What Tony Sunday Means to Me as a Theatre Person

by Chris Peterson

Tony Sunday is my Super Bowl, my family reunion, and my annual emotional check-in with the weird little art form that has somehow taken over my life.

Yes, I know how dramatic that sounds. I also know I am among friends here.

On one level, it is just an awards show. But for theatre people, Tony Sunday has never been only about trophies.

It is the one night a year when Broadway gets treated like a national event instead of a niche obsession your relatives tolerate. For a few hours, the rest of the world wanders into our church.

I love Tony Sunday because it captures the strange contradiction of theatre: it is glamorous and yet completely unglamorous. The telecast gives us sparkle, but anyone who has spent five minutes in this world knows what lies beneath it: dance belts, throat-coat tea, bruised knees, student loan debt, quick changes, tech rehearsals that feel like hostage negotiations, and actors eating dinner at 11:43 p.m. over a sink.

That is why the performances get me. Behind every three-minute performance is the whole invisible machine of theatre: swings, understudies, dressers, stage managers, musicians, crew members, and ensemble performers smiling through choreography that could legally qualify as a 5k race.

Tony Sunday gives all of that a little light.

It also makes me embarrassingly sentimental. I think about high school auditoriums, community theatres, and all the places where people learned how to belong before they had the words for what they were looking for.

And yes, I have opinions. Of course, I have opinions. I am a theatre person. 

I will yell when the wrong show wins. I will defend a performance as if I were presenting evidence in court. I will complain about speeches getting cut off and then cry during one anyway.

That is the ritual.

Tony Sunday is joy with a scorecard. It is commercial Broadway congratulating itself, yes, but it is also a night when someone watching from far away might see a voice, a face, a story, or a possibility and think, maybe there is room for me there.

That is what Tony Sunday means to me.

It reminds me of why I fell in love with theatre in the first place.