Both new productions scored across major categories, including best musical, acting and design, signalling broad support from nominators while Ragtime reaffirmed its enduring resonance with recognition for its sweeping score and a slate of stand-out performances.
The nominations, announced on Tuesday by actors Uzo Aduba and Darren Criss ahead of a June 7 awards night, offer a snapshot of a Broadway season defined by new musicals, bold revivals and a renewed sense of what it means to gather in a theatre post-pandemic.
This season has also been marked by even more celebrities making their Broadway debuts, like Adrien Brody, Tessa Thompson and Patrick Ball, along with an uptick in celebrity producers including Kim Kardashian (The Fear of 13) and Barack Obama (Proof).
None of those shows or people were nominated, however.
Joshua Henry was nominated for best actor in a musical for his role as Coalhouse Walker Jr in Ragtime, one of the most talked-about performances of the season.
His nomination caps a breakout moment that included his opening the Met Gala red carpet on Monday night with a performance of I Wanna Dance with Somebody by Whitney Houston, choreographed by Ragtime choreographer Ellenore Scott, who was also nominated.
Henry's co-star Caissie Levy, nominated for the first time 20 years after her Broadway debut in Hairspray, told Reuters it gives her "a huge amount of satisfaction and joy in being recognised by my community at this point in my life for this role and in this show that is so resonant right now in the world we're living in".
Nicholas Christopher, the first Bermudian to be nominated for a Tony, got the nod for his commanding turn as the tortured Anatoly in Chess, outshining his better-known co-stars Lea Michele and Aaron Tveit, who were not nominated.
Another co-star, Hannah Cruz, was also nominated for best featured actress.
"Audiences are really responding to this show in a beautiful way," Christopher told Reuters.
"The music is the hook that grabs people and then I think they're a little bit surprised at how emotionally attached they get to these flawed human beings, and they're rooting for everybody."
Mark Strong, nominated for his role as the title character in this season's reimagining of Oedipus, which scored seven nominations, told Reuters he thought the production had a powerful effect on audiences because of its timelessness.
"The fact that we're still telling that story, but to be able to update it to a modern idiom, and to a political idiom, as well as all of the family stuff that happens in the story, makes it so immediate for a modern audience," Strong said.
Surprisingly, in a season full of beloved and well-reviewed musical revivals, only three of a possible five nominations were announced in the category: Cats: The Jellicle Ball, Ragtime and The Rocky Horror Show.
Bess Wohl's Liberation was nominated for best play a day after it won the Pulitzer Prize for drama.
The Pulitzer committee called it, in part, "a striking blend of comedy and sincerity that explores the legacy of the consciousness-raising feminist groups of the 1970s".
The awards will take place on June 7 at Radio City Music Hall in New York City, hosted by pop star Pink.
Founded in 1947, the Tony Awards honour excellence on Broadway.
