Tony ‘s nominations show Broadway’ s return to the pandemic WGN Radio 720

NEW YORK (AP) – After a frantic end to the Broadway season and some nervous moments when the show struggled to reach qualifying amid fresh COVID-19 outbreaks, Tony Award nominations are finally approaching.

Tony Award winner Adrien Warren and three-time nominee Joshua Henry were to help uncover a list of 26 categories on Monday morning on Tony’s YouTube channel.

The season – with a whopping 34 new productions – represents a complete return to the cinema after nearly two years of shutdown due to the pandemic. It is also marked by a wave of plays by black playwrights that reflect the impact on Broadway of the world race talk after the assassination of George Floyd in 2020.

Potential shows eligible for the nomination are very diverse: from the revival of David Mamet to the Paula Vogel show. There are Golden Age classics like “Funny Girl” and “The Music Man,” and very relevant records like “Thoughts of a Colored Man” and “Pass Over”. There’s Stephen Sondheim’s “Company” with gender reassignment and a show in honor of Michael Jackson.

One of the most popular new musicals of the season is The Amazing Loop, a theatrical meta-journey by playwright Michael R. Jackson, a melodic show about a black gay man who writes a show about a black gay man. It’s a bold job that will baffle Tony’s nominees, delighting her with freshness and sincerity, but perhaps worrying about her commercial viability outside of New York.

Leading potential contenders for the best new musical crown include “Six,” adjusting the feminist view of the six wives of Henry VIII of England, and “Girl From the North Country,” which uses Bob Dylan’s songs to create a history of depression. in the Midwest.

There is also “Mrs. Doubtfire ”, based on a Robin Williams film about an actor who pretends to be a gorgeous child, a Scottish nanny to spend time with after divorce, and“ MJ ”, a bio-musical king of pop, filled with his biggest hits, including including “ABC”, “Black or White”, “Bad”, “Billie Jean”, “Off the Wall”, “Thriller” and “I’ll Be There”.

The best new plays may include two about economics – “Skeleton Crew”, a play by Dominique Mariso about the uncertainty of workers at a car factory in Detroit in 2008 and “The Lehman Trilogy”, a play by Stefano Massini, which covers 150 years about what led to the collapse of financial giant Lehman Brothers.

There’s also “Minutes,” a reflection of Tracy Lets ’small town council meeting that exposes stab wounds to the back, greed and great madness in American history, and Keenan Scott II’s“ Thoughts of a Colored Man ”about being black in America. , told with a series of vignettes in one day.

During the season, there were four musical revivals – “Funny Girl”, a classic American show starring Beanie Feldstein about the rise of comic book star Siegfeld, and “Music”, which celebrates the soul of America with a wanderer in the small town of Iowa and Iowa Satan Foster in the lead roles, each with two Tony and likely to be nominated this time.

Two other likely entries in the category of musical renaissance are “Caroline, Or Change,” a show by Tony Kushner and Janine Tesori that explores the racial, social, and economic divisions of America in Louisiana in 1963, and “Company,” a study of Sondheim’s conflicting feelings. about commitment, this time with the protagonist’s gender reassignment.

Strong contenders in the category of revival of the play are “Trouble in the Head”, Alice Childress’s play about a Broadway play that explores racial division in the 1950s, and “How I Learned to Ride”, a play of memory Vogel, awarded the Pulitzer Prize. survived sexual abuse as a child, starring two likely nominees: Mary-Louise Parker and David Morse.

Others include Take Me, a study by Richard Greenberg about what happens when a baseball superstar is gay, and “for colored girls who have thought about suicide / if the rainbow is enough,” a study of playwright Ntozake Shanga’s black femininity. There is also “Macbeth” with experimental theatrical sensitivity with Daniel Craig and Ruth Nega in the lead roles.

The best actor in the music race is likely to include a trio of veterans: Jackman in “Music,” Rob McClure in “Mrs. Doubtfire ”and Billy Crystal from“ Mr. Saturday Night ”- and two newcomers, Jacqueline Spivey from“ A Strange Loop ”and Miles Frost, who star in a lunar walk in“ MJ ”.

Probably the main nominees for the best female role in the musical are Sharon D. Clark from “Caroline, or Change”, Foster in “Music”, Katrina Lenk in “Company” and Joaquin Kalukanga for “Paradise Square”. Other features include Britney Mack (“Six”) and Mary Winningham (“Girl from the North”).

Voting could go down in history when L. Morgan Lee from “Strange Loop” takes the actress in the music nomination, making her the first openly transgender performer to be nominated for a Tony Award.

The expiration date for the 2021-2022 season has been postponed to May 4 after several Broadway shows were forced to cancel performances due to COVID-19 cases recorded among actors and film crew.

The Tony Awards ceremony will take place at Radio City Music Hall on June 12. The ceremony will be broadcast live on CBS and Paramount + starting at 8pm ET. The host will be movie and stage star Ariana Deboz.

This year, producers Tony made a point to tell the audience that they have a “strict policy without violence”, which clearly indicates the consequences when actor Will Smith hit comedian Chris Rock on the stage of the Oscars.

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Mark Kennedy is located at http://twitter.com/KennedyTwits