2025 Tony Awards: Who will win, who should win in a year with few sure things

Chicago Tribune

2 days ago

Will Nicole Scherzinger, sizzling in 'Sunset Blvd.,' beat out Audra McDonald, who made Rose a metaphor for the tragic human condition? Could Jonathan Groff, a knockout Bobby Darin, win back-to-back kudos? Might Sadie Sink of 'John Proctor Is the Villain' be sunk by the wild-eyed Laura Donnelly of 'The Hills of California' or the ever-savvy Mia Farrow of 'The Roommate,' even though all three women played equally terrifying characters?
These and many other questions will be answered on Sunday at the Radio City Music Hall in New York, where host Cynthia Erivo will present the 78th annual Tony Awards (beginning at 7 p.m. June 8 and broadcast on CBS and streamed on Paramount+). The ceremony will be the climax of the 2024-25 Broadway season and the reason that several struggling musicals ('Real Women Have Curves,' 'Boop! The Musical') are hanging in there, hoping for a life-saving boost.
Tony Award voters are casting their ballots. Let's look at who should be ascending to the dais in the traditional ebullient panic, holding back tears and staring into the camera to tell all the envious theater kids at home how you, too, can have all this if you only fight off the naysayers and follow your dreams!
Right. Down to it.
This one will be, and rightly should be, a runaway victory for 'Maybe Happy Ending,' a delightfully unnerving musical that most everyone on Broadway underestimated because it was an original love story between two retired South Korean 'helperbots.' To my mind, Will Aronson and Hue Park's quirky, charming little tuner succeeds mostly because of one small but pivotal idea: the notion that a robot's battery life can be a proxy for human mortality. Oliver and Claire fall in love as their percentages drop. Thus, the show manages to simultaneously tap into the fear we all have of an imminent robotic takeover (oh, it's coming) while avoiding the problem of making a dystopian musical. By making the robots as vulnerable as us, they forged a charming romantic comedy performed by Helen J. Shen (robbed of an acting nomination) and Darren Criss (who dove deep into robotland).
The competition? Nothing credible. 'Buena Vista Social Club' is a very good time, musically speaking, but has a predictably formulaic book. The inventive 'Death Becomes Her' works just fine as a campy frolic but it relies much on its source movie. And 'Operation Mincemeat' is the most jolly of pastiches, rib-tickling fun all the way. Only 'Dead Outlaw' represents truly credible competition and deserves to siphon off some votes. But at the end of the day, it's a musical about a corpse.
There were two excellent, Tony-worthy new plays in this Broadway season: Jez Butterworth's 'The Hills of California,' set in the British working-class resort of Blackpool, and Branden Jacobs-Jenkins' 'Purpose,' both a high-style dissection of the dysfunctional family of the civil rights icon Jesse Jackson and a moving exploration of what it's like to be an introverted kid in a high-pressure family.
'Purpose,' which is still running and more relevant to most Tony voters, is likely to win. But Butterworth's play forged a complex dramaturgical structure and explored deeply empathetic characters. Its central point? To explore how and why childhood trauma impacts our adulthoods. Butterworth has been writing plays a lot longer than Jacobs-Jenkins and his experience shows; I wanted the perfectly crafted 'Hills' to never end.
Writer Kimberly Belflower's very lively 'John Proctor Is the Villain' might sneak in there, but I think that audiences at this drama about high schoolers studying 'The Crucible' are responding more to a brilliant production than to the play itself, which is at the end of the day a melodrama that relies on someone else's intellectual property. No shame there, but not the equal of the competition and, with much respect, nor is the very smart and potent 'English,' a show about ESL students that also leads to an inexorable conclusion matching the playwright's point of view.
This category will hinge on how many voters embrace Jamie Lloyd's cleverly branded deconstruction of 'Sunset Blvd.' over George C. Wolfe's more nuanced approach to 'Gypsy.' In many ways, the two leading candidates represent a kind of yin and yang of musical revival. 'Sunset Blvd.' is showy and radical and replaced the gilded excess of the original production with an excess of concept, deceptively minimalist but only on the surface. Wolfe's 'Gypsy' aimed to excise the show of Patti LuPone-like drama. McDonald, who brought her classically trained voice to Rose, saw her antiheroine more as an everywoman and the production responded accordingly, as if Wolfe were trying to say that 'Gypsy' was the American tragic musical that few previously understood.
I see the arguments against 'Sunset Blvd.' but in the end, Lloyd's staging was just so audaciously thrilling that it overcame them for me. As a director, he's obsessed with film, but then this is a musical about a movie star, so if ever there was a show that could stand such a metaphoric obsession, then here it was. And although this may seem counterintuitive, I thought 'Gypsy' missed the chance to stage this title with far more Black actors, allowing it to serve as a metaphor for the condition of Black entertainers in early 20th century America. It almost went there, but not quite.
2025 Tony Award nominations: Steppenwolf's 'Purpose' and 'Death Becomes Her' both score bigThis was not a stellar season for play revivals. 'Romeo + Juliet,' a pretentious and wildly uneven misfire, did not even remotely deserve its Tony nomination and, bracing moments notwithstanding, 'Our Town' was uneven and derivative of David Cromer's prior revival. 'Eureka Day,' a piece about pretentious pre-school parents and teachers, was an effective satire but hardly surprising. That leaves David Henry Hwang's 'Yellow Face,' an autobiographical piece about Hwang himself and a 'Miss Saigon' casting scandal. 'Yellow Face' has knocked around the American regions for years. But this was a truly excellent piece of new direction from Leigh Silverman and for the first time, the play transcended its inside-baseball orientation and had much to say about America and race.
Team Nicole Scherzinger or Team Audra McDonald?
Both deconstructed iconic characters (Norma Desmond and Madam Rose) using every ounce of their mutually formidable craft. With all due respect to McDonald, I'm Team Nicole because her work was the more radical of the two performances in rescuing Norma from bathetic senility and giving her back her sexuality, and because McDonald's tragic approach to Rose inevitably de-emphasized her chutzpah and self-aware vivacity which is much of why 'Gypsy' is 'Gypsy.' Still, no shame in being on the other team.
It would feel strange for either Megan Hilty or Jennifer Simard to win for 'Death Becomes Her' at the expense of the other and I suspect Tony voters will feel the same way. But let's add some props for Jasmine Amy Rogers, truly a perfect Betty Boop who managed to turn a vampish cartoon figure into a complex and vulnerable heroine.
If you judge a performance by pizzazz, charm and growing star power, Jonathan Groff is your winner for his dazzling take on Bobby Darin in 'Just in Time.' If immersion inside a character is your choice, you are choosing between Darren Criss for 'Maybe Happy Ending' and Andrew Durand in 'Dead Outlaw.' I thought Durand was just astonishing as the titular outlaw, whose corpse takes on an all-American trajectory of its own. Aside from the technical demands of playing a dead dude, Durand also nailed a guy with zero access to his own feelings. In other words, what he didn't do was probably as important as what he did. I preferred that to Jeremy Jordan in 'Floyd Collins', but I may be in a minority. And Tom Francis, who sings his way through Midtown eight times a week in 'Sunset Blvd.,' will have deserved support.
Mia Farrow has acted only rarely in the past decade but her empathetic performance as a vegan, pot-growing Iowan in 'The Roommate' was a reminder of her astonishing ability to fuse what actors think of as externals and internals — her work felt deeply authentic but savvy observers also noted the sophistication of her comic technique and dramatic timing.
Alas for Farrow, this is an extraordinary category and by far the most competitive at this year's Tony Awards. Take Sarah Snook, whose work in 'The Picture of Dorian Gray' had not a single syllable out of place on the night I saw the show, notwithstanding the huge technical demands of a video-filled production that co-starred numerous versions of her recorded self. She's one of the world's great performers.
Then there was the less-famous Laura Donnelly, who played a mother and (later) her adult daughter in 'The Hills of California,' all in service of the writer's point that we all eventually have to live the way we were raised. So distinct were these two characters that some punters in my row clearly did not know they were watching the same actress they'd seen in a different role just a few minutes before. Donnelly was at once empathetic and Medea-like in her intensity. We were supposed to be scared of both of Donnelly's characters and I swear I could not tell you which terrified me the most.
Sadie Sink also has a lot of fans and that was indeed a savvy turn in 'John Proctor.' But this competition is between Snook and Donnelly and it was a hard choice for me. Donnelly haunts me the most.
George Clooney is on the list of nominees and I hardly need to recount his formidable talents, but he was fundamentally filmic in 'Good Night, and Good Luck,' rather than truly translating his subtle version of Edward R. Murrow to a stage the size of the Winter Garden Theatre.
So, with an additional nod of admiration to the delightfully quirky Louis McCartney, who managed to survive all of the crashes and bangs of 'Stranger Things: The First Shadow,' I preferred Jon Michael Hill, playing a young man born into a famous and famously dysfunctional Black political family even though he just wanted to take photographs and stay as far away as possible from his father and his actions. Hill was the most rooted actor in a stellar Steppenwolf Theatre production of 'Purpose.'
But I suspect Cole Escola, the star of 'Oh, Mary!,' a silly but strikingly effective satire of Mary Todd Lincoln and her bearded spouse, who will take the prize. No complaints here. Escola hardly was subtle with a guileless, all-in performance that has been packing the house. It's a one of a kind show and that's its greatest selling point. But Escola also offers a clever commentary on present-day America, fueled by fun, freedom and frustration.
What the Tony nominations got right — and wrongDavid Cromer's work on 'Dead Outlaw' was typically detailed and worthy and Christopher Gattelli wrangled 'Death Becomes Her' with witty aplomb, but 'Maybe Happy Ending' was an eye popping career-high for Michael Arden, who created the most romantic of dreamscapes and yet also insisted that the audience look precisely and only where the director wanted its eyes to be.
Speaking of career highs, Danya Taymor convinced her youthful cast in 'John Proctor Is the Villain' that the stakes in this high school English class were a matter of life and death. Taymor has to compete with Kip Williams, who employed multiple screens and videographers in 'The Picture of Dorian Gray' for what was more conceptual authorship than direction, and with Sam Mendes, whose mastery of the exquisite ensemble cast of 'The Hills of California' was formidable. Mendes has won many kudos; most Tony voters will want to reward Taymor, a rising talent. Fair enough.
Last, here are my picks for the remaining acting categories.