Tony Awards 2024
Stereophonic, The Outsiders, Suffs and more—the best of Broadway
The Tony Awards are for excellence in Broadway Theatre (the forty-one professional theatres, each with 500 or more seats, in the Theater District on the very long Broadway road in Manhattan, New York)—presented 16 Jun at the David H. Koch Theater (part of the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts complex) in New York
These have been going since 1947 and are presented by the American Theatre Wing and The Broadway League at an annual ceremony in Midtown Manhattan. The award is for productions in the previous season, in this case the 2023-2024 Broadway, encompassing plays that opened between 28 Apr 2023 and 25 Apr 2024.
They’re named after Antoinette Perry, an American actress, director and co-founder of the American Theatre Wing, who died in 1946 at the age of fifty-eight. A rotating committee of about fifty theatre professionals nominates candidates, and the Tony Award voters from various professional theatre-related societies (numbering about 830) vote for the winners. There are currently twenty-six categories including actor and actress categories, costume, lighting and sound design, as well as the best play and musical categories.
Admittedly, you have to go to New York to see these—unless or until they wind up at your local village hall. Outside of that, you’ll find film adaptations, books and albums below, and one day some of these plays may wander close to your neighbourhood, albeit with different performers. Culture is all around us….
Selected Results
Best Play: Stereophonic by David Adjmi, which, according to the Tony Awards site, “mines the agony and the ecstasy of creation as it zooms in on a music studio in 1976, where an up-and-coming rock band finds itself on the cusp of superstardom”. It received thirteen nominations (a record) and five awards and is playing through to 5 Jan at the Golden Theatre (New York).
Best Musical: The Outsiders, with music and lyrics by Jonathan Clay and Zach Chance (from the folk rock band Jamestown Revival) and Justin Levine, with book by Adam Rapp and Justin Levine. This is based on the 1967 book of the same name by S. E. Hinton, which was made into a film by Francis Ford Coppola in 1983 starring many up-and-coming actors such as Patrick Swayze, Tom Cruise, Matt Dillon, Rob Lowe and Emilio Estevez. Told through the eyes of a fourteen-year-old boy, the play’s set in Tulsa, Oklahoma in the 1960s and follows the conflict between two rival gangs: the working-class "Greasers" and the upper-middle-class "Socs".
Best Book of a Musical: Suffs by Shaina Taub, about the suffragette movement in the lead-up to the ratification of the nineteenth amendment to the United States constitution in 1920 that gave women the right to vote. The best book of a musical refers to the text in a musical separate from the composed music and is known as the libretto—it’s usually won by the best musical, but not this year.
Best Revival of a Play: Appropriate by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, first performed in 2013, described as a darkly comic family drama about “the dysfunctional Lafayette family as they return to a decaying plantation mansion in Arkansas to battle over their recently deceased father's inheritance”.
Best Revival of a Musical: Merrily We Roll Along, with music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim, first performed in 1981 and based on a 1934 play. It concerns a famous songwriter and “moving backwards across 20 years, details his rise from a penniless dreamy-eyed composer to a wealthy film-producing sell-out, and what he lost to get there”. A film adaptation is in progress.
Best Original Score: Suffs by Shaina Taub. You can get the album on Amazon, here, or find various songs from the musical on YouTube by searching for “Suffs Shaina Taub”, for example, this quick 60-second snippet. I like it!
Wikipedia provides details of the winners and nominees for Best Musical and Best Play (and other categories if you follow the links at the Wikipedia Tony Awards page), and the Winners page on the Tonys site provides a search facility and a wealth of information about the plays.
Next up are the Yoto Carnegies for children’s fiction (on 20 Jun), the TRIC Awards (Television and Radio Industries Club) for British TV and radio (25 Jun) and the CWA dagger awards for UK-published crime books (4 Jul). I’m not too far behind!