78th Annual Tony Awards (American Theatre Wing, League of Broadway, White Cherry Entertainment, CBS-TV, aired June 8, 2025)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Sunday, June 8) my husband Charles and I watched the 78th annual Tony Awards from 5 to about 8:15 p.m. It was the usual lumbering spectacle awards shows generally are, though it did feature some nice performances of songs from the nominated Broadway musicals. The most interesting aspect of the show was the sheer amount of gender-bending involved. Sarah Snook won for Best Performance by a Leading Actress in a Play for The Picture of Dorian Gray, an adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s novel in which she literally plays all the parts. Cole Escola (whom we’d seen on Stephen Colbert’s show and who considers themselves “non-binary” and thereby insists on plural pronouns), who stars in a one-person show they wrote called Oh, Mary! (a radical re-interpretation of the Lincoln assassination that posits that losing that dorky husband of hers was actually the best thing that could have happened to Mary Todd Lincoln, who in Escola’s script recovers and becomes a cabaret entertainer), lost for Best Play to Purpose but won for Best Actor in a Leading Role in a Play, and their director, Sam Pinkleton, also won. My favorite winner was Jak Malone, one of the four performers in Operation Mincemeat, an adaptation of the story told in Ewen Montagu’s 1953 book The Man Who Never Was and Ronald Neame’s 1956 film of that title. It was a true story from World War II about a British Secret Service operation to fool the Germans about where the Allied invasion of Italy would take place. It was actually planned for Sicily but the idea was to make the Germans think it was going to be on Sardinia, and in order to do that MI-5 wrote up a set of fake plans for a Sardinia invasion and planted them on a corpse which they released off the coast of Spain where a known German agent was operating. Operation Mincemeat uses a four-person cast, each playing multiple roles, and Malone’s principal role is as a woman named Hester Leggatt who uses her own memory of having lost a boyfriend during World War I to write a phony letter ostensibly from the mystery man’s fiancée.

In their acceptance speech, Malone (who mostly presented as a male but wore bright red lipstick) praised the play and the theatre community in general for its openness to new concepts of gender that don’t fit the classic male/female binary. They also thanked their “partner” Jasmin. Indeed, there are so many Queer folk involved in the Broadway theatre (a tradition that began, according to Sam Stagg’s 1968 book The Brothers Shubert, with Lee Shubert, who deliberately hired only Gay men for his casts and crews because he didn’t want any younger, hunkier straight guys around competing with him in cruising the chorus girls) that when a husky, heavy-set Black playwright named Branden Jacobs-Jenkins won Best Writing of a Play for Purpose (which is essentially Succession with Black people: it’s the story of a retired minister and civil-rights activist and his family), it was no particular surprise that he thanked his husband. The real surprise came when Jonathan Spector won for Best Revival of a Play for Eureka Day (a story about an outbreak of measles at a progressive private day school in Berkeley and the resistance of several parents to vaccination) and came off as such a screaming queen it was startling when he thanked his wife and their two children! There was a similar surprise late in the show when Darren Criss, winner for Best Actor in a Leading Role in a Musical for Maybe Happy Ending – a quirky show about two robots who fall in love even though both of them are nearing the ends of their shelf lives and are about to die when their batteries run down – also thanked his wife and their kids when he was just dripping with Gay-style male hunkiness. Maybe Happy Ending also won the award for Best Musical (which disappointed me; I was hoping it would be Operation Mincemeat), though the song Criss and his female lead, Helen J. Shen, performed on the show was an awfully twee number about hunting down fireflies together. (I was amused by how many presenters who referred to the show got its title wrong and said Maybe Happy Endings, plural.)

The show was hosted by Cynthia Erivo, a particular favorite of mine, and she got two big numbers, one at the beginning called “Sometimes All You Need Is a Song” and one at the end which was a bizarre rewrite of “And I Am Telling You I’m Not Going,” Effie’s big number from the musical Dreamgirls, rewritten as “And I Am Telling You I Am Going.” Megan Hilty from the cast of Death Becomes Her, a musical based on a 1992 film by Robert Zemeckis whose imdb.com synopsis, “When a fading actress learns of an immortality treatment, she sees it as a way to outdo her long-time rival,” makes it sound like a modern-dress version of Carel Kapek’s The Makropulos Case and Leos Janacek’s opera based on it, sang a song from it. Originally it appeared to be titled, “Everything I Do, I Do It for the Games,” only as the song wound on I started to hear the last word as “gains,” and then I finally realized it was, “I Do It For the Gays.” The Wikipedia page on the show says the actual title is “For the Gaze,” but the Queer impression was only reinforced by all the hot, hunky, muscular chorus boys cavorting behind her! Natalie Venetia Balcon, who won Best Actress In a Featured Role in a Musical for Buena Vista Social Club, did a Spanish-language number from the show and managed to look and sound like a part-Cuban Ella Fitzgerald. Jonathan Groff from Just in Time, a one-person bio-musical about Bobby Darin, sang a medley of three Darin songs: “Mack the Knife,” “That’s All” (one of the most aggravating records Darin ever made; he took a song written as a plaintive ballad, and sung that way superbly by Nat “King” Cole, and turned it into a bouncy uptempo nightclub number), and “Once in a Lifetime.” Then Nicole Scherzinger came on and did “As If We Never Said Goodbye” from Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Sunset Boulevard (which won for Best Revival of a Musical and scored Tonys for Scherzinger and its director, Jamie Lloyd, who’s shaved his head and had the whole head covered in tattoos; Charles said that after he heard Lloyd lived in London the bizarre extent of his body art seemed a little more understandable); she did it stunningly, and whatever else you say about Andrew Lloyd Webber, he knows how to write a great power ballad for a woman.

A few awards later and it was time for the next musical number, done by David Hyde Pierce and the cast of something called Pirates: The Penzance Musical, a pointless rewrite of Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Pirates of Penzance taking place in 19th century New Orleans and featuring a chorus of washboards. (Why?) Then came the Maybe Happy Ending duet and, after that, a nice medley of songs from the revival musical Floyd Collins, based on the same story of a man trapped by a cave-in and the media circus it became as Billy Wilder’s 1951 masterpiece Ace in the Hole. The next number up was a 10th anniversary celebration of the play Hamilton, Lin-Manuel Miranda’s by-now legendary retelling of the American Revolution in general and Alexander Hamilton’s life in particular through rap (or “hip-hop”) music. That brought back memories of the year that one of the Grammy Awards shows featured a live telecast of the opening number of Hamilton, which momentarily convinced me that rap can actually be beautiful, moving, and communicate an artistic message – and then the very next number was a typical piece of garbage by Kendrick Lamar that reminded me of what a cesspool of offal rap usually is. (I got even angrier the next day when the Los Angeles Times reviewer praised Lamar’s piece of shit as the best number on the program, and when Lamar won a Pulitzer Prize for music I got even more outraged and said, “They wouldn’t give it to Duke Ellington, but they gave it to Kendrick F***ing Lamar.”) After that Erivo and Sara Bareilles, who seemed headed for Britney Spears’s sort of career until Broadway saved her and gave her a chance to write truly great songs, did the big number “Tomorrow” from Annie as accompaniment to the “In Memoriam” segment honoring those theatre talents who passed away in 2024. (Charles thought that was a strange song choice because if you’re dead, then you have no more tomorrows.) One of the quirkier numbers was by the cast of Dead Outlaw, based on a real incident in which the people running a California Wild West museum discovered in 1976 that an object they’d been exhibiting as just a plaster replica was in fact the mummified remains of a real-life outlaw who’d died in Oklahoma in 1913. The songs were a ballad called “I’m Here” and an all-out country stomper called “And So Are You” (dead, it meant).

The most disappointing number of the night was, surprisingly, Audra McDonald’s performance of “Rose’s Turn” from the musical Gypsy, composed by Jule Styne with lyrics by Stephen Sondheim from 1958 and a vehicle for Ethel Merman. The reason this was such a big surprise – and not at all a positive one – was not only that McDonald is usually such a reliable performer but Charles and I had seen her do another song from Gypsy, “Everything’s Coming Up Roses,” on Stephen Colbert’s show and do it quite well. Not “Rose’s Turn,” though; she took this brilliant theatrical tour de force and mangled it, emphasizing all the wrong things. My reference is the 1962 film version with Rosalind Russell as Rose; though she may have been doubled by Lisa Kirk for all or much of the vocal (albeit when I saw Russell at the 1970 San Francisco Film Festival she insisted that all the singing was hers), she was still a lot better than McDonald. Midway through her performance I rather grimly joked to Charles, “Just because Ethel Merman introduced this song, that does not mean you have to sing it as badly as she did!” The best number of the evening was “Born to Lead,” the song that opens Operation Mincemeat, which is about the upper-class status of the MI-5 officials who are planning the deception at the root of the story. To my mind (and Charles’s, too), it had far more of both the letter and the spirit of Gilbert and Sullivan than the weird farrago of nonsense performed earlier as Pirates: The Penzance Musical. And it was followed by a song almost as strong: “Jugglin’,” from a show called Real Women Have Curves, about the multiple jobs Latinas in New York City have to juggle to support themselves. The heroine of Real Women Have Curves is a high-school student who’s training to become a journalist but still has to help out in her mom’s sewing shop.

Though there were a few veiled political comments in this year’s Tony Awards, mostly vague references to America’s unsettled and divided political climate, the Tony Awards definitely declared themselves part of the opposition by the sheer number of Queer people who won awards and nominations, as well as the multiplicity of genders involved in the casting of the various shows. If anything, it was a refutation of the whole absurd idea President Trump has tried to proclaim by executive order that there are only two genders, male and female, and your biological sex at birth inflexibly determines which one you are. And the extent to which Trump and the theatre community are at odds is only heightened by the fact that at least two of the shows represented, Hamilton and Eureka Day, canceled their engagements at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. once Trump took personal charge of its programming and fired all the Democrats on the Kennedy Center board.