Tony AwardsOverlooked: Who Was Shut Out of the 2022 Tony Award Nominations?
Playbill looks at the artists and productions left out from this year’s Tony Awards.
By
Logan Culwell-Block
May 09, 2022
Theatre fans everywhere are celebrating this year's Tony Award nominees, which were announced May 9 (see the full list here). But what of the shows and artists that were overlooked in this year's nominations?
Of the 34 plays and musicals that were eligible for this year's honors, only five were completely shut out, and they were notably all plays: Birthday Candles, Chicken & Biscuits, Is This a Room, Pass Over, and Thoughts of a Colored Man. Unsurprisingly, four of those productions all closed several months ago, which often leads to less recognition at Tony time. This also means that 29 productions all received at least one nomination, which is, historically, a pretty good track record for the season.
But even with all musicals receiving Tony nominations, several were overlooked in the Best Musical and Best Revival of a Musical Category, most notably Funny Girl, which is the sole musical revival of the season not recognized in the category.
Even for shows not completely shut out of nominations, many above-the-title-billed stars were left empty-handed, including Funny Girl's Beanie Feldstein, Ramin Karimloo, and Jane Lynch; Neil Simon's Plaza Suite's Sarah Jessica Parker and Matthew Broderick; Macbeth's Daniel Craig; Company's Katrina Lenk; and American Buffalo's Darren Criss and Laurence Fisburne, among others.
Tracy Letts' The Minutes created an unusual situation (though not without precedent), receiving a nod for Best Play that was its sole nomination. The move suggests that nominators found the final product to have been more than the sum of its parts, or perhaps that they wanted to single out Letts' play as a piece of writing rather than the production itself. In either case, a Tony win here would be awarded to both Letts and the production's producers.
Meanwhile, fan favorite SIX The Musical pulled in an impressive eight Tony nominations, but zero nominations for its six leading ladies: Adrianna Hicks, Andrea Macasaet, Brittney Mack, Abby Mueller, Samantha Pauly, and Anna Uzele. Some may have been a casualty of no longer being with the show—Uzele left the production earlier this year, and though Mueller is back as of May 9, she had been on hiatus since March—but it's more likely that the ruling that all six be considered in the Leading Actress in a Musical category was a miscalculation.
This year's Tony winners will be announced June 12 at Radio City Music Hall. Following last year's two-part broadcast shared by CBS and Paramount+, the 2022 Tony Awards will include an hour of exclusive programming streaming on Paramount+ June 12 from 7 PM ET, followed by the three-hour awards ceremony airing live on CBS and streaming simultaneously on Paramount+ (for premium-level subscribers only) from 8 PM ET, making this year's ceremony the first in Tony Awards history to be available live nationwide. The broadcast will also be available to stream on demand on Paramount+ for all membership tiers following the live stream.