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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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      in Theater

      Why Do Broadway Actors Love to Work Summers at The Muny in St. Louis?

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      As summer sets in and New Yorkers escape to greener, milder, beachier pastures, Broadway performers are flocking elsewhere: the great, landlocked outdoors of St. Louis, where summers are known for … bugs. Humidity. Unpredictable storms. Oppressive heat.What draws them there is the Muny, a century-old outdoor musical theater nestled in Forest Park that seats nearly 11,000 a night through a rapid-fire lineup of seven shows in 10 weeks. The experience, according to the actors who return year after year, is worth the elements.The Muny will open its season with “Bring It On,” a musical about the world of competitive cheerleading. The cast of 39 includes Equity actors and University of Kentucky cheerleaders.Preparations for the Muny’s 107th season, which begins June 16 with “Bring It On,” are in full swing. A whirlwind week of rehearsals began on Monday, as has been the Muny’s fast and furious way for decades. Only this summer, the process is unfolding with an extra notch in the company’s belt: this year’s regional theater Tony Award.The honor is certainly a nod to the cast and crew members who put up Broadway-caliber shows in an impossible span of time, seven times in a row. But it’s also a recognition of the significant role the Muny plays in St. Louis — a place where generations of families have spent their summer nights, an institution as synonymous with the city as the Gateway Arch or the Cardinals.“Everyone has worked so hard, really worked hard, because we believed in what this could be for our community and our audience,” said Mike Isaacson, the Muny’s artistic director and executive producer.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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      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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      Sunny Jacobs, a Celebrity After Freed From Death Row, Dies at 77

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      Her story, fashioned into an Off Broadway play and television movies, was later questioned by an investigator in a 2021 book.Sunny Jacobs, a former death row inmate who was convicted of a 1970s double murder in Florida and later freed, becoming a news media celebrity and a leading subject in an acclaimed Off Broadway play and two television movies, died on Tuesday in rural County Galway, Ireland. She was 77.Her death was announced by the Sunny Center, an anti-death penalty nonprofit organization founded by Ms. Jacobs, with locations in Galway and Tampa, Fla. It said she had “passed away after a fire at the Sunny Healing Center.” The circumstances of the fire were not immediately clear.Ms. Jacobs spent nearly 17 years in prison in Florida, five of them on death row, for the murders of two law enforcement officers in February 1976 at a rest stop near Fort Lauderdale.Her boyfriend at the time, Jesse Tafero, a petty criminal who had been convicted of attempted rape, was also convicted of murder. He was executed by electric chair in Florida in a notoriously botched procedure in May 1990. It took seven minutes and three jolts, and his head caught on fire.Ms. Jacobs, whose death sentence was overturned in 1982, was ultimately freed a decade later, when a federal appeals court found that prosecutors had improperly withheld evidence from the defense. She took a plea deal rather than face retrial and was never legally exonerated.It was this story that formed the basis of Ms. Jacobs’s subsequent, celebrated tale — that she had been an innocent, a “28-year-old vegetarian hippie,” as she told The New York Times in a 2011 Vows article about her marriage to a fellow former inmate, the Irishman Peter Pringle, who died in 2023.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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      13 Off Broadway Shows to See in June

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      Reed Birney and Lisa Emery in a two-hander, Taylor Mac in a Molière riff and Jay Ellis in a romantic drama — here’s what’s on New York stages this month.In the crowded June theater calendar, Pride fare figures prominently, but there’s a lot more out there, too. Here are some of the notable productions this month across New York City.‘Not Not Jane’s’Mara Nelson-Greenberg, whose absurdist workplace comedy “Do You Feel Anger?” was an Off Broadway wow several seasons back, fills the middle spot in this year’s Clubbed Thumb Summerworks festival with this new play in which a young woman gets funding to start a community center, but with an asterisk: It’s at her mom’s house. The reliably fascinating Susannah Perkins is part of the cast in Joan Sergay’s production. (Through June 13, Wild Project)‘Blood, Sweat, and Queers’The early life of the Czech athlete Zdenek Koubek, a women’s track and field star of the 1930s who transitioned later that same decade, is the subject of this contemporary Czech play by Tomas Dianiska, translated by Edward Einhorn and Katarina Vizina, and starring Hennessy Winkler as Zdenek. Part of the Rehearsal for Truth International Theater Festival, it is directed by Einhorn, the festival’s artistic director. (Through June 15, Bohemian National Hall)‘Lunar Eclipse’Reed Birney plays George to Lisa Emery’s Em in this Thornton Wilder-inflected new play by the Pulitzer Prize winner Donald Margulies (“Dinner With Friends”), about a long-married couple moon-gazing in a field on their Kentucky farm. Keeping each other company through the summer night, they talk over fear and regret, mortality and memory, love and encroaching decline. Kate Whoriskey directs for Second Stage. (Through June 22, Pershing Square Signature Center)‘Prosperous Fools’Arching an eyebrow at philanthropy and its insincerities, Taylor Mac’s latter-day riff on Molière’s comedy-ballet “Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme” is set at a gala for a nonprofit dance company. With Mac leading a cast that also includes Sierra Boggess and Jason O’Connell, the Tony Award winner Darko Tresnjak (“A Gentleman’s Guide to Love & Murder”) directs the world premiere for Theater for a New Audience — the final production in the 46-year tenure of Jeffrey Horowitz, its founding artistic director. (Through June 29, Polonsky Shakespeare Center)‘The Wash’From left, Bianca Laverne Jones, Margaret Odette, Kerry Warren and Alicia Pilgrim in “The Wash” at WP Theater.Hollis KingWe 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