustrated backgrounds for the shadow puppetry, so there is additional visual depth there. Czech illustration, as a broad style, is very striking and often warps scale and perception, which felt appropriate as a reflection of Babi’s young mind. We also use verbatim throughout the show, so there are segments of stories from real people who were evacuated on Kindertransport trains. The Voice/Vision Holocaust Survivor Oral History Archive kindly gave us permission to use them and the piece would be very different without those.

      What themes does the show explore? Presumably, it’s not just a bleak and depressing war story?

      Not at all! Mostly, Kinder is about hope and about how the acts of kindness that Babi encounter along the way really do make all the difference to her; in fact, they save her. Of course, there is difficult content in there and we wouldn’t be doing the story justice if we didn’t cover that, but it’s a tale of humanity, in all its various forms. For me, that’s what’s so compelling, particularly in light of the situation in Ukraine. Despite nationality, despite culture, despite race, despite religion; what binds us is that we are human and if we can hold on to that, kindness will prevail.

      You’ve made a show for older children, age 11-16, which is brilliant to see, as teenagers can often miss out on this kind of really creative, visual theatre. Is Kinder just for schools, or for wider family groups?

      We wanted to make a show specifically for teenagers because as you say, they’re often missed out.  We regularly work with young people, so something the story focuses on is this idea of identity and what that means. Teenagers are often asked to make really tricky calls on their futures; who they are, what they want to be. But ultimately, it’s sometimes OK to not have all the answers, to change your mind, or to just not know.

      We’ve also reflected the age group in the actual construction and presentation of the work. Sometimes shows can feel physically and emotionally very distant, making them hard to engage with. By placing the audience literally in the centre of the action and actively removing the preconceived notion of sitting still and being quiet, we hope that their engagement and investment will be much greater. Kinder is definitely something that wider family groups can enjoy though, and whilst we wouldn’t recommend it for younger audiences, it’s a great show for families, as familial ties are at the heart of our story and you see Babi as a grandmother, revisiting her past with her Grandson.

      What do you hope your audiences will come away with from Kinder?

      As I mentioned, Kinder is a show about hope. There are joyful parts and there are sad parts, but ultimately it is a reminder of all of the things that unite us when conflict tries to divide us. Being sat inside the set, with the show taking place around you, brings a different perspective on the work, one that we hope will resonate with our audiences. 

      I believe the show is going on a journey of its own, isn’t it? Where will your tour take you?

      We’re opening the show at the Little Angel Theatre in London and then we’ll be visiting the National Holocaust Centre and Museum in Newark (near Nottingham) before heading on to Harwich Festival. We’re planning on touring Kinder fully next year and will be visiting theatres, schools, festivals and community centres.

      Many thanks to Molly for taking the time to talk to us. Kinder is on at the Little Angel Studios from 12–14 May, and is aimed at ages 11-16. Further information and bookings can be found here.

      The show will also play National Holocaust Centre & Museum 31 May & 1 June, then Harwich Festival, Harwich on 30 June & 1 July More