Best Reunion: The ‘Hamilton’ Cast
It was plugged before what seemed like every commercial break, but when members of the original cast of “Hamilton” finally gathered onstage at Radio City Music Hall for a 10th-anniversary reunion performance, the hype proved justified. Sleekly lit and dressed and choreographed, Lin-Manuel Miranda and Leslie Odom Jr. were gloriously back; so were Phillipa Soo, Renée Elise Goldsberry and Jasmine Cephas Jones and that Tony-nominated guy who played King George. The eight-song medley — which included “My Shot,” “The Schuyler Sisters” and “The Room Where It Happens”— snapped. I’d make room for it on any list of all-time-best Tonys performances.
— Scott Heller
Best Inspiration: Here’s to You, Mr. Robinson
The smooth baritone, the sly half-smile and the wink at the camera. This guy had to be an actor. And, once upon a time, he was. But Gary Edwin Robinson received a Tony Award last night for his second career, as a teacher, at Boys and Girls High School in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn. Accepting the honor in that voice that could make you believe anything, he said that he trained his students not merely to appreciate theater, but to find careers in it. Appreciation is of course valuable, but the harder thing is to instill in young people the idea that finding “the theater in themselves” can be honorable, and even necessary.
— Jesse Green
Best Epic Acceptance: Nicole Scherzinger
Nicole Scherzinger’s acceptance speech was as epically demonstrative as her movements in “Sunset Boulevard” are controlled, restrained, precise. The acknowledging of “the exceptional warrior women in this category”! The shaking! The crying! The swooping motions from the hand that was not holding her new award! At times it felt like seeing a modern Maria Callas shaking her fist at the heavens, except that for once those heavens had ruled in her favor. There was an outsize grandeur to the drama of it all that felt classical. Can Medea be far off?
— Elisabeth Vincentelli
Best Placement: Cynthia Erivo’s Balcony Bit
It’s become an awards-show staple: The host schleps up to the balcony seats to mingle with us regular folks and maybe tell a joke or two. Erivo’s ascent at Radio City was worth the climb. In a night of a thousand costume changes, her pink candy wrapper of a dress was a zany delight. And the atmosphere up there lent itself to deft comedy — about her height, about Abraham Lincoln and, best of all, about why sitting far away was the best place to watch Jonathan (“He Spits When He Sings”) Groff perform: “So please welcome the man who makes everyone wet…”
— Scott Heller
Best Nightclub Act: Jonathan Groff as Bobby Darin
Showmanship is distinct from acting. It’s an elusive, unfairly distributed quality: You have it or you don’t. Groff’s dynamite medley — “Mack the Knife,” “That’s All” and “Once in a Lifetime” — proved he has it. In this context, merely delivering a song well isn’t enough — you have to sell it. It’s something that Bobby Darin, the subject of Groff’s current vehicle, “Just in Time,” had. At Radio City on Sunday, Groff moved like a man possessed by the need to entertain, straddling a seated Keanu Reeves’s head and driven by the rhythm of mad bongos. Please, let him host the Tonys next year.
— Elisabeth Vincentelli
Worst Eyeful: Too Many Pixels
This season, virtual scenery reached critical mass on Broadway, in “Sunset Boulevard,” “The Picture of Dorian Gray,” “Redwood” and “Maybe Happy Ending.” The Tony Awards telecast followed suit, ditching traditional flats, drops and clunky wagons in favor of digital backgrounds that ultimately looked cheesy. Literally cheesy-looking in the case of the excerpt from “Operation Mincemeat,” a totally old-tech musical performed during the ceremony in front of yellow-washed screens that made the actors look as if they’d fallen into a vat of fondue. Why would the producers of a theater awards show make such an anti-theatrical choice? For the same reason some of the less artful shows do: It’s faster, cheaper and, for audiences who have to be pried away from their own screens, perhaps more enticing.
— Jesse Green
Best Homecoming: Asian and Asian American Artists Win Big
It was a historic evening for a troupe of Asian and Asian American theater artists, including Nicole Scherzinger, Francis Jue and Darren Criss, who all won performance Tonys. Marco Paguia also received a Tony for his “Buena Vista Social Club” orchestrations, and Hue Park won for writing the lyrics and co-writing the book for “Maybe Happy Ending,” the evening’s breakout success. In their speeches, several of the artists made reference to feeling left out or ignored before finding a home in the theater. Scherzinger, who noted her Filipina, native Hawaiian and Ukrainian ancestry, said, “I always felt like I didn’t belong, but you all have made me feel like I belong and I have come home at last.”
— Alexis Soloski
Best Sell: Making the Plays Pop
For all their glamour, and their genuine recognition of talent, the Tonys are an industry advertisement — meant not only to sell tickets in New York, but also to give the nominated shows a life beyond Broadway. Musicals, with their colorful numbers, have always had an advantage in making their case for that. Plays, by comparison, have tended not to translate. But there was real charm to the way this year’s best play nominees were introduced. With a framed screen of video clips playing upstage, a Tony-nominated star from each show spoke with an insider’s affection while giving a synopsis of it: Marjan Neshat for “English,” Sadie Sink for “John Proctor Is the Villain,” Cole Escola for “Oh, Mary!,” Harry Lennix for “Purpose,” Laura Donnelly for “The Hills of California.” It was easy to imagine would-be producers and audience members out there, their interest suddenly piqued.
— Laura Collins-Hughes
Best ‘Sing-Off’: Cynthia Erivo’s ‘My Way’
It’s always a delicate matter: how to usher off winners whose speeches go too long. A clever step up from canned elevator music: Erivo singing a passage from the standard “My Way,” popularized by Frank Sinatra. When Kara Young, accepting her award for “Purpose,” was still in the thick of her extensive list of thank-yous to those who had made her back-to-back featured actress in a play wins possible, it was a gentle balm to hear “And now, the end is near / And so I face the final curtain …”
— Sarah Bahr
Worst Placement: Preshow Spot for Book and Score Awards
Not every scene deserves a spotlight, but relegating the book and score awards to the Tonys preshow felt at least a little rude. What is a musical without its songs? Or its occasionally effortful patter between songs? (And is dance really an also-ran, too?) At the 2025 Tonys, a win for “Maybe Happy Ending” was practically assured after its wins for book and score, though viewers watching only the main broadcast would never have known this. Couldn’t we swap out a drug ad or a few host jokes to show these prizes on the main stage?
— Alexis Soloski
Best Farewell to Cynicism: Hester’s Open Heart
In the World War II caper “Operation Mincemeat,” Jak Malone’s big song, “Dear Bill,” is nearly six minutes long. It’s a major reason he won a featured-actor Tony, because that is the moment when his character — a middle-aged British intelligence secretary named Hester — opens her wounded heart to the audience. “They weep for her,” Malone said in his speech, “they invest in her, they love her for her old romantic heart. And if you watched our show and found yourself believing in Hester, well, then I am so glad to tell you that, intentionally or otherwise, you might have just bid farewell to cynicism, to outdated ideas, to that rotten old binary, and opened yourself up to a world that is already out there in glorious Technicolor and isn’t going away anytime soon.”
— Laura Collins-Hughes
The post Best and Worst Moments From the 2025 Tony Awards appeared first on New York Times.
