Tony Awards: Gay, Black play named Best Musical, first non-binary winner and Jennifer Hudson gets EGOT
Tony Award winners: Six’s Lucy Moss and Toby Marlow, and A Strange Loop creator Michael R. Jackson and producer Jennifer Hudson. (Getty)
A Strange Loop was the among the big winners at the Tony Awards 2022, with producer Jennifer Hudson completing her EGOT, while Six: The Musical composer Toby Marlow made history as the first out non-binary winner.
Hosted by Oscar-winning actor Ariana DeBose, the Tony Awards returned to New York’s Radio City Music Hall on Sunday night (12 June), and LGBTQ+ talent proved to be the star of the show .
Michael R. Jackson’s queer, Black musical, A Strange Loop, led the event with an impressive 11 nominations, including L Morgan Lee – the first our trans performer to have ever been nominated in an acting category.
On the night, A Strange Loop won Best Musical and Best Book of a Musical.
The win means that Jennifer Hudson, who is one of the play’s producers, becomes the second Black woman in history to achieve EGOT status. EGOT refers to those who have won an Emmy, Grammy, Oscar and Tony Award.
Elsewhere, Six: The Musical’s Toby Marlow and Lucy Moss won Best Original Score Written for the Theatre. The win makes Marlow the first non-binary Tony Award winner in the event’s 75-year history.
Six was nominated for eight Tony Awards in total, with Gabriella Slade also winning best costume design. The musical retells the stories of Henry VIII’s six wives.
Speaking to press after the event, Marlow described the increased queer representation at the Tony Awards as “amazing”.
“It just feels really amazing to be part of a season where there’s so much queerness on stage explicitly,” Marlow said, according to The Hollywood Reporter.
A handful of other queer productions and performers won big on the night, including Jesse Tyler Ferguson who won Best Actor in a Featured Role in a Play for his performance in Take Me Out. The play itself, which is about a gay pro-baseball player, won Best Revival of a Play.
The biggest winners with five awards each were The Lehman Trilogy, which took home Best Play, and Company, which saw Patti LuPone win Best Actress in a Musical.
Adding an extra dose of talent to the night, queer icon Billy Porter took centre stage during the event’s In Memoriam segment, singing ‘On the Street Where You Live’ from My Fair Lady as a tribute Broadway creatives who have passed away during the past year.
