Tony Award Quiz: Part One
Answers

It’s Tony season and who better to educate us about the wonderful world of theatre than Thomas S. Hischak, author of The Oxford Companion To The American Musical: Theatre, Film and Television. Hischak is a Professor of Theatre at the State University of New York College at Cortland. He is the author of sixteen books on theater, film, and popular music as well as the author of twenty published plays. In The Oxford Companion To The American Musical Hischak offers over two thousand entires on musicals, performers, composers, lyricists, producers, choreographers and much more. Below are the answers to this morning’s quiz. Be sure to check back next week on Tuesday for another quiz about the Tonys.

1. The musical Passion (1994) ran only 280 performances, the shortest run on record for a Best Musical winner. Hallelujah, Baby! (1967) ran only two weeks longer but it had closed before it won the Tony so the award could not help business.

2. Poet T. S. Eliot (1888-1965) won when his light verse was set to music by Andrew Lloyd Webber for Cats (1982).

3. Pseudolus in A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. Mostel won for the original 1962 production, Silvers and Lane won for the 1972 and 1996 revivals, and Alexander won when he played Pseudolus and other roles in Jerome Robbins’ Broadway (1989).

4. The Threepenny Opera (1954). In 1956 the American Theatre Wing gave a special Tony to the long-running Off Broadway musical.

5. It was their Broadway debut. Bosley in Fiorello! (1959), Smith in Follies (1971), Holliday in Dreamgirls (1981), Martin in My Favorite Year (1992), McDonald in Carousel (1994), Heredia in Rent (1996) and Foster in Thoroughly Modern Millie (2002).

6. Chicago. The 1997 production won the Revival Tony and is still running.

7. Ethel Merman lost to Mary Martin in The Sound of Music in 1960. Bernadette Peters lost in 2004. Angela Lansbury won in 1975, Tyne Daly in 1990. Will Patti LuPone follow suit?

8. Frankie Michaels as Young Patrick in Mame and Daisy Eagan as Mary Lenox in The Secret Garden.

9. Both Mary Martin and Robert Preston were nominated for “I Do! I Do!.” Preston won.

10. Tommy Tune. He has Tonys for Best Leading Actor in a Musical, Best Featured Actor in a Musical, Best Director of a Musical, and Best Choreographer. Harvey Fierstein has also won Tonys in four different categories but half were for nonmusicals: as author of Best Play, Best Actor in a Play, Best Actor in a Musical, and Best Book for a Musical.