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did the TONY Awards get it wrong? | Mickey-Jo's reaction to the 2026 winners, performances and ceremony
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Mickey Jo
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Mickey Jo
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Mickey Jo
I woke up today to do two things. Eat leftover corn pudding and talk about the Tony Awards. And I've just finished my corn puddin, which, as it turns out, delicious. So let's talk about the Tony Awards. Oh my God. Hey, welcome back to my theatre themed YouTube channel. My name is Mickey Jo and I am obsessed with all things theatre. I am a critic, a content creator and a pundit here on social media. And today we are going to be talking all about the 2026 Tony Awards, the annual celebration of the best of Broadway's plays and musicals. They were held last night at Radio Music hall in New York and I watched them very late last night from my sofa in the uk where as in previous years, I had something of a small party complete with themed dishes coming up first, we have themed to Titanique, an iceberg lettuce salad. This is a liberation cheese ball. It's a 70s thing. It's in the play. This is world famous corn puddin that Aaron James made. August Wilson's, Joe Turner's Taraji P. Henson's fried chicken in two flavors. And my personal favorite pun from Beaches, the wind beneath my chicken wings. Not forgetting the cake carried from the supermarket by Aaron and I. And as always, the Monday after the Tony Awards is a time for immediate reflection. What did we think of the night's winners, the results, but also the ceremony itself, the program, the host. This year, Pink hosted the broadcast for the very first time. What did this year's Tony results mean for Broadway? Are there any shows that are going to be positively or negatively impacted by this? I'm going to let you know all of my thoughts, but as always, I would love to hear yours. Let me know what you thought about every aspect of the Tony Tony Awards last night, including the winners in the comments down below. And if you would like to hear more of my thoughts, you can find them wherever you are. Seeing my face or hearing my voice. Make sure to subscribe or follow me there. You can also find all of my thoughts about theatre every week in a free weekly email subsack newsletter, the link to which is in the description of this video. For now, though, let's talk about the Tonys. So before we talk about the night's biggest winners in terms of shows and individuals, I want to talk about the entire ceremony and broadcast itself. And obviously the most immediate burning question is, was Bernadette Peters a seat filler? Because every time I saw her, she was sat in a different place. So the Tonys were once again held this year at Radio City Music hall, which always offers a lot in terms of the scale of what can be achieved on stage. That was exemplified very early on in the opening number performed by Pink, who I will say I thought was a really terrific Tonys host. And I never really understood the backlash to Pink being announced in the first place. The narrative that kind of went along with this was that Pink and her family have recently recently moved to New York. Pink, if you don't know, is a recording artist who was featured on the single Lady Marmalade that was part of the Moulin Rouge movie soundtrack, which I bought on cassette tape as a very young child who inexplicably still had to tell his mother he was gay about 13 years later. Anyway, Pink and family have moved to New York Because Pink's daughter is hugely into theater, has seen the Lost Boys a dozen times, wants to perform on Broadway, is absolutely obsessed with it. I can relate to that. I'm sure many of you can as well. And I think it's really sweet that that is part of why Pink is hosting the Tony Awards. I also think it works to have an outsider to the environment in some ways, especially one who is going to give such deference and who is still hugely talented. Like the vocals speak for themselves and have done throughout Pink's entire career, but also giving it Velma Kelly with the company of Chicago. I don't necessarily know if Pink needs to go into Chicago or even wants to go into Chicago, but I think she proved herself more than proved herself. And I was just so touched by the respect that she clearly has for stage performers and all of these shows and how hard working she kept saying everybody was. There's also something so effortlessly cool about her, which is for sure a really important component of hosting in a high pressure environment. And I think some of the best Academy Awards hosts haven't necessarily been actors or, you know, people who are very celebrated within the film industry. You can be a comedian and do a great job of that. I think just enough of an outsider is often the best placed person. I'm intrigued about whether or or not she would host again for a second year or whether this kind of ushers in a new era of a lot of other sort of tangential entertainment types hosting the Tony Awards and helping to use their celebrity to bring more attention to Broadway. Anyway, the opening number was an all timer, I thought spoke for itself and did the whole thing of like giving deference to all of these other people. I love that Ariana DeBose style. She name checked so many nominees and talented performers in the opening number. Megan Thee Stallion, who recently appeared in Moulin Rouge on Broadway, got carried in and there were jokes on top of jokes on top of jokes. I don't know who was on the writing team for this year's Tonys, but hilarious when Megan talked about the two guys bringing her on stage and called them two strangers who just carried some cake. Hilarious. Sam Tutty running across the background repeatedly carrying cakes. Also hilarious. I was particularly struck by Lea Michele getting into costume to perform a little cameo despite both her and the show Chess not being nominated. This marks I think Leah's fifth time performing at the Tonys in a year when she hasn't been nominated, which has been all of them. But kudos to her very game. She's not the only one who made a cameo. We had former host Neil Patrick Harris help to ignite the whole thing with a very funny bit of banter between him and Pink. Genuinely funny, I thought, this year, not a lot of cringe moments. We also had a cameo from Paddington Bear himself, anticipating his arrival next season. But since they were performing leading Lady Marmalade, a take on the Lady Marmalade song, it made sense to have Neil skip across the stage holding Paddington and singing Marmalade. That was great. And a lovely little plug for Paddington's imminent Broadway arrival. My favorite type of Tony's opening is one where you have cast members from all of these shows, and it's just massive and they're performing in the aisles, and it's extraordinary, and it just shows the scale and spectacle of Broadway, but it also indicates, you know, how many people are working within this industry just in midtown Manhattan. Now let's move on from the pink of it all to the actual broadcast itself. And with the utmost respect for the number of different moving pieces here and how challenging something like this is to put together. I thought this is one of the worst years that I can recall in terms of both video and sound. And unfortunately, that impacted a handful of the performances, which we'll talk about in a moment. But I would be incandescent with rage as a producer if I thought that poor sound management was impacting what is surely like the biggest marketing opportunity for. For a lot of these new Broadway shows. At a time when the finances of the whole thing are on a knife edge of uncertainty more so often than winning a Tony. Getting to do these musical performances and really sell your show is so important. And the fact that sound impacted particularly, I thought Titanique, but also even, like the chorus vocals in Schmigadoon felt very underpowered. Felt like we were hearing them in a weird way. Whoever, like, did the sound design for the Tony Awards this year, I don't think they're winning a Tony for it anytime soon. And there was something sort of precarious about a lot of the camera work that I haven't picked up on previously. It always felt a little more secure. It felt as though we were trying a little too hard to get a lot of these in motion shots. And the number of times when the camera people are on the stage with the performers and the audience are behind them and they're walking upstage and they're lit in a slightly weird way. I don't know that we needed quite so much of that. Just zoom out a little bit. Go back to the Tony Awards of like the 2000s, the 2000s, and they seemed to be doing just a much more robust, reliable job with the video and the audio. Other than that one year when 50 million shows performed medley at the beginning and you could hear people warming up during Shrek and it was chaos.
- [09:48]
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- [11:33]
Mickey Jo
Carrying on seamlessly. Then let's talk about the awards themselves and the night's biggest winners. And it seemed early on as though there might be a dual sweep happening for Schmigadoon in the world of musicals and for Death of a Salesman in the world of plays. And I got, quite quickly, a little dejected. Not because both productions aren't richly deserving, but because it wouldn't have been indicative of this Broadway season, one, which has been characterized by many people as being a little sparse, certainly in terms of new musicals, but also perhaps a little underwhelming. We could have a conversation about the extent to which a lot of the nominees of this year's, you know Best new play and best new musical wouldn't necessarily have had a look in last year whether some of the runners up that we don't know about of last year's awards might have had a better chance this time around. But certainly it wouldn't be a very realistic overview of this season to just say, Schmigadoon wins everything and Salesman wins everything, everything. And thankfully that kind of turned around a little bit and it ended up being a fairly even spread. I really would have loved. I was very happy for Cinco Paul becoming a Tony winner. I think that was really important. And I was thrilled and I desperately wanted it to be for score because I think those songs in Schmigdoon are brilliant. I would have loved if the writing awards could have been spread and even orchestrations as well between Schmigadoon and Two Strangers or for Titanique to walk away with something. I was sad for Two Strangers and Titanique to walk away from the Tony with no wins whatsoever. That I thought was a little disappointing because both of those shows are deserving in their own ways. But in terms of the actual predictions that I'd shared for the Tonys about a week ago, I was pretty. Probably like 75%, I want to say. I haven't gone through and counted every single one. I was pretty uncertain this year in a lot of the major categories, but there was nothing hugely surprising. And Schmigadoon certainly did very well winning best musical, winning score, winning book, winning orchestrations. Come on, Benedet. Schmigadoon.
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Schmigadoon.
- [13:33]
Mickey Jo
Win. Lost Boys also did well winning in two performance categories for supporting actor and actress. I had faith in Allie Lewis Borski winning and supporting actor, even when everyone was telling me he wouldn't. Michael Arden wins another Tony. Lost Boys wins Set second. I figured out my T shirt was the wrong way around. Oh, my God, the way I told you all. And Ragtime won in best revival as well as for sound design. Right. And actor and actress. But it didn't sweep creative categories either. Lost Boys picked up a couple of those. And Cats, the Jellicle Ball won for direction and choreography and costume design. And it was very interesting, actually to see a split between Cats winning direction, but Ragtime winning revival. And that's, you know, a falling of the cards that I can kind of get on board with, even if I think objective, effectively catch the jell in terms of reinvention and creativity was probably more deserving of best revival of a musical, specifically. Ragtime takes sound. Where's my fan. Where's my fan?
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Where's my van?
- [14:52]
Mickey Jo
No, no. Leading action to musical. Casey Levy. Casey Levy. Now leading actor, we assume. Joshua Henry. That's a stunning aversion. Tell us. Stink. Still ragtime. There you go. Now, over in the world of plays, Death of a Salesman won for best revival of a play, as well as in a whole handful of creative categories, plus for best director and best supporting actress for Laurie Metcalfe. More on the speeches and the lack of producer Scott Rudin in just a moment. Liberation won for best new play, but in none of its other categories, which I think were something of an uphill battle, even though richly deserved liberation. An interesting thing was happening with the acting awards for plays because very often they were the only categories won by each of these shows. Alden Ehrenreich won for best featured actor in a play, beating out Ruben Santiago Hudson. Not a total surprise, but not necessarily what I'd imagined would happen, but very well deserved for his performance in Becky Shaw.
- [16:08]
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Oh, I got mad about it.
- [16:10]
Mickey Jo
He was incredible. Not mad about it. John Lithgow won for Giant, but it didn't win play or director or anything like that. And Leslie Manville for leading actress in a play was the sole winner for Oedipus leading action play. Lesley Manville. Yay for British on Broadway. In terms of the number of British voices that we heard in acceptance speeches this year, probably comparable with last year from what I remember. Who knew so many of the Death of a Salesman creatives were British? Didn't see that coming. There were a couple of milestones that we should acknowledge. Bess Wall, in her acceptance speech for Liberation, noted that she was the first female American playwright to win the award in something like 40 years. Once again, the Pulitzer Prize for drama winner also wins the Tony Award in the same year as happened last year with Brandon Jacobs Jenkins and Purpose Queen. Jean, the costume designer of Cats the Jellicle Ball, who was also nominated for best costume designer for play for her work on Liberation, an award that went to Jeff Marshey for Fallen Angels has been reported as the first openly trans Tony award winner. As a distinction, it's worth pointing out from the non binary winners over the past few years, Death of a Salesman became, I believe, the the fourth Tony winning best revival of this play, whereas Ragtime, in spite of being a hugely celebrated book musical, won the Tony for the very first time. They may have lost to Lions back in the 90s, but they weren't about to do the same thing with those cats and quite possibly Schmigadoon. Became the first Tony winning best new musical to have been based on a TV show. Unless I'm forgetting a really obvious example that you can let me know about in the comments. And some of my favourite years at the Tonys are those when the awards are fairly evenly spread through a handful of really great shows. So I like seeing this happen because I think rather than just sort of something sweeping in triumph, it allows for that really the right awards going to the right people, which for the most part I think that they did, per my own subjective opinions. We could certainly have a conversation about regional voters and Ragtime Touring vs. Cats, the Jellicle Ball, which very much can't. But also there are only certain shows which I think really need in terms of their box office viability, the endorsement of a Tony Award win in the first. The first place for other shows, their marketing is already doing what it's doing. Certainly there are some shows that will benefit after this. Certainly there are other shows that may be negatively impacted. And one of the things I always like to think about is who was really the overall winner of the night, who did well. And Schmigadoon bookended the evening with success. I also thought they performed well. But I do think the evening was also a really good advert for the Lost Boys. It was a celebration of Ragtime. And I think it was a pretty great ad for Cast Cats. The Jellicle Ball, whose masterstroke here was putting all of those yellow Cats fans under everybody's seats. I was thwacking mine from the sofa. But how thrilling to see so many of the audience members in the orchestra at Radio City Music hall waving those around almost from the beginning of the awards and hilariously getting a little confused. And a couple of people like doing it for John Lithgow when he won as well. That was great. And while I'm talking about the biggest winners of the night, you might expect me to say Death of a Salesman. However, the energy of Salesman's wins felt, for understandable reasons, a little unusual. So let's get into this and talk about some of the best speeches and presenters and performances of the night. And one of the really conspicuous things here was not only Scott Rudin not being present to accept the award for Death of a Salesman, I didn't see him shown in the audience either. I'm assuming that he was just not in attendance this year at the Tony Awards. And Nathan Lane accepted on his behalf. The more conspicuous thing I thought was the fact that he was not named in any of the speeches, including by Laurie Metcalfe, who has advocated on his behalf thoroughly in the press. And I don't know whether that was something that he had asked for or something that PR had briefed everybody on, because I had heard that there was a situation at the Drama Desk Awards when he was booed by the folks there a couple of weeks ago. But the result was this strange sort of almost mournful energy, especially during their acceptance speech for best revival of a play. And listen, Death of a Salesman is never a party and a laugh, the same way that a Schmigadoon is or their cat's the Jellicle bull. But there was something sort of decidedly tense and it would be unfair, I think, and one sided to only have a conversation about the Scott Rudin of it all and not acknowledge Christine Schwartzman, who spoke second when Schmigadoon won Best New Musical. Now, Lorne Michaels spoke first and seemed perhaps a little surprisingly unenthusiastic. But this isn't really his traditional arena, the world of theatre and musicals. The person who spoke second is Christine Schwartzman. She is a lead producer on Schmigadoon. This is among her first really big Broadway successes with her production company, no Guarantees. Now her husband is the CEO of Blackstone and is I believe, allegedly a top 10 donor to Donald Trump through both of his presidential campaigns, with the two of them having both been in attendance at controversial state dinners. There is every indication that Christine Schwartzman and her husband are huge ongoing financial supporters to Donald Trump while she continues to simultaneously be more embedded in the world of Broadway. And she spoke a little bit about her backstory very, very briefly in the Schmigadoon speech. And that isn't the version of it that she really presented. And I say this not to try and cancel Schmigadoon. I say this in Nicole Scherzinger and Kristin Chenoweth both appeared on the broadcast and often whenever they are mentioned these days, you see it in social media comments sections. People are hugely critical of each of them for sort of MAGA indicative commentary and social media activity that they have made over the past couple of years. Well, here we have someone who has contributed financially hugely, had a really tangible impact on American and international politics, who is standing on stage holding a Tony Award. And I think, you know, it's important that we know who everybody is. It's also important that we hold the right people accountable. And hers was the final speech of the night, which flew very much in the face of a theme of advocacy and authenticity in many of the speeches. It was a big night for the political speech and the times in which we are living, both because of everything happening in the United States, but also everything happening on the world stage, sort of demands a political speech. These are the times for really using your platform, using your voice, using that kind of that huge moment in order to articulate your values and say something. And people have been critical of this and like whatever impact it has. But it's. I think it's important to the artists to share that, to feel as though they are doing something with the opportunity that they have. Ali, Louis Borski did a really beautiful job with this sort of. As the spiritual successor to last year's winner in the same category, Jack Malone and his incredibly efficient, heartfelt, conscientious speech. There was also a lot of support for working mothers. A lot of people spoke. Casey Levy spoke about this. Shoshana Bean spoke about this. There was the interesting little quirk of the two of them both being former Elphabas, receiving Tony Awards for the first time and being celebrated for the extensive Broadway careers they've led up to this point. Also, at one time, Kacey Levy was attached to play both of these roles, but decided to remain with Ragtime and step back from the Lost Boys. If she had decided to stay with the Lost Boys, she may have won two Tony Awards in the same night. We will never really know. My thought process is that so much of it is about the campaigning and her staying in Ragtime up until the Tonys and through the Tonys through the end of the run, I think think was in its way also very important in her winning in what was a very heated category. Ergo, I think she always would have won a Tony Award, but she only would have won the Tony Award for whichever role she was playing at the time. I think that's probably how it would have gone down. I also loved the speech given by the Cats directors. I loved that they ended it with. That's what you call a tag team performance, a nod to the show. I loved Queen Jean's speech. I loved Jen Shriever's speech who won for lighting design of the Lost Boys alongside Michael Arden, who is co lighting designer on that show. He didn't win direction but he sort of gave the speech I feel like he would have given. So I feel like he knew that he wasn't going to be back up on that stage and said what he wanted to about the Lost Boys more broadly than just talking about the lighting of it all. And Michael Arden always gives a good speech at the Tony awards and it tickles me that he's now making his way through different creative categories. I would like for him to become the creative answer to Audra McDonald and like do set design next and slowly just build up a Tony repertoire from all of these different categories. The thing I really liked about Jen Shriever's speech is that she mentioned that her younger brother was running a follow spot and that I think was a really great reminder that theatre was still happening. And while celebrating everybody on stage on their night off from a show getting glammed up, there were still so many people working on the Tonys to make them happen as well. Meanwhile, best presenters of the night came in very early. Maya Rudolph and Cola Scola. Hilarious back and forth. I wanted this to go on forever. I thought they were are hysterically funny together. And Mhi' Ya being a replacement in Omari means you would never usually get to see her doing comedy magic alongside Cole with the two of them in a double act. So that was
- [25:15]
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- [25:54]
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- [26:55]
Mickey Jo
Very special. Now let's talk about about the performances and I may sit down and have a longer conversation about just this topic because I feel as though as everything is getting higher and higher stakes for these Broadway producers, everything is more expensive. The Tonys mean so much. This is the biggest way to showcase these performances. What are we going to do? What is the choice? How do we get our show out there? I feel as though with the weight of all of that pressure, they are consistently making perhaps the wrong choice and trying to over market the show by presenting all of this expositional material. It was the year of the expositional performance. So many shows choosing to either partly or fully include the opening number, but also doing these medleys that I don't think are necessarily the best showcase of the material. I often think, and in the social media age as well, if you see just a little insight into something, a little part of a story, it's going to create more intrigue. Ragtime is an interesting example example of this because the first song I ever heard from Ragtime was yous Daddy's Son, no video. I just heard it on YouTube because I discovered Audra McDonald and I was listening to that and she sings I buried my heart in the ground and the lyric that follows. And I was so intrigued about how we got there in the narrative. I had to look it up. But if I had seen the opening, I might have thought, wow, the scale and spectacle for this, this is huge. This seems exciting. I don't know that I would have been prompted to find out what happens next. I feel as though if you take something from part way through a story, it creates more intrigue. And I think that's the thing that is being missed when these decisions are being made about which numbers should be performed. And it is a big decision. It's a really important decision. And I think Schmigadoon made the right choice. I actually said my Schmigadoon review. The one thing I don't necessarily love about the show is the fact that they're on stage the whole time. In the beginning, they're always in a musical and then they're trapped in one. But at the Tonys, they did the thing I want them to do at the Nederlander, which is to walk down through the audience and argue their way onto the stage and then they're trapped there and can't leave. Through the fourth wall. Two strangers. I understand the choice that they made because they want to show Cristiani and Sam. I sometimes think they just have to bite a bullet and show the best number, regardless of who it features more heavily because just doing New York might have been a slightly better choice here. American Express, while a great number shared between the two of them is kind of just like we're having a fun time in New York and I think it's time the story that's going to get people hooked and intrigued. Lost Boys was intriguing. It was seductive. I don't know that we needed quite so much no more Monsters in the beginning, but once we got into I have to have you, it could have been filmed a little better. Some of the choreography and stunt work that they were doing in the pit wasn't showcased as well as it could be. It didn't look as impressive as it actually is because the cameras were catching it in a weird way. No one suffered through this as much as Titanique though, I fear, who also made a medley choice. And I really do think we just need to kind of ditch the idea of these medleys. I on the Tonys, they always feel a little jarring, a little incomplete, but who didn't necessarily get to sell themselves. And their tone in a way that I think was really indicative of the easy fun of the show. Meanwhile, Rocky Horror was a really interesting one because this may be to my mind one of the only examples of a medley that moves backwards through the show. Because they did Sweet Transvestite into the Time Warp and I get the reason as to why, but Sweet Transvestite happens subsequently in the show, so it's one of few medleys to move backwards. So I do think in the next week or so you can look forward to a longer discussion from me about Tony's performances through the years and how if we glance back, some of the best ones have just been self contained single numbers, often that aren't very expositional. As they said in Urinetown, there is such a thing as too much exposition. That might be a lesson to learn moving forwards. Of course, the nominated shows weren't the only performances of of the evening. We also had anniversary performances for the Book of Mormon. So much fun to see the original Broadway company members reuniting to see them doing a different song. Back in the early days of Book of Mormon, they were incredibly protective about the show's material. They weren't doing a lot of public performances. It was years before they would do that at West End live or anywhere. They did, I believe on the Tonys, but it didn't really encompass the full wackiness of the show. So for them to do do a Different song. Obviously they'd done hello the year afterwards. But for them to do something that had Josh Gad for them to do, man up, that was really great. Chicago was the most star studded performance with Pink performing as Velma Kelly. I wonder if at one point this had been conceived as the opening and that was why Pink was central to it. It was also introduced by film cast member Queen Latifah. Introducing Alex Newell who added about 50 million options to the song when you're good to mama sounding sensational. And I loved all of the little cameos leading into Cell Block Tango. I love that Dylan Mulvaney, got to say six. I love that Whitney Levitt who sold out the show to record breaking grosses, got to be a part of that as well as she deserved to be. It made perhaps a little bit more sense than the Chorus Line anniversary moment. And there was a Chorus Line anniversary concert in New York in the last year or so at the Shubert Theatre that had all of these alumni and it was a huge success. It was brilliantly produced, I don't know why. Then we ended up with a performance of what I Did for Love and just that. And no dance, no top hats, no one, no opening on the Tonys like A Chorus Line has performed on the Tony Awards enough times in history. Sure. And it's a beautiful song. And Rachel Zegler, stunning, phenomenal, did a fantastic job. Can't wait for her to be back on Broadway next year. DeVito. And we will certainly hear from her next year at the Tonys where she will undoubtedly be nominated and she may be a front runner to win. Most likely she will also be performing again, performing with the company of Evita. And so always a treat to hear her voice. This was a slightly puzzling addition. The rumor that I had heard was that there was maybe some friction once the estates of those attached to A Chorus Line found out that Chicago was doing an anniversary performance. So they wanted to do an anniversary performance. And it played a little bit like an In Memoriam for the musical Chicago. Not to be confused with the actual In Memoriam which was filmed. This was performed by Leslie Odom Jr singing Without yout from Rent. Lovely choice of performer and song. The cinematography of this made it look a little bit like an edgy Saturday Night Live music performance. But that sort of redirects me to the frustration I have about the way a lot of this was filmed. Like why in the middle of the Cat's number are we cutting to. Is it Mark Consuelas? I don't need to know what he's thinking of Cats while they're performing. Did they think he was Angelo? What were they doing? What was the plan here? Anyway, there is one more thing for us to discuss, which is what are the implications of this year's Tony Awards? So based on this year's winners, what are we potentially expecting to see? Well, a handful of shows in anticipation of the Tonys and while they were campaigning in the run up have already announced future life had already extended beyond their originally limited runs. I think Titanique runs through its limited run. I think Schmigadoon could turn into a long runner. The best case scenario is that Schmigadoon now becomes so popular and so successful that the third season retroactively gets reinstated. It was already mostly written either by Apple TV plus or it gets picked up by somebody else and we finally get into the Schmoods and that gets, you know, brought back to life because of the success of the show on stage, which ultimately only could have happened because it got cancelled in the first place. So an interesting sort of way of looking at it there. Schmigadoon is also going to have a hugely successful life, not only on its US tour, but also subsequently with regional production. Schmigadoon at the Muni. That's inevitable. Schmigadoon, a paper mill playhouse and then community theatre. Schmigadoon. That's going to be great. Are any of these shows going to come to London? Could we get Schmigadoon now that it's a Best New Musical winner? Well, winning Best New Musical isn't always a guarantee that something's going to come to the West End. It still has to be right for a British audience. There are previous winners of this that took a very long time to come over or still never have. Looking at you. A Gentleman's Guide to Love and Murder. Two Strangers Carry a Cake Across New York is an interesting one. They had announced a US tour, I dare say that, you know, and they've done really well in a different climate. Two Strangers at the Longacre, which is a challenging theater to be in and, you know, telling a completely original, original story with no star names. I think they've done very well to get to this point and they should be immensely proud of the Broadway journey that they've had. I am concerned that with no Tony wins, you know, they're going to keep it open to see what the performance did for them. They didn't win Best New Musical or one of the leading actor awards, had they won for material. I don't know what that necessarily would have done. I tend to think only Best New Musical really captures the attention of prospective ticket buyers and tourists and direct them to a marquee, to a box office to go and buy tickets for that show. And so we'll see what happens with two strangers. I am perhaps a little concerned for them on Broadway. Hopefully this motivates a return to London in triumph because they were nominated for these Tony Awards, you know, they didn't get any Olivier nominations because of the process and eligibility and annoying technicalities and things that went a little bit wrong, I believe. But certainly the show has a lot of fans here in the UK and I think it would be welcomed with open arms should they decide to meaningfully come back with either a West End run or maybe a UK tour. Now, the Lost Boys is a huge question mark because of the scale of the production. They have announced a US tour and we will see what happens. I dare say they're going to continue with it. Hopefully the show did enough at the Tonys in order to continue to run for a decent amount of time on Broadway. It's a really expensive production, but I think it has legs if they can manage to, you know, sustain their finances. Cats the Jellicle Ball meanwhile, I really hope that that extends for a decent stretch of time. I don't think we're going to see it touring. I don't think we're necessarily going to see it in London because there is another production of Cats soon to open here at Regent's Park Open Air Theatre that is subsequently going to tour. It wouldn't surprise me if that production was eyeing a West End home of its own. And I just don't think culturally that Cats, the Jelkable Ball will be meaningfully understood here by London audiences. The play Liberation has already announced a London run at an unnamed venue. But in general we don't tend to see a lot of transfers of the American built play productions to the West End. Very often London's most successful plays all go to Broadway. It doesn't happen a lot in reverse. So I wouldn't expect for us to see this Death of a Salesman revival, but, you know, perhaps we will. To Kill a Mockingbird came over from the same producer, so we will see what happens. As for the actors who won Tony Awards, you know, so many of them have been working back to back, many of them are also parents. So after they finish in these shows, whenever that may be, a lot of them may take a well deserved break. It has been stated by Casey Levy that the rumoured transfer of the West End production of Next to Normal that she led to Broadway isn't going to be happening. But then Audra McDonald said Gypsy wasn't happening and then it did. So I'm still holding out hope that potentially that could be something that happens even if the next year or two already feels very crowded for musical revivals. One of the rising star Tony Award winners of the night, of course, was Allie Lewis Borski, who previously to his work in the Lost Boys was attached to a new musical called We Live in Cairo. I would love for that to get a return and for him to return to that show again. I don't know if it would immediately be on Broadway, but hopefully that's not the last we've seen or heard of it. For now, though, those are, I think, all of my thoughts about this year's Tony Awards. As always, I would love to hear yours. Were you happy with the results? I have to say, on balance, that I pretty much was. I wasn't necessarily too surprised or disappointed one way or another, and I look forward to next year's Tony Awards and the upcoming Broadway season, which may feel just a little more momentous as that begins. You can look forward to more Broadway coverage from me, as well as my thoughts on theatre around the world. Make sure to subscribe here on YouTube or follow me wherever you are, seeing my face or hearing my voice. You can also sign up to my free weekly Substack email newsletter. And as always, I hope that everyone is staying safe and that you have a stagey day for 10 more seconds. I'm Mickey Jo Theatre. Oh my God. Hey, thanks for watching. Have a stagey day. Subscribe this episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Do you ever think about switching insurance companies to see if you could save some cash? Progressive makes it easy to see if you could save when you bundle your home and auto policies. Try it@progressive.com Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates. Potential savings will vary. Not available in all states At Edward Jones, we believe rich is more than caring about the latest and greatest. It's also taking care of what gives your life meaning. 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