Latest in Tony Watch

Call them predictions, opinions or hopes, but here are my thoughts on this year’s Tony Awards races. As usual, the roster of nominees includes a mix of consensus categories (famous last words) and the up-for-grabs. Voting closes today, so the curtain is all but drawn on the campaigning and jockeying and strategizing…

Nearly 10 million people saw Camille A. Brown’s work one night last year. Let that sink in. On a single evening – Easter Sunday 2018 – Brown’s choreography for NBC’s Jesus Christ Superstar Live In Concert reached a number of viewers unimaginable in the dance, theater and concert halls of New York, and yet an…

Amber Gray had been simmering Off and Off Off Broadway for about a decade when, in 2016, she appeared to arrive fully-formed – to Broadway audiences, anyway – as some sort of next-generation diva, a new force in the world of musical theater, landing a knock-out performance as Countess Hélène Bezukhova in the Broadway…

In just five years, playwright, screenwriter and Oscar-nominated director (for Manchester by the Sea) Kenneth Lonergan has seen three of his earlier works – all originally staged Off Broadway – revived for Broadway, with 1996’s This Is Our Youth (the play that introduced Mark Ruffalo to New York audiences) kicking…

New Yorkers started hearing the buzz about Oklahoma! last year, as yet another production from the acclaimed St. Ann’s Warehouse in Dumbo, Brooklyn, began making its presence known. The Sexy Oklahoma! The Oklahoma! with blood and darkness, a hard slap at the very notion that making America great had something to do…

When this year’s Tony Award nominations were announced, Jeremy Pope became only the sixth person Tony history nominated twice in the same season. His performance in Tarell Alvin McCraney’s Choir Boy as Pharus, a bullied, gay prep school student whose singing talent is matched by a fierce determination, has Pope in the…

The “Guilty” that sends an innocent man to his death in Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird was just one of the powerful indictments that gave both the 1960 novel and its 1962 movie adaptation the ring of a clarion call, rebukes of injustices from the entrenched racism of the Deep South to the casual cruelty captured…

It might be a bit much to say that Beth Leavel’s roster of Broadway credits – The Drowsy Chaperone, Elf, Young Frankenstein, among many others – has been leading inexorably to the show for which she’s again been Tony nominated, but neither could anyone doubt that the The Prom is anything but a big, fluffy corsage…

This summer, The Boys In The Band will add a new chapter to its long life, this time as a Netflix movie. Back will be the camping, the fighting and laughing and crying, a portrait of friendship as both endurance test and saving grace that Mart Crowley got so right more than a half-century ago. Opening Off Broadway in…

Rachel Chavkin has been here before. Under her direction, Hadestown, Anaïs Mitchell’s gorgeous musical that sets the mythical tales of Orpheus, Eurydice, Hades and Persephone in – above ground – a stylized New Orleans and – below ground – a coal-mining hellscape – has garnered 14 Tony Award nominations. That’s the…

Laurie Metcalf’s Hillary Clinton might or might not be your Hillary Clinton. It certainly isn’t the historical Hillary Clinton, as playwright Lucas Hnath so intriguingly writes in the early moments of Broadway’s Hillary and Clinton. Think alternate universe, some other dimension where a Hillary might have…

Celia Keenan-Bolger was nominated for her first Tony Award in 2005 (The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee), her second in 2012 (Peter and the Starcatcher) her third in 2014 (The Glass Menagerie) and her fourth just weeks ago. As Scout Finch in Aaron Sorkin’s adaptation of Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird…