These are the best and worst moments from the 2025 Tony Awards

Sydney Morning Herald

10-06-2025

Best placement: Cynthia Erivo's balcony bit
It's become an awards-show staple: The host schleps up to the balcony seats to mingle with us regular folks and maybe tell a joke or two. Erivo's ascent at Radio City was worth the climb. In a night of a thousand costume changes, her pink candy wrapper of a dress was a zany delight. And the atmosphere up there lent itself to deft comedy – about her height, about Abraham Lincoln and, best of all, about why sitting far away was the best place to watch Jonathan (He Spits When He Sings) Groff perform: 'So please welcome the man who makes everyone wet …' – SH
Best nightclub act: Groff as Bobby Darin
Showmanship is distinct from acting. It's an elusive, unfairly distributed quality: You have it, or you don't. Groff's dynamite medley – Mack the Knife, That's All and Once in a Lifetime – proved he has it. In this context, merely delivering a song well isn't enough — you have to sell it. It's something that Darin, the subject of Groff's current vehicle, Just in Time, had. At Radio City on Sunday, Groff moved like a man possessed by the need to entertain, straddling a seated Keanu Reeves' head and driven by the rhythm of mad bongos. Please, let him host the Tonys next year. – EV
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Worst eyeful: Too many pixels
This season, virtual scenery reached critical mass on Broadway, in Sunset Boulevard, The Picture of Dorian Gray, Redwood and Maybe Happy Ending. The Tony Awards telecast followed suit, ditching traditional flats, drops and clunky wagons in favour of digital backgrounds that ultimately looked cheesy. Literally cheesy-looking in the case of the excerpt from Operation Mincemeat, a totally old-tech musical performed during the ceremony in front of yellow-washed screens that made the actors look as if they'd fallen into a vat of fondue. Why would the producers of a theatre awards show make such an anti-theatrical choice? For the same reason some of the less artful shows do: It's faster, cheaper and, for audiences who have to be pried away from their own screens, perhaps more enticing. – JG
Best homecoming: Asian and Asian American artists win big
It was a historic evening for a troupe of Asian and Asian American theatre artists, including Nicole Scherzinger, Francis Jue and Darren Criss, who all won performance Tonys. Marco Paguia also received a Tony for his Buena Vista Social Club orchestrations, and Hue Park won for writing the lyrics and co-writing the book for Maybe Happy Ending, the evening's breakout success. In their speeches, several of the artists made reference to feeling left out or ignored before finding a home in the theatre. Scherzinger, who noted her Filipina, Native Hawaiian and Ukrainian ancestry, said, 'I always felt like I didn't belong, but you all have made me feel like I belong and I have come home at last.' – ALEXIS SOLOSKI
Best sell: Making the plays pop
For all their glamour, and their genuine recognition of talent, the Tonys are an industry advertisement — meant not only to sell tickets in New York, but also to give the nominated shows a life beyond Broadway. Musicals, with their colourful numbers, have always had an advantage in making their case for that. Plays, by comparison, have tended not to translate. But there was real charm to the way this year's best play nominees were introduced. With a framed screen of video clips playing upstage, a Tony-nominated star from each show spoke with an insider's affection while giving a synopsis of it: Marjan Neshat for English, Sadie Sink for John Proctor Is the Villain, Cole Escola for Oh, Mary!, Harry Lennix for Purpose, Laura Donnelly for The Hills of California. It was easy to imagine would-be producers and audience members out there, their interest suddenly piqued. – LAURA COLLINS-HUGHES
Best 'sing-off': Cynthia Erivo's My Way
It's always a delicate matter: how to usher off winners whose speeches go too long. A clever step up from canned elevator music: Erivo singing a passage from the standard My Way, popularised by Frank Sinatra. When Kara Young, accepting her award for Purpose, was still in the thick of her extensive list of thank-yous to those who had made her back-to-back featured actress in a play wins possible, it was a gentle balm to hear 'And now, the end is near / And so I face the final curtain …' – SARAH BAHR
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Worst placement: Preshow spot for book and score awards
Not every scene deserves a spotlight, but relegating the book and score awards to the Tonys preshow felt at least a little rude. What is a musical without its songs? Or its occasionally effortful patter between songs? (And is dance really an also-ran, too?) At the 2025 Tonys, a win for Maybe Happy Ending was practically assured after its wins for book and score, though viewers watching only the main broadcast would never have known this. Couldn't we swap out a drug ad or a few host jokes to show these prizes on the main stage? – AS
Best farewell to cynicism: Hester's open heart
In the World War II caper Operation Mincemeat, Jak Malone's big song, Dear Bill, is nearly six minutes long. It's a major reason he won a featured-actor Tony, because that is the moment when his character — a middle-aged British intelligence secretary named Hester — opens her wounded heart to the audience. 'They weep for her,' Malone said in his speech, 'they invest in her, they love her for her old romantic heart. And if you watched our show and found yourself believing in Hester, well, then I am so glad to tell you that, intentionally or otherwise, you might have just bid farewell to cynicism, to outdated ideas, to that rotten old binary, and opened yourself up to a world that is already out there in glorious Technicolor and isn't going away anytime soon.' – LCH