Here are some of our favorite quotes from the stars on the exciting Tony Awards red carpet. See more photos from the night here.
How are you feeling on the red carpet right now?
BETH LEAVEL: Floating. A, I feel like a princess. B, we just finished a matinee. And then you get all blinged up and here to perform and I have lyrics going on in my head. It’s one of the most thrilling energies to be in, in your lifetime ever. So I’m just trying to stay in the moment and enjoy all of it.
Ephraim Sykes; he’s amazing on stage. Have you ever seen anyone do what he does?
SERGIO TRUJILLO: Well, Ephraim Sykes I’ve known since he was 20 years old. Ephraim Sykes was in one of my shows, Memphis. So I’ve been grooming Ephraim Sykes for this long. So when we got into this room, it was a really wonderful experience, because I could just turn to Ephraim and say you know what, I want you to do a double tour. And when you land on a double tour, I want you to land in the splits. But one more thing— before you take off on your double tour, I want you to throw your mic up in the air and catch it before you get up from the splits, and there it is. He says, “ok!” [laughs]
At the Spring Road Conference, someone pointed out that you were the only woman this season to be nominated in your category. Can you talk about why it’s important for women to be represented and why you weren’t super thrilled when people were clapping?
RACHEL CHAVKIN: Yeah that’s a terrible thing to applaud. I think [it’s terrible] when there’s only one of any human in a category, and of course, a human contains multitudes inside themselves. So, the Venn diagram is just constantly overlapping and I think it’s just a terrible thing to ask anyone to do. So, I think we’re gonna see it changing, and I hope we’re gonna see it changing exponentially, both for women and artists of color over the next few years because I know a number of projects coming up from the downtown, from London, from the grassroots. It’s happening there and it’s happening Off-Broadway. So it’s not about the part of altruism being needed on the part of any single producer. These artists are ready to go and they just need to get hired.
What advice would you give to aspiring artists and creatives?
EDDIE PERFECT: Everyone says to never give up. It is really really hard and it’s really depressing. All I would say is if you want to be a writer, this part with putting on a suit and being around fancy people and having people actually be interested in what you have to say, is the very tip of a very large iceberg, most of which is submerged in freezing cold water and that cold water is writing. You being on your own, in a room, with a black page, stressing, fretting, feeling like you’re never going to have a great idea, paranoid that you’re the worst writer ever. Like that’s the natural state of writing. But that’s also the really exciting part. When you join one section of a song to another, or you find an exciting way out of a bridge into a release, or you find that perfect rhyme or you find that idea for a song, you’re like oh, I gotta write this now. It’s you. It’s alone, in a room, It’s a very weird thing. So my advice to writers is to fall in love with that process. Cause that’s 99% of your process. And the rest of it is… It’s almost like you make yourself lonely in order to write your way back to people. So you have to be at peace with the loneliness.
What is your favorite Tonys memory?
BRADLEY KING: Oh, two probably! One is watching Neil Patrick Harris perform in 2013, Bigger, that number I will remember for the rest of my life. And two years ago, when I got my first nomination for Natasha Pierre, and the Great Comet of 1812, that’s probably going to stick with me for a while as well.
I heard you studied biology in college. Did you ever think that you’d end up at the Tony Awards?
DERRICK BASKIN: Absolutely not. Absolutely not. You know, the Tonys were so far from my periphery, that I had no idea what Broadway was. I grew up a science geek, I grew up with music, grew up singing my whole life, but theatre, that was new to me. To find this actual dream is just the best.