• Nominees for this year’s Tony Awards, which honor Broadway plays and musicals, are being announced.
• There are 34 shows eligible for Tonys this season, including 21 plays and 13 musicals.
• 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.
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 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 box-office hit “To Kill a Mockingbird,” adapted by Aaron Sorkin from Harper Lee’s novel about race and justice in Alabama in 1934.
Those are sprawling shows with large casts; a much more intimate play, “What the Constitution Means to Me,” is a likely nominee as well. It’s 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 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.
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.
There is “Tootsie,” a musical comedy that, like many Broadway shows today, was adapted from a popular film, and “Ain’t Too Proud: The Life and Times of the Temptations,” which is a jukebox musical employing a pop song catalog. And then there is “Hadestown,” a more unconventional show, which is a sung-through reimagining of the Orpheus and Eurydice myth.
Among the others in the running are two set among high school outcasts: “The Prom,” which is about a group of insufferable 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 “Be More Chill,” adapted from a young adult science fiction novel about a teenage boy who swallows a pill-sized supercomputer in an effort to boost his popularity.
Other possible contenders include another jukebox musical, “The Cher Show.” We’ll let you guess the subject.
There were only two musical revivals this season. Both were well reviewed, and both are expected to be nominated for the prize in that category: a revised “Kiss Me, Kate” and a revisionist “Oklahoma!”
Will prominent performances be 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 look for love to be showered on Bryan Cranston, starring in “Network,” Stephanie J. Block, who portrays the title character in “The Cher Show,” and Elaine May, who at age 86 stepped onto a Broadway stage for the first time in 50 years in “The Waverly Gallery.”
Many of the acting categories, however, 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.
