Maybe Happy Ending, a musical about two robots falling in love, was the big winner at the Tony Awards Sunday, as the ceremony also awarded a number of firsts.
The musical took home the top prize of best musical, with Darren Criss winning his first Tony Award for leading the show, as well as four other Tonys, including best director of a musical. Nicole Scherzinger won her first Tony Award for her role as Norma Desmond in Sunset Blvd. in one of the most hotly contested categories, beating out six-time Tony Award winner Audra McDonald.
“Growing up, I always felt like I didn’t belong. But you all have made me feel like I belong, and I have come home, at last,” Scherzinger said during her emotional acceptance speech.
Sunset Blvd. also won the Tony for best revival of a musical, for Jamie Lloyd’s stripped-down reinterpretation of the Andrew Lloyd Webber classic.
Many of the races were particularly close this year, including best play, with Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’ family drama Purpose taking home the trophy over Cole Escola’s Oh, Mary! and John Proctor Is the Villain, starring Sadie Sink.
But Cole Escola won the Tony Award for best best performance by an actor in a leading role in a play, and the play’s director Sam Pinkleton also took home a Tony.
Running to the stage in an outfit that paid homage to Bernadette Peters, Escola, who portrays Mary Todd Lincoln as a wannabe cabaret star, thanked the other nominees they had beat out in the category, including George Clooney.
“It’s an honor to be in your company. And more than that, it’s been a sincere pleasure spending time with you over these warm salads at all these luncheons,” Escola said.
In a celebrity filled season, Sarah Snook won the Tony for best performance by an actress in a leading role in a play for one-woman production of The Picture of Dorian Gray, in which she plays all 26 roles. The Succession star made her Broadway debut with the role, after performing the role in the West End.
“This means so much for a little Australian girl to be here on Broadway,” Snook said. “It is billed as a one-person show, and I don’t feel alone any night that I do this show.”
Eureka Day, a dark comedy about vaccinations, took home the Tony for best revival of a play.
Kara Young also made history as the first Black performer to win two Tonys in a row, winning best featured actress in a play for her role as Aziza, a wayward friend thrown into the family drama of the Pulitzer-prize winning play Purpose. She has also been nominated four years in a row.
Natalia Venetia Belcon won best featured actress in a musical for her role as famed singer Omara Portuondo in Buena Vista Social Club, marking one of four wins the show, which was also up for best musical, took home.
Cynthia Erivo, who was this year’s host, opened the ceremony with a backstage homage to Sunset Blvd., leading into a sung gospel number alongside the Broadway Inspirational Voices choir. Erivo, who won a Tony Award in 2016 for her role as Celie in A Color Purple, then took turns poking fun at the nominees in the audience, including Clooney, who she mentioned as a first-time nominee who was going places, and then herself.
“As they apparently say in a very fertile piece of intellectual property: ‘There’s no place like home.’ And Broadway has always been mine,” Erivo said.
Erivo later greeted Oprah Winfrey in the audience and told her to look under her chair, under which she had placed a gift bag and items including candy and a model car. “You get a car,” she quipped. Winners who went too long in their speeches were played off by Erivo’s singing.
Other starry names on Broadway, including Denzel Washington and Jake Gyllenhaal, starring in Othello, and Kieran Culkin in Glengarry Glen Ross, were not nominated for Tony Awards and were not part of the ceremony.
Bryan Cranston, Allison Janney, Glenn Close, Jesse Eisenberg, Sara Bareilles, Jean Smart and Sarah Paulson were among the Tony Awards presenters.
Jak Malone won a Tony Award for best actor in a featured role in a musical for his roles in Operation Mincemeat, which includes a female secretary named Hester, a feat he accomplishes only with “simple adjustments to posture, voice and energy.” He was one of several nominees to hint at the current political environment in his speech.
“If you watched our show and found yourself believing Hester, then I am so glad to tell you that intentionally or otherwise, you might have just bid farewell to cynicism, to outdated ideas about that old binary and opened yourself up to a world that is already up there in glorious technical and isn’t going away any time soon,” Malone said in his acceptance speech.
Michael Arden, who won a Tony for his direction of Maybe Happy Ending, also pointed to how “live theater confirms that no matter how different we may be from one another, we are all connected” and called on viewers to “Support the arts. Support artists. We need you now more than ever.”
The broadcast featured musical performances by Death Becomes Her, Buena Vista Social Club, Just In Time, Sunset Blvd, Pirates! The Penzance, Maybe Happy Ending, Dead Outlaw, Flloyd Collins, Operation Mincemeat, Gypsy, Real Women Have Curves and a reunion of the original Hamilton cast, including Lin-Manuel Miranda, Leslie Odom Jr and Ariana DeBose and Jonathan Groff doing double duty performing with them and with Just In Time.
In the first half of the Tonys telecast, Stranger Things: The First Shadow largely swept the creative awards, taking home three design awards, while Maybe Happy Ending picked up two big musical awards, with writers Will Aronson and Hue Park winning best book of a musical and best original score.
Paul Tazewell won a Tony for best costume design of a musical for his designs on Death Becomes Her, in the musical’s only win, after winning an Oscar for his costume designs on Wicked earlier this year.
Tony Award-winning actor Celia Keenan-Bolger received the Isabelle Stevenson Award for her advocacy work, including LGBTQ+ activism, and promoted Gavin Creel Fellowship, named after her late friend and beloved Broadway actor, which will provide $25,000 grants to five emerging theater actors annually.
Harvey Fierstein, a four-time Tony Award winner, received the lifetime achievement in theater award, for his work including Torch Song Trilogy, the 1982 play he wrote and starred in, which broke ground for its portrayal of gay culture, as well as writing the book for La Cage Aux Folles, Kinky Boots, Newsies and more. He received a standing ovation as he walked up and teared up before saying, “Don’t make Mommy cry.”
“What I find most humbling is the thought that somehow my journey means something to you,” Fierstein said.
