They met the Tony Award nominees, the recognition for the best of the year on Broadway. The show that received the most nominations, with 11, was “A Strange Loop” by Michael R. Jackson (the playwright who shares a name with the former King of Pop), who has already won the Pulitzer Prize for this metamusical about a writer queer black that he’s writing a musical about a black queer writer: hence the loop. New York Times critic Maya Phillips said that she “achieves an amazing feat: condensing a complex idea, full of paradoxes and abstractions, into the form of a Broadway musical.”
Three of its stars were nominated: Jaquel SpiveyJohn-Andrew Morrison and Morgan Lee, who becomes the first performer openly transgender to be nominated for a Tony Award for acting.
Hot on his heels, with 10 nominations, is “MJ,” the musical about Michael Jackson (now the singer), which Adrian Horton of The Guardian called “a joyous parade of hits… and a sanitized spin through Jackson’s life that outline demons without filling them. “MJ” pushed nominations for her star Myles Frost, director and choreographer Christopher Wheeldon, and writer Lynn Nottage, who also received a best play nomination for her drama “Clyde’s.”
The other nominees for best play are black comedy “hangmen” by Martin McDonagh; the drama “Skeleton Crew” by Dominique Morisseau; “The Lehman Trilogy”; Y “The Minutes”, Tracy Letts’ play about a town hall meeting.
“Paradise Square,” a musical named after a 19th-century Manhattan saloon, received 10 nominations. And the musical”Six” garnered eight nominations, including best musical and best original score for Lucy Moss and Toby Marlow, who wrote it as undergraduates in their final year at Cambridge: Henry VIII’s wives return from the dead to give a pop concert.
“For Black Girls Who Have Considered Suicide” poet Ntozake Shangereceived seven nominations, as did “Girl from the North Country,” Conor McPherson’s musical set of songs by bob dylan. Hugh Jackman star of “The Music Man”, is also nominated: if he wins it would be his third Tony.
While, “american buffalo” David Mamet’s classic that has production from the Argentine Diego Kolankowsky, received four Tony Award nominations. The play stars Lawrence Fishburne (from “The Matrix”), Sam Rockwell (Oscar winner for “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing”) and Darren Criss (from “Glee” and Harry Potter on Broadway, Emmy winner for “The Assassination of Gianni Versace”) received nominations for Best Leading Actor for Sam Rockwellfor best direction for Neil Pepe, for best set design for Scott Pask, and for best revival.
Production was stopped during the pandemic and the project was able to sustain itself and be released for twenty-five months, being celebrated by critics of the New York Times and the Washington Post which he described “as an explosive setting and pure dynamite”.
Kolankowsky who already has a Tony Award for Best Musical for “Eleven on this island”, He thus scored his fourth nomination with his first participation in a text work in the theater capital of the world, which once again puts the awards for its pandemic Broadway circuit at the top: the 2020 edition of the awards has been canceled due to the quarantine imposed in New York, which also caused the delay of the 2021 ceremony, where “Moulin Rouge!” he triumphed collecting 10 statuettes.
This year’s awards will take place June 12 at Radio City Music Hall in the Big Apple, and will be hosted by Ariana DeBose, who won an Oscar for her performance in Steven Spielberg’s “West Side Story.”
After what Chris Rock was slapped onstage by Will Smith at the Academy Awards earlier this year, the Tony Awards announced that they have a “strict non-violence policy” and that “in case of an incident, the perpetrator will be expelled”.
by RN
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