NEW YORK — Joshua Henry had been nominated before. So had Shoshana Bean, and so had Caissie Levy. Broadway had put all three of them in the room, given them the categories, placed the statuettes nearby — and then, for years, handed them to someone else. Sunday night at Radio City Music Hall, the 79th annual Tony Awards settled the debt on all three at once.
Schmigadoon! won Best Musical, and Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman swept six awards to lead the night. But the ceremony’s emotional weight landed somewhere else entirely: on a generation of Broadway performers whose careers had been measured, quietly, by what they hadn’t yet won. Henry, in the lead role of Coalhouse Walker Jr. in Ragtime, took Best Actor in a Leading Role in a Musical. Levy, his co-star as Mother, won Best Actress. And Bean, playing Lucy Emerson in the vampire spectacle The Lost Boys, claimed Best Featured Actress in a Musical — her first Tony after a career spanning two decades and multiple celebrated runs on the Great White Way.
“It is an honor to play this role,” Henry told the Radio City audience after accepting the award, his speech landing somewhere between gratitude and manifesto. “A Black musician whose art led him to his love and to his dream — and even in the face of tragedy he found a way to be heard. Every artist in this room, every artist at home: Fight. Fight to be heard.”
The night also made history through Qween Jean, the costume designer for Cats: The Jellicle Ball, who became the first transgender Tony Award winner in the ceremony’s history. The win came as part of a three-trophy haul for the radically reimagined revival, which also claimed Best Direction of a Musical for Zhailon Levingston and Bill Rauch, and Best Choreography for Omari Wiles and Arturo Lyons.
Schmigadoon! — a comedic, affectionate send-up of golden age musicals adapted from the Apple TV+ streaming series — won four awards in total, including Best Book and Best Original Score, both for creator Cinco Paul. Lorne Michaels, the Saturday Night Live producer who backed the project, accepted the Best Musical trophy with characteristic understatement. His co-producer Christine Schwarzman offered the evening’s most unexpected punchline: she thanked Apple TV+ for canceling the show’s third season. “Without that,” Schwarzman said, “we couldn’t have brought it to Broadway.”
The Lost Boys, the punk-rock adaptation of the 1987 vampire film that entered the night tied with Schmigadoon! at 12 nominations each, did not take the top prize, but it was hardly a consolation night. In addition to Bean’s win, Ali Louis Bourzgui won Best Featured Actor in a Musical, while Dane Laffrey’s three-story set — which had cast members falling into pits, riding elevators, and flying through the air — claimed Best Scenic Design of a Musical. Jen Schriever and director Michael Arden took Best Lighting Design of a Musical, a category Arden was also nominated in for directing.
Ragtime, the Lincoln Center Theater revival of the sweeping historical epic that had never won the top prize when it first ran in 1998, added Best Revival of a Musical to its haul alongside Henry and Levy’s acting awards and a fourth win for choreographer Ellenore Scott. The evening marked the first time in 28 years that a musical revival claimed both lead performance prizes in the same year.
Death of a Salesman, the Joe Mantello-directed revival, dominated the evening’s play categories. Joe Mantello won Best Direction of a Play. Laurie Metcalf took Best Featured Actress in a Play. Chloe Lamford won for scenic design. Jack Knowles for lighting. Mikaal Sulaiman for sound. John Lithgow, playing the title role, won Best Actor in a Leading Role in a Play. Six awards in all — the night’s highest total for a single production, and arguably its most complete sweep.
Best Play went to Liberation by Bess Wohl, making Wohl only the fourth woman in Tony Awards history to claim that prize. Lesley Manville, reprising her Olivier Award-winning performance in Robert Icke’s Oedipus, won Best Actress in a Leading Role in a Play — the same role for which she was honored in London. Alden Ehrenreich won Best Featured Actor in a Play for the dark comedy Becky Shaw.
The preshow, hosted by Laura Benanti and Tituss Burgess, dispensed the craft categories before Pink took the stage to host the main broadcast on CBS and Paramount+. The ceremony included performances celebrating anniversaries of The Book of Mormon, Chicago, and A Chorus Line. What it also included, though less advertised, was a reckoning: a Broadway season in which parody thrived, revivals outran their originals in prestige, and the performers who had waited the longest finally stopped waiting.
What remains unresolved is what the night’s shape tells us about Broadway’s next chapter. A streaming show’s stage adaptation winning the top prize while the same streamer had canceled that show’s third season is not a story with a clean moral. Whether Schmigadoon!’s victory signals that Broadway is now the destination for IP too beloved to die on-screen, or simply that a well-crafted show is a well-crafted show regardless of its origin, is a question the industry will spend the better part of next season arguing about. For Bean, Henry, and Levy — and for Qween Jean — Sunday night did not feel like an argument. It felt like a long time coming.
