Tony Awards 2018: winners, nominations, news, and reviews

At an event night honoring the best and brightest performances on Broadway, there was one performance that shocked and might have overshadowed the rest at Sunday night’s Tony Awards: Robert De Niro cursing at the sitting president of the United States — twice.

“I’m gonna say one thing: Fuck Trump,” De Niro said, bringing the audience to its feet for a standing ovation. “It’s no longer ‘down with Trump.’ It’s ‘fuck Trump.’”

Angels in America — Tony Kushner’s bizarrely beautiful, Pulitzer-winning gay fantasia, now nominated for 11 Tonys — is a play about the triumph of life over death, queer joy over bigoted hate, progress over reactionary politics. In the 1980s, when it was written, that meant that it was primarily concerned with the specific horror of the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s, and the lasting trauma of what it did to a generation of gay men. But in 2018, as a new production of the seven-and-a-half-hour, two-part play burns up Broadway, the trauma at its center is evolving.

Then as now, the play concerns Prior Walter, who is diagnosed with AIDS in 1985, and whose boyfriend Louis promptly abandons him to take up with a closeted gay Mormon Reaganite. Prior’s defiant fight for life in the face of despair — sometimes in the form of a literal wrestling match with an angel, like Jacob fighting for his blessing — is the heart of the play’s two parts. Powerful reactionaries like the HIV-positive and wildly homophobic lawyer Roy Cohn (a real-life historical figure) may lurk balefully in the shadows, but Prior’s ecstatic, redemptive blessing to the audience — “I bless you: More Life.” — gets the last word.

The 72nd annual Tony Awards ceremony is just around the corner, and if you’re one of the many theater fans for whom Broadway’s most star-studded evening is the awards night of the year, you’re in luck. For one thing, first-time co-hosts Josh Groban and Sara Bareilles have pledged to lean into their buddy chemistry when they take to the stage at Radio City Music Hall on Sunday, June 10, at 8 pm Eastern on CBS.

For another, the show’s most recently announced guest? Bruce Springsteen. The Boss will be performing during the ceremony, where he’ll also receive a Special Tony Award for his one-man show Springsteen on Broadway — described by the Tonys as “a once-in-a-lifetime theater-going experience for the Broadway stage, allowing fans an intimate look at a music idol.” Springsteen will accept the award alongside John Leguizamo, who’ll receive his trophy for “his commitment to the theatre, bringing diverse stories and audiences to Broadway for three decades.”

The 2018 Tony nominations are in, and for once, the plays are stealing all the glory from the musicals.

Usually, the buzziest show of the night is a musical — think Hamilton or even Book of Mormon — and the most spectacular moments of the ceremony are the musical performances. The most highly anticipated award is Best Musical, which is why it comes at the end of the telecast.

“Mark Rylance,” I said to a friend, “is probably one of Our Greatest Living Actors.”

I added the emphasis of capital letters to be ironic about it because it’s such a grandiose thing to say, but I also thought that it was probably true. Rylance was just nominated for his fourth Tony for Farinelli and the King, but the first time I ever saw him, starring in La Bête in New York in 2010, he delivered an uninterrupted 20-minute monologue and held the audience’s attention the whole time through sheer force of magnetism. Ever since then, whenever I think of him I picture him capering across the stage, swishing his long wig and prattling with unceasing glee.

As the new musical Mean Girls premieres on Broadway — and racks up 12 Tony nominations in the process — it’s entering the not-quite-proud tradition of the screen-to-stage musical, with all the baggage that lineage entails.

There are plenty of musicals that have made the transition from stage to screen without losing their sterling reputations (West Side Story! Chicago!), but the shows that make the change the other way around — that start as movies without singing and then become stage musicals — have a much more fraught reputation.

Angels in America has been a sacred work to me.

It is one of the pinnacles of LGBTQ art. Tony Kushner, its craftsman and creator, is a genius. His words have won every award imaginable. And Angels in America is the best of his best. Performing it, I imagine, seems like an act of courage and carefulness, as if you’re holding someone else’s newborn child.