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 on Sunday, 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 had some verve, and honored some strong work. But it was undeniably pandemic-tinted. Aaron Tveit was the lone nominee for best leading actor in a musical. (He won.) Only three awards were handed out on TV. (The rest came in a ceremony 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 pre-COVID levels. TKTS is open for business, and tourists are flocking once more: 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 8 p.m. ET.
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.
Two more musicals shined almost as bright in the nomination process. “MJ,” about Michael Jackson — the King of Pop, that is — and the dazzlingly intricate “Paradise Square,” set in 19th-century Manhattan, both picked up 10 nominations.
If there is a dark-horse contender for the best new musical, it may be “Six.” The 80-minute, high-octane take on the six spouses of King Henry VIII is built like a concert, with sparse plotting and set design, arcade-style lighting and some of the season’s most memorable songs. It picked up eight nominations.
A scalding-hot ticket, the irreverent “Six” hardly needs a Tony nod to keep packing houses. Lucy Moss and Toby Marlow created the show in 2017 during their senior year at Cambridge University and received a nomination for best original score. Performances are electric, perhaps buoyed by pent-up pandemic excitement.
“I remember the first preview back after the shutdown — that was the most enthusiastic audience,” said Moss, who also picked up a Tony nomination for co-directing the production. “It was like they gave a standing ovation every number.”
Tonys watchers can expect performances Sunday from “Six,” as well as “A Strange Loop,” “Paradise Square,” “MJ,” and a production of “Company,” which picked up nine nominations and is viewed as a prohibitive favorite in the best musical revival category.
At the same time, the Tonys will shower love on a season of well-crafted plays.
“The Lehman Trilogy,” an epic take on the rise and fall of Lehman Brothers, seems to sit in the driver’s seat for best new play. But it will have to beat out the gripping “Skeleton Crew,” about a distressed Detroit auto plant during the Great Recession, and the dark and surprising mystery “Hangmen.”
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