The Tony Awards are given annually to recognize achievement in live Broadway theatre. The awards are presented by the American Theatre Wing and The Broadway League at a ceremony in New York City.
Tony Award Production

After its longest shutdown, Broadway reopened in New York in September 2021. The Covid-19 pandemic forced the closure of theaters in March 2020. Many Broadway productions relied on government funding to return to the stage. As a result, fewer musicals, plays, and revivals were eligible for the 2021 Tony Awards.

Moulin Rouge! won the most awards of any show of the night. Of its 10 Tony Awards, Moulin Rouge! brought home best musical. The musical had performances for seven months before the Covid-19 shutdown.

The Inheritance won best play. With The Inheritance, Matthew Lopez became the first Latino writer to win best play. Lois Smith won best-featured actress in a play as The Inheritance‘s sole female actor. At age 90, Smith became the oldest performer to win a Tony Award for acting.

A Christmas Carol became the first play to win best original score. All five nominees for the award were plays.

A Soldier’s Play won best revival of a play.  

Slave Play made history with a record 12 nominations. Despite its nominations, Slave Play was shut out of any awards.

The Tony Awards are presented annually for distinguished achievements the previous season in the Broadway theater in New York City. The awards are named for Antoinette Perry, an American actress, producer, and director. They are administered by the League of American Theaters and Producers and the American Theater Wing.

The Tonys honor achievements in about 20 categories, including best new play, best new musical, and best revivals of a play and a musical. Tonys are awarded for acting, directing, designing, orchestrations, and choreography. Special awards are also made for lifetime achievements in the theater and to a distinguished American regional theater.

A Tony Awards committee appoints a group of theater professionals to select four nominations for each category. Several hundred theater professionals and journalists then vote on the winners. Winning a Tony, or even being nominated for the award, has become important to the box-office success of many Broadway shows. The Tony Awards were founded in 1947.

Feb. 7, 2012

The great English novelist Charles Dickens was born on this day, February 7, in 1812. The 200th anniversary of the birth of the author of A Christmas Carol and so many other classics is being celebrated worldwide. The first global celebrity author, Charles Dickens chronicled the modern industrial city and its painful inequalities. His biographer Claire Tomalin notes, “You only have to look around our society and everything he wrote about in the 1840′s is still relevant. The great gulf between the rich and poor, corrupt financiers, corrupt Members of Parliament . . . You name it, he said it.”

At a service at Westminster Abbey in London, Prince Charles and his wife, Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall, laid a wreath at the author’s grave in the Poets’ Corner.  Attended by Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams and a number of Dickens’s descendants, the service included a reading from Great Expectations by the American actress Gillian Anderson. Anderson had played Miss Havisham in a recent BBC adaptation of the novel. Actor Ralph Fiennes read from Bleak House, the story of a lawsuit that consumes whole generations of a single family.

Charles Dickens, the most famous English writer of his time, enchanted audiences with dramatic readings from his novels. The Dickens Fellowship, London

At a simultaneous event in Portsmouth, England, where Dickens was born, Dickens biographer Simon Callow read from David Copperfield, the coming-of-age story of an orphan whose travails are not dissimilar to Dickens’s own. Also at St Mary’s Church in Portsmouth, actress Sheila Hancock read from Oliver Twist, the story of another orphan who falls into the clutches of the villainous Bill Sikes and Fagin.

Elsewhere around the world, Dickens’s fans staged 24-hour “readathons” in 66 countries from Albania to Zimbabwe. This international event began in Australia with a reading of Dombey and Son. It will end in the United Arab Emirates with an excerpt from The Mystery of Edwin Drood, Dickens’s last work, left unfinished when he died in 1870 at age 58.

Additional World Book articles

• A Tale of Two Cities
• Hard Times
• Nicholas Nickleby
• United Kingdom (The Victorian Age (1840′s-about 1900)