The day after the 79th Tony Awards, Sam Biondolillo had a flight to catch back to New London, Connecticut, where he teaches a summer theater workshop at Connecticut College. He also had a Tony, won the night before as a producer on Best Musical Schmigadoon, in a carry-on. The combination is unusual enough that local affiliates spent the weekend lining up to talk to him.
Biondolillo, a visiting assistant professor of theater who has been teaching at Connecticut College since 2023, joined the Schmigadoon producing team in 2024 when the Cinco Paul and Ken Daurio Apple TV+ musical began its move to Broadway. He sat fifth-row centre at Radio City Music Hall on Sunday, June 7 — by his own description “underdressed by Broadway standards” — and made the trip onstage with the rest of the producing team when Christine Schwarzman and Lorne Michaels accepted the Best Musical statuette.
“You go in pretending you have not thought about what you would say,” Biondolillo told News 12 Connecticut at his New London office on Tuesday. “And then it is your name being read out and you realise the only person you actually need to call is your mother.” The Tony, by Wednesday, was on a shelf above his desk between a row of dog-eared theater anthologies and a coffee mug from the college bookstore.
Schmigadoon, the film-musical satire that began as an Apple TV+ series in 2021, made its Broadway transfer official in March 2025 after years of workshop development at the Williamstown Theatre Festival and the Old Globe in San Diego. The Broadway production opened at the Shubert Theatre in April 2025 and was, almost immediately, the season’s surprise. Its Best Musical Tony win on June 7 made it the first show built on an Apple TV+ original property to win the category, beating Cats: The Jellicle Ball and Liberation in a race the Broadway press had called the closest in a decade.
Biondolillo’s path into the producing team is the kind of resume Broadway producing has not historically encouraged. He grew up in Stonington, Connecticut. He has an undergraduate degree from Wesleyan and an MFA in theater management from Yale. He spent the better part of 2018 to 2022 as the lighting designer on a series of mid-budget musicals, mostly out of town. The Schmigadoon producers brought him in for the Williamstown workshop because they needed someone who could light a parodic 1940s Broadway tableau without making it look like an SNL set, and kept him on through the transfer.
The Connecticut College half of the resume is the part the rest of the producing team finds extraordinary. The school, a 1,800-student liberal-arts institution on the Thames River, has had a strong theater department for decades but is not a place that typically produces Broadway producers. Biondolillo teaches a 100-level introduction to dramatic structure each fall, a 300-level lighting-design seminar each spring, and a summer workshop the rest of the year. He has, by the college’s count, taught approximately 240 students since 2023. Three of them attended the Tony Awards as his guests.
The Connecticut local press has spent the week treating the win as a college-town victory. NBC Connecticut led their Tuesday newscast with the story. The Day, the New London daily, ran a Wednesday feature in which Biondolillo’s department chair, Lawrence Vincent, called the Tony “the kind of credential that a tenure committee cannot ignore.” Biondolillo, asked on Tuesday whether he would now be pursuing a tenure-track conversion, said only that he intended to teach the summer workshop as scheduled.
His next professional project is already booked. Biondolillo will make his West End producing debut later this year on Allegra, a new comedy musical by Stephanie J. Block and James Lapine that opens at London’s Garrick Theatre in November. He has also signed on as a co-producer on the planned Broadway revival of Sondheim’s Merrily We Roll Along, which is scheduled for the 2026-27 season. The Williamstown workshop where he found Schmigadoon has, in the meantime, asked him to come back as the festival’s interim associate producer next summer.
The Tony itself, for now, is staying in New London. “I considered taking it back to Williamstown,” Biondolillo told News 12. “My students would like to see it.” The Schmigadoon Broadway production, meanwhile, has extended its open-ended run at the Shubert through at least September 2027, with talks underway for a North American tour to begin in spring 2028. The same producing team — which also includes Qween Jean, who became the first openly trans person to win a Tony on the same night — will run the tour. Biondolillo will, on paper, be responsible for the lighting brief.
The Connecticut College summer workshop he teaches starts Monday. Twelve students. The Tony will be in the room.
