Awards Season: Tonys, Eliot Norton Awards, and June Anne Baker Prize Lead Recognitions

Bess Wohl, center, accepts the award for best play for “Liberation” during the 79th Tony Awards on Sunday, June 7, 2026, at Radio City Music Hall in New York. (Photo by Charles Sykes/Invision/AP)

Awards

June 8, 2026 American Theatre Editors Leave a comment

Tonys, Eliot Norton Awards, June Anne Baker Prize, and More

A roundup of prizes, fellowships, and other recognitions.

By American Theatre Editors

NEW YORK CITY: The 79th annual Tony Awards were presented last night in a ceremony at Radio City Music Hall , hosted by P!nk on the CBS broadcast, with Laura Benanti and Titus Burgess presenting creative awards on Paramount Plus. The top winners were Cinco Paul’s Schmigadoon for Best Musical, Bess Wohl’s Liberation for Best Play, Lincoln Center Theater ’s Ragtime for Best Revival of a Musical, and Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman for Best Revival of a Play. Wohl’s win marks the first time an American woman has won Best Play since Wendy Wasserstein won for The Heidi Chronicles in 1989, coming ahead of a season with at least six productions of Liberation at TCG theatres. It’s also the first time Lynn Ahrens and Stephen Flaherty’s Ragtime has won a Tony production award since its 1998 debut.

Cinco Paul, who told this magazine’s editor-in-chief 30 years ago he had this idea of a musical “where two guys get trapped in a town that’s a musical,” won for Best Original Score and Best Book of a Musical during the creative awards. His collaborators Doug Besterman and Mike Morris were awarded for Best Orchestrations. As for directors, Joe Mantello won for Death of a Salesman , and Zhailon Livingston and Bill Rauch won Best Direction of a Musical for their reimagining of Cats: The Jellicle Ball , with a tag team speech paying tribute to ballroom. Cats choreographers Omari Wiles and Arturo Lyons were also recognized, as was costume designer Qween Jean, the first out trans artist to win for costume design, who graced our magazine cover in 2023 , and was also nominated for Liberation ’s costumes.

In the acting awards, longtime Broadway performers Joshua Henry and Caissie Levy, both in Ragtime , received their first Tonys, winning their respective Leading Performance in a Musical categories. John Lithgow made history as the oldest man to win Best Performance by a Leading Actor in a Play for his portrayal of author Roald Dahl in Giant , with Lesley Manville winning Leading Actress in a Play for playing Jocasta in Oedipus . Becky Shaw ’s Alden Ehrenreich and Death of a Salesman ’s Laurie Metcalf won in the featured role in a play category. The Lost Boys ’ featured performers, Shoshana Bean and Ali Louis Bourzgui, both won in their respective categories. In his speech, Bourzgui spoke out on behalf of Arab, immigrant, and LGBTQ+ folks and reflected on his role.

“Sometimes humanity needs a fantastical lens outside of ourselves to look at and explore questions about our own nature,” Bourzgui said. “Vampires represent those who have shunned their own humanity in order to achieve a nonexistent sense of superiority. The billionaires will never find happiness from their money. The colonizers will never find fulfillment from the land and lives they steal. The fascists will never find meaning from their conformity, not in this lifetime or eternity. People like to say that theatre is a form of escape, but I’ve found…theatre is one of the last places people can come worship the power of collective human presence.”

In the design categories, The Lost Boys won for Dane Laffrey’s scenic design and Jen Schriever and Michael Arden’s lighting design. Death of a Salesman won for Chloe Lamford’s scenic design, Jack Knowles’s lighting design, and Mikaal Sulaiman’s sound design. Rounding out the design awards were Kai Harada’s sound design for Ragtime and Jeff Mahshie’s costume design for Fallen Angels . Special awards included lifetime achievement awards for Lincoln Center artistic director Andre Bishop, director and playwright James Lapine, and lighting designer Jules Fisher, as well as a special Tony for the League of Resident Theatres . Tony Honors for Excellence in the Theatre went to 1/52 Project, Jake Bell, Kenn Lubin, and Loren Plotkin. Music director Mary-Mitchell Campbell received the Isabelle Stevenson award. American Players Theatre won the Regional Theatre award.

BOSTON: The Boston Theater Critics Association has announced the recipients of the 2026 Eliot Norton Awards, awarding theatre in the Greater Boston area. In a June 1 ceremony at the Huntington Theatre , over two dozen categories of outstanding actors, directors, designers, choreographers, musicians, and productions, and five awards for visiting productions were awarded.

The Huntington was a big winner, garnering five awards for The Light in the Piazza , including Outstanding Musical, Loretta Greco’s direction and Joshua Grosso’s featured performance, as well as Outstanding Play for The Hills of California with Berkeley Repertory Theatre . The Glass Menagerie at Gloucester Stage won Outstanding Play, Midsize, and Front Porch Arts Collective ’s The Mountaintop with the Suffolk University Modern Theatre won Outstanding Play, Small. The Moderate , a Catalyst Collaborative@MIT Production presented by Central Square Theater , was recognized for its new script. These productions also saw wins for directors ( Glass Menagerie ’s Doug Lockwood and The Mountaintop ’s Maurice Emmanuel Parent) and performers. SpeakEasy Stage ’s Jaja’s African Hair Braiding was honored for Outstanding Ensemble. All winners can be found here .

The 2026 Elliot Norton Prize for Sustained Excellence was awarded to producer Bill Hanney, who reopened the nationally recognized North Shore Music Theatre and Rhode Island’s landmark 500-seat professional summer theatre Theatre By The Sea . Special citations were awarded to Commonwealth Shakespeare Company in honor of its 30th anniversary season, the Blue Man Group in honor of its 30-year residency in Boston, and to veteran arts administrators Temple Gill and Jim Torres. The Elliot Norton Arts Education Award was presented to Open Door Theater , one of the only integrated, accessible theatres to stage productions featuring actors who are deaf, blind, disabled, autistic, or neurodiverse.

SAN FRANCISCO: PlayGround has announced the recipients of the 25th Anniversary June Anne Baker Prize , one of the nation’s longest continuously running awards and commissions for early-career female and nonbinary playwrights. New this year, PlayGround has expanded the prize to include one playwright from each of the four regions where the company operates. The winners are Honduran bilingual playwright, actress, director, and translator Esther Banegas Gatica (Los Angeles); Berkeley-based playwright and screenwriter KT Frances Hartline (San Francisco); Uma Incrocci (New York City), a PlayGround Writers Pool member since 2018; and Toby Inoue (Chicago), a member of the PlayGround-Chicago community for three seasons, a founding member of the Evanston Playwrights Group, and a member of the Playwrights Circle at Speranza Theatre Company . They will be honored at this year’s One PlayGround Gala , taking place in all four cities simultaneously on Sept. 14. Over the next year, each writer will develop a new full-length play under commission, based on one of their PlayGround short works, as part of the 2026-27 PlayGround Playwright Residency program .

LOS ANGELES: The AAPI Equity Alliance presented awards on May 21 at the California Science Center in Los Angeles during its inaugural policy summit, “AAPI Power: Democracy in Action,” and its 50 Years of Leadership and Legacy Gala, recognizing its founders and generations of leaders vital to AAPI Equity Alliance’s founding and growth. Among the awardees was Center Theatre Group artistic director Snehal Desai, who received the Groundbreaker Award for his visionary leadership reshaping the landscape of American theatre. Founded in 1976 as the “Asian Lunch Bunch” and then Asian Pacific Policy & Planning Council (A3PCON), the coalition has worked to bring together Asian American and African American communities after the 1992 Uprising, ensure health care access for immigrant communities and increase AAPI voting power in local elections.

CHICAGO: First Floor Theater has announced playwright, actor, and multidisciplinary artist Netta Walker as the recipient of its 2026 Blueprint Commission, the company’s new play development initiative supporting the creation of bold, original works. Walker’s new play, Nordica, is in development through the commission and will receive a multi-phase workshop process culminating in a staged reading later this year. Her play draws inspiration from George S. Schuyler’s Harlem Renaissance novel Black No More and continues her exploration of culture, mythology, and identity through a contemporary lens.

Born and raised on the Florida/Georgia line in Jacksonville, Florida, Walker is an award-winning artist whose work spans theatre, television, and film. She played Keisha McCalla on All American: Homecoming and received a Jeff Award for her performance in Yen at Raven Theatre . As a playwright, her work has been developed and produced nationally and internationally, including the Eugene O’Neill National Playwrights Conference , Definition Theatre’s AMPLIFY Festival , and workshops in London and Chicago.

The Blueprint Commission provides selected artists with resources and a collaborative team to develop new plays through two dedicated workshops over the course of the commission. Launched in 2020, the Blueprint Commission is First Floor Theater’s flagship new-play development program.

WASHINGTON, D.C., and NEW YORK CITY: The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) and National Alliance for Musical Theatre (NAMT) have announced the winners of the 2025-26 Musical Theater Songwriting Challenge for high school students. This program provides student writers with an unparalleled opportunity to develop and showcase original musical compositions that could become part of full-scale musical theatre productions. The winning songwriters will travel to New York City this June to work with mentors and refine their songs for a special concert on Monday, June 15, at 7:30 p.m. ET at New World Stages . The concert will be available to watch nationwide at arts.gov/songwriting and namt.org/challenge . The 2025-2026 winners include:

- Izzy Burris, an 11th grade student at Carlsbad High School in Carlsbad, California, for “Where Do You Get Off?,” about two young people deeply in love who clash over fear, vulnerability, and the possibility of a future together.

- Rett Bush, a 12th grade student at Johns Creek High School in Johns Creek, Georgia, for “Welcome to Winter’s Edge,” a heavy metal song about a sentient robot in a not-so-distant future, in which he must save himself and abandon humanity’s survivors, or sacrifice everything in a frozen wasteland.

- Isaac Goodman, a 10th grade student at Cambridge Rindge & Latin School in Cambridge, Massachusetts, for “Another Dreamer Down the Hall,” about Frank Thurman, a once-promising musical theatre songwriter now disillusioned by the industry, who finds his quiet Brooklyn apartment disrupted by a young composer who moves in down the hall.

- Liam Liang, an 11th grade student at Crimson Global Academy in Harvard, Massachusetts, for “Oh No Gaby,” which traces a young girl’s emotional unraveling from infatuation to disappearance.

- Merissa Moore, a 12th grade student at Pocono Mountain West High School in Tobyhanna, Pennsylvania, for “Find Me,” about a woman caught between life and death as she searches for her grieving husband in the afterlife.

- James Pumphrey, a 12th grade student at Great River School in Minneapolis, Minnesota, for “Am I Doing Enough?” about a struggling young actor newly arrived in New York City and the restless anxiety of early artistic adulthood.

- Cameron Steele, a 10th grade student at Riverside High School in Leesburg, Vir

_Originally reported by [American Theatre](https://www.americantheatre.org/2026/06/08/tonys-eliot-norton-awards-june-anne-baker-prize-and-more/)._