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Hello and welcome to your Tony Award nomination episode of Broadway Radio. My name is Matt Tamminini. I'm coming to you just minutes after Uzo Aduba and Darren Criss wrapped up announcing all of the Tony nominations for the 2025, 2026 season. Of course, it started over on CBS mornings where they did the always awkward conversation with the hosts who don't really know a whole lot about theater and try to ask questions, even though it would be better left to people who are there to make the announcements and maybe let them banter because they would be better maybe trying to have people throw in things about topics that they don't understand. Nonetheless, let's run through the Tony nominations. I'm going to keep these fairly straightforward, give you the nominees. If I have any thoughts, I'll throw them in. But we will obviously talk a lot about the Tony nominations here moving forward. But let's start with the nominees for best play and they are the Ballisters by David Lindsay Abair Giant by Mark Rosenblatt Liberation, which just won the Pulitzer Prize for drama by Bess Wool and Little Bear Ridge Road by Samuel D. Hunter. You will notice that there were only four in that category that will be the same for musicals just because of how many eligible shows were in the season. There were six or less. So there were only four nominees. Barring ties, there weren't any. So we had four best play and four best musical nominees. So for the musicals, the nominees are the Lost Boys, Schmigadoon Titanique and Two Strangers Carry a Cake Across New York. Now let's go to the other production categories. Let's start with best Revival of a play. The nominees are Becky Shaw by author Gina Gianfredo. She will be eligible to win a Tony award if Becky Shaw wins this category because the show has never been on Broadway before and she is still alive. Also in the category are Death of a Salesman, Every Brilliant thing authors, Duncan McMillan with Johnny Donahoe. They will be eligible if that wins. And Fallen Angels along with Oedipus by Robert Ike, who penned this adaptation. So he will be eligible to win a Tony Award individually if the show wins in the category as well. Best revival of a musical. There were only three because there were only five eligible shows. So those nominees are Cats, the Jellicoe Ball, Ragtime and the Rocky Horror Show. Now let's get into the performance categories. Best performance by an actor in a leading role in a play. The nominees are Will Harrison for Punch, Nathan Lane for Death of a Salesman, John Lithgow for Giant, Daniel Radcliffe for Every Brilliant Thing and Mark Strong for Oedipus. Best performance by an actress in a leading role in a play. The nominees are Rose Byrne for Fallen Angels, Carrie Coon for Bug, Susannah Flood for Liberation, Leslie Manville for Oedipus and Kelly o' Hara for Fallen Angels. Best performance by an actor in a leading role in a musical. The nominees are Nicholas Christopher for Chess, Luke Evans for the Rocky Horror Show, Joshua Henry for Ragtime, Sam Tutty for Two Strangers and Brandon Uranowitz for Ragtime. Best performance by an actress in a leading role in musical. Nominees are Sarah Chase for Schmigadoon, Stephanie Hsu for the Rocky Horror Show, Casey Levy for Ragtime, Marla Mandel for Titanique and Cristiani Pitts for Two Strangers. Best performance by an actor in a featured role in a musical. The nominees are Christopher Abbott for Death of a Salesman, Danny Burstein for Marjorie Prime, Brandon J. Dearden for Waiting for Godot, Alden Ironreich for Becky Shaw, Ruben Santiago Hudson for Joe Turner's Come and Gone and Richard Thomas for the Ballisters. There are six there, so that means that there had to be the number five and number six vote getters and term nominations were within 10%. That's what constitutes a tie. To expand the category for nominations for the actual awards, it has to be a legitimate tie. But for nominations, if they are within 10% of the total points allocation, then they add a nominee. This is the only performance category that did that this year, but we have seen it multiple times over the years and sometimes having two or three categories that have six or more people. But moving to best performance by an actress in a featured role in a play, the nominees are Betsy Adam for Liberation, Mary Louise Burke for the Ballisters, Aya Cash for Giant, Laurie Metcalfe for Death of a Salesman and June Squibb for Marjorie Prime. Going over to the musical side of things, Best performance by an actor in a featured role in a musical. The nominees are Allie Louis Borsgi for the Lost Boys. Andre de Shields for Cats, the Jellicoe Ball, Bryce Pinkham for Chess, Ben Levi Ross for Ragtime and Leighton Williams for Titanique. Best performance by an actress in a featured role in a musical. The nominees are Shoshana Bean for the Lost Boys, Hannah Cruz for Chess, Rachel Dratch for the Rocky Horror Show, Anna Gasteyer for Schmigadoon and Nichelle Lewis for Ragtime. Interesting there. We get two former SNL stars back to back in that category, so that's fun. They should be a hoot on the promotional scene over the next month. Now I'll run through some of the other categories here a little bit more quickly. Let's do best book of a musical. The nominees are the Lost Boys, Schmigadoon, Titanique and Two Strangers. Best original score, music and or lyrics written for the theater. This is where it gets interesting. I talked about on last week on Broadway how there probably weren't enough musicals to fill this category. There were five nominees, but two were plays and three were musicals. There were was a musical left out of this, so I'll let you fill in the blanks there. But the nominees are Death of Salesman, Joe Turner's Come and Gone, the Lost Boys, Schmigadoon and Two Strangers Carry a Cake Across New York. Let's move over to the direction categories. Best direction of a play. The nominees are Nicholas Heitner for Giant, Robert Icke for Oedipus, Kenny Leon for the Ballisters, Joe Mantello for Death of a Salesman and Whitney White for Liberation. On the musical side of things, the best direction nominees are Michael Arden for the Lost Boys, Lear Dessinet for Ragtime, Christopher Gattelli for Schmigadoon, Tim Jackson for Two Strangers and Zylon Livingston and Bill Rauch for Cat's the Jellicle Ball. Best choreography. The nominees are Christopher Gattelli for Schmigadoon, Lauren Yolongo Grant and Christopher Cree Grant for the Lost Boys, Omari Wiles and Arturo Lyons for Cats. The Jellicle Ball, Eleanor Scott for Ragtime and Annie Taj for the Rocky Horror Show. For some of these that have multiple nominees, I will just read the shows. If you want to get the complete list of everybody who is officially a Tony nominee as of today, you can head over to the show notes. But best orchestrations, the nominations went to the Lost Boys, Schmigadoon, Two Strangers, Cat's the Jellicle Ball and Chess. Looking at the design categories, let's start with scenic design of a play. The nominees are Hildegard Bechtler for Oedipus, Takesha Kata for Bug, David Korin's for Dog Day Afternoon, Chloe Lamford for Death of a Salesman and David Rockwell for Fallen Angels. Scenic design of a musical. The nominees are Dots for the Rocky Horror Show, Sutra Gilmore for Two Strangers, Rachel Hauck for the Jellicle Ball, Dane Laffery for the Lost Boys and Scott Pask for Schmegadoon. Going over to costume design, the nominees are Brenda Abandonedolo for Dog Day Afternoon, Queen Jean for Liberation, Jeff Masche for Fallen Angels, Emilio Sosa for the Ballisters and Paul Tazewell for Joe Turner's Come and Gone. On the musical side of things, the best costume nominees are Linda Cho for Ragtime, Linda Cho for Schmegadoon as well. Queen Jean getting nominated in both play and musical category here for Cats, the Jellicoe Ball, Ryan park for the Lost Boys and David I. Reynoso for the Rocky Horror Show. Looking at lighting design of a play, Isabella Bird was nominated for Dog Day Afternoon, Natasha Cheers Cheevers was nominated for Oedipus, Stacy derozier for Joe Turner's Come and Gone, Heather Gilbert for Bug and Heather Gilbert for the fear of 13, along with Jack Knowles for Death of a Salesman. On the musical side, Kevin Adams was nominated for Chess. Recent Broadway radio guest Jen Shriver and Michael Arden were nominated for the Lost Boys. Jane Cox was nominated for the Rocky Horror Show. This is fairly interesting. Adam Honore and Donald Holder were nominated together for Ragtime. Donald Holder was nominated individually for Schmigadoon and Adam Honore was nominated individually for Cats, the Jellicle Ball. Moving over to sound design, the nominees for the play category are Justin Ellington for Joe Turner's Come and Gone, Tom Gibbons for Oedipus, Lee Kenney for the Fear of Thirteen, Josh Schmidt for Bug and Mikhail Suleiman for Death of a Salesman. On the musical side, Adam Fisher for the Lost Boys, Kai Harada for Cats of the Jellicoe Ball, Kai Harada for Ragtime, Brian Ronan for the Rocky Horror show and Walter Trbach for Schmegadoon. That is all of the competitive categories I've already talked about. The Lifetime Achievement Awards, the Isabella Stevenson Award, the honorees for excellence in theater. Those are all on previous episodes. The one new things we learned on nomination day is that a special Tony Award will be given to the league of Resident theaters. Lort, this is, I guess, in the place of the the theater company that normally gets it. Normally a regional theater gets one, but that was not announced. Maybe another one will be announced in the coming days, but normally they don't do those after the nominations go out. But the League of Resident Theaters is the organization that oversees regional theaters around the country and actually in New York as well, like Lincoln Center Theatre is considered a a LORT member along with other non for profit theater. So that is why they are technically Broadway houses but don't have to pay Broadway prices for things as well. All right, that is all that I have for you. We will talk about the Tony nominations, the Tony campaigns, the Tony winners many, many times over the rest of this month. So if you want to make sure that you get all of our conversations here on Broadway Radio, head over to patreon.com broadwayradio broadwayradio.com patreon as James Marino announced on Sundays, this week on Broadway, we will be we will be launching a new Broadway radio app where you will get all of the episodes, both the things that go out on your regular podcast feeds. Those will still be there, but it will kind of replace our Patreon. So keep an eye out for that. We don't exactly have a launch day, but it is coming soon. I've seen some mockups of it and it should be pretty exciting. But if you want to make sure that you get everything, stay tuned with us here throughout Tony's season. Thanks again for listening. This has been Matt Tamineni and I'll talk to you.