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      How to Watch the Tony Awards 2024: Date, Time, Streaming

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      The main event will be broadcast on CBS and livestreamed for Paramount+ with Showtime subscribers. A simulcast will also air at Damrosch Park in Manhattan.OK, Broadway fans: It’s showtime.The Tony Awards — the annual celebration of Broadway’s best — are on Sunday evening, with performances and prizes and who-knows-what-they’ll-say acceptance speeches.Here’s what you might want to know:When is the ceremony, and how can I watch it?The main event, featuring songs from most of the nominated musicals and the announcement of most of the big winners, is scheduled to start Sunday at 8 p.m. Eastern and to end at 11.The ceremony will be broadcast live on CBS, and can be streamed live by Paramount+ with Showtime subscribers. (Paramount+ Essential subscribers can watch the next day.)A preshow ceremony, at which a number of awards for design and other crafts will be handed out, will take place from 6:30 to 8 p.m. Eastern and will be streamed on Pluto TV, a free service. (Go to Pluto TV on whatever device you’re using, and then click on the ET channel.)If you’re in New York, you can also watch from Damrosch Park at Lincoln Center. That’s a seated area, outdoors, where a simulcast will play. Skylar Astin will host, and there will be some performances and guest appearances. The free event begins at 6:30 p.m. Eastern; the simulcast begins at 8. Capacity is limited, and American Express cardholders are given priority seating.There are also a variety of ticketed watch parties taking place at bars and other venues. Here’s a list from BroadwayWorld.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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      ‘The Welkin’ Review: A Strong Ensemble and a Story That Resonates

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      A somber yet witty play set in 18th-century England is a clever perversion of a courtroom drama that features strong performances from an ensemble cast.The final word of “The Welkin” — a soft “oh” of realization that left the theater breathless — is more of an utterance, the coo of an innocent young babe. But the speaker isn’t a child; she’s a grown woman.And she’s accused of murder.It’s England in 1759, just around the time everyone is buzzing about the arrival of Halley’s comet. This woman, Sally Poppy (played by Haley Wong), and her lover are accused of the murder and dismemberment of the young daughter of the rich family for which Sally worked. She’s set to hang, but there’s a hitch: Sally claims she’s pregnant.“The Welkin” is a kind of courtroom drama or, rather, a clever perversion of such; technically we don’t see the courtroom, just a dim, dungeonlike room nearby where a forum of 12 matrons has been convened. They’re not Sally’s final adjudicators (that job is for the men, after all), but the jury ruling on the women’s issue in this case: whether Sally’s actually pregnant.A little bit “The Crucible” and a lot bit the 2022 film “Women Talking,” in all the best ways, “The Welkin,” which opened on Wednesday at Atlantic Theater Company’s Linda Gross Theater, is a somber yet witty examination of how women labor — with housework, with children and with a society of men that doesn’t serve them — and how they negotiate their assumed responsibilities with their desires.“The Welkin” successfully depicts these women as unique individuals, representing women from different strata of society, and with different prejudices and viewpoints. Each one is memorable, from the stately outsider, Charlotte Cary (Mary McCann), a colonel’s widow in a stylish crown of a hat, to Mary Middleton (Susannah Perkins), an awkward, superstitious young woman who is worried only about getting home to her crop of leeks.Sandra Oh (center) is a standout of the ensemble cast. Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesWe 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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      Tony Predictions: Expect Wins for ‘Merrily’ and ‘Stereophonic’

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      Our reporter surveyed a quarter of Tony voters before Sunday’s ceremony. One certainty: Sondheim’s onetime flop seems destined for redemption.Everyone loves a comeback story. And this year, Broadway will be celebrating one for the ages.“Merrily We Roll Along,” a Stephen Sondheim show that has long been one of musical theater’s most storied flops, will cement its long-sought redemption on Sunday by winning the Tony Award for best musical revival, according to my annual survey of Tony voters.This week I have connected, by phone or by email, with just over a quarter of the 836 Tony voters, and asked how they were voting. In a season in which lots of new musicals have admirers but none seem to have fully satisfied industry insiders, that race is tight, as are some of the key acting categories.But “Merrily,” more than any show since “Hamilton,” has won over not only the ticket-buying audience, which has made this production a significant hit, but also the group of producers, investors, writers, actors, designers and others whose work or volunteer lives are so theater-involved that they have qualified as Tony voters.The survey is not a scientific poll; some voters haven’t even cast their ballots yet. For the actual winners (and some song and dance, too), tune in Sunday for the awards show, which starts at 8 p.m. Eastern on CBS and Paramount+ with Showtime. A preshow with some of the awards will stream on Pluto TV starting at 6:30 p.m. Eastern, and we’ll be live-blogging all evening at nytimes.com/theater.Until then, here’s a look at what those surveyed are indicating.Best musical: ‘The Outsiders’ could upset ‘Hell’s Kitchen.’“The Outsiders” is getting lots of love for its vivid depiction of violence and gritty physical production, but less for its score.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesMany are loving the vocal performances and the choreography in “Hell’s Kitchen,” but are less enamored with the storytelling.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“Hell’s Kitchen,” the Alicia Keys musical, is doing quite well: good reviews, lots of media attention and the strongest sales of any of the season’s new musicals.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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      ‘How Long Blues’ Review: Twyla Tharp in Overdrive at Little Island

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      Her frenetic new dance-theater work, which opens a new festival at the new park on the Hudson, includes references to Camus and music by T Bone Burnett.On a recent dusky evening, a dozen or so visitors to Little Island in Manhattan were gazing into its outdoor amphitheater from a nearby perch. They didn’t have tickets, sold out at $25 each, to “How Long Blues,” the first outing in a new summer festival that hopes to fulfill the site’s promise as a lively platform for the performing arts. So the slope of a rolling, manicured hill offered the best vantage point.Halfway through the hourlong show, though, most of them had wandered off.To be fair, the lush, dynamic public park, rising from the Hudson River and privately funded by the media titan Barry Diller for $260 million, can be delightfully distracting. But “How Long Blues,” a new dance-theater work conceived, choreographed and directed by Twyla Tharp, now running through June 23, is a chaotic head-scratcher. While a riverside setting can be overstimulating (a heliport is less than 20 blocks uptown), the action onstage pulls your attention in so many directions at once that you feel you’re always missing something.In addition to an excellent band on elevated platforms, a standing piano rides in on the back of a tricycle. (The music, a mercurial flow of jazz that ranges from swingy and upbeat to trippy and dissonant, is by T Bone Burnett and David Mansfield.) There are appearances by performers wearing doll heads with cartoon features, a demonlike figure covered in straw fringe and Sisyphus carrying a rock on his shoulder — all of this while two smartly dressed men (played by the Tony Award winner Michael Cerveris and a Tharp regular, John Selya) vaguely pantomime amid a swirl of vibrant dancers. (The show has only a few spoken lines.)You would have little way of knowing, without reading Tharp’s interview in The New York Times, that “How Long Blues” concerns the French writer and philosopher Albert Camus, and specifically elements from his 1947 novel “The Plague” about a pandemic in Algeria (coughing fits by a dancer or two are not sufficient clues). Notes shared privately with the press confirm that Cerveris is meant to be Jean-Paul Sartre, a close friend of Camus, played by Selya, and that “literal thinking” about narrative “is not helpful here,” according to Tharp.That’s certainly true, but nor is “How Long Blues,” named for a song by Leroy Carr, coherently abstract. Consistent gestures toward an illegible story undercut the show’s components, which are less often in harmony than in competition.Tharp’s choreography, when it has sufficient room to breathe, is the star attraction: a medley of vigorous and precise ballet technique — graceful suspension, expansive limbs — with the sort of unexpected pivots and urgent expressiveness that distinguish her muscular style.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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      Listen to the Best Songs From 8 Tony-Nominated Shows

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      “Hell’s Kitchen,” “Stereophonic” and others are up for top prizes at Sunday’s ceremony. Our critic takes stock of their cast albums, all available now.Cast albums are both keepsakes and fantasies, preserving a show for those who have seen it and implying it for those who have not. At their best, they are also stand-alone works of musical-theater art. Listening to the recordings of the eight shows nominated for Tony Awards in the best musical and best score categories — all of which are now available — I was impressed by how often and how variously they reached that standard. Below, in chronological order by opening date on Broadway, a guide to the latest batch of future treasures.‘Here Lies Love’The first of the season’s best score nominees, this sung-through biography of Imelda Marcos was the only one not to release a cast recording. That’s a shame, but die-hards can seek out the 2014 Off Broadway version or the 2010 concept album, with its whacka-whacka disco-beat ditties by David Byrne and Fatboy Slim. Remastered in 2023, and with a very different collection of songs from the Broadway show, the concept album is naturally less theatrical; with each track featuring a different singer in a totally distinctive style — Tori Amos, Florence Welch, Natalie Merchant, Sia — character development is impossible. Instead, it offers hypnotic dance-floor euphoria, as in Cyndi Lauper’s take on Imelda’s “Eleven Days” of courtship.“Eleven Days”“Here Lies Love,” featuring Cyndi Lauper, from the 2010 concept album (Nonesuch)‘Days of Wine and Roses’A story of husband-and-wife alcoholics on diverging paths toward recovery and disaster is bound to be harrowing, but Adam Guettel’s score carefully balances the inevitable lows with the sometimes wild highs. The cast album brilliantly captures that full-spectrum range, especially in the edge-of-danger singing by Kelli O’Hara and Brian D’Arcy James at their finest. Their quasi-operatic cries for relief and forgiveness effectively contrast (but do not contradict) the jazzy mania of songs like “Evanesce,” in which the snockered characters sound like xylophones and leap like dolphins, making you ache if not for drink then for these desperate drinkers.“Evanesce”“Days of Wine and Roses” (Nonesuch)‘Water for Elephants’Jessica Stone’s thrilling staging is a real eye-catcher in this circus-based musical at the Imperial Theater. But the cast album demonstrates how the songs, by PigPen Theater Co., a seven-man indie folk collective, can grab you by the ears. Avoiding the rut of some Americana scores, PigPen, along with its arrangers and orchestrators, offers a wide variety of sounds and formats that suit the milieu and the action: bravura showstoppers for the ringmaster, soaring anthems for the hero, haunting ballads for the woman caught between them. One of those ballads is “Easy,” a heartbreaker even if you have no idea that it’s sung to a dying horse.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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      Idina Menzel Will Return to Broadway in ‘Redwood’

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      The new musical, about a woman seeking healing, is to arrive early next year.Idina Menzel will return to Broadway early next year in a new musical called “Redwood,” about a grieving woman who seeks healing among ancient trees.Menzel, who has not worked on Broadway for a decade, remains one of the industry’s most-loved stars, forever associated with two iconic roles: Maureen, in the original production of “Rent,” and Elphaba, in the original production of “Wicked” (she won a Tony Award for that one). She then belted her way into the lives of millions of children by voicing Elsa in the “Frozen” films and recording the first film’s monster hit, “Let It Go.”“Redwood” is an original musical that was conceived by Menzel and Tina Landau (“Mother Play,” “SpongeBob SquarePants”), who wrote the musical’s book and is directing the production. The score features music by Kate Diaz and lyrics by Landau and Diaz.The show had an initial production earlier this year at La Jolla Playhouse in San Diego. The Broadway production will be produced by Eva Price (“& Juliet”), Caroline Kaplan, a film producer, and Loudmouth Media, a company founded by Menzel, and is being capitalized for up to $16 million, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.The producers announced Thursday that the show would open on Broadway next year, but during the current theater season, which means they anticipate opening between January and April; Landau is also committed to directing a production of “Floyd Collins” that is scheduled to open on Broadway next April. The producers did not specify which theater “Redwood” will play, and they did not name any other cast members. More

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      The Writer Behind “Stereophonic,” the Most-Nominated Play in Broadway History

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      David Adjmi felt out of place in the Syrian Jewish community in Brooklyn, where he grew up. He felt uncomfortable at the Juilliard School, where he studied playwriting. Some of the earliest productions of his plays taught him that his theatrical style could be frustrating and alienating for his collaborators and his audiences. In a review of a 2013 Off Off Broadway production of Adjmi’s play “Marie Antoinette,” the Times theater critic Ben Brantley called Adjmi “a polarizing playwright who specializes in sounding the depths of shallowness.” Adjmi decided that mainstream success was out of reach for him. He considered giving up writing altogether.But that’s not what happened. Adjmi told Melissa Kirsch the story of how he came to write “Stereophonic,” his newest play, which was recently nominated for 13 Tony Awards, a record for a play.On today’s episodeMelissa Kirsch, the deputy editor of Culture and Lifestyle for The Times and the writer of The Morning newsletter on Saturdays.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times; Illustration by The New York TimesThe New York Times Audio app is home to journalism and storytelling, and provides news, depth and serendipity. If you haven’t already, download it here — available to Times news subscribers on iOS — and sign up for our weekly newsletter. More

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      ‘Ghostlight’ Review: With Patient Ears, Attend

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      The film is a gentle, emotional drama about a family struggling to stay together. It’s also about the power of theater.The therapeutic value of theater is no secret. Everything from role play to full-out drama can be part of the health practitioners’ toolbox. But even a young person who finds themselves sobbing onstage in a role in the high school play knows there’s something regenerative about stepping into someone else’s shoes for a while.That’s the gist of “Ghostlight,” named for the single bulb often left burning in a theater when all the rest of the lights are shut off, keeping it from total darkness. If that sounds like a metaphor, it is. There are metaphors aplenty in “Ghostlight,” written by Kelly O’Sullivan (“Saint Frances”) and directed by O’Sullivan and Alex Thompson. The pair are partners, with a young child, which is worth noting mostly because “Ghostlight” centers on a family rocked by tragedy and brought together by theater. (O’Sullivan is an alumna of the school at Chicago’s eminent Steppenwolf Theater Company — this is familiar territory for her.)The story centers on Dan (Keith Kupferer), a stoic construction worker who is trying to hold his family, and himself, together after the tragic death of a teenage son, the details of which the movie at first keeps us from knowing, for reasons that eventually become clear. His wife, Sharon (Tara Mallen), is a teacher, and their teenage daughter Daisy (Katherine Mallen Kupferer) is a theater kid with a belligerent streak. It’s obvious the family isn’t OK. It’s volatile, stressful work to stay afloat.After Daisy gets herself suspended from school, Dan is about at his limit, and after an outburst at work he gets put on leave, too. He doesn’t want to tell his family. A serendipitous encounter with an onlooker named Rita (Dolly De Leon) leads him into an unexpected place: a rehearsal for a local production of “Romeo and Juliet,” which has just lost a player. Rita badgers him into reading lines for a day. He keeps coming back.It’s a gentle story, full of tender moments, and knowing that the parents and daughter in the main cast are a family in real life increases the warmth. There’s a complexity to their conversations, the way their interactions are never one-note (as parents and teens often are in films), that you can sense has its roots in real life. By the end of the film, their emotional bond carries the story. Have a few tissues on hand.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