The 75th annual Tony Awards ceremony is Sunday night, honoring the best of Broadway during the 2021-2022 season. The show will air live across the county from Radio City Music Hall at 8 p.m. ET/5 p.m. PT on CBS. The Tonys will also be streamed live on Paramount+, which is also home to an exclusive one-hour pre-show beginning at 7 p.m. ET/4 p.m. PT.
Ariana DeBose, who recently won the Best Supporting Actress Oscar for playing Anita in Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story, hosts the Tony Awards. She is a Tony nominee herself, scoring a nod in 2018 for Best Featured Actress in Summer: The Donna Summer Musical. Darren Criss and Julianne Hough are hosting the Paramount+ pre-show, titled The Tony Awards: Act One. The hour-long special includes performances and presentations of technical awards.
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As with past Tonys broadcasts, the ceremony will be jam-packed with performances from the Tony-nominated musicals. The companies from A Strange Loop, Company, Girl from the North Country, MJ, Mr. Saturday Night, The Music Man, Paradise Square, and SIX will take the stage. Bernadette Peters, Billy Porter, the New York City Gay Men’s Chorus, and the original Spring Awakening cast will perform as well. There will also be a star-studded tribute to 75 years of Broadway and Tonys history.
Michael R. Jackson’s A Strange Loop is the most-nominated production with 11 nominations. The show focuses on Usher (Jaquel Spivey), a Black gay writer working on a musical about a Black gay writer working on a musical. Jackson wrote the music, lyrics, and book for the production, which has already won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. It was nominated for Best Musical, alongside MJ, Girl from the North Country, Mr. Saturday Night, Paradise Square, and SIX.
The Lehman Trilogy, written by Stefano Massini, is the most-nominated play. It was first performed in France in 2013 and is inspired by the Lehman Brothers during the 2008 financial crisis. The play is up for eight Tonys, including Best Play. The other nominees for Best Play are Clyde’s by Lynn Nottage; Hangmen by Martin McDonagh; Skeleton Crew by Dominique Morisseau; and The Minutes by Tracy Letts.
Caroline, or Change; Company; and The Music Man were nominated for Best Revival of a Musical. The Best Revival of a Play nominees are American Buffalo; For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When The Rainbow is Enuf; Take Me Out; How I Learned to Drive; and Trouble in Mind. Robert E. Wankel will receive the Isabell Stevenson Award, and Angela Lansbury will receive the Lifetime Achievement Tony Award.
Jennifer Hudson could make history Sunday night by joining the EGOT club. She is a producer on A Strange Loop, meaning she has a shot to win her first Tony. She already won an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress for Dreamgirls; a Daytime Emmy as an executive producer on Baby Yaga; and Grammys for The Color Purple and her self-titled debut album. Hudson is also performing Sunday night.
