What to Know About the 2021 Tony Awards
After a year of lockdown, the star contenders of the 2019-2020 Broadway season are finally reaping their rewards.
After a year-long shutdown, a few reschedules, and an abbreviated season, the Tony Awards are back celebrating the best of theatre albeit with a few untraditional peccadillos.
The award show, set to air Sunday, September 26, from the Winter Garden Theatre in New York will be presented in two parts. The first, hosted by six-time Tony winner Audra McDonald on Paramount + starts at 7 p.m. ET and will resemble a traditional award show presenting a majority of the Tony Awards. Following this two-hour presentation, CBS is airing the Tony Awards Present: Broadway's Back! concert featuring a host of Broadway legends crooning the classics, and the presentation of Best Play, Best Revival, and Best Musical.
Due to the May 2020 shutdown, the awards are honoring the 2019-2020 season, with stand-out nominees such as Tina: The Tina Turner Musical, Moulin Rouge! and Jagged Little Pill, the latter of which snagged 15 nominations.
Celebrity-favorite Jagged Little Pill, which utilizes music from Alanis Morissette’s musical catalog, leads the pack with this season's most nominations. Its runner-up, Moulin Rouge!, adapted from the 2001 Baz Luhrmann film, carries 14 nominations, including a Best Leading Actor in a Musical Category nomination for Aaron Tveit who's competing against himself and himself only. (Though, in spite of being the sole nominee, Tveit still must earn 60 percent of the casted ballots to take home the prize.)
Slave Play, an eccentric and, at the time, contentious drama scored a historic 12 nominations. The frontrunner for Best New Play, Slave Play has since cemented writer Jeremy O’Harris’ début as a cultural power player following a signing deal from HBO.
But this is not your average Tony Awards. Repetitious nominations and exclusions are the norm for this season’s nominees. Due to an unprecedentedly bizarre season, only four new musicals, four revivals, and ten new plays were eligible for nomination—a far cry from the 34 shows eligible from the previous season. Best New Score, for instance, features only original work from the season’s plays, as the season’s only eligible musical contender, The Lightning Thief: The Percy Jackson Musical, was met with critical repulsion. While Best Musical Revival was eliminated entirely, as the season’s only revival West Side Story was deliberately released one day after the eligibility cut-off.
Despite the idiosyncrasies of this year's nominees, performances from the year's top musicals and the slate of Broadway legends joining Hamilton's Leslie Odom Jr. during Tony Awards Present: Broadway's Back! will provide a spectacle that all of us theatre-aficionados have been missing.
