Tony Awards Will Go Virtual In Fall; No Date Set Yet

Patrick Hipes
Updated ·2 min read

Producers of the Tony Awards said Friday that the 74th annual ceremony to honor the best on Broadway will be presented digitally this year sometime in the fall, with a date and a platform to be announced soon.

The event had been scheduled for June 7 at New York’s Radio City Musical Hall with its usual live broadcast on CBS, but the coronavirus shutdown of Broadway as COVID-19 gripped New York City and the world made it impossible to go forward. Broadway theaters shut their doors March 12, with trade group The Broadway League confirming later in the summer that nothing would reopen before January 2021.

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A streaming Broadway-themed fundraising special scheduled to air June 7 in the Tonys’ place was also postponed in the wake of national unrest over the police killing of George Floyd.

“Though unprecedented events cut the 2019-2020 Broadway season short, it was a year full of extraordinary work that deserves to be recognized,” said Charlotte St. Martin, president of The Broadway League, and Heather Hitchens, president and CEO of the American Theatre Wing. “We are thrilled not only to have found a way to properly celebrate our artists’ incredible achievements this season, but also to be able to uplift the entire theatre community and show the world what makes our Broadway family so special at this difficult time. The show must go on, no matter what – and it will.”

The closures and the awards-date move leaves eligibility details for 2020 in flux; Broadway League and fellow Tony organizer the American Theatre Wing said today that final eligibility determinations will be made by the Tony Awards Administration Committee in the coming days.

The Tony Awards are produced by Tony Award Productions.

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