Every year when the Tony Award nominations are revealed, fans and industry members dive into Broadway research, tallying data, examining trends, and analyzing milestones to see if any history has been made.
This year, the banner is raised high for history-making women. For the first time in Tony Awards history, there are more women than men nominated in the Best Direction of a Musical and Best Direction of a Play categories. With seven out of the 10 directing nominees (across both categories) identifying as women, the record set in 2022 — when four out of 11 directing nominees were women — has been shattered.
The four out of the five Best Direction of a Musical Tony nominees who identify as women include: Merrily We Roll Along’s Maria Friedman, The Outsiders’s Danya Taymor, Suffs’s Leigh Silverman, and Water for Elephants’s Jessica Stone. Michael Greif, who was nominated for his direction of Hell’s Kitchen, rounds out the category.
For Best Direction of a Play, Lila Neugebauer was nominated for her direction of Appropriate, Whitney White for Jaja’s African Hair Braiding, and Anne Kauffman for Mary Jane. Purlie Victorious‘s Kenny Leon and Stereophonic’s Daniel Aukin are the two other nominees.
To honor this milestone, we are taking a closer look at these history-making directing nominees.
Maria Friedman, Merrily We Roll Along
Friedman has been considered a miracle worker, taking Stephen Sondheim and George Furth’s Merrily We Roll Along (which was considered a commercial failure when the original 1981 production only ran 13 performances after 44 previews) and transforming it into a hit Broadway musical. She first staged this production in 2012 at London’s Menier Chocolate Factory, and it was then transferred to London’s West End, earning her an Olivier nomination for her direction and the production the Olivier Award for Best Musical Revival.
Including Friedman’s nod, this Broadway revival received seven nominations: Best Revival of a Musical, Best Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role in a Musical (Jonathan Groff), Best Performance by an Actor in a Featured Role in a Musical (Daniel Radcliffe), Best Performance by a Featured Actress in a Musical (Lindsay Mendez), Best Sound Design of a Musical (Kai Harada), and Best Orchestrations (Jonathan Tunick).
One of the most frequent praises of this production is the chemistry of its leading trio: Groff, Mendez, and Radcliffe.
“You can’t fake [that chemistry],” Friedman said to Broadway Direct at the Meet the 2024 Tony Nominees press junket. “I took six months to cast. I knew who they were. I knew they’d bring humanity to the parts. You have to have humanity and a beating heart in this. It’s not about showing off; it’s about a much deeper requirement as an actor.”
Friedman brings a unique perspective to her role as director. She played Mary (the part now played by Mendez) in a 1992 U.K. production. In seeing the story from multiple points of view, she has dug into the timelessness of Sondheim.
“Sondheim deals with humanity and its frailty and being alive. He’s unashamed of humanity with its faults, he’s not pretending. He gives you a scaffolding to hang the humanity on.”
Leigh Silverman, Suffs
The meta feeling of directing Suffs, the Shaina Taub–written musical about the turn-of-the-century woman suffrage movement, is not lost on Silverman.
“We talk about how this show was made by a bunch of women who were working tirelessly and really hard to make a show about a bunch who were working tirelessly and really hard to get the right to vote,” Silverman says. “I think they’d be really excited [Suffs is nominated for Best Musical]. I don’t think they expected any recognition.”
Suffs doesn’t just spotlight women’s history — it’s making it. It’s the first Broadway musical with an all-female and nonbinary cast, lead creative, and producing team. In addition to Silverman’s nomination, the show was nominated for Best Musical, Best Original Score, Best Book of a Musical, Best Performance by a Featured Actress in a Musical (Nikki M. James), and Best Costume Design of a Musical (Paul Tazewell).
Silverman also helmed the Off-Broadway run of Suffs at The Public Theater in 2022. Since then, the creative team has continued to fine-tune the storytelling as the musical made its way to Broadway. In chronicling the movement, Silverman and the entire company hope to uplift the women who are often erased from history books — from the movement leaders like Alice Paul and Ida B. Wells to women who made their own impact in their micro-communities.
“It’s so much about our appreciation, trying to honor them, and also our enthusiasm and passion for telling this story,” Silverman says. “It’s really exciting to share who these women were, saying their names and telling their stories and making people care about them and what they went through.”
Jessica Stone, Water for Elephants
This season, Stone traded in the candy necklaces of Kimberly Akimbo for circus animals in Water for Elephants. Though she hadn’t read the book or seen the film when approached for the project, when she did read the Sara Gruen novel, Stone was struck by “how theatrical it could be and what the possibilities were.”
Those possibilities were translated into puppetry, sky-high aerial work, and captivating circus tricks. With music by PigPen Theatre Co. and a book by fellow Tony nominee Rick Elice, the creative team — “the merry band,” as Stone calls them — worked together to fully realize a theatrical three-ring circus.
“The idea of it being a memory play and someone taking stock of a very vibrant chapter of his life really unlocked some stuff for me,” she says. “With it set in a circus, all of that physical language of the circus can represent some of his most important memories. That immediately flew off the page for me.”
In addition to Stone’s and Elice’s nominations, the musical received five nominations: Best Musical, Best Choreography (Jesse Robb and Shana Carroll), Best Costume Design of a Musical (David Israel Reynoso), Best Lighting Design of a Musical (Bradley King and David Bengali), and Best Scenic Design of a Musical (Takeshi Kata).
Danya Taymor, The Outsiders
S.E. (Susan Eloise) Hinton’s original 1967 novel has inspired multiple adaptations — a 1983 Francis Ford Coppola–directed film, a Coppola-produced 1990 television series, and a stage play written by Christopher Sergel published the same year. Hinton was only 16 years old when she wrote The Outsiders, providing a level of authenticity and honesty that Taymor connected with and wanted to preserve in the musical stage adaptation.
“The voices of the characters are so authentic and unfiltered,” says Taymor. “What hit me was how she captured what being a teenager feels like. It felt so compelling to me, and it was something I wanted to and could bring to the stage.”
Though Taymor has a long list of directing credits in New York’s Off-Broadway scene, and was the director for the Broadway premiere of Antoinette Nwandu’s play Pass Over in 2021, this is the first time she has helmed a Broadway musical. To create chemistry among the cast, her approach connected back to Hinton’s authenticity, focusing on the actors establishing genuine bonds with each other.
“It’s an amazing ensemble of true triple threats across the board,” Taymore says. “We did long hour-and-a-half warmups that were physical and had a sense of play and partner work. We established consent and established touch in a way that felt actually safe. I wanted to give them tools to build trust, because that’s something you have to earn over time. We got to know each other over time as human beings and created work outside of the script, so when we went to stage things, we had camaraderie and energy between us that you can still feel onstage.”
The second most nominated musical of the season, The Outsiders earned 12 nominations overall. Beyond Taymor’s nod, the musical is represented in the categories of Best Musical, Best Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role in a Musical (Brody Grant), Best Performance by an Actor in a Featured Role in a Musical (Joshua Boone and Sky Lakota Lynch), Best Book (Adam Rapp and Justin Levine), Best Original Score (Jamestown Revival’s Jonathan Clay and Zach Chance and Justin Levine), Best Choreography (Rick Kuperman and Jeff Kuperman) Best Orchestrations (Justin Levine, Matt Hinkley, and Jamestown Revival’s Jonathan Clay and Zach Chance), Best Lighting Design of a Musical (Brian MacDevitt and Hana S. Kim), Best Scenic Design of a Musical (AMP featuring Tatiana Kahvegian), and Best Sound Design of a Musical (Cody Spencer).
Anne Kauffman, Mary Jane
Over a decade ago, Kauffman directed Amy Herzog’s Belleville Off-Broadway at New York Theatre Workshop. Now she is Tony-nominated for directing Herzog’s semiautobiographical play Mary Jane.
Before the Broadway premiere, Kauffman and Herzog collaborated on Mary Jane’s world premiere at Yale Repertory Theatre in 2017, before putting up a production later that year Off-Broadway at New York Theatre Workshop. The Off-Broadway production led to Kauffman winning a Lucille Lortel Award and an Obie Award for Outstanding Direction of a Play.
Mary Jane marks Kauffman’s third Broadway production, directing last season’s revival of Lorraine Hansberry’s The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window and the 2017 run of Marvin’s Room, with fellow Tony-nominated director White as her assistant director.
Mary Jane is also nominated for Best Play, Best Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role in a Play (Rachel McAdams), and Best Sound Design of a Play (Leah Gelpe).
Lila Neugebauer, Appropriate
Neugebauer has had a busy Broadway season, directing both Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s Appropriate and the Heidi Schreck adaptation of Anton Chekov’s Uncle Vanya. Before this Broadway outing, Neugebauer had collaborated with Jacobs-Jenkins on the 2017 Off-Broadway premiere of his play Everybody.
Appropriate made its Off-Broadway premiere at Signature Theatre in 2014, which led to Jacobs-Jenkins’s tying with himself for the 2014 Best New Play Obie Award (the other being his play An Octoroon). While Neugebauer didn’t direct the Off-Broadway production, she did direct a 2016 production at Julliard. In an interview with The New York Times, Neugebauer shared how her perspective has shifted since then.
“The first time, the play struck me on more theoretical terms. Now I feel more of an invitation to have complicated feelings about these characters,” Neugebauer says. “Every character has done something that someone in the audience or someone onstage might feel is questionable or strange or other. Every person walking the planet is the star of their own lives. Therefore, it feels like the thing that’s happening to them is the most significant thing that could ever be happening to anyone.”
Because of its major New York production in 2014, Appropriate is nominated in the Best Revival of a Play category. It also received nominations for Best Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role in a Play (Sarah Paulson), Best Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role in a Play (Corey Stoll), Best Costume Design of a Play (Dede Ayite), Best Lightning Design of a Play (Jane Cox), Best Scenic Design of a Play (dots), and Best Sound Design of a Play (Bray Poor and Will Pickens).
Whitney White, Jaja’s African Hair Braiding
Though directing Jocelyn Bioh’s Jaja’s African Hair Braiding marked White’s Broadway debut as lead director, she had already made her mark on the New York theater scene. Beyond assistant-directing the Broadway play Marvin’s Room in 2017, she won an Obie Award for her direction of Alexis Scheer’s Our Dear Dead Drug Lord, a 2020 Lilly Award, and was the 2018 recipient of the Vineyard Theater’s Susan Stroman Directing Award.
And Jaja’s isn’t her first NYT Critics’ Pick, either. Our Dear Dead Drug Lord and Aleshea Harris’s What to Send Up When It Goes Down both earned the accolade during their Off-Broadway runs.
White entered the theater world as an actor, but during her MFA acting program at Brown University/Trinity Rep, she took a directing class that prompted an artistic evolution.
“That [class] changed my life,” White told The Talks in an interview. “I got my first chance to direct during this class, and it changed everything. It was the first time I felt that all of my skills were being put to use, that my brain was quiet and focused.”
In addition to White, Jaja’s African Hair Braiding earned nods for Best Play, Best Costume Design of a Play (Dede Ayite), Best Scenic Design of a Play (David Zinn), and Best Sound Design of a Play (Justin Ellington and Stefania Bulbarella).
Header photos by Jemal Countess/Getty Images for Tony Awards Productions.