• The new musical “Hadestown” led the Tony nominations Tuesday morning, getting nods in 14 categories.
• The nominees for best musical are “Ain’t Too Proud: The Life and Times of the Temptations,” “Beetlejuice,” “Hadestown,” “The Prom” and “Tootsie.”
• Best play nominees are “Choir Boy,” “The Ferryman,” “Gary: A Sequel to Titus Andronicus,” “Ink” and “What the Constitution Means to Me.”
• Among the boldfaced names nominated were Annette Bening, Bryan Cranston, Jeff Daniels, Adam Driver, Elaine May and Laurie Metcalf.
• The awards ceremony will take place at 8 p.m. Eastern on Sunday, June 9, at Radio City Music Hall, and will be broadcast on CBS. James Corden is the host.
‘Hadestown’ and ‘The Ferryman’ get Tonys love
“Hadestown,” a folk-and-blues-inflected musical reimagining the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, led the Tony nominations Tuesday morning, winning nods in 14 categories.
But the nominations were notable not only for those they honored, but for those they ignored. “To Kill a Mockingbird” and “Network,” two costly dramas that have been big hits at the box office, did not get nominated in the best new play category. But they did not come away empty-handed — “Mockingbird” was nominated in nine other categories, and “Network” in five.
The current Broadway season, much to the surprise of many who worried that the industry is being swallowed by big brand blockbuster musicals, was dominated by plays — 21 in all, many of them new, several of them profitable, and some quite adventurous.
The Tony race for best new play is now likely to be a face-off between “The Ferryman,” Jez Butterworth’s gripping family drama set in a troubled Northern Ireland in 1981, and the much more intimate “What the Constitution Means to Me,” an autobiographical piece by Heidi Schreck about gender and American legal history, inspired by her adolescent experience giving speeches about the Constitution to win scholarship money.
The other contenders for best new play are “Choir Boy,” “Gary: A Sequel To Titus Andronicus” and “Ink.”
The race for best play revival is wide open, but among the hopefuls are “The Waverly Gallery,” a Kenneth Lonergan drama, first produced in 1999, about how Alzheimer’s disease affects a woman and her family, and “The Boys in the Band,” a pioneering 1968 play by Mart Crowley about a group of gay men gathered for a birthday party. Neither play had ever been staged on Broadway before.
Also nominated: “All My Sons,” “Burn This” and “Torch Song.”
A panel of 42 theater experts who saw all 34 eligible shows over the last year voted on the nominations. The nominators are not allowed to have any financial relationship with any of the eligible shows.
A medley of musicals in the running
The musicals vying for big awards this season could hardly be more different from one another.
“Hadestown” is an unconventional show born of the downtown theater scene — sung-through, poetic, packed with both emotion and politics. That show will now face off against “Ain’t Too Proud: The Life and Times of the Temptations,” an exuberantly sung and danced jukebox musical, which garnered 12 nominations, and “Tootsie,” a musical comedy that, like many Broadway shows today, was adapted from a popular film, but smartly updated to reflect today’s gender politics.
Also in the running is “The Prom,” which is about a group of egotistic New York actors who decide to come to the aid of an adolescent girl in Indiana who wants to take her girlfriend to the prom, and “Beetlejuice,” adapted from the Tim Burton film.
There were only two musical revivals this season. Both were well reviewed, and both were nominated for the prize in that category: a revised “Kiss Me, Kate” and a revisionist “Oklahoma!”
Prominent performances are recognized
This season did not feature a talk-of-the-town starmaking performance like those of Cynthia Erivo in “The Color Purple” or Ben Platt in “Dear Evan Hansen” in recent seasons.
But the nominators gave nods to performers well known from television and film, including Bryan Cranston, as a decompensating television anchor in “Network”; Annette Bening, as the determined mother trying to hold a troubled family together in “All My Sons”; Adam Driver, as the wild-eyed suitor of his late brother’s roommate in “Burn This”; and Jeff Daniels as Atticus Finch in “To Kill a Mockingbird.”
Laurie Metcalf will be up for her third Tony in three years for her fierce-yet-fragile performance as Hillary Clinton in “Hillary and Clinton.” Also noteworthy: 86-year-old Elaine May, the beloved comedian and director, was nominated for portraying a woman losing her memory in “The Waverly Gallery” — her first time appearing on Broadway in 50 years.
Many of the acting categories appear to be hotly contested — the featured performances were especially strong this season — so watch for a lot of campaigning, Tonys-style, over the next few weeks. The nominees will be showing up for gala dinners and fancy luncheons and giving a lot of interviews as they try to remind voters of their charm and skill.
The path to the ceremony
There are 831 Tony voters — actors, producers, writers, directors, designers and others active in the theater community, some with financial interest in the nominated shows — who now have until noon on June 7 to cast ballots.
The winners are to be announced on June 9 at the 73rd annual Tony Awards, held at Radio City Music Hall, hosted by James Corden, and broadcast on CBS starting at 8 p.m. Eastern. The Tony Awards, formally called the Antoinette Perry Awards, are presented by the Broadway League and the American Theater Wing.
Invariably, the awards process creates losers as well. Broadway is a brutal business, and watch for some shows that fare poorly in the nominations or voting to announce closings, particularly at the end of the summer as the tourist season wraps up.
They are already winners
The Tony Awards administrators have already announced the winners of several noncompetitive prizes.
The playwright Terrence McNally, the actress Rosemary Harris, and the orchestrator Harold Wheeler will be honored with special Tony Awards for lifetime achievement in the theater.
Special Tony Awards will be given to Sonny Tilders and Creature Technology Company, the Australian creators of the giant animatronic title puppet in the new musical “King Kong”; Jason Michael Webb, for the musical arrangements in the play “Choir Boy”; and posthumously to the actress Marin Mazzie for her work on women’s health issues.
The actress Judith Light will receive the Isabelle Stevenson Tony Award, which honors volunteerism by a member of the theater community, in recognition of her work on H.I.V./AIDS issues and her support for gay rights.
TheatreWorks Silicon Valley will receive the 2019 Regional Theater Tony Award.
And Tony Honors for Excellence in the Theater will be presented to Broadway Inspirational Voices, a choir founded by Michael McElroy; Peter Entin, a retired Shubert Organization executive; Joseph Blakely Forbes, the founding president of Scenic Art Studios, a scene painting studio in Newburgh, N.Y.; and Engine 54, Ladder 4, Battalion 9, a Midtown firehouse that lost 15 firefighters on Sept. 11.
