Tom Stoppard’s play Leopoldstadt, a look at how one Jewish family confronts anti-Semitism and loss, and intimate tragicomic musical Kimberly Akimbo earned the top prizes on Sunday at the Tony Awards, the highest honors in American theater.
Inclusion and identity were key themes on a night at which history was made — J. Harrison Ghee in Some Like It Hot and Alex Newell in Shucked became the first openly nonbinary actors to win trophies for their work on Broadway.
Winners, performers and presenters alike at the United Palace theater in Manhattan’s Washington Heights neighborhood also offered their full support to striking writers in Hollywood.
Photo: Reuters
The 85-year-old Stoppard, who won his fifth Tony for best play with Leopoldstadt, a work inspired in part by his own family history, called out artificial intelligence, saying he was “teeming with emotions a chat box wouldn’t begin to understand.”
In the 55 years since his first Tony for best play for Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, Stoppard said:, “I have witnessed the theater writer getting progressively devalued in the food chain. It’s just something I thought I’d mention.”
The play won four awards overall, including best director and best featured actor.
Kimberly Akimbo — about a high-school student suffering from a genetic disorder that causes her to age prematurely — won five Tonys, including best musical and best lead actress for Victoria Clark.
Ghee and Newell gave emotional speeches, with Ghee telling the audience: “For every trans, nonbinary, gender-nonconforming human who ever was told ... you couldn’t be seen, this is for you.”
Britain’s Jodie Comer, known to TV fans as the assassin Villanelle on Killing Eve, won for best actress in a play for her searing one-woman show Prima Facie, about a lawyer who defends men accused of sexual assault, until she herself is attacked.
Sean Hayes, who starred on TV’s Will and Grace, won for best actor in a play for Good Night, Oscar.
The Tonys almost did not happen, as a strike by the Writers Guild of America (WGA), which began early last month, called into question how to produce the live nationally televised event.
Eventually, the union said it would not picket the ceremony, after Tonys organizers made some concessions about the show’s format — the show was unscripted, a fact made clear by host Ariana DeBose, who opened the show by looking at blank pages.
“Our siblings over at the WGA are currently on strike in pursuit of a fair deal,” she said after an elaborate opening dance number. “I’m live and unscripted... Buckle up.”
It began as a satirical online project. Now millions of young people in India are flocking to it as an outlet for their frustration. A parody political party called the Cockroach Janta Party, with the insect as its symbol, has exploded across India’s social media by turning absurdist humor into protest. Memes and short videos mocking corruption, joblessness and political dysfunction have flooded social media sites, where millions of users are embracing the cockroach — known for its ability to survive harsh conditions — as a tongue-in-cheek symbol of endurance. The online movement’s rise has been unusually rapid. The Cockroach Janta Party (CJP)
SPEAKING OUT: After Siranudh Scott’s allegations surfaced, celebrities and public figures took to social media to share their own experiences of sexual misconduct and abuse A high-profile alleged sexual abuse case within a wealthy Thai beer brewing family has prompted a wave of painful accounts from survivors of unconnected abuse in the conservative nation. Siranudh Scott, a member of the billionaire Thai family that founded the ubiquitous Singha beer brand, posted an emotional video this month accusing his elder brother Sunit of repeatedly abusing him when he was a teenager. Sunit, who is in his 30s, later denied the allegations in a video posted online, but Singha parent Boonrawd dismissed him from his executive role with the company on Tuesday last week. “I felt I needed to speak
A Hong Kong astronaut is to join a Chinese space mission for the first time as part of a three-person crew launching today, as Beijing edges closer to its goal of landing people on the moon. The Tiangong space station — crewed by teams of three astronauts that are typically rotated every six months — is the crown jewel of China’s space program, boosted by billions in state investment in a bid to catch up with the US and Russia. The Shenzhou-23 mission is to blast off at 11:08pm from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in northwestern China, carrying three astronauts to
UPGRADED ALERT: The risk inside DR Congo is now considered ‘very high,’ while neighboring countries face a ‘high’ threat as the outbreak continues, the WHO said Ebola is spreading faster than responders can track it in eastern Congo, where health workers managed to follow up with barely one in five identified contacts in a single day. Authorities in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DR Congo) reported 83 confirmed infections, 746 suspected cases and 1,603 identified contacts as of Thursday, but health workers were able to follow up on only 342 contacts that day — about 21 percent of the total under monitoring — data released by the DR Congo Ministry of Public Health on Friday showed. The figures suggest the response is falling behind the outbreak itself,
RSS