Tony Awards to announce the nominees, but who knows when the show will be back?
Aux Features Coronavirus
Traditionally, the Tony Awards are a summertime staple with all of Broadway’s biggest stars converging at Radio City Music Hall in a most dramatic fashion. That obviously didn’t happen this June, and those who look forward to CBS’s annual glimpse at the the largely inaccessible theater world have been patiently waiting for The Broadway League to announce a Plan B. We briefly received as much back in August when the committee confirmed that the show would be arriving digitally sometime in the fall. And why would we question that? All of the biggest award shows thus far have found ways to pivot to remote ceremonies with few issues.
But while film, music, and TV have continued to progress in some fashion during the quarantine, Broadway was brought to a halt back in March and hasn’t resumed since, making eligibility a sticky issue. (It was later determined that any shows that opened on or before February 19 would be eligible, which is a serious bummer for West Side Story, which debuted February 20.) Amid a lot of questions, The Broadway League has remained quiet on any new developments until today when, according to Vulture, organizers confirmed that an official vote will be taking place on October 13 and the resulting nominees would be revealed two days later, on October 15. Aladdin and Hamilton’s James Monroe Iglehart will announce the nominees via a livestream. Maybe he’ll also be kind enough to reveal when this event is scheduled to take place, as that little detail is still very much unknown. Sure, it’s not like we have any other pressing plans at the moment, but it would be great to get some notice so that we can get to planning our virtual watch parties. (Yes, that sounds just as depressing to us.) For now, theater fans can plan on catching the stream on the show’s official YouTube channel.
2 Comments
The Tonys are easily my favorite awards show but that’s largely because it’s always a big, splashy show with big, splashy performances from live performance experts. They seem particularly badly suited to the sort of socially distanced model they will understandably need to adopt for safety.
On the flip side, theater kids will all get to debate whether a single person delivering a speech to neither an audience nor a cast qualifies as a new type of performance distinct from monologues and soliloquies. Bullies, in turn, who have suffered as a result of socially distanced education, will get some much needed rationale for beating up the aforementioned theater kids. In effect, Zoom Tonys are necessary if we hope to sustain the high school social economy.