2018 Tony Awards


The 72nd Annual Tony Awards were presented June 10 at Radio City Music Hall. The winners of genre interest are shown below. The complete list of winners is here.

Best Play

  • Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, Parts One and Two

Best Direction of a Play

  • John Tiffany, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, Parts One and Two

Best Sound Design of a Play

Gareth Fry, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, Parts One and Two

Best Scenic Design of a Musical

  • David Zinn, SpongeBob SquarePants: The Musical

Best Lighting Design of a Play

  • Neil Austin, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, Parts One and Two

Best Scenic Design of a Play

  • Christine Jones, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, Parts One and Two

Best Costume Design of a Play

  • Katrina Lindsay, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, Parts One and Two

31 thoughts on “2018 Tony Awards

  1. Not of genre interest, but Robert DeNiro made a pretty frank political statement, as well. Are all USian Filers registered to vote in November.

  2. Andrew Garfield (Spiderman) won for his role in ANGELS IN AMERICA which I’m seeing on Wednesday! Tony Shalhoub (Men In Black, Galaxy Quest) won for his role in THE BAND’S VISIT.

    Several presenters were also linked to F&SF genre! Melissa Benoist (Supergirl), Tatiana Maslany (Orphan Black) and Carey Mulligan (Doctor Who: Blink) all presented.

    I really enjoyed watching the Tonys this year!

  3. It’s probably worth noting that Harry Potter and the Cursed Child won Best Play as well as the best direction and best sound, lighting, and costume design of a play.

  4. Not genre-related, but the drama students from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, performed “Seasons of Love” from Rent. Not a dry eye in the house, and perhaps the loudest ovation of the night.

    If the young lady who handled the solo doesn’t have an agent and five offers this morning, there is something wrong with the theater business.

  5. Vicki Rosenzweig: Thanks for the correction. Appertain yourself your favorite post-theater beverage!

  6. I’m reminded that when Craig Ferguson used to say stuff on his show, they’d flash the flag of Scotland over his lips. Which meant you couldn’t lipread what he said, either, but on the other hand, you never missed the fact that he’d cussed.

  7. Did they bleep DeNiro’s statement out in the US? Cause I just saw the full thing, complete with f-word, on TV in a German culture program. It was the only thing they showed of the awards ceremony, too, which made me go, “And what about the actual winners?”

  8. @Douglas Berry: Not necessarily. They bleeped out so much of the surrounding words that it wasn’t even obvious to me that De Niro was talking about Donald Trump, although if I had been paying closer attention I might have guessed. It sounded to me like an audio failure, and I didn’t find out what De Niro had said until the next morning.

  9. Msb on June 10, 2018 at 10:55 pm said:
    Not of genre interest, but Robert DeNiro made a pretty frank political statement, as well. Are all USian Filers registered to vote in November.

    I registered to vote as soon as I turned 18 and I’ve very, very seldom missed an election since then. It’s too important.

  10. Yeah, what Sheila said.

    I also saw a suggestion today that anyone who has not voted in a few years recheck their registrations, as poll purging may be occurring.

  11. Let me underscore Lenore’s admonition. The Supreme Court just said Ohio could throw people off the rolls for not voting in an election.

    Please vote every time, insofar as it is possible. Don’t leave it all to retired guys like me. We’re not all sane, you know.

  12. Even though I mostly disagree with the Supreme Court’s decision, I’d like to point out that they actually said that you can’t be thrown off the rolls for not voting because that’s against the National Voter Registration Act, but you can be thrown off the rolls for not voting AND ignoring a postcard asking you to confirm your residency.

  13. Postcards have been the notification of choice, especially when they can send them to an old address where they won’t be forwarded. I’m glad my life doesn’t hinge on detecting one important postcard in a daily drizzle of advertisements designed to look like important official communications.

  14. A couple of other winners that could be considered that could be considered “of genre interest” are Rodgers & Hammerstein’s Carousel (“Best Performance by an Actress in a Featured Role in a Musical” for Lindsay Mendez and “Best Choreography” for Justin Peck), an afterlife fantasy, and (depending on how literally you take its renderings of angels, Heaven, and departed spirits) Angels in America (“Best Revival of a Play”, “Best Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role in a Play” for Andrew Garfield, and “Best Performance by an Actor in a Featured Role in a Play” for Nathan Lane).

  15. Kip: If you’re in the voter registration system correctly, they should never be sending it to an old address. I must admit that I don’t carefully go through my mail, and I would probably miss a postcard notification too. Fortunately, my state allows registration at the polling place on election day.

  16. Rob T. You are the first fan I’ve heard of to try and claim Carousel is a genre work. I don’t think you can get any more mainstream in American culture than Rodgers & Hammerstein.

  17. Mike Glyer: You are the first fan I’ve heard of to try and claim Carousel is a genre work.

    Well, it’s about a ghost — how would that ever not be genre (even if critics weren’t willing to call it that)?

  18. they should never be sending it to an old address.

    But they have done that, and gotten a lot of people (primarily in cities) off the voting rolls who never knew it until they tried to vote. It’s almost as if the system works better for some people than for others.

    JJ: “It’s about a ghost.” Yup. And parts of it take place in Heaven. I was in the chorus of that a few years back. Gah, it’s my second-most recent show.

  19. JJ: Well, it’s about a ghost — how would that ever not be genre (even if critics weren’t willing to call it that)?

    It’s a mainstream work based on folk religion.

    Do you think “A Fiddler on the Roof” is genre? It has a ghost in it, too.

  20. Hmm…OK Mike, I’ll grant that Carousel “isn’t a genre work” if you’ll grant that out-of-genre work could still have “genre interest.” I’m curious as to what is the difference between a mainstream work based on folk religion and a genre work based on folk religion, though.

  21. Rob T: Hmm…OK Mike, I’ll grant that Carousel “isn’t a genre work” if you’ll grant that out-of-genre work could still have “genre interest.” I’m curious as to what is the difference between a mainstream work based on folk religion and a genre work based on folk religion, though.

    For all that, we have to parse the apples and oranges under discussion.

    Anytime I cover anything on File 770, people ask — sometimes out loud — why did I cover that in a “science fiction blog”. “Genre interest” is a sort of code for “things that actually are sff, plus some other stuff that I am a fan of, plus even more things I know Filers have pulled into the fannish tent for one reason or another.” In short, it’s an editorial decision by me. I have no reason to argue against what you would designate as “genre interest” to you if you edited a blog.

    That said, mainstream work is widely accepted by the culture. When Carousel came out it was embraced by the general public, unlike pulp magazine stories or movie serials, which real adults were not supposed to take seriously. Or if you slice it another way, the huge audience for Carousel (and recordings of the music) identified it as part of mass culture, in contrast to the audience for Golden Age SF.

    Nowadays SF is part of mass culture and part of the mainstream, so the significance of “genre” has been pared away to be mainly a literary identification debate. Everything with fantastic elements in it is arguably fantasy, but I see that as a kind of reductio ad absurdum argument that leads to making “fantasy” a rather unhelpful term when people try to classify the things they’re talking about.

    So sure, Carousel is fantasy, but how many Filers are going to point to it when they’re recommending works of sff?

  22. @Bruce A
    Even though I mostly disagree with the Supreme Court’s decision, I’d like to point out that they actually said that you can’t be thrown off the rolls for not voting because that’s against the National Voter Registration Act, but you can be thrown off the rolls for not voting AND ignoring a postcard asking you to confirm your residency.

    It’s more stringent than that. You have to skip voting for two years, ignore the postcard, and skip voting for four more years. If the plaintiff, Larry Harmon (not the Bozo one) had voted just once in 2009 or 2010 or 2011 or 2012 or 2013 or 2014, in either a primary or general election, local or state or federal, he would not have been presumed to have moved.

    Harmon lives in Portage County, OH, which had well over twenty elections between the General election of 2008, when he last voted, and the General election of 2015, when he found he had been purged. If he had voted in any of them at all, he’d still be able to vote.

  23. Bill on June 12, 2018 at 11:29 am said:

    Harmon lives in Portage County, OH, which had well over twenty elections between the General election of 2008, when he last voted, and the General election of 2015, when he found he had been purged. If he had voted in any of them at all, he’d still be able to vote.

    Voting is a fundamental right, enumerated in the Constitution. We should *never* purge people off the voter registration rolls without proof beyond a reasonable doubt that they have A) died, B) moved out of the precinct, or C) renounced their citizenship.

    Sign people up automatically on their 18th birthday and *keep them there* until A, B or C happen.

    We have people in this country arguing that a background check infringes on their second amendment rights, while being perfectly fine with any and all infringements on their 15th, 19th, or 26th amendment rights.

  24. @KipW Being a voter requires actions on your part. The state is under no compulsion to track you down and find out where you live. When you move, you need to file a change of address with the post office, and determine if you need to update your voter registration. You can do both in the same visit to the Post Office.

    As for the postcard, I’m sorry, but I’m boggled. Now the state has to help you check your mail? It was Trash Day here yesterday, the usual landslide of circulars and sale announcements. It took less than five minutes to sort into “interesting” and “recycle bin” and find the birthday card sent to my lovely wife.

    You are making excuses.

  25. Yes, excuses. All the minority voters who were kicked off the rolls because they move from time to time or have names similar to someone else of the same ethnicity must be stupid or careless. It’s sad they aren’t as savvy as you. It’s too bad they don’t just take the necessary time off from their low-paying jobs to do these things. If they’re so busy, they should have the butler do it.

  26. Yeah, before I had the stroke and had to live on SSD I was a truck driver. So spare me. You are the one now saying that the simple process of checking your mail and updating your address unfairly targets minorities, not me.

    Now, it will affect those have to move often, and those without a permanent address. Two shortcomings that need to be addressed.

  27. Homeless people do have the right to vote. And postcards aren’t exactly going to reach them. Ditto students who change addresses every semester. During the recession and mortgage crisis, people who lost their houses may not have had anywhere to forward their mail to. Add natural disasters (flooding, hurricanes, tornados, earthquakes, mud slides, forest fires) that take out a swath of houses and apartment buildings and it can be big issue for voters who have every legitimate right to vote in a particular place but don’t necessarily have an address, though no fault of their own. It’s easy to say, oh, that’s their own fault, but the post office isn’t exact going to deliver a postcard to the campground where you’ve pitched a tent since your house got foreclosed or the alley where you sleep in a cardboard box because your whole apartment building is gone. (I’m sincerely not trying to be snotty or anything. But these are legitimate legal issues that were raised during the 2008 election and I think they still apply in cases like the Ohio decision.)

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