The nominees for the 69th Tony Awards were announced Tuesday, and An American in Paris and Fun Home came out on top. Each musical received 12 nominations.
The two musicals show very different sides of this year’s Broadway season. Fun Home is based on Alison Bechdel’s graphic coming of age novel about a lesbian girl growing up with a closeted, suicidal father. And the 1951 musical adaptation An American in Paris features the classic Broadway-style ballet set to the tunes of George and Ira Gershwin.
Max von Essen, who received a nomination for featured actor in An American in Paris, said that he was happy to know there was room for anything if it was “good,” according to Kansas City Star. He added that there is room for a “show-stopping revival” and a “darker piece.”
Essen was not the only actor to be nominated from the cast. Leading actors Leanne Cope and Robert Fairchild received nominations, and director-choreographer Christopher Wheeldon received a nomination for both choreography and directing, according to Wall Street Journal.
Most of the cast of Fun Home received nominations in the acting categories. Judy Kuhn and Michael Cerveris, who play the parents of a girl played by three nominated actresses, were two of those cast members.
Cerveris hopes that the nominations will provoke people to want to come see the critically acclaimed show. He said that the “real value of the Tonys” or any awards show is to direct viewers’ attention to something they might not have thought to see before. He claimed the awards were great advertising since “every aspect of the production” was acknowledged.
Other musicals competing in the sought-after best musical category are Something Rotten!, which is a satire about two brothers who invented the world’s first musical in Elizabethan England, and The Visit, which is a musical version of Friedrich Durrenmatt’s 1961 tragicomedy by John Kander and Fred Ebb, as reported by Washington Post. The Visit received five nominations and Something Rotten! received at least 10.
The awards will be announced June 7 at the Radio City Music Hall in New York. Kristin Chenoweth and Alan Cumming are hosting the show, and the broadcast will appear on CBS.