Tony Afterglow Notes + What's Opening on Broadway in 2022

A few tidbits in the afterglow of the 75th Annual Tony Awards. Plus which shows might factor into next year's Tony race.

Max Clayton labelled this photo "chlll date night" haha. Photo by Emilio MK

• Hugh Jackman tested positive for COVID after his Tony night performance. What timing. So his standby Max Clayton will be playing Harold Hill for the next week of Music Man shows. You saw Max Clayton a couple of times on Tony night since he got a big smooch and shout-out from his boyfriend Matt Doyle who who Best Featured Actor in a Musical for Company. Incidentally the role of "Jamie" in Company, which Doyle won for, is the same role that won Bridgerton star Jonathan Bailey an Olivier in London so this gender-bent version of Sondheim's classic has been a huge boost for super-handsome out gay theater actors!

• Ratings are in and the Tony Awards were up 40% from last year's strange nearly awards free edition of the show. The Tonys went back to basics...

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75th Annual Tony Awards in Review

by Nathaniel R

© Theo Wargo/Getty for Tony Awards Production

Ariana DeBose, fresh off her Oscar win, hosted the Tony Awards with enough theater kid energy to make Anne Hathaway blush. No reviews  will be able to claim (in good faith) that she didn't work her ass off to entertain the audience. She was "on" in every moment, pulling faces, doing little dance moves, singing, and engaging with the celebrity audience. She mentioned the 75th Anniversary several times but in truth the show's Diamond anniversary wasn't any different than any other Tony show; they've always mixed a couple "special" reunion-style performances with showcases for the current musicals (the ones that are still open that is). Even the Sondheim tribute -- which we expected to be epic -- was just one number long: Bernadette Peters singing "Children Will Listen" from Into the Woods. 

Best Speech, Ticket-Boosters, A New "EGOT" winner, and more after the jump...

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"A Strange Loop" and "Company" lead the musical nods for the 75th Annual Tony Award Nominations

by Patrick Ball

A STRANGE LOOP leads the nominations. Photo © The New York Times / Sara Krulwich

Pulitzer winner A Strange Loop led the Tony nominations this morning but only by 1. Paradise Square a period musical about NYC's five points neighborhood, and the Michael Jackson musical MJ each scored 10 nominations. While Stephen Sondheim's Company was the clear frontrunner among the Revivals with 9 nominations. Voters nearly shut out two big glitzy musicals (Funny Girl and Mrs Doubtfire scored just 1 nomination each!) and the year's priciest ticket had mixed results with The Music Man scoring just 6 nominations. If you believe nomination counts predict winners (they do sometimes) your big winners in June will be the popular gender bent revival of Company, the box office struggling revival of for colored girls (which could get a big boost from these nods), and for original musicals and plays, A Strange Loop  and the already-closed The Lehman Trilogy respectively. 

The nominations after the jump include a lot of well loved stars (Jackman, Foster, Rashad, Negga, Crystal, Dratch, Aduba, Winningham) though several other "names" were snubbed (SJP, Feldstein, Craig) were left out...

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Which shows will be Tony Award nominated next week?

by Patrick Ball

Daniel Craig and Ruth Negga in a modern "Macbeth"

It’s only been 8 months since last year’s long delayed Tony Awards, but it’s time to celebrate the best of The Great White Way once more. This year’s crop represents the first full season since 18 months back when Covid chaos  closed the industry that depends on gathering patrons en masse in close quarters. Though at times it was a bumpy road back to anything approaching normal for Broadway, come Tony season we actually have a pretty robust roster of new shows ready for their turn in the awards season sun.

Nominations will be announced by Tina: The Tina Turner Musical’s Tony Winning Adrienne Warren and Joshua Henry on Monday May 9th. The Tonys will be broadcast live June 12th on CBS and Paramount+ and will be hosted by our newly minted Oscar winner and former Tony nominee Ariana Debose. 

Unlike the Oscars, the Tonys are in a bit of a world unto themselves in the landscape of theater awards...

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Awards Calendar 2022/2023

If you're eyes rolled when you saw this headline that means you still need more recovery time from the fiasco that was the 2021/2022 awards season. But time marches on and now we must draw our attention to the next wave of awards shows. We'll update this post periodically and republish.

APRIL 2022
28th Tony Eligibility Ends

If a show hasn't officially opened by this date, it's not eligible until 2023. The following shows are expected to be eligible: 13 original plays (Birthday Candles, Chicken & Biscuits, Clydes, Dana H, Hangmen, Is This a Room, The Lehman Trilogy, The Little Prince, The Minutes, Pass Over, POTUS or..., Skeleton Crew, Thoughts of a Colored Man), 7 play revivals (American Buffalo, For Colored Girls who..., How I Learned To Drive, Lackawanna Blues, Macbeth, The Skin of Our Teeth, Trouble in Mind), 7 original musicals (Diana, Flying Over Sunset, Girl from the North Country, MJ, Mr Saturday Night, Mrs Doubtfire, Six), and 4 musical revivals (Caroline or Change, Company, Funny Girl, The Music Man). It is our dream to one day get press invites to ample theater so we can do a once weekly column on that as a cultural sidebar.

MAY 2022
3rd Tony Award Nominations Announced
31st Emmy Eligibility Ends

The eligibilty period began on June 1st, 2021 (The debut seasons of Disney+'s Loki, Netflix's Sweet Tooth, Apple TV's Physical, AMC's Kevin Can F*** Himself, and Starz' Blindspotting and the second season of Hulu's Love Victor will thus be eligible despite feeling very 'old' by voting time) and ends on this date. If a show has aired enough episodes (six) to be considered a series by May 31st, 2022 its 'hanging episodes' (airing after this date but before the balloting ends in June) still count. The Emmys have fixed some of their rules so now if a film has qualified for the Oscars or has had a mass theatrical release (more than 70 theaters) on a single day, it is no longer eligible for the Emmy, so that should end the double-dipping that used to occur. More film festivals are now including TV programming but festival screenings do not interfere with Emmy eligibility... 

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