Which Tony Award-winning shows might come to London?

Following the Tony Awards ceremony on 8 June, Matt Wolf takes a look at the night's winners — and speculates which might make the journey across the pond to London's West End.

The Tony Awards don’t just make or break Broadway shows; the New York theatre’s annual celebration often has implications for London too. By way of proof, look no further than the currently previewing West End play Stereophonic, which won last year’s Tony for Best Play and has crossed the pond in the Tony-winning director Daniel Aukin’s production, albeit with some changes in cast.

Hadestown and Moulin Rouge both won Tonys for Best Musical in their respective years and have settled in for hefty West End tenancies.

So what are the implications of this year’s ceremony for the London stage? Who or what amongst the victors, or nominees, seems best poised for a London run? The night’s big winner, Maybe Happy Ending, took six Tonys including Best Musical and belongs to the same comparatively small-scale realm as such previous victors in the same category as A Strange Loop, which nabbed this very prize in 2022 and went on to have an acclaimed run at the Barbican, receiving a 2024 Olivier nomination for Best Musical.

But unlike A Strange Loop, whose purposefully queer, distinctly American sensibility was in every way the product of its (Tony winning) creator Michael R Jackson, Maybe Happy Ending tells of two android helper-bots in South Korea in the “near future” who discover a thing or two about humanity, their robot status notwithstanding. It’s also a true original at a time when so many shows capitalise on an already-familiar title.

Performed by a cast of four that on Broadway includes its newly Tony-winning leading man, Darren Criss (who came away with a second Tony as a producer on the show), the material courses with a gentleness and heart that are built to travel. If the Tony-winning director Michael Arden’s empathic staging can have led this piece from its East Asian origins to a pre-pandemic American premiere in 2020 in Atlanta and eventually to Broadway, there’s no reason for London not to follow suit.

Among the musical runners-up, there will surely be West End interest in Death Becomes Her, which comes with the inbuilt appeal of the pre-existing Meryl Streep/Goldie Hawn film from 1992. Also working to its advantage is the flat-out funniest book (from Marco Pennette) I’ve come across in any musical since Shucked, except that Christopher Gattelli’s exuberant production exists on a far broader, more lavish scale. (Nominated for 10 Tonys, it won for the costumes of Paul Tazewell, who earlier this year took home an Oscar for Wicked.)

My only concern is how to match, or better, the stratospheric star chemistry of the female double-act, Megan Hilty and Jennifer Simard, who play the “frenemies” originated onscreen by Streep and Hawn. I heard rumblings during my Tony season trawl through Broadway of Hannah Waddingham as a possible Madeline Ashton in London – Ashton being the vainglorious star brought to prismatically preening life by Hilty. Whoever inherits these star parts will need the stamina of an ox: among the guessing games in New York of late has been how best to catch both leading ladies in performance at the same time given the demands these high-energy roles take on the players.

Buena Vista Social Club won four competitive Tonys alongside a special one for its musicians, and this title will be known to many from the album celebrating the exuberant Cuban music as well as the 1999 film documentary from Wim Wenders. Music speaks a universal language, and this sonically charged piece seems made to order for the enveloping climes of the Donmar Warehouse, where a previous Tony winner, The Band’s Visit, set up shop in 2022 (both shows began Off Broadway at the Atlantic Theatre Company in Chelsea).

Not to be outdone, the evening’s higher-profile plays seem poised for travel, too. Among the best play nominees, Sanaz Toossi’s Pulitzer-winning English already had a London run this time last year at the Kiln. This year’s joint recipient of both the Pulitzer and the Tony, Purpose comes from the pen of Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, whose plays An Octoroon, Glory, Appropriate, and The Comeuppance have all been seen to acclaim in London, and there’s no reason why this revelation-heavy drama set in Chicago shouldn’t follow suit, even if the odd trim might not go amiss.

Cole Escola wrote a bravura vehicle for themselves with Oh, Mary!, which took the Tonys for best actor (for Escola, playing a fiendishly manic, music-obsessed Mary Todd Lincoln) and for its director, Sam Pinkleton, whose choreography for Here We Are is on view just now at the National Theatre. The entire trajectory of this show has seen a steady increase in popularity from Off Broadway to on, and Escola surely will want to add London to the mix, even if the energies of the piece seem decidedly American: Escola’s sprint to the stage to accept their trophy speaks volumes about the high spirits of the venture.

I’d save a particular shoutout for my favourite of the play nominees. That would be Kimberly Belflower’s smart and cunning John Proctor is the Villain, which tells a #MeToo-era inflected story set amid a Georgia high school in 2018. Its narrative ending where the female hysteria of The Crucible begins, Belflower re-evaluates the heroic figure of John Proctor from the Arthur Miller classic that has long been a London mainstay.

The result is dynamic, often funny, and in the end utterly devastating, and Danya Taymor’s production does the textual shifts in tone proud. However one ends up regarding Proctor – and the play’s title brings one perspective into bold relief – this show is the real deal. A London run seems certain, and the sooner the better.

Book tickets to Tony Award-winning shows on LondonTheatre.co.uk

Photo credit: Maybe Happy Ending, John Proctor Is the Villain, Buena Vista Social Club. Inset: Stereophonic in London, Death Becomes Her, Buena Vista Social Club, both Broadway, Here We Are in London. (All images courtesy of productions)