“I’m gonna just talk fast and try not to cry,” Daniel Radcliffe began his acceptance speech, and I felt like saying: Take your time! Cry!
The Tony Awards is just a TV show, but listening to the acceptance speeches drives home its outsized meaning to people who want to make theater their future – people who yearn — and for those who have spent their life making theater – people who struggle.
Playwright David Adjmi, accepting the Tony Award for Best Play for Stereophonic:
“This play took me 11 years. It almost didn’t happen….It’s really hard to make a career in the arts. We need to fund the arts. It’s a sign of a civilized society.”
Kecia Lewis, best featured actress in a musical for Hell’s Kitchen:
“Forty years ago yesterday, I walked into the Imperial theater to begin my Broadway career at 18 years old. I have had so many amazing experiences and some heartbreaking ones too. I took a short break from show business and raised the son as a single parent while trying to build a career. This moment is the one I dreamed up for most of those 40 years. So I say to everyone who can hear my voice. Don’t give up”
Jonathan Groff, best lead actor in a musical for Merrily We Roll Along:
“I grew up in a house surrounded by cornfields in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. I was raised by my parents, Jim and Julie Groff and my brother David and the three of them are sitting right there. Thank you for letting me dress up like Mary Poppins when I was three. Thank you for letting me act out scenes from I Love Lucy on my 10th birthday. Thank you for always allowing my freak flag to fly without ever making me feel weird about it…. when I was a kid in Pennsylvania, I used to record the Tony Awards on a VHS tape and watch the performances over and over again, and to actually be able to be a part of making theater in this city. And just as much to be able to watch the work of this incredible, incredible community has been the greatest gift and pleasure of my life.”
Shaina Taub, best book and best score, Suffs
“This is for the theater kids out there, especially the little girls…The epigraph on my script is a quote from the Talmud: ‘You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to abandon it,’ This is a hard year in our country, and I just hope that we can remember that when we organize and we come together we are capable of making real change and progress for this country for equality and justice. And so I hope we can all do that together.”
For more highlights check out my Twitter feed.
2024 Tony Award Winners: Stereophonic, The Outsiders, Merrily, Appropriate
(Who I, and a reader poll, thought SHOULD win, and why )
See videos of the Tony cast performances at the bottom of this post.
The Week in OTHER Theater Awards
2024 Drama Desk Award Winners: Stereophonic, Dead Outlaw
Theatre World Award Winners on When They First Knew
The Week in Tribeca Festival Reviews
“Satisfied” at Tribeca: Hamilton’s Renée Elise Goldsberry
You might think that Ariana DeBose would be too busy the night before her hosting duties at the Tony Awards to go to a movie. But the world premiere of “Satisfied,” a documentary about Renée Elise Goldsberry as performer and mother, brought DeBose to the stage of the Beacon…along with Leslie Odom Jr, Kelli O’Hara, Sara Bareilles, Billy Porter….All these Broadway heavy hitters felt like a preview of the Tony Awards at its most glamorous – and served as something as a counterpoint to “Satisfied,” which is named after the song that Goldsberry sung to great acclaim as an original cast member of “Hamilton.” While revisiting the juggernaut success of that eleven-time Tony winning musical (one of which was given to Goldsberry), the documentary also offers a look at the private side of the public performer, employing copious candid video diaries Goldsberry took of herself over the years with a smart phone. Full review
“Slave Play. Not A Film. A Play” by Jeremy O. Harris and “The Mayfly” by Betty Buckley
Jeremy O. Harris’ film about his Broadway play “Slave Play” begins with a young Black woman in an NYU sweatshirt looking straight up at the ceiling and screaming with great violence. It’s alarming, it’s disorienting, but it turns out to preview what’s absolutely the best part of “Slave Play. Not A Movie. A Play,” a freewheeling, fascinating, self-indulgent, often exasperating mess of a film that could well become a must-see for theater lovers. It is scheduled to start streaming on Max June 20 .after its run at the Tribeca Festival…..Full review
The Mayfly,” we’re told at the outset, is “inspired by a true event,” even though the main character is an insect …Full review
“Griffin in Summer” wins The Tribeca Festival Award for Best U.S. Narrative Feature, and also Best Screenplay. It’s about a 14-year-old playwright. My review.
The Week in New York Theater News
Nick Jonas and Adrienne Warren (pictured above as presenters at the Tonys) will star in the first Broadway production of Jason Robert Brown’s chamber musical “The Last Five Years,” about a failed relationship chronicled backwards in time (much like “Merrily We Roll Along”) Directed by Whitney White (Tony nominee for “Jaja’s Hair Braiding Salon”), it will open sometime in Spring 2025 (we don’t yet know where or when.)
Idina Menzel is pictured here as a presenter with Cynthia Erivo, who is going to play Elphaba in the forthcoming film of “Wicked,” the character Menzel originated on Broadway. After a decade’s absence, Menzel will return to Broadway in “Redwood,” a musical about a grieving woman who seeks healing by traveling to the precious and precarious world of the redwood forest in Northern California. The musical was conceived by Menzel withTina Landau, who also directs it, wrote the book and co-wrote the lyrics with composer Kate Diaz. There is no further cast,theater or opening date, although the producers anticipate an opening between January and April 2025.
Adam Guettel and Tina Landau’s haunting 1996 musical “Floyd Collins,” about an infamous cave rescue attempt, is coming to Broadway in Spring 2025 as part of Lincoln CenterTheater’s 40th anniversary season, which will also feature:
On December 9, 2024, a one-night-only reunion concert of Lincoln Center Theater’s Tony Award-winning 2008 production of Rodgers & Hammerstein’s South Pacific, starring original cast members Kelli O’Hara, Paulo Szot, Matthew Morrison, Danny Burstein, Loretta Ables Sayre, Sean Cullen, Victor Hawks, Li Jun Li, Skip Sudduth, and Noah Weisberg
“McNeal,” a new play by Ayad Akhtar marking the Broadway debut of Robert Downey Jr. in the Fall
The Blood Quilt by Katori Hall
A new version of Ibsen’s Ghosts, directed by Jack O’Brien, who, in accepting his lifetime achievement Tony Award last night after George C. Wolfe accepted his own, joked: “Oh my god, does this mean it’s over? Are George and I getting the hook tonight?”
This Week’s Theater Videos
These videos of Tony performances by nominated shows, presented alphabetically, are courtesy of CBS, who in the past have taken them down after a short while.
“Merrily We Roll Along” Director Maria Friedman on Why It Works
