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Tony Awards 2025: Broadway's best shows and top nominations
Discover the top nominees for the 2025 Tony Awards, including Broadway hits “Buena Vista Social Club” and “Death Becomes Her”
“I’m just really excited to be a part of this crop of amazing performers.”“Buena Vista Social Club,” which takes its inspiration from Wim Wenders’ 1999 Oscar-nominated documentary on the making of the album “Buena Vista Social Club,” will face off for best musical crown with “Death Becomes Her,” based on the 1992 cult classic film of the same name about frenemies who seek a magic eternal youth and beauty potion.The category also includes “Maybe Happy Ending,” a rom-com musical about a pair of androids that crackles with humanity and Dead Outlaw, a musical about a real-life alcoholic drifter who was shot dead in 1911 and whose afterlife proved to be stranger than fiction as he was displayed at carnivals for decades.A second show with a corpse, the British import “Operation Mincemeat,” also made it, the improbably true story about a British deception operation designed to mislead Nazi Germany about the location of the Allied landing at Sicily.In the best play category, “English,” Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Sanaz Toossi’s look at four Iranian students preparing for an English-language exam, made the cut. As did “The Hills of California,” Jez Butterworth’s look at a family gathering for the impending death of its matriarch set in a hotel in the summer of 1976 in England.They'll compete with “John Proctor Is the Villain,” Kimberly Belflower’s examination of girlhood, feminism, the #MeToo movement and a compelling rebuttal to “The Crucible,” and "Purpose,” Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’ drawing-room drama about an accomplished Black family destroying itself from within.The category is completed with “Oh, Mary!,” an irreverent, raunchy, gleefully deranged revisionist history by Cole Escola centered on Mary Todd Lincoln, a boozy, narcissistic, potty-mouthed first lady determined to strike out of the subordinate role into which history has placed her.Jacobs-Jenkins, whose “Appropriate,” won best play revival last year, said Thursday morning that his category was filled with plays that started regionally or off-Broadway, showing the art’s strength.“I hope people kind of see the diversity of what’s happening in terms of writing for the American stages right now. “I think that’s just the testament to how fruitful the form is.”Acting nods and some missingAudra McDonald, as expected, heard her name called for her turn as Rose in a hailed revival of “Gypsy,” a role that led to previous Tonys for the likes of Angela Lansbury, Tyne Daly and Patti LuPone.
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