These are the best and worst moments from the 2025 Tony Awards

Best reunion: The Hamilton cast

It was plugged before what seemed like every commercial break, but when members of the original cast of Hamilton finally gathered onstage at Radio City Music Hall for a 10th anniversary reunion performance, the hype proved justified.

Renee Elise Goldsberry, from left, Lin-Manuel Miranda, and Christopher Jackson perform a medley from Hamilton.Credit: Charles Sykes/Invision/AP

Sleekly lit and dressed and choreographed, Lin-Manuel Miranda and Leslie Odom Jr. were gloriously back; so were Phillipa Soo, Renée Elise Goldsberry and Jasmine Cephas Jones and that Tony-nominated guy who played King George. The eight-song medley – which included My Shot, The Schuyler Sisters and The Room Where It Happens – snapped. I’d make room for it on any list of all-time-best Tonys performances. – SCOTT HELLER

Best inspiration: Here’s to You, Mr. Robinson

The smooth baritone, the sly half-smile and the wink at the camera. This guy had to be an actor. And, once upon a time, he was. But Gary Edwin Robinson received a Tony Award last night for his second career, as a teacher, at Boys and Girls High School in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighbourhood of New York City’s Brooklyn borough. Accepting the honour in that voice that could make you believe anything, he said he trained his students not merely to appreciate theatre, but to find careers in it. Appreciation is of course valuable, but the harder thing is to instil in young people the idea that finding “the theatre in themselves” can be honorable, and even necessary. – JESSE GREEN

Nicole Scherzinger accepts the award for best performance by an actress in a leading role in a musical during the 78th Tony Awards.Credit: Charles Sykes/Invision/AP

Best epic acceptance: Nicole Scherzinger

Scherzinger’s acceptance speech was as epically demonstrative as her movements in Sunset Boulevard are controlled, restrained, precise. The acknowledging of “the exceptional warrior women in this category”! The shaking! The crying! The swooping motions from the hand that was not holding her new award! At times it felt like seeing a modern Maria Callas shaking her fist at the heavens, except that for once those heavens had ruled in her favour. There was an outsize grandeur to the drama of it all that felt classical. Can Medea be far off? – ELISABETH VINCENTELLI

Cynthia Erivo in full flight during the Tonys. Credit: Charles Sykes/Invision/AP

Best placement: Cynthia Erivo’s balcony bit

It’s become an awards-show staple: The host schleps up to the balcony seats to mingle with us regular folks and maybe tell a joke or two. Erivo’s ascent at Radio City was worth the climb. In a night of a thousand costume changes, her pink candy wrapper of a dress was a zany delight. And the atmosphere up there lent itself to deft comedy – about her height, about Abraham Lincoln and, best of all, about why sitting far away was the best place to watch Jonathan (He Spits When He Sings) Groff perform: “So please welcome the man who makes everyone wet …” – SH

Jonathan Groff performs at the Tonys. Credit: Charles Sykes/Invision/AP

Best nightclub act: Groff as Bobby Darin

Showmanship is distinct from acting. It’s an elusive, unfairly distributed quality: You have it, or you don’t. Groff’s dynamite medley – Mack the Knife, That’s All and Once in a Lifetime – proved he has it. In this context, merely delivering a song well isn’t enough — you have to sell it. It’s something that Darin, the subject of Groff’s current vehicle, Just in Time, had. At Radio City on Sunday, Groff moved like a man possessed by the need to entertain, straddling a seated Keanu Reeves’ head and driven by the rhythm of mad bongos. Please, let him host the Tonys next year. – EV

Worst eyeful: Too many pixels

This season, virtual scenery reached critical mass on Broadway, in Sunset Boulevard, The Picture of Dorian Gray, Redwood and Maybe Happy Ending. The Tony Awards telecast followed suit, ditching traditional flats, drops and clunky wagons in favour of digital backgrounds that ultimately looked cheesy. Literally cheesy-looking in the case of the excerpt from Operation Mincemeat, a totally old-tech musical performed during the ceremony in front of yellow-washed screens that made the actors look as if they’d fallen into a vat of fondue. Why would the producers of a theatre awards show make such an anti-theatrical choice? For the same reason some of the less artful shows do: It’s faster, cheaper and, for audiences who have to be pried away from their own screens, perhaps more enticing. – JG

Darren Criss, left, and Helen J Shen perform Never Fly Away from Maybe Happy Ending during the 78th Tony Awards.Credit: Charles Sykes/Invision/AP

Best homecoming: Asian and Asian American artists win big

It was a historic evening for a troupe of Asian and Asian American theatre artists, including Nicole Scherzinger, Francis Jue and Darren Criss, who all won performance Tonys. Marco Paguia also received a Tony for his Buena Vista Social Club orchestrations, and Hue Park won for writing the lyrics and co-writing the book for Maybe Happy Ending, the evening’s breakout success. In their speeches, several of the artists made reference to feeling left out or ignored before finding a home in the theatre. Scherzinger, who noted her Filipina, Native Hawaiian and Ukrainian ancestry, said, “I always felt like I didn’t belong, but you all have made me feel like I belong and I have come home at last.” – ALEXIS SOLOSKI

Sadie Sink on the Tonys red carpet.Credit: Evan Agostini/Invision/AP

Best sell: Making the plays pop

For all their glamour, and their genuine recognition of talent, the Tonys are an industry advertisement — meant not only to sell tickets in New York, but also to give the nominated shows a life beyond Broadway. Musicals, with their colourful numbers, have always had an advantage in making their case for that. Plays, by comparison, have tended not to translate. But there was real charm to the way this year’s best play nominees were introduced. With a framed screen of video clips playing upstage, a Tony-nominated star from each show spoke with an insider’s affection while giving a synopsis of it: Marjan Neshat for English, Sadie Sink for John Proctor Is the Villain, Cole Escola for Oh, Mary!, Harry Lennix for Purpose, Laura Donnelly for The Hills of California. It was easy to imagine would-be producers and audience members out there, their interest suddenly piqued. – LAURA COLLINS-HUGHES

Best ‘sing-off’: Cynthia Erivo’s My Way

It’s always a delicate matter: how to usher off winners whose speeches go too long. A clever step up from canned elevator music: Erivo singing a passage from the standard My Way, popularised by Frank Sinatra. When Kara Young, accepting her award for Purpose, was still in the thick of her extensive list of thank-yous to those who had made her back-to-back featured actress in a play wins possible, it was a gentle balm to hear “And now, the end is near / And so I face the final curtain …” – SARAH BAHR

Worst placement: Preshow spot for book and score awards

Not every scene deserves a spotlight, but relegating the book and score awards to the Tonys preshow felt at least a little rude. What is a musical without its songs? Or its occasionally effortful patter between songs? (And is dance really an also-ran, too?) At the 2025 Tonys, a win for Maybe Happy Ending was practically assured after its wins for book and score, though viewers watching only the main broadcast would never have known this. Couldn’t we swap out a drug ad or a few host jokes to show these prizes on the main stage? – AS

Jak Malone accepts the award for best performance by an actor in a featured role in a musical for “Operation Mincemeat: A New Musical” during the 78th Tony Awards.Credit: Charles Sykes/Invision/AP

Best farewell to cynicism: Hester’s open heart

In the World War II caper Operation Mincemeat, Jak Malone’s big song, Dear Bill, is nearly six minutes long. It’s a major reason he won a featured-actor Tony, because that is the moment when his character — a middle-aged British intelligence secretary named Hester — opens her wounded heart to the audience. “They weep for her,” Malone said in his speech, “they invest in her, they love her for her old romantic heart. And if you watched our show and found yourself believing in Hester, well, then I am so glad to tell you that, intentionally or otherwise, you might have just bid farewell to cynicism, to outdated ideas, to that rotten old binary, and opened yourself up to a world that is already out there in glorious Technicolor and isn’t going away anytime soon.” – LCH

By Scott Heller, Jesse Green, Elisabeth Vincentelli, Alexis Soloskilaura, Laura Collins-Hughes and Sarah Bahr

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.