“This has all happened by accident,” Harvey Fierstein said at the 78th annual Tony Awards. Tony Kushner had just introduced him as “a great theater artist, a great force for connection and justice and change, and a monumental mensch” who “raised his voice, a voice without precedent in the annals of theater and without plausible explanation in the annals of otolaryngology..”
Fierstein himself said: “See if it had gone to plan. I should now be a retired high school art teacher. But what happened was my freshman year at the High School of Art and Design, this kid in my class said that his mother was starting a community theater in Brooklyn and needed kids to come and make posters. I figured, why not? I don’t know if it was the fumes from the magic markers, but I entered the basement of a Unitarian Church in Flatbush, Brooklyn, and I found my community.
“Here were people, mostly adults, who saw this odd, chubby, recently bar mitzvahed boy who’d put a towel on his head and lip sync Broadway show tunes into his bedroom mirror and without hesitation or judgment, just welcomed him in. I painted scenery, I ran lights, I pulled curtains, and by the age of 15, I was on the board of directors of the Gallery Players – a theater still exists in Brooklyn.”
The acceptance speeches are always a highlight of the Tony Awards night, driving home its outsized meaning to theater people, and Fierstein’s for Lifetime Achievement (albeit cribbed from his memoir, which he unabashedly promoted) was one of the best. It didn’t make it to Prime Time.
The Tony Awards ceremony has been turned into a TV show. Its producers seem to forget the point of it each year when they consign the designers and lifetime achievers to Pluto and give short shrift to the straight plays, offering a sentence to each rather than a scene. Plays have always been an essential part of Broadway; as it happens, they were among the best-attended and (producers, take note) highest-grossing new shows of the Broadway season that was being celebrated last night.
Who I, and a reader poll, thought should win, and why
Below read more excerpts from the acceptance speeches, and watch videos of the Tony cast performances at the bottom of this post.
For my highlights, check out my Blue Sky feed
Acceptance Speeches
Nicole Scherzinger, best actress in a leading role in a musical for Sunset Blvd.: “I want to thank all of you for making this little Hawaiian, Ukrainian Filipino girl’s dream come true…Tom Francis, thank you so much for letting me sever your head every single night .. 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. So if there’s anyone out here who feels like they don’t belong where your time hasn’t come, don’t give up. Just keep on giving and giving, because the world needs your love and your light.”
Cole Escola, best actor in a leading role in a play for Oh, Mary: “Wow. Julie Harris has a Tony for playing Mary Todd Lincoln, Sorry.I want to thank the other nominees, George and John and Harry and Daniel and Louie. 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.”
Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, playwright of Purpose, which won Best Play: ” I encourage everyone to please support their local theaters. A lot of great stuff happens in New York, but a lot more happens out in the region. So use your next commercial break to Google a local theater near you, or have a very difficult conversation with your family members.”
Michael Arden best director for a musical Maybe Happy Ending: “Go to the theater, whether Broadway or a high school production. We need you”
Paul Tazewell, best costume design for a musical for Death Becomes Her: “This Black, queer little boy in Akron, Ohio, had no idea that in 2025 he would have the year that he had [ winning the Academy Award for costume design for “Wicked” and now the Tony Award.] Looking out of this audience, I have dressed so many of you out there, and I have worked with the rest of you out there in creating amazing worlds and telling wonderful stories, and it is a huge privilege to be a meaningful part of this Broadway community.”
Celia Keenan-Bolger, Isabelle Stevenson humanitarian Tony Award: “We are living theough big challenging times where any act of resistance or kindness or engagement can feel insufficient . In honoring me, you’re sending a message that the work of community care matters. The writer Clarissa Pinkola Estés says ours is not the task of fixing the entire world all at once, but of stretching out to mend the part of the world that is within our reach.”
Hue Park, co-songwriter and co-librettist of Maybe Happy Ending, which won best musical: “By the way, I’m still single.”
The Week in OTHER Theater Awards
2025 Off Broadway Alliance Award Winners
Theatre World Award Winners reveal what it takes
The Week in Reviews
In the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, Orpheus tries to retrieve Eurydice from the underworld, but can’t help looking back at his wife, and so loses her forever. Sarah Ruhl is also looking back at “Eurydice,” in a revival at Signature Theater of a play she wrote two decades ago. In doing so, she largely loses me. o be fair, the play attempts something intriguing, shifting the perspective from Orpheus to Eurydice and reworking the central relationship to be the one between Eurydice and her father…There are moments that recall the inventiveness and heart of the many plays Ruhl has written since…
Tribeca Festival: Marlee Matlin: Not Alone Anymore
Marlee Matlin became the first Deaf actor to win an Academy Award, at age 21, for her role in “Children of a Lesser God.” Thirty-five years later, another Deaf actor named Troy Kotsur, Matlin’s co-star in the 2021 Oscar-winning “CODA,” became the second – hence the subtitle in “Marlee Matlin: Not Alone Anymore.” The documentary film, screening at the Tribeca Festival before opening in cinemas, chronicles the actress’s life and career in a way that is novel for a mainstream film (but shouldn’t be): Her friends, family and associates communicate to the camera in a combination of American Sign Language and English – and, unlike other films that feature Deaf people (including “CODA”), everything is subtitled, including the English.
In her film debut, director Shoshannah Stern, who is herself a Deaf actress, is clearly attempting to use Matlin’s singular story as a way to focus attention on Deaf performers as a whole, and, by extension, all Deaf people. But, thanks to a kind of cultural myopia, the film omits a significant part of that bigger picture.
The Week in Other Theater News
There are now nine shows in the 2025-2026 Broadway season with precise dates and venues . Four of them were announced last week: Dog Day Afternoon, a new play by Stephen Adly Guirgis (Between Riverside and Crazy) based on the 1975 Al Pacino movie about a bank robbery gone, wrong, is coming to Broadway in Spring 2026 starring Jon Bernthal & Ebon Moss-Bachrach (both of The Bear) The other three previously on NY stages: Marjorie Prime, a 2015 play about an elderly woman in the near future whose grown children give her a robot caregiver, and Becky Shaw, a 2008 comedy about a blind date spiraling spectacularly off the rail, both at Second Stage’s Hayes Theater, and a third run of Beetlejuice, at the Palace.
A newly announced Broadway-bound musical without precise dates or venues: Polly: The Musical, based on the 1989 Disney television movie and novel by Eleanor H. Porter about a plucky orphan with a relentless sense of optimism, who is forced to contend with negativity and conflict in a small town in Alabama in the 1950s. Debbie Allen, who helmed the original 1989 film, will direct and choreograph the musical.
The van containing the control room that live-streamed the penultimate performance of “Good Night, and Good Luck” to CNN and Max. That play, and Othello, closed on Sunday — the two highest-grossing new shows of the season.
Broadway’s marquees will dim on Tuesday, June 10 at 6:45PM ET to honor: Marshall Brickman, Richard Chamberlain, William Finn, Athol Fugard, Helen Gallagher, Gene Hackman, Quincy Jones, Linda Lavin, Merle Louise, Ken Page, Joan Plowright, Tony Roberts, Charles Strouse and Lynne Taylor-Corbett
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.
Buena Vista Social Club
Dead Outlaw
Death Becomes Her
Floyd Collins
Gypsy
Just in Time (Jonathan Groff ws nominated, not the musical)
Maybe Happy Ending, which won Best Musical
Pirates! The Penzance Musical
Real Women Have Curves (nominated for best original score and featured actress)
Sunset Blvd., which won Best Musical Revival
