It almost got by me but The 75th Annual Tony Awards will be televised tomorrow evening. The first hour commencing at 7 PM Eastern Time will apparently only be available on Paramount-Plus and I dunno what'll be in it but one assumes they'll save the major awards and musical performances for the CBS telecast.
The CBS broadcast is live at 8 PM if you're in the proper time zone or if you have Paramount-Plus anywhere. The rest of us will be watching the delayed rebroadcast at 8 PM Pacific Time. Ariana DeBose is the host and one of the themes will be to salute the understudies and swings who have performed so heroically on Broadway stages during The Pandemic. If I were producing the ceremony, I'd have an announcement at the beginning that Ms. DeBose has taken ill and then I'd have the first ten minutes hosted by a standby.
I have seen absolutely nothing on Broadway for 2+ years so my opinions are even more worthless than usual. But the folks who go to everything and predict seem to think that A Strange Loop (a show about which I know nothing) will win for Best Musical and The Lehman Trilogy will win for Best Play. In the category of Best Revival of a Musical, everyone expects Company to beat out The Music Man and for Patti LuPone's performance in Company to win her the Tony for Best Performance by a Featured Actress in a Musical.
I don't see anyone predicting any wins for the two shows we've been keeping an eye on from afar — The Music Man and Mr. Saturday Night. Neither Hugh Jackman nor Billy Crystal are on the list of the presenters but it does include non-nominees Lin-Manual Miranda, Nathan Lane, Bryan Cranston, Samuel L. Jackson, Bernadette Peters, Billy Porter, Sarah Silverman, Chita Rivera and RuPaul. For some reason, these people will all be wearing the same outfit. There will be musical performances from all the nominated musicals except Caroline, or Change, which has closed. I've set my TiVo.