The 2019-2020 Tony Awards will happen…eventually.

COVID-19 and the quarantine hit theatre hard. This is a creative industry that cannot exist in a meaningful way without a live audience. Believe me. I work in it. You think your Zoom meeting is bad? Trying putting on a live show from 20+ locations at once with singing and dancing.

Since its inception in 1947, the Tony Awards have not missed a ceremony year. Sure, there have been times where not all the categories were presented because there weren’t enough good and/or eligible shows to recognize, but some ceremony has always happened.

When Broadway shut down in March 2020, many of us assumed the Tonys weren’t going to happen. How could they? Most of the musical productions hadn’t opened yet. The shows that had just opened probably hadn’t been seen by voters. And then you had shows like Six that were set to open the day the shutdown was announced. May to March may seem like a lot of time, but the most anticipated shows of the season usually open in April or the first few days of May.

The Broadway League and the American Theatre Wing announced that the 75th Annual Tony Awards will happen at some point. We don’t know when. We don’t know how. But they will happen.

Here’s what we do know that makes everything just stranger than it already is. The cutoff date for eligibility is 19 February 2020. That’s about a month before the shutdown happened on 12 March. It means two big contenders that did open, Girl from The North Country and a radical reimagining of West Side Story, are not eligible. It’s like many people anticipated: the voters did not get to the shows before the shutdown, so not enough people saw the shows to vote on them.

The shows that are eligible have to jump through extra hoops to get the nominations. It’s not a matter of “the four/five highest votes get in” this year. The nominators have to evaluate any and all potential nominees to make sure they are of a high enough calibre to be nominated at all. With such a truncated season, they don’t want the awards to just be a participation trophy.

There’s a lot of speculation as to why this rule change was made. I’m not onboard with what are essentially conspiracy theories. It’s not a targeted attack against the critically-maligned The Lightning Thief musical. Shows with worse reviews than that received nominations in the past during competitive seasons. It also has a great score, a solid book, and potential to gross a lot of money down the line with amateur licensing to schools. The Tony Awards are as much a marketing tool as they are a recognition of artistic achievement and potential future revenue does play into the vote. No, this is a decision made to account for a much smaller pool of shows than usual.

Listen. Every arts and entertainment industry with awards has a whole game built around releasing the product. The Tony Awards get inundated with big contenders right before the ballots are submitted to keep shows fresh in the mind, the same way Oscars are (were?) dominated by the December releases for decades.

It’s quite likely that new musicals that just opened or were in previews like Girl from The North Country, Six, and Mrs. Doubtfire were going to receive the most nominations. Revival was also going to be very competitive, with the critically acclaimed productions of Company and Caroline, or Change remounting from the West End runs. It’s how the game is played. The Tony Awards are dealing with a scenario where the presumed front runners don’t even qualify. They have to spend time looking back on shows that already closed before the shutdown to determine what is truly worth celebrating in a truncated season.

Here’s how the rules will work, demonstrated by the smallest possible category. Best Leading Actor in a Musical has two potential nominees: Aaron Tveit in Moulin Rouge and Chris McCarrell in The Lightning Thief. They are eligible because of previous rulings during the season. Neither is guaranteed a nomination. If both performances pass whatever threshold is established to determine the quality of a performance, the category has two nominees. If either performance is not considered worthy of potentially winning the award, that performance will not be nominated. If neither performance is deemed worthy, no one is nominated and the category is shelved for the season.

There is precedence for this. So few musicals opened in the 1984-1985 season that Leading Actor and Leading Actress in a Musical were not awarded. Anyone deemed good enough for a nomination competed in Featured Actor/Actress. Both lead actors in Big River (an adaptation of Huckleberry Finn) and the lead actress in a The King and I revival competed with featured performers; none of them won.

The new voting procedure will happen in every category on every level. We can have four nominees or no category for Best Musical, as only four eligible shows opened. Best Play is a wider field, but the Play categories tend to have nominees spread out throughout the season. Most Broadway plays are limited engagements, not sit down productions like To Kill a Mockingbird and The Cursed Child. There isn’t as big a market for straight plays on Broadway, so the limited runs create a sense of urgency and higher ticket sales for these productions. The Play categories are likely to reach the usual four to five nominee status; it’s the Musical categories that might be a bit barren. For goodness sake, there is already no Best Revival of a Musical category since none opened during the eligibility period.

At some point, the Tony Awards will announce the nominees for the 2019-2020 season. The ceremony will most assuredly be digital. We just don’t know when or where or how.

I don’t want to end this article on a downer, but I feel honesty is the best approach right now. The Tony Awards recognizing the 2020-2021 season will likely not happen. The shows eligible right now opened between 20 February and 12 March of 2020. It is very unlikely that we will have any shows open before May 2021, the usual cutoff for the ceremony. Broadway is not going to be able to reopen until large crowds can safely meet in enclosed public spaces without social distancing. The backstage areas are not safe for cast and crew and the budget and space is not there to gut the theaters and rebuild for social distancing. Many of the shows that were scheduled to open will never happen as the money won’t be there to actually mount the shows. It’s actually surprising that more current shows on Broadway have not announced they will not reopen yet. There will be no “normal” in theatre for a very long time.