After a very difficult 18 months, Broadway is officially back with hit musicals such as The Lion King, Jagged Little Pill, Waitress, Hamilton and Wicked taking over New York’s theatre district once more.
Given how much the theatre industry has endured over the course of the pandemic and how long productions were forced to remain dark, you can only imagine what a celebration the 2021 Tony Awards are going to be.
The 74th iteration of the Awards will commemorate the resilience and the return of Broadway as part of a four-hour special featuring performances from the three Best Musical nominees including the Australian-produced Moulin Rouge! The Musical.
Moulin Rouge! The Musical — which is competing for 14 Tonys — is the first Australian-produced musical to originate on Broadway and will have its Australian premiere this year at Melbourne’s Regent Theatre, with global productions set to open in London’s West End in November and Tokyo in 2023.
After debuting in 2019, the production broke box office records for the Al Hirschfeld theatre, scored a Grammy nomination for the Original Cast Recording, a Drama League Award for Outstanding Production of a Musical and ten Outer Critics Award Honours.
Hosted by Audra McDonald and Leslie Odom Jr, the Tonys will finally go ahead on Sunday, September 26 (New York time) after being postponed in 2020 thanks to the pandemic. Included in the performers, along with the cast of Moulin Rouge!, will be the casts of Tina: The Tina Turner Musical, and Jagged Little Pill, the latter of which is up for a staggering 15 nominations in total.
Other nominees include Jake Gyllenhaal, who’s up for Best Leading Actor in a Play for Sea Wall/A Life, and Adrienne Warren for Best Leading Actress in a Musical, for her portrayal of Tina Turner.
Matthew Lopez, who is writing the remake of The Bodyguard, has also scored a Best Play nomination for The Inheritance while Slave Play earned 12 noms, breaking the record for most nominations for a non-musical play set by Angels in America which eaned 11 in 2018.
The 74th Annual Tony Awards will be broadcast in Australia on 10 Peach from 9AM AEST on Monday 27 September with special event performances beginning at 11AM AEST and later available for catch up on 10 Play On Demand.
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