What do a cheeky horror movie about a teenager forced to battle vampires and a TV series following a couple trapped in an old-fashioned musical have in common? The answer is that both inspired critically acclaimed, crowd-pleasing shows that are now tied for the most Tony Award nominations for this past season.
The Lost Boys, adapted from the 1987 film of the same name, and Schmigadoon! , based on the 2021 Apple TV+ series, are each up for a dozen of this year’s Broadway’s biggest prizes. Both are competing in the categories of Best Musical, Best Book of a Musical, original score, direction, choreography, orchestrations, and in numerous design and acting categories to boot.
Other productions are also poised to potentially take home multiple trophies when the Tonys are handed out June 7. Lincoln Center Theater’s celebrated revival of Ragtime — Lynn Ahrens, Stephen Flaherty, and Terrence McNally’s adaptation of E.L. Doctorow’s novel tracking immigrant families in the early 20th century — collected 11 nominations, and a starry production of Arthur Miller’s great American tragedy Death of a Salesman received nine, including nods for Nathan Lane for Best Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role in a Play, Laurie Metcalf for Best Performance by an Actress in a Featured Role in a Play, and Joe Mantello for best director.
An exhilarating new staging of Richard O’Brien’s The Rocky Horror Show, and CATS: The Jellicle Ball, a joyful reimagining of the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical, paying homage to ballroom culture and the LGBTQ community that conceived it, each picked up nine nominations, among them best revival and best choreography. Other nominees from those shows include film star, London stage alumnus, and Broadway newcomer Luke Evans of Rocky Horror, who will compete with theater favorites Joshua Henry and Brandon Uranowitz of Ragtime for leading actor in a musical, while another musical star from Ragtime, Caissie Levy, and Oscar nominee Stephanie Hsu, who returned to Broadway for Rocky Horror, are both up for leading actress.
Two Strangers (Carry a Cake Across New York), a London import following a budding romance between a local gal and a young Englishman, and Titaníque, an Off-Broadway transfer parodying the blockbuster 1997 film Titanic — with Celine Dion, played by cocreator Marla Mindelle, narrating — respectively earned eight and four nominations, and round out the Best Musical field. Mindelle and Two Strangers star Christiani Pitts are vying with Levy, Hsu, and Sara Chase from Schmigadoon! for leading actress in a musical, while Pitts’s costar Sam Tutty, and Nicholas Christopher, from a new production of Chess that’s up for four other awards, complete the leading actor candidates.
Where plays are concerned, a revival of another American classic, August Wilson’s Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, is nominated for seven Tonys, among them best featured actor for Ruben Santiago-Hudson, an expert interpreter of Wilson’s work as both a performer and a director. Joe Turner’s is one of two nonmusical stagings that were also tapped for best score, for its incidental music, the other being Salesman.
Another U.K.-based production, Oedipus, playwright and director Robert Icke’s blistering contemporary adaptation of the Greek tragedy, received nine nominations, including Best Revival of a Play, best director, and leading actor and actress for Mark Strong and the long-adored British stage and screen actress Lesley Manville, who made her Broadway debut in the production. The other contenders for revival of a play are a staging of Noël Coward’s farce Fallen Angels starring Kelli O’Hara and Rose Byrne, both also up for leading actress, and two productions written years ago and produced numerous times, but never on Broadway: Gina Gionfriddo’s Becky Shaw, and Every Brilliant Thing, written by Duncan Macmillan with Jonny Donahoe.
Every Brilliant Thing, an immersive work hailed for its reaffirming spirit, also earned a leading actor nod for Daniel Radcliffe, who returned to Broadway for the first time since winning a Tony for his performance in a 2023 revival of Merrily We Roll Along. That category typically poses a tight race, and this year will be no exception. Strong, Lane, and Radcliffe will face off against Will Harrison, tapped for the redemption saga Punch, and John Lithgow, who won raves for his powerhouse performance in Giant, Mark Rosenblatt’s searing portrait of the dark side of beloved children’s author Roald Dahl. Both Rosenblatt and Lithgow won Olivier Awards for a previous West End staging of the production.
The Best Play field is equally competitive, with Giant; Liberation, Bess Wohl’s lauded homage to second wave feminism; The Balusters, a very modern comedy of manners by Tony and Pulitzer Prize winner David Lindsay-Abaire; and Little Bear Ridge Road, the bleakly funny and deeply haunting play that marked the long-overdue Broadway bow of Samuel D. Hunter, one of the most revered playwrights working today.
The category of leading actress in a play, too, is packed with top-tier talent. In addition to O’Hara — already the recipient of a Tony and multiple nominations for her luminous work in musical theater — Byrne — a recent Academy Award nominee — and Manville, contenders include: Carrie Coon, who earned acclaim in theater before finding wider exposure in film and television (most recently in The Gilded Age and The White Lotus), for Bug; and Susannah Flood, much praised for her extensive work on and Off-Broadway and in regional theater, for Liberation.
Stage and screen favorites also fill the fields of featured actor and actress in a play. In the latter, Metcalf will vie with Betsy Aidem (Liberation), Marylouise Burke (The Balusters), Aya Cash (Giant), and June Squibb — who, at 96, became the oldest Tony nominee ever, for her work in Marjorie Prime. Film star and Broadway newbie Alden Ehrenreich, recently honored by the New York Drama Critics’ Circle as giving the season’s best individual performance, for Becky Shaw, will nonetheless face heady competition from Christopher Abbott (Salesman), Danny Burstein (Marjorie Prime), Brandon J. Dirden (the revival of Waiting for Godot), Santiago-Hudson (Joe Turner’s) and Richard Thomas (The Balusters).
Other rising and established stars were tapped for featured actor and actress in a musical, from André De Shields (Cats) and Shoshana Bean (The Lost Boys) to Ali Louis Bourzgui (The Lost Boys) and Nichelle Lewis (Ragtime). Candidates for Best Direction of a Musical are Michael Arden (The Lost Boys), Lear deBessonet (Ragtime), Tim Jackson (Two Strangers), Zailon Levingston and Bill Rauch (Cats), and Christopher Gattelli, also nominated for choreography for Schmigadoon! For play, Mantello and Icke will face Nicholas Hytner (Giant), Kenny Leon (The Balusters), and Whitney White (Liberation).
The winners will be revealed at Radio City Music Hall the first Sunday in June, in a ceremony hosted by Pink and broadcast live on CBS and streaming on Paramount +.
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