A Few Thoughts on an Awards Season Full of News-Worthy and Prize-Worthy Nominations

We’re officially in awards season.  The Outer Critics Circle, on whose nominating committee I sit, announced its choices for the best in the 2023-2024 season last week (click here to see our nominations for shows both on and off Broadway).  And then this week came nominations from the Drama Desk, which celebrate shows on, off and off-off Broadway (click here for its choices) and the Chita Rivera Award nominations for the best in theatrical dance (click here for those nods).  And then, of course, came the Tony Award nominations (click here to see those).

Still to come are the Drama Critics Circle Awards, which will be announced on May 13 and the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, which is scheduled to be announced on May 8.

But even with all those chances, some worthy contenders always get left out. And that was even more the case this year because there were so many shows—13 opening in the last two weeks of the season alone—so many of them boasted award-worthy elements and so many of them featured big casts with lots of talented performances. Which made it all the more difficult to put out a slate of just five to seven names in any category. 

It delighted me when some of my personal favorites got recognized (yay, Mother Play) and made me a little sad when some didn’t (Michael Imperioli really should have been in the mix for his turn in An Enemy of the People). But what I focused on more is what these combined nominations tell us about the current state of Broadway, which is searching for a new identity in this post-pandemic era.

Most attention tends to center around the prizes for musicals because (1) that’s what so many theatergoers think of when they think of a Broadway show and (2) musicals are so damned hard to get right. So I'm going to focus this post on them too. And it makes extra sense to do that because last season saw an influx of new voices and talents into that arena.

More award-winning playwrights than ever are writing the books for musicals. Kristoffer Diaz, a one-time finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, wrote the book for Hell’s Kitchen, the musical drawn from the songbook of Alicia Keyes and inspired by the singer-songwriter’s coming of age in the ‘90s in the New York City neighborhood that gives the show its title. 

Another former Pulitzer finalist Craig Lucas collaborated with composer Adam Guettel on Days of Wine and Roses, the story of a couple (gloriously played by Brian d'Arcy James and Kelli O'Hara) whose lives are ruined by alcoholism. 

Meanwhile yet another Pulitzer finalist, Adam Rapp adapted The Outsiders, S.E. Hinton’s now-classic 1967 novel about rival teen gangs divided along social class lines.  

And Jackie Sibblies Drury, who actually won the Pulitzer in 2019 for her audacious play Fairview, created the narrative storyline for Justin Peck’s all-dance show Illinoise, which was inspired by and set to the music of Sufjan Stevens.

But Stevens’ music wasn’t the only score to redefine what a Broadway show now sounds like. Singer-songwriter Ingrid Michaelson created the pop-rock score for The Notebook; the folk-rock duo Jamestown Revival collaborated with Justin Levine on the music for The Outsiders and the collective of musicians known as the Pigpen Company did the score for Water for Elephants.  

However perhaps most surprisingly, Will Butler, a former member of the indie band Arcade Fire, wrote the songs for Stereophonic, David Adjmi’s play about a rock band working through both artistic and personal issues as it records its sophomore album. 

Shaina Taub’s score for Suffs, a show about the feminist campaign to get women the right to vote, is a bit more traditional but it's attention worthy too because Taub is one of just a handful of women ever to have written the book, score and lyrics for a Broadway show.

Women also broke out in other ways last season. Four of the five Tony nominations for Best Director of a Musical deservedly went to women: Maria Friedman for Merrily We Roll Along, Leigh Silverman for Suffs, Jessica Stone for Water for Elephants and Danya Taymor for The Outsiders.  

All of these writers, composers and directors picked up OCC or Drama Desk nominations too. As did their shows.  And because there is no obvious frontrunner for the Best Musical this year, watching as the nominees and their producers jockey for the top prizes could make this awards season one of the most fun and exciting in recent memory.

Update: Although above the post said the Pulitzer Prize for Drama would be announced on May 8, it was announced on May 6 (and you might think I would have known better since I had the honor of chairing this year's jury; click here for info about the runners-up and the other jury members). The prize went to Eboni Booth's Primary Trust (click here to listen to an interview I did with Booth when the show ran at Roundabout's Laura Pels Theatre last year).

Reveling in the 2022-23 Awards Season

And so it’s begun. The last show of Broadway’s 2022-23 season—a revival of The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window,Lorraine Hansberry’s 1964 meditation on white allyship—opened on April 27. And that's set off a flood of awards nominations, including the ones this week for the Tonys.

The Drama League got things going with its nominations for both on and off-Broadway productions (click here to see its choices) and will announce its winners on May 19.  

The Outer Critics Circle, for whom I serve as a nominator, announced our slate of on and off-Broadway nominees a couple of days later (click here to read them); we’ll announce our winners on May 15 and celebrate them in an awards ceremony at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts on May 25. 

Then the Drama Desk (I’m a voting member of that one) announced its candidates for the season’s best productions on Broadway, off-Broadway and off-off-Broadway (click here for those) and it will hand out its prizes on June 6.

The rules and even the eligibility dates vary from group to group but a consensus does seem to have formed around which were the best Broadway shows. Each of the groups put Tom Stoppard’s Holocaust drama Leopoldstadt on their lists and all three nominated the musicals & Juliet, a jukebox musical riff on Shakespeare set to pop songs by Max Martin; Shucked, a comedy about corn with a joke-stoked book by Robert Horn and music by country songwriters Brandy Clark and Shane McAnally; and Some Like It Hot, Matthew Lopez and Amber Ruffin’s updating of that classic movie comedy with a score by Scott Wittman and Marc Shaiman. 

In the revival categories, the awards groups agreed on Ohio State Murders, Adrienne Kennedy’s seldom seen meditation on toxic racism, for best play; and Parade, Jason Robert Brown and Alfred Uhry’s rendering of an antisemitic lynching, as the best musical.  And now the Tonys have confirmed those choices, while adding others—including a few surprises.

Joining the already Olivier-honored Leopoldstadt for the Tony honor of best play are three Pulitzer Prize winners that have only now made it to Broadway: Stephen Adly Guirgis’ Between Riverside and Crazy, Martyna Majok’s Cost of Living and James Ijames’ Fat Ham, each of which also snagged nominations for actors in their casts. 

Rounding out the best play category is Ain’t No Mo’, a satire about a government program that addresses the race problem by giving every black person in the U.S. a one-way ticket to Africa. 

Ain’t No Mo's spot on the list is a bit of a surprise since the show ran for just 23 performances in December but it’s racked up six nominations, including one for its director and a featured acting nod for its 26-year-old playwright Jordan E. Cooper who also appeared in the play as a no-nonsense flight attendant named Peaches.

For best musical, Some Like It Hot, Shucked and & Juliet were joined by New York, New York, a paean to the city built around numbers from the songbook of 96-year-old John Kander and the late Fred Ebb, with additional lyrics by Lin-Manuel Miranda; and Kimberly Akimbo, the musical that Jeanine Tesori and David Lindsay-Abaire adapted from his play about a 16-year-old girl with a rare genetic condition that prematurely ages her. 

That same production of Kimberly Akimbo won the top prize from all the other critics’ groups (including the New York Drama Critics Circle) when it played off-Broadway at the Atlantic Theater in the 2021-22 season and it’s been a frontrunner for the Tony since it opened on Broadway last November. But it now looks as though it may have to beat back competition from Some Like It Hot, which earned 13 Tony nominations, more than any other show this year.

But the hottest races may be in the revival categories. Ohio State Murders didn’t make the cut for the Tonys (although its star Audra McDonald did get a nomination—her 10th—for her performance). Instead, the best play revival contest is between August Wilson’s The Piano Lesson, Suzan-Lori Parks’ Topdog/Underdog (both Pulitzer winners; are you detecting a trend?) and playwright Amy Herzog's new adaptation of Henrik Ibsen’s classic feminist drama A Doll’s House. 

And the showdown is even more intense in the revived musicals category with Parade facing off against two beloved Stephen Sondheim shows, Into the Woods and Sweeney Todd: The Demond Barber of Fleet Street; and a new version of Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe’s Camelot, updated by Aaron Sorkin (you can check out all the Tony nominations here). 

As you might imagine, I’ve spent the last few days doing almost nothing but thinking and talking about these awards. I’m delighted to be able to say that I tied for second place on the Gold Derby awards site’s list of theater “experts” who predicted which shows, actors and other creatives would get Tony nominations (click here to see more about that). 

I also spent an hour on Tuesday afternoon talking about the Tony choices with a panel of folks convened by the Theatre Development Fund (you can listen to that by clicking here). And two days after that, I again joined Adam Feldman of Time Out New York and Helen Shaw of The New Yorker to record an episode on the Tonys for my pal Patrick Pacheco’s show “THEATER: All the Moving Parts,” which will air later this month.  

I’m a little talked out right now. But that won’t last long. The one big takeaway I’ve had this week is that the 2022-23 season was a damn good one and I don’t think I’m done with it yet, especially since this year’s Pulitzer awards are scheduled to be announced next week. Plus, believe it or not, I’ve already begun lining up shows to see for the 2023-24 season. So I hope you’ll come back here and join me for all of it.

Why the OCC (and Me) Made the Switch to More Gender-Inclusive Acting Awards

Giving awards can be tricky. We all want to—and should—celebrate extraordinary theatrical talent. But every time one person is ushered into the winner’s circle, a whole lot of other folks are left out of it. And adding insult to injury, it's often been really hard for some outsiders to find a way in at all. 

In the not-so-distant past, most of those who took home the honors and trophies looked like one another: lots of white men and some white women. That’s begun to change over the past few years in the wake of the reckonings brought on by the #OscarSoWhite and We See You White American Theater campaigns and the representation reports issued by the Asian American Performers Action Coalition. 

So more opportunities to make their way into the circle have opened up for a wider range of people and some of those people have been really, really talented: seven of the last 10 winners of the Pulitzer Prize for Drama have been playwrights of color.  

But there’s still more work to be done to level the playing field. Which is why I’m taking time out from talking about shows I’ve recently seen to note that this week the Outer Critics Circle announced that it is eliminating gendered acting categories.  

So instead of giving awards for, say, Outstanding Actor in a Play and Outstanding Actress in a Play, the OCC will now celebrate the Outstanding Performer in a Play, regardless of whether that performer is male, female or nonbinary.

I sit on the OCC’s executive board and although our deliberations are private, I’m going to out myself by admitting that the decision was complicated for me. I worried that we might end up with a slate of all male-identifying performers since they get so many more of the attention-grabbing roles. Only 37% of the 233 principal roles in the 30 new shows that opened on Broadway in 2018 were for women (click here to read more about that). 

Those numbers clearly run the risk of putting female performers at a disadvantage if all performances are being weighed against one another. But after doing a lot of reading, talking and soul searching, I also came to the conclusion that nonbinary actors were at an even greater disadvantage. Fitting into neither the category of Outstanding Actor or Actress, left no place for them be considered at all, unless they shoehorned themselves into a misnomer category (click here to read about one actor's experience). 

Changing the awards to Outstanding Performance in a Male or Female Role seemed like an option. But playwrights and musical book writers have begun creating characters like May in & Juliet or Daphne in Some Like It Hot who don’t fit into those slots either. Which meant, at least for me, that there was only one way to go.

And in the end, the board rethought entirely how we would distribute our acting awards. Now instead of dividing them by who’s doing them, we’re dividing them by where they’re being done. So there will now be awards for actors in Broadway shows and for those performing Off-Broadway. This evens things up in a different way since fantastic work by actors in smaller productions has long been overshadowed by that of their peers in big Broadway shows. 

But of course, awards tend to say as much, if not more, about the people giving them as the people receiving them. So it’s incumbent on all of us who see shows, lobby for favorites on social media or actually vote—be it for the OCC, Drama Desk, Drama League, New York Drama Critics or Tony awards—to make sure that it is as fair and easy as possible for any of the most talented performers, regardless of celebrity, ethnicity, gender identity or physical ability, to get into that winner’s circle.   

Celebrating Even Making it to Awards Season

It may seem strange for a theater lover—and hip-hop know-nothing—like me to be quoting the rapper Drake but his self-congratulatory lyrics “Started from the bottom, now we're here” seem particularly apt at this theatrical moment. After all, concerns about the spread of the coronavirus had closed theaters everywhere at this time last year but now, we're here, in the awards phase celebrating a full New York theater season. 

Of course, there have been bumps along the way. Broadway shows opened and closed and opened again as infection rates in the city ebbed, surged, wavered. Performances were canceled when stars like Hugh Jackman, Patti LuPone, Sarah Jessica Parker and Daniel Craig tested positive for the virus. But, thanks to having been vaccinated, they all returned relatively quickly to their productions, even though the Tonys had to extend their deadline so that nominators would be able to see all the shows and all the contending performers. 

Meanwhile, tourists, the lifeblood of Broadway, have been slow to return and the city’s official marketing organization is predicting that visitors to New York will be down about 15% from the pre-pandemic levels of 2019. And even some locals have been skittish about seeing shows, including those off-Broadway. 

All of that has caused premature closings, even of touted shows. The much-praised revival of Nzotake Shange’s for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf announced that it would close next week, three months ahead of schedule, before an online campaign won it a two-week reprieve until June 5. The musical Mrs. Doubtfire is unlikely to be so lucky; after getting just one Tony nomination (for Rob McClure's terrific lead performance) its producers said they will bring down the curtain on May 29.  

On the other hand, people seem happy to pay premium prices to see Jackman in The Music Man, Craig in Macbeth, Parker and her also-starry husband Matthew Broderick in Plaza Suite and Beanie Feldstein headlining Broadway’s first revival of Funny Girl in 55 years, even though those four shows have drawn mixed reviews. 

So the awards this year will have been particularly hard won and may be even more cherished than usual. The Tony nominators tacitly acknowledged that this week when they gave nods to 29 of the 34 shows that opened between Aug. 1, 2021 and May 4, 2022. Even Diana, the much-derided musical about the late princess that ran for just 34 performance, got a nod for its costumes. 

But the biggest bragging rights went to the musical A Strange Loop, which lead the pack with 11 nominations although it was closely followed with 10 each by Paradise Square and MJ, the musical about Michael Jackson. On the play side, The Lehman Trilogy boasted eight nominations, including one for each of its three actors. All the winners will be announced at the ceremony scheduled for June 12. You can find—and debate—the entire list of nominees by clicking here.

Of course the Tonys aren’t the only honors that will be given out over the next few weeks. It can be difficult to keep score because the various awards groups have different qualifying periods. On Monday the Pulitzer Prize committee, which uses a calendar year and recognized A Strange Loop in 2021, gave its award to Fat Ham, a new twist on the Hamlet story by James Ijames that was streamed by Philadelphia’s Wilma Theater last year and just started previews for a May 26 opening at The Public Theater. You can read more about it and about the two semi-finalists by clicking here.

A couple of days later the New York Drama Critics’ Circle gave its Best Play prize to Samuel D. Hunter’s A Case for the Existence of God, a fantastic play that opened last week at Playwrights Horizons (click here to see my review). It also named Kimberly Akimbo, David Lindsay-Abaire’s adaptation of his 2003 play with a score by Jeanine Tesori, as Best Musical (click here for my thoughts on that one). The musical, which had a brief run at the Atlantic Theatre, is scheduled to open on Broadway in November and you can see the impressive list of runners-up for best play by clicking here.  

There’s even more to come. The Drama Desk, which recognizes Broadway, off-Broadway and off-off-Broadway productions, was supposed to announce its nominations on May 2 but pushed them back to this coming Monday.  A day later, the Outer Critics Circle, on whose executive committee I’m proud to serve, will announce our winners for the 2021-2022 season. In the meantime, you can check out the list of our nominees by clicking here.

And this Sunday, I’m going to join my BroadwayRadio colleagues James Marino, Peter Filichia and Michael Portantiere to discuss all of this and more on this week’s episode of This Week on Broadway, which you should be able to find here.

Finally, Some Good Theater News, Compliments of the Outer Critics Circle

Good news, particularly good news about theater, has been hard to find over the last two months since concerns about the coronavirus locked most of us indoors and closed theaters around the country. Prognosticators have been saying that theaters will be among the last things to reopen once it’s been deemed safe enough to resume some semblance of life as we once knew it. So that’s why I’m delighted to be able to share the very good news that the Outer Critics Circle has come up with a way to honor the truncated 2019-2020 season and to celebrate the better days that are sure to come.

The OCC board, of which I am proud to be a member, decided to suspend our traditional practice of issuing a slate of nominees for shows on and off-Broadway and then having our members select one to be the best in each category. Instead, we’ve decided to honor ALL our nominees this year.

And on top of that, we’re doing something a little extra special for the honorees cited for our John Gassner Award. Named for one of the group’s co-founders, it is usually given to an American play by a new writer at the beginning of his or her career. We’re proud of the fact that our past winners have included Aaron Sorkin, August Wilson, Lynn Nottage, John Leguizamo, David Henry Hwang, Suzan-Lori Parks, Ayad Akhtar and Bess Wohl.

This year, we’re cheering on four young writers: Will Arbery for Heroes of the Fourth Turning, Eboni Booth for Paris, Catya McMullen for Georgia Mertching Is Dead and Alexis Scheer for Our Dear Dead Drug Lord. And we’re giving each of them $500 as a token of our belief in their talent and their ability to help lead American theater into the future.  

This is the OCC’s 70th anniversary season and we’re so pleased to be able to celebrate in this way.  And we’re just as pleased that, as you’ll see below, some special friends have joined us to mark the occasion.

You can see the full print list of our honorees by clicking here.  And our president David Gordon will talk even more about it with my buddy, and boss, James Marino on the Tuesday edition of BroadwayRadio's "Today on Broadway," which you can listen to here.

A Great Start to This Year's Awards Season

Hard to believe but the 2018-2019 season is over. Except for the shouting. And there will be plenty of that because we’re now in awards season, which means the weeks from now until the June 9 Tony Awards ceremony will be filled with all kinds of theater-related press coverage (like The New York Times’ multi-article look at how black playwrights energized the season) and theater-related events (including an already-sold out live reunion of the much-missed TV show “Theater Talk” that will take place at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center on Tuesday, May 7, with panelists including the show’s creator Susan Haskins, New York Times theater critics Ben Brantley and Jesse Green and me).

Of course awards season is mainly about the awards celebrating the best theater of the past year. The Tonys will announce their nominees this coming Tuesday. But the Drama Desk, the Drama League and the Outer Critics Circle (on whose nominating committee I’m honored to sit) have already released their slates. Two of the biggest love-‘em-or-hate-‘em shows—Hadestown and Oklahoma!—have so far garnered the most nominations.

But those nominating groups, who, unlike the Tonys, celebrate both Broadway and off-Broadway shows, spread their love around, with productions from early in the season like Classic Stage Company’s Carmen Jones, New York Theatre Workshop’s The House That Will Not Stand and Signature Theatre’s Our Lady of 121st Street getting nods right alongside the more recent Broadway arrivals such as All My Sons, Ink and Tootsie

The individuals they've honored are wonderfully diverse and at the same time each totally deserving. Female artists appear in an unprecedented number of categories. Those telling a full range of LGBTQ stories are celebrated. Talented newcomers stand shoulder to shoulder with accomplished old-timers. And the nominees are so racially diverse that three of the OCC’s five nominees for Best Actor in a Play are black.

Those are just a few of the reasons that I’m so proud of this year's OCC nominations and why I’m so delighted to share our choices here with you:

OUTSTANDING NEW BROADWAY PLAY
The Ferryman
Ink
Network
To Kill a Mockingbird
What the Constitution Means to Me

OUTSTANDING NEW BROADWAY MUSICAL
Be More Chill
Hadestown
Head Over Heels
The Prom
Tootsie

OUTSTANDING NEW OFF-BROADWAY PLAY
Fairview
The House That Will Not Stand
Lewiston / Clarkston
The Light
White Noise

OUTSTANDING NEW OFF-BROADWAY MUSICAL
The Beast in the Jungle
Black Light
Girl from the North Country
The Hello Girls
Midnight at the Never Get

OUTSTANDING BOOK OF A MUSICAL
(Broadway or Off-Broadway)
Robert Horn Tootsie
Conor McPherson Girl from the North Country
Peter Mills and Cara Reichel The Hello Girls
Anaïs Mitchell Hadestown
Jeff Whitty and James Magruder Head Over Heels

OUTSTANDING NEW SCORE
(Broadway or Off-Broadway)
Matthew Sklar and Chad Beguelin The Prom
Joe Iconis Be More Chill
Peter Mills The Hello Girls
Anaïs Mitchell Hadestown
David Yazbek Tootsie

OUTSTANDING REVIVAL OF A PLAY
(Broadway or Off-Broadway)
All My Sons
By the Way, Meet Vera Stark
Juno and the Paycock
Our Lady of 121st Street
The Waverly Gallery

OUTSTANDING REVIVAL OF A MUSICAL
(Broadway or Off-Broadway)
Carmen Jones
Fiddler on the Roof (in Yiddish)
Kiss Me, Kate
Oklahoma!
Smokey Joe’s Cafe

OUTSTANDING DIRECTOR OF A PLAY
Rupert Goold Ink
Sam Mendes The Ferryman
Jack O’Brien All My Sons
Bartlett Sher To Kill a Mockingbird
Logan Vaughn The Light

OUTSTANDING DIRECTOR OF A MUSICAL
Rachel Chavkin Hadestown
Scott Ellis Tootsie
Daniel Fish Oklahoma!
Joel Grey Fiddler on the Roof (in Yiddish)
Cara Reichel The Hello Girls

OUTSTANDING CHOREOGRAPHER
Warren Carlyle Kiss Me, Kate
Christopher Gattelli The Cher Show
Denis Jones Tootsie
David Neumann Hadestown
Sergio Trujillo Ain’t Too Proud: The Life and Times of the Temptations

OUTSTANDING SCENIC DESIGN
(Play or Musical)
Beowulf Boritt Bernhardt/Hamlet
Bunny Christie Ink
Rachel Hauck Hadestown
Rob Howell The Ferryman
David Korins Beetlejuice

OUTSTANDING COSTUME DESIGN
(Play or Musical)
Rob Howell The Ferryman
Bob Mackie The Cher Show
William Ivey Long Beetlejuice
William Ivey Long Tootsie
Arianne Phillips Head Over Heels

OUTSTANDING LIGHTING DESIGN
(Play or Musical)
Neil Austin Ink
Stacey Derosier Lewiston / Clarkston
Bradley King Hadestown
Jason Lyons Sugar in Our Wounds
Peter Mumford King Kong

OUTSTANDING PROJECTION DESIGN
(Play or Musical)
Peter England King Kong
Alex Basco Koch Be More Chill
Peter Nigrini Beetlejuice
Jeff Sugg All My Sons
Tal Yarden Network

OUTSTANDING SOUND DESIGN
(Play or Musical)
John Gromada All My Sons
Peter Hylenski King Kong
Drew Levy Oklahoma!
Eric Sleichim Network
Nevin Steinberg and Jessica Paz Hadestown

OUTSTANDING ORCHESTRATIONS
Michael Chorney and Todd Sickafoose Hadestown
Simon Hale Girl from the North Country
Joseph Joubert Carmen Jones
Daniel Kluger Oklahoma!
Harold Wheeler Ain’t Too Proud: The Life and Times of the Temptations

OUTSTANDING ACTOR IN A PLAY
McKinley Belcher III The Light
Bryan Cranston Network
Daveed Diggs White Noise
Bill Irwin On Beckett
Jeremy Pope Choir Boy

OUTSTANDING ACTRESS IN A PLAY
Glenn Close Mother of the Maid
Edie Falco The True
Glenda Jackson King Lear
Mandi Masden The Light
Elaine May The Waverly Gallery

OUTSTANDING ACTOR IN A MUSICAL
Brooks Ashmanskas The Prom
Reeve Carney Hadestown
Damon Daunno Oklahoma!
Santino Fontana Tootsie
Steven Skybell Fiddler on the Roof (in Yiddish)

OUTSTANDING ACTRESS IN A MUSICAL
Stephanie J. Block The Cher Show
Kelli O’Hara Kiss Me, Kate
Beth Leavel The Prom
Anika Noni Rose Carmen Jones
Mare Winningham Girl from the North Country

OUTSTANDING FEATURED ACTOR IN A PLAY
Bertie Carvel Ink
John Clay III Choir Boy
Hugh Dancy Apologia
John Procaccino Downstairs
Benjamin Walker All My Sons

OUTSTANDING FEATURED ACTRESS IN A PLAY
Joan Allen The Waverly Gallery
Stephanie Berry Sugar in Our Wounds
Fionnula Flanagan The Ferryman
Harriett D. Foy The House That Will Not Stand
Celia Keenan-Bolger To Kill a Mockingbird

OUTSTANDING FEATURED ACTOR IN A MUSICAL
John Behlmann Tootsie
André De Shields Hadestown
Reg Rogers Tootsie
George Salazar Be More Chill
Ephraim Sykes Ain’t Too Proud: The Life and Times of the Temptations

OUTSTANDING FEATURED ACTRESS IN A MUSICAL
Amber Gray Hadestown
Leslie Kritzer Beetlejuice
Bonnie Milligan Head Over Heels
Sarah Stiles Tootsie
Ali Stroker Oklahoma!

OUTSTANDING SOLO PERFORMANCE
Mike Birbiglia The New One
Maddie Corman Accidentally Brave
Jake Gyllenhaal A Life
Carey Mulligan Girls & Boys
Renée Taylor My Life on a Diet

JOHN GASSNER AWARD
(Presented for an American play, preferably by a new playwright)
Jeremy O. Harris Slave Play
Jeremy Kareken & David Murrell, and Gordon Farrell The Lifespan of a Fact
Donja R. Love Sugar in Our Wounds
Ming Peiffer Usual Girls
Charly Evon Simpson Behind the Sheet