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    Best and Worst Moments From the 2025 Tony Awards

    There was a “Hamilton” reunion, Nicole Scherzinger’s outsize grandeur and Cynthia Erivo’s pleasant “sing-off” music. But those cheesy projections were a big miss.Best Reunion: The ‘Hamilton’ CastIt was plugged before what seemed like every commercial break, but when members of the original cast of “Hamilton” finally gathered onstage at Radio City Music Hall for a 10th-anniversary reunion performance, the hype proved justified. Sleekly lit and dressed and choreographed, Lin-Manuel Miranda and Leslie Odom Jr. were gloriously back; so were Phillipa Soo, Renée Elise Goldsberry and Jasmine Cephas Jones and that Tony-nominated guy who played King George. The eight-song medley — which included “My Shot,” “The Schuyler Sisters” and “The Room Where It Happens”— snapped. I’d make room for it on any list of all-time-best Tonys performances.— Scott HellerBest Inspiration: Here’s to You, Mr. RobinsonGary Edwin Robinson, the head of the theater arts program at Boys and Girls High School in Brooklyn, accepting his special Tony Honor.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe smooth baritone, the sly half-smile and the wink at the camera. This guy had to be an actor. And, once upon a time, he was. But Gary Edwin Robinson received a Tony Award last night for his second career, as a teacher, at Boys and Girls High School in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn. Accepting the honor in that voice that could make you believe anything, he said that he trained his students not merely to appreciate theater, but to find careers in it. Appreciation is of course valuable, but the harder thing is to instill in young people the idea that finding “the theater in themselves” can be honorable, and even necessary.— Jesse GreenBest Epic Acceptance: Nicole ScherzingerAn outsize grandeur animated Nicole Scherzinger’s acceptance speech.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesNicole Scherzinger’s acceptance speech was as epically demonstrative as her movements in “Sunset Boulevard” are controlled, restrained, precise. The acknowledging of “the exceptional warrior women in this category”! The shaking! The crying! The swooping motions from the hand that was not holding her new award! At times it felt like seeing a modern Maria Callas shaking her fist at the heavens, except that for once those heavens had ruled in her favor. There was an outsize grandeur to the drama of it all that felt classical. Can Medea be far off?— Elisabeth VincentelliBest Placement: Cynthia Erivo’s Balcony BitReady to mingle: The show’s host Cynthia Erivo in the balcony.Sara Krulwich/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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    The 2025 Tony Nominees Discuss Their Biggest Tests and Triumphs

    Since 2018 The New York Times has been interviewing and shooting portraits of performers nominated for Tony Awards, those actors whose work on Broadway over the prior season was so impressive that they are celebrated by their peers. This spring, we asked those nominees to tell us about tests and triumphs — how they persevered, persisted or muddled through challenges on the path to becoming a successful actor, and in the roles for which they are nominated.‘The Picture of Dorian Gray’Sarah Snook“I was pregnant when I was offered this role. Had I known what it was to do this show, and had I known what it was to have a kid, I probably would have said no! You’re kind of going in with blissful ignorance on both counts, and finding your way through that, and showing up and being conscious about being present in all the places that you’re asked to be, whether it’s family or it’s work.”‘Sunset Boulevard’Nicole Scherzinger“I’ve always struggled with low self-esteem and a lot of insecurities. This role has really helped me to become the woman who I was meant to be. Facing head-on those insecurities, that’s where you build your bravery and you build your armor.”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 ‘Sandra,’ a Search for a Friend Leads to Self-Discovery

    In the playwright David Cale’s thriller, a woman looking for a vanished friend discovers a new sense of self.David Cale’s new play, “Sandra,” is packed with classic thriller tropes, as if he had challenged himself to cram as many of the genre’s staples as possible into a 90-minute show — I kept waiting for someone to transfer information from a computer to a USB key as seconds ticked by.Though this tale of a woman’s search for a missing friend is built using basic potboiler blocks, “Sandra,” which opened Sunday at the Vineyard Theater, is far from generic.Cale is operating, as he has been for over 35 years, within the parameters of the monologue — a style demanding of writer and actor, and not one usually associated with white-knuckle suspense. He also weaves in the themes that have long permeated his work, including the way people reinvent themselves, often to deal with trauma, and the need for transformation in the face of adversity.The playwright usually performs his own shows, but here he is lending his voice to another actor, as he did with his 2017 hit, “Harry Clarke,” which starred Billy Crudup and introduced Cale to a wider audience.Marjan Neshat (“English,” “Wish You Were Here”) plays all the characters, chief among them the narrator, Sandra Jones, a woman in her 40s who owns a cafe in Brooklyn and is vaguely dissatisfied with her life. One day, a close friend, a musician named Ethan, leaves for a trip to Puerto Vallarta, Mexico; he never returns. Ethan’s compositions live on with Sandra (the lovely piano score is by Matthew Dean Marsh, Cale’s collaborator on the 2019 play with music “We’re Only Alive for a Short Amount of Time”), who listens to them often. But physically, it’s as if he has vanished off the face of the earth.Our heroine decides to look for him, jumping on the first of several flights she will take over the course of the show. Once in Mexico, Sandra — who is separated from her husband and, perhaps, had not realized how emotionally and physically bereft she was — falls for Luca, a younger hunk. He says he’s a student, and glows with a magnetic, insouciant masculinity, with just the right amount of enticing mystery about his background. Luca is a male counterpart to the sultry sirens who have long lured film noir’s male protagonists, and at times it feels as if Cale is having great fun flipping the codes of the 1990s erotic thriller.Though the show’s plot can seem outlandish, Neshat acts as an anchor, infusing Sandra with a perfectly calibrated balance of effortless warmth.Sara KrulwichLeigh Silverman’s sober staging can dull the impact of the show’s suspenseful set pieces, as when Sandra surreptitiously searches a bag while its owner is in the shower, or when she stealthily records an incriminating conversation on her phone. Thom Weaver’s lighting is the great technical asset, romantically moody in the early stages of Sandra and Luca’s relationship, then suggesting the ominous chiaroscuro of film noir when the plot thickens.Neshat mostly stays rooted to a spot, sometimes standing and sometimes sitting, and the show feels uninterested in the body as a storytelling tool. The actress is literally at the center of it all, and has been handed a thorny gift of a role that requires the protean ability to portray a variety of characters, including the manager of Sandra’s cafe, an Australian surfer dude and an older gentleman straight out of a Tennessee Williams play. She struggles to differentiate them, and even Luca does not register much as Neshat goes in and out of his accented “potpourri of a voice.”But she shines as Sandra herself, a woman who was confident enough in her identity to name her cafe after herself but feels adrift, and defined mostly in relation to others. As far-fetched as the plot gets, Neshat is a steadying force, infusing Sandra with a perfectly calibrated balance of anxious hope and effortless warmth — her smile alone is a masterpiece of complexity, in turn melancholy, joyous, triumphant, bittersweet. We immediately understand, for instance, why Sandra throws herself into the relationship with Luca (the reverse is not as convincing).Early on, Sandra informs us that when Ethan was about to depart for Puerto Vallarta, he told her that they were “so simpatico, if I vanish you’d probably disappear from your life too.” Yet Sandra does build herself out of Ethan’s absence, and even, ultimately, her own.SandraThrough Dec. 11 at the Vineyard Theater, Manhattan; vineyardtheatre.org. Running time: 1 hour 20 minutes. More