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    Tonys 2025 Predictions: Who Will Win? And Who Should?

    Our chief theater critic looks at this year’s nominees and weighs in on the plays, musicals and artists he thinks will — and should — take home trophies on June 8.Tony voters do not have it easy. As the quality of (some) shows on Broadway improves, so does the difficulty and futility of ranking them. Yet not fully futile, at least for me in my fictional Tonys: A long look back at the 2024-25 season, during which I saw all 42 eligible Broadway productions, offered a chance to recall, reorganize and enjoy in memory the work of thousands of very talented artists.Thus, below, my take on the likely winners (marked with a ✓) and my personal “shouldas” (marked with a ★) in 17 of the 26 competitive categories. I hope your own Tonys, no doubt different from mine, prove as rewarding.Best PlayCole Escola, left, and James Scully in “Oh, Mary!”Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“English”“The Hills of California”“John Proctor Is the Villain”✓ ★ “Oh, Mary!”“Purpose”It’s a strong season when five new plays (with options to spare) all deserve their nominations — and one of them, “Purpose,” won this year’s Pulitzer Prize for drama, while another, “English,” won in 2023. But though both, like the other nominees, are startling in some way, Cole Escola’s “Oh, Mary!,” in which Mary Todd Lincoln’s dreams of becoming a cabaret star are nearly foiled by her very Gaybraham husband, is almost freakishly so, barely containing its demented story in the very disciplined frame of a super-tight production. As good as the other nominees are, this comedy trumps them by ripping open the notion of what camp — and Broadway — can be.Best MusicalDarren Criss and Helen J Shen in “Maybe Happy Ending.”Jeenah Moon for The New York Times“Buena Vista Social Club”“Dead Outlaw”✓ “Death Becomes Her”★ “Maybe Happy Ending”“Operation Mincemeat”Despite its brand-extension birth, “Death Becomes Her” is a classic Broadway musical in at least this sense: It brings home the laughs. That’s no mean feat, but my vote usually goes to shows that advance Broadway instead of compromising with it. In their intimacy, their delicacy, their seriousness and faith in themselves, “Maybe Happy Ending” and “Dead Outlaw” both do that. For me, “Maybe Happy Ending,” by Will Aronson and Hue Park, has the slight edge because, on top of all that, it’s shattering (in the quietest way possible).Best Play RevivalFrom left, Amber Gray, Bill Irwin, Chelsea Yakura-Kurtz and Jessica Hecht in “Eureka Day.”Sara Krulwich/The New York Times★ “Eureka Day”“Romeo + Juliet”“Our Town”✓ “Yellow Face”In this season’s death match between “Our Town,” the quintessential American drama, and “Romeo + Juliet,” the everlasting English tragedy, the Thornton Wilder revival won by a knockout. (Nobody really seemed to die in the Shakespeare.) But “Yellow Face,” by David Henry Hwang, complicating its story about colorblind casting with piquant ironies, will likely defeat them both. Still, I’d go for Jonathan Spector’s “Eureka Day,” a satire of vaccination politics that skewers both sides: anti-science know-nothings and trip-on-your-tongue progressives. It lets every kind of American cringe.Best Musical RevivalFrom left, Charlie Franklin, Jeremy Davis and Dwayne Cooper in “Floyd Collins.”Richard Termine for The New York Times★ “Floyd Collins”“Gypsy”“Pirates! The Penzance Musical”✓ “Sunset Boulevard”So sue me, I disliked “Sunset Boulevard,” which did everything in its considerable power to bury the property’s many shortcomings. That doesn’t seem to me to be a worthy goal in reviving a show. But you know what is? Getting to see our era’s biggest musical theater star (Audra McDonald) play one of the canon’s greatest roles (Rose in “Gypsy”). And though I’m loath to vote against a stage mother and a gaggle of strippers, for me, “Floyd Collins,” by Adam Guettel and Tina Landau, is the necessary revelation. It’s like “Our Town” in a cave: cosmic, brutal. (Since I worked with Guettel’s mother, Mary Rodgers, on her memoirs, I refrained from reviewing the show, but I do think it should win.)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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    Review: In ‘John Proctor Is the Villain,’ It’s the Girls vs. the Men

    Kimberly Belflower’s play, on Broadway starring Sadie Sink, gives high school students a chance to prosecute a #MeToo case against “The Crucible.”The first word spoken in “John Proctor Is the Villain,” a vital new play in a thrilling production at the Booth Theater on Broadway, is “sex.”Defining the word is part of a six-week sex education unit at a rural Georgia high school that doesn’t want to teach it. Just 10 minutes a day is all it gets, and those minutes consist mostly of reading a textbook aloud, in imperfect unison that makes it sound like mush.The 16- and 17-year-old girls in the class know all about sex anyway. Even in their conservative, one-stoplight community — one’s father is the preacher at the Baptist church most of the others attend — they’ve “done some stuff,” or at any rate have obsessed over Lorde and practiced Talmud on Taylor Swift.It is in this hormonal, repressive environment, in 2018, just a year since #MeToo acquired its hashtag, that the playwright, Kimberly Belflower, sets the action. But the girls who want to start a feminism club, which the school resists as “a tricky situation,” do not need hashtags to understand sexual predation. Some have already lived it. Raelynn, the preacher’s daughter, has a purity ring but also an ex-boyfriend who, trying to win her back, forces her to have what he later calls a “conversation.”“Do you mean like when you threw a desk on the ground and kiss-raped me?” she asks.Others have experienced worse.But even for those who have thought little about the subject, the world is about to change, as their lit teacher, the golden Mr. Smith, embarks on a unit about “The Crucible.” Excitedly he tells them that the Arthur Miller classic, an allegory of McCarthyite witch hunts set in 17th-century Salem, Mass., is “a great play about a great hero.” Once they start reading it, they beg to differ.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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    Review: In ‘Sally & Tom,’ Plantation Scandal Meets Backstage Farce

    The 30-year relationship between Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson is the basis for Suzan-Lori Parks’s hilarious and harrowing nesting doll of a play.If I were reviewing “The Pursuit of Happiness,” produced by a “low-budget-no-budget” troupe called Good Company, I might note that the subtlety, cleverness and humanity with which it approaches the story of Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson come as quite a surprise. After all, Good Company is best known for “politically charged,” “finger-waggy” provocations like “Patriarchy on Parade” and “Listen Up, Whitey, Cause It’s All Your Fault” — work that leaves audiences running for the exits while casts bid them farewell with the bird.But “The Pursuit of Happiness” isn’t real: It’s the play within Suzan-Lori Parks’s backstager “Sally & Tom,” which opened on Tuesday at the Public Theater.Still, my review stands — except for one thing. The subtlety, cleverness and humanity with which “Sally & Tom” approaches the story of Hemings and Jefferson, dazzlingly doubled in the story of the troupe putting it on, come as no surprise at all. They are the hallmarks of an author incapable of writing a line unfilled with the bewildering burden — or is it the treasure? — of human contradiction.Indeed, Parks begins with an unprovable yet also undisprovable thesis. She has Luce, the author and star of “The Pursuit of Happiness,” decree: “This is not a love story.”Luce (Sheria Irving) feels compelled to say so because her boyfriend, Mike, the show’s director — and also its Jefferson — wants a happier ending than the one she has written. As a proper white ally, Mike (Gabriel Ebert) understands that love is, at best, a problematic notion when one of the lovers is owned by the other. Even after 30 years together, Jefferson did not free Hemings in his will.But would it be so awful, he wonders, to make more money and draw a wider audience — which Luce mishears as a “whiter” one — by introducing just a bit of recognizable romance at the curtain? Can the not-yet-third president and the teenager who would soon bear six of his children at least hold hands?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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    Review: ‘Pass Over’ Comes to Broadway, in Horror and Hope

    Antoinette Chinonye Nwandu’s play about young Black men in peril inaugurates the new season with unexpected joy.On Wednesday night, when a preshow announcement informed the 1,200 or so people at the August Wilson Theater that they were “one of the first audiences back to see a real Broadway play,” the response was the kind of roar you’d expect for a beloved diva returning from rehab. And “Pass Over,” by Antoinette Chinonye Nwandu, does not disappoint in that regard. Having survived pandemic jitters (so far) and its own circuitous path to get there, it emerged like a star: in top shape, at full throttle and refreshed by some artful doctoring.If it seems strange to talk about a tragedy in such terms, keep in mind that though “Pass Over” is forthrightly centered on the plight of two young Black men in an urban police state, its ambition is so far-reaching that it embraces (and in Danya Taymor’s thriller of a production, succeeds as) comedy, melodrama and even vaudeville. In that, it emulates the vision and variety of its most direct sources: “Waiting for Godot,” the Samuel Beckett play about tramps biding their time in eternity, and the Book of Exodus, about an enslaved people seeking the Promised Land.In “Pass Over,” the tramps and the enslaved are combined in the characters of Moses (Jon Michael Hill) and Kitch (Namir Smallwood). They are men of our current time who live on the streets of a city not unlike Chicago, yet also on a pre-Emancipation plantation and in Egypt more than three millenniums ago.The history of slavery everywhere is a heavy symbolic weight for individual characters to carry, but the suffering of men like Moses and Kitch in a racist society right now is not out of proportion to that of their forebears. When they try to make a list of everyone they know who has “been kilt” by the police, it takes a very long time to name them while also distinguishing their particulars. Among many others there are Ed with the dreadlocks (not light-skinned Ed), “dat tall dude got dat elbow rash,” Kev and “dat otha” Kev, Mike with “dat messed up knee.”They expect at any moment to be next.Yet as Moses and Kitch move through a day’s attempts at diversion from this horror, including their oft-rehearsed roughhousing routines and games of “Promised Land Top 10” — Kitch wants a pair of new (but “not thrift store new”) Air Jordans — Nwandu forces us to look beyond their struggle to their full humanity. Despite their encounters with a clueless white gentleman called Mister and an enraged police officer called Ossifer (both played by Gabriel Ebert) they remain witty and warmhearted, belligerent only to cover their need for each other, and filled with big dreams accompanied by the almost unbearable burden of hope.Their biggest dream is to “pass over” — an equivocal phrase that shifts its meaning as the 95-minute play moves through various theatrical genres. (There’s no intermission; in an introduction to the script, Nwandu writes that if Moses and Kitch can’t leave, “neither can you.”)At first, “pass over” means simply to get off the streets: to achieve, if not the fine foods and soft sheets on their Top 10 lists, then at least a decent meal and a bed that is not made of sidewalk. Later the phrase takes on larger meaning as their plight evokes and even merges with that of Black people escaping slavery and the biblical Israelites recalled on Passover. Yet later it becomes part of a suicide pact by which they hope to end their suffering together, and “pass over” into paradise.Many of these moments may be familiar to you if you know “Waiting for Godot,” in which Beckett’s tramps similarly rehearse old routines, contemplate hanging themselves from a spindly tree, deal with mystifying visitors and share their moldy turnips. (In “Pass Over,” the tree becomes a lamppost; the turnips, a pizza crust.) Yet even in earlier versions of the play — originally produced by Steppenwolf Theater in Chicago in 2017, then filmed by Spike Lee and revised for Lincoln Center Theater in 2018 — Nwandu never bound herself to her templates, leaving Beckett’s absurdism behind as the needs of her particular story required. Those needs took her to strange places.From left, Smallwood, Hill and Gabriel Ebert, as Ossifer, who is not a caricature so much as a compendium of sadistic police officer tropes. Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesIn rewriting for Broadway, she has gone even further. Not only has she decided to push the play past tragedy into something else, but she has also, in its last 10 minutes, let its innate surrealism fully flower in a daring and self-consciously theatrical way. (The transformation is gorgeously rendered in Wilson Chin’s scenic design, Marcus Doshi’s lighting, Justin Ellington’s sound and even, in their removal, Sarafina Bush’s costumes.) Somehow Nwandu gives us the recognition of horror that has informed drama since the Greeks while also providing the relief of joy — however irrational — that calls to mind the ecstasies of gospel, splatter flicks and classic musicals, all of which are sampled.Taymor’s production could hardly support that vision better. Though I was at first troubled by how strongly she stresses the comedy — given the almost ritualized clowning, it was no surprise to see Bill Irwin credited as a movement consultant — it soon became clear that allowing the humor full rein allows the same to terror. In pushing both extremes further forward, often letting them spill into the theater with winks and shocks, Taymor asks the audience to accept its role in the story and perhaps also its complicity.She has also shaped the performances, which were already excellent three years ago, into something that seems to go deeper than acting. Like Laurel and Hardy, who were surely among Beckett’s models for his tramps, Hill and Smallwood have a kind of anti-chemistry that draws them closer the more they squabble.Hill, as befits a character named Moses, has the heavier burden of a vision to carry out; you can see his body resist the weight and then wonderfully, if only temporarily, lift it. Smallwood, as Kitch, the epitome of a pesky younger brother, knows just how to get under Moses’s skin because that’s where he needs to be for safety. For both of them, “You feel me?” is almost a password.Of course, when Mister hears it, he fails to understand. “I’d rather not,” he says.As Mister, Ebert manages the virtuoso trick of making obtuseness both weird and charming, at least for a while. But watch him try to sit down at one point, his lanky body becoming an expression of hypocrisy as he snakes one way then slumps the other. Later, when Ebert returns as Ossifer, hard and unbending, you barely know him, and certainly don’t want to.Ossifer is not a caricature so much as a compendium of sadistic police officer tropes. Yet Nwandu’s larger view makes the choice to write him that way more than an expedience. Without ever forgetting its origin in American racism, “Pass Over” broadens to include every kind of -ism, including the ultimately unanswerable one of existentialism. She is asking not only why Black men must live in fear of having their bodily integrity stolen but also why all humans must, in any age and place.And if she waffles a bit near the end, never quite landing the final leap across the river, she lets us bathe in the hope of it anyway. After all, as the roar at the start of the show announced, we have already begun to pass over some things; the existence of “Pass Over” on Broadway is proof of that. Do we dare to hope that as a new season begins, new promised lands are possible too?Pass OverTickets Through Oct. 10 at the August Wilson Theater, Manhattan; passoverbroadway.com. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes. More