The Tony Awards are the closest thing the American theater has to a single scoreboard, and like any scoreboard they measure something narrower than the game. It helps to know exactly what they measure, because it explains a great deal about what gets produced, and when.
Who gives them
The Antoinette Perry Awards for Excellence in Broadway Theatre, the Tonys, are presented jointly by the American Theatre Wing and The Broadway League, the trade association of Broadway producers and theater owners. They are named for Antoinette Perry, an actress, director and leader of the Wing, and were first handed out in 1947. The ceremony is held in June.
The pairing is worth noticing. One partner is a service organization, the other represents the people who own the buildings and finance the shows. The award is an artistic honor, and it is also an instrument of the Broadway business.
What is eligible
Eligibility is defined by real estate. A production must open in one of the designated Broadway theaters, the houses of roughly five hundred seats or more that make up the district, all forty-one of which we map here. It must open within the Tony season, which runs from late spring of one year to a cutoff in late April of the next.
Two consequences follow. First, Off-Broadway is not eligible at all, however good it is. A play can win every honor downtown, from the Obies to the Lucille Lortel Awards, and still be invisible to the Tonys until it transfers uptown. (We explain the Broadway / Off-Broadway line here.) Second, the cutoff shapes the calendar. Producers with awards ambitions crowd their openings into March and April, so the work is fresh in voters’ minds, and the spring becomes a traffic jam of openings.
Who decides
The process has two stages. A nominating committee, a rotating group of theater professionals appointed for multi-year terms, is required to see every eligible production, and it chooses the nominees. Then a much larger pool of voters, several hundred people drawn from the governing bodies of the theater unions and professional organizations, and the League’s membership, votes on the winners. Voters are expected to have seen the nominated work in a category before voting in it.
So the nominees are chosen by a small group that has seen everything, and the winners by a large group that, by design, includes the industry’s own producers and theater owners. The second fact is not a scandal, but it is a bias, and it tends to favor work that can tour, record and sell.
The categories
The headline awards are Best Musical and Best Play, for new work, and Best Revival of a Musical and Best Revival of a Play. Below them come the acting categories, split between leading and featured performers, then direction, book, score, orchestrations, choreography, and the design categories for scenery, costumes, lighting and sound.
What a win does
Commercially, a Best Musical win is the most valuable single night a production can have: it extends runs, launches tours, and gives a title a permanent line in its advertising. For plays the effect is smaller but real. For a struggling show, a win can be the difference between closing in June and running for another year.
That is why the award matters, and also the limit of what it tells you. A Tony identifies the season’s most celebrated work in a particular set of buildings. Treat it as one useful signal about a show, along with the reviews and what you know of your own taste.
