Tonys to show that Broadway is back
NEW YORK >> This is how Broadway is supposed to be.
As Midtown returns to its disorderly pre-pandemic glory — with Times Square once more a seething sea of tourists, food carts and street performers — the theater world plans to celebrate at the 75th annual Tony Awards today, feting the first full Broadway season since the COVID-19 pandemic started two years ago.
The awards follow a scaled-down fall Tonys show honoring the season cut short in March 2020. That night, Aaron Tveit was the lone nominee for best leading actor in a musical and only three awards were handed out on TV. (The rest were streamed online.)
The Tonys this weekend will look more like how you remember them: arriving in the spring, with a red carpet rolling toward a familiar destination: Radio City Music Hall.
The show arrives as Broadway attendance and Times Square foot traffic nudge back toward preCOVID levels. On May 29, some 404,000 people walked through Times Square, a 13% increase from 2019, according to the Times Square Alliance.
Ariana DeBose, a star from the original cast of “Hamilton” and a Tony nominee in 2018 for “Summer: The Donna Summer Musical,” will host the three-hour Tonys ceremony on CBS beginning at 5 p.m.
Broadway's biggest fans can tune in an hour early for streaming content on Paramount+, with two Emmy winners, Darren Criss and Julianne Hough, hosting. Some awards will be dished out during the web-only hour, according to the Tonys.
The slate of nominees, announced last month, emerged from a field of 34 shows that battled through meddlesome virus variants.
Leading the field with 11 nominations is “A Strange Loop,” a musical meta exposition on Broadway and its culture through the perspective of a Black, gay usher who aspires to write a musical. Michael R. Jackson won a Pulitzer for the work, and the production is seen as the favorite to win best new musical.
“MJ,” about Michael Jackson, and the dazzlingly intricate “Paradise Square,” both picked up 10 nominations.