The Tony Awards honors “Hamilton” with 11 statuettes in new breakthrough for diversity
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The Tony Awards, the world’s most famous theater prizes, honored “Hamilton” with 11 statuettes and showed a wholehearted acceptance of diversity just hours after the Orlando massacre.
The hip-hop musical about America’s founders, with an interracial cast and in which the star (music, script, acting) is Puerto Rico’s Lin-Manuel Miranda, was, as expected, the big winner of the night.
Miranda made a hit with his speech in the form of a sonnet referring to the Orlando tragedy, and particularly with the phrase “love is love is love cannot be killed or swept aside.” The hashtag “#Loveislove” went viral.
The presence of Latinos including Miranda along with Emilio and Gloria Estefan with “On Your Feet!” and with African Americans in such works as “Eclipsed” and “The Color Purple,” gave a very different image from that seen at the last Oscars.
Something that Tony Awards host, the actor James Corden, made much of.
“This is like the Oscars, but with diversity. So much diversity that Trump has threatened to build a wall around this theater,” Corden joked.
Aside from “Hamilton,” the awards went mainly to “The Humans” with four statuettes including best play, and to “A View from the Bridge” and “The Color Purple” for best revival of a play and a musical, respectively.
Two veterans, Jessica Lange and Frank Langella, took separate acting awards, he for “The Father” and she for “Long Day’s Journey into the Night.”
Very much a part of the celebrities’ speeches at the Beacon Theater was the subject of the Orlando massacre
“Your tragedy is our tragedy. Theatre is a place where every race, creed, sexuality, and gender is equal, is embraced, and is loved. Hate will never win,” James Corden said.
