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      2025 Tony Awards: What to Know Ahead of the Ceremony

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      How is Broadway doing? Who are the top contenders for awards? Our theater reporter, Michael Paulson, has some answers.The Tony Awards are on Sunday night. If you’re new to this season, or to theater, here are some things you might want to know.What are the Tony Awards?The Tony Awards, presented by the Broadway League and the American Theater Wing, is an annual ceremony honoring plays and musicals staged on Broadway. And Broadway, in industry parlance, refers to 41 theaters in and around Times Square, each of which must have at least 500 seats. There are awards in 26 competitive categories, plus a few noncompetitive prizes like lifetime achievement.The main event is on Sunday, June 8, at 8 p.m. Eastern, broadcast on CBS and streaming on Paramount+ with Showtime. Cynthia Erivo is hosting at Radio City Music Hall.Many of the awards for creative teams will be given out at a preshow that starts at 6:40 p.m.; it is streaming on Pluto TV and hosted by Darren Criss and Renée Elise Goldsberry.Here’s more on what to expect, including a 10th anniversary “Hamilton” performance:How is Broadway doing?It’s a mixed picture. The 2024-25 season that just ended was the highest grossing in history, and it was the first since the coronavirus pandemic to outgross the prepandemic peak of 2018-19, although those figures are not inflation-adjusted.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 to Watch the 2025 Tony Awards

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      The ceremony, at Radio City Music Hall, will be broadcast on CBS starting at 8 p.m. Eastern, and livestreamed for Paramount+ with Showtime subscribers.The Tony Awards, the annual event honoring the best work on Broadway, take place tonight (Sunday, June 8). This is the 78th Tony Awards ceremony.Here’s how to watch:What time does the show start?The televised portion of the ceremony starts at 8 p.m. Eastern (5 p.m. Pacific) at Radio City Music Hall in Manhattan. The broadcast is scheduled to last three hours.Where can I watch?The main event, with prizes for plays, musicals and performers, will be televised on CBS. For those without network television, it’s a bit more complicated: In the United States, it will stream on Paramount+, but only Paramount+ with Showtime subscribers can stream it live, via their local CBS affiliate; otherwise it can be streamed on demand starting the next day.Who is hosting?The broadcast ceremony will be hosted by Cynthia Erivo, a powerhouse singer best known for starring as Elphaba in the “Wicked” films. She is a Tony winner herself, for a 2015 revival of “The Color Purple.” The broadcast will feature performances by 11 of this past season’s Broadway musicals, as well as by the original cast of “Hamilton” in honor of that show’s 10th anniversary. The presenters will include Oprah Winfrey, Charli D’Amelio, Bryan Cranston, Samuel L. Jackson, Adam Lambert and Keanu Reeves.Is there a non-broadcast portion of the ceremony?Yes. There is a preshow ceremony, starting at 6:40 p.m. Eastern, at which many of the awards for creative teams will be handed out. That event will be hosted by Darren Criss and Renée Elise Goldsberry, and can be streamed free on Pluto TV (click on the “Live Music” channel in the “Entertainment” category).What’s eligible?The 21 plays and 21 musicals that opened on Broadway between April 26, 2024, and April 27, 2025, are eligible for awards this year. Prizes will be granted in 26 competitive categories. The most-nominated shows are the musicals “Buena Vista Social Club,” “Death Becomes Her” and “Maybe Happy Ending,” with 10 nominations each. More

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      Five Actors on the Muny: ‘Unlike Any Place I’d Ever Been on Earth’

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      The St. Louis theater, this year’s regional Tony Award winner, has drawn Broadway actors to its stage for a century.Cary Grant and Gene Kelly have been there. So have Carol Burnett, Angela Lansbury, Ethel Merman and Debbie Reynolds. Not to mention Jennifer Holliday, and Ben Vereen, and Joel Grey, and Bernadette Peters.The Muny has lured plenty of stars to St. Louis, some who grace the theater’s massive stage in Forest Park as established talents, others who begin long careers there. But perhaps more notably, after spending the summer sweating through breakneck rehearsals, those stars decide to come back.As the Muny accepts its regional theater Tony Award on Sunday, I asked several Broadway actors, including some of this year’s Tony nominees, about what drew them, often more than once, to St. Louis. Their interviews have been edited and condensed.Danny BursteinBurstein, a Tony nominee this year for his role in “Gypsy,” has been in 11 shows at the Muny, starting the summer he was 19.The Muny’s executive producer Ed Greenberg was actually my teacher at Queens College. Ed took me under his wing and became a great mentor and a dear, dear friend. And when I was 19 he said, “Why don’t you come out for the summer?” It was my first Equity contract.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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      Test Your Broadway Knowledge, Celebrity Edition

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      George Clooney is making his Broadway debut in the stage adaptation of his 2005 film “Good Night, and Good Luck.” In 1994, he had his big break on the popular medical ensemble drama “ER.” Which other “ER” actor also starred in a Broadway show this season? More

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      What to Expect at the 2025 Tony Awards: ‘Hamilton,’ Robots and More

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      This year’s annual celebration of the best on Broadway is being hosted by Cynthia Erivo.Singing robots. Undead frenemies. A dead bank robber, and a dying cave explorer. A fumbling group of spies, and a bumbling group of pirates. Also: “Hamilton.”Welcome to the 2025 Tony Awards, which take place on Sunday at 8 p.m. Eastern at Radio City Music Hall, broadcast on CBS.The show is Broadway’s biggest night, because it introduces the latest plays and musicals to a television audience of several million, any of whom might turn into a theater lover, a ticket buyer, or even an artist (so many Broadway performers and producers have stories about watching the Tony Awards as children).Here’s what to expect:The HostThis year’s ceremony is being hosted by Cynthia Erivo, a 38-year-old British actress who won a Tony Award in 2016 for her breakout performance starring in a revival of “The Color Purple.”In the years since, she has focused on movies, television and music — she stars as Elphaba in the pair of “Wicked” films (the second one comes out Nov. 21), and she played Harriet Tubman in the film “Harriet” and Aretha Franklin in National Geographic’s “Genius: Aretha.”After the Tony Awards, she’ll be returning to the stage. In August she’s playing Jesus in a one-weekend run of “Jesus Christ Superstar” at the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles, and then early next year she’ll star in a one-woman version of “Dracula” in London’s West End.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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      Tony Awards 2025: 13 Great Songs of the Season

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      Our critic listened to the cast recordings of all the nominated musicals and picked one of his favorite tracks from each.Great Broadway musicals must feature great songs, but not all the great songs are found in great musicals. That’s why I collect cast albums: There are obvious gems and hidden ones. To explore that range at the end of a generally fine and unusually eclectic Broadway season, I picked a song from every show that received a Tony Award nomination in any category. (The exception: “Pirates! The Penzance Musical,” which will record its New Orleans-inflected Gilbert and Sullivan score after the awards are doled out on CBS this Sunday.) Some of the songs are delicate, others brassy. Some jerk tears, others laughs. Some forward the show and others stop it cold. In any case, even if you never see them onstage, they all repay a deep listen.‘Up to the Stars’ from ‘Dead Outlaw’Thom Sesma crooning “Up to the Stars” as Thomas Noguchi, a.k.a. the “coroner to the stars,” in “Dead Outlaw,” the Broadway musical about a long-lived corpse.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThom Sesma as Thomas Noguchi (Audible and Yellow Sound Label)For most of its 100 minutes, “Dead Outlaw,” a death-dark comedy about a man who became a mummy, accompanies its posthumous picaresque with songs (by David Yazbek and Erik Della Penna) in a genre you might call rockabilly grunge. But near the end, the palette radically changes, when a formerly secondary character emerges as the show’s perfect avatar. He is Thomas Noguchi, the real-life Los Angeles “coroner to the stars” from 1967 to 1982. In a hilarious yet philosophical number called “Up to the Stars,” filled with sparkling, macabre lyrics, he details his most famous cases and corpses in the finger-snapping Rat Pack style of Dean Martin. As Noguchi, Thom Sesma sells what may be the best number ever about buying the farm.‘With One Look’ from ‘Sunset Boulevard’Nicole Scherzinger as Norma Desmond in Jamie Lloyd’s revival of “Sunset Boulevard.” Songs like “With One Look” evoke the drama of Desmond’s contradictions.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesNicole Scherzinger as Norma Desmond (The Other Songs)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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      2025 Tony Awards Predictions: Best New Musical, Best Leading Actress and More

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      Expect wins for the musicals “Maybe Happy Ending” and “Sunset Boulevard,” but the races for best play and leading actress in a musical are too close to call.The Broadway season that just ended was the most robust since the pandemic, with record-setting grosses, a plethora of profitable plays and celebrities galore.Serious challenges remain — vanishingly few new musicals are making money — but there is a rich subject and stylistic diversity of offerings. Now, industry insiders face a lot of tough choices as they determine which shows to honor at Sunday night’s Tony Awards ceremony, which airs at 8 p.m. Eastern on CBS.Over the last few days, I asked Tony voters which productions, and which performers in leading roles, they deemed the best. After consulting with more than one quarter of the 840 voters, these are my predictions.Expect wins for “Maybe Happy Ending” …Tell people the plot summary for “Maybe Happy Ending,” and they immediately think they don’t want to see it: It’s about two lonely robots in Seoul who go on a road trip and find, well, each other. But over the last seven months, the show has steadily won over fans thanks to strong reviews and excellent word-of-mouth; it has clearly won over Tony voters too.The show has what I believe to be an overwhelming lead over its closest competitors, “Buena Vista Social Club” and “Death Becomes Her,” both of which are based on existing material. That’s one part of what’s working for “Maybe Happy Ending”: Voters over and over say they appreciate that, in an era in which Broadway is dominated by big-brand titles adapted from movies, books or popular song catalogs, this musical has both an original story and an original score.There are, of course, detractors, who find the four-performer show twee, but there are significantly more admirers, many of whom praise the way all the elements of Michael Arden’s production cohere — the performances, the direction, the story and the lavish set, with state-of-the-art automation and technology. “It’s delicate and intimate and engaging,” one voter told me, “and the scenic design came together to support the story in a very unified way.”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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      Tom Felton to Reprise Draco Malfoy Role in ‘Harry Potter’ on Broadway

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      Felton makes his Broadway debut this November for a limited engagement, playing a grown-up Draco, through March.Tom Felton, who rose to fame as Draco Malfoy in the “Harry Potter” film franchise, is reprising his role as the boy wizard’s blond archnemesis on Broadway, for a limited engagement beginning in November.He will be making his Broadway debut with his turn in “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child” — his first return to the character in 15 years — and will be in the show through March, according to a news release.Felton said in a statement on Thursday that being part of the “Harry Potter” films had been one of the greatest honors of his life.“Joining this production will be a full-circle moment for me, because when I begin performances in ‘Cursed Child’ this fall, I’ll also be the exact age Draco is in the play,” he said. “It’s surreal to be stepping back into his shoes — and of course his iconic platinum blond hair — and I am thrilled to be able to see his story through and to share it with the greatest fan community in the world.”The Broadway show takes place 19 years after the original series ended. Draco is now a father, and he — along with Harry, Ron, and Hermione — sends his child to Hogwarts.Alexis Soloski wrote in a 2021 review for The New York Times that after the Covid pandemic forced the show to close, it returned with a shorter, streamlined story. The play, she wrote, remained “diamond-sharp in its staging and dazzling in its visual imagination, as magical as any spell or potion.”Sonia Friedman and Colin Callender, the producers for the show, said in a joint statement that Draco left an indelible impression on Harry Potter fans around the world and that Felton’s return to the franchise would offer Potterheads a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to see him again. “This moment is powerful on many levels,” they said, adding that the moment was charged with nostalgia, evolution and emotion. “Tom’s return to Hogwarts bridges generations of fans and breathes new life into a beloved story.”Since appearing in the “Harry Potter” films, Felton has acted in the movies “Rise of the Planet of the Apes” and “A Babysitter’s Guide to Monster Hunting.”In 2022, he released a memoir, “Beyond the Wand” and made his West End debut that year, as the star of “2:22 A Ghost Story.” More