June 12, 2022, 7:00 p.m. ET
June 12, 2022, 7:00 p.m. ET
Jesse Green
Principal theater critic
The American Theater Wing and the Broadway League call tonight’s ceremony the 75th annual Tony Awards, but as our colleague Michael Paulson has pointed out, that’s not entirely true. It has not been annual; there were no awards in 2020.
This is due to the pandemic, of course, which closed Broadway from March 12, 2020 until Bruce Springsteen reopened his “Springsteen on Broadway” on June 26, 2021. It was 15 months of dark stages.
I hope tonight’s presentation recognizes this, as well as the erratic reopening of Broadway, both directly and indirectly. Live: winks, standby, swings, Covid monitors and others who kept the show going when it seemed like an almost impossible task. Indirect: Some of the tribute content came to Broadway because the closures cleared the ground for authors, works, and styles that had rarely been seen there before.
I mean, we’d have seen “MJ,” Michael Jackson’s jukebox, independently. But I wonder if we would have “A Strange Loop,” even with its Pulitzer Prize, on Broadway, and 11 awards, without the pandemic burning things up a bit. Or “Trouble in Mind,” which is the best rebirth of a play. The “Dana H”. Or “This is a room.” I hope so, but …