The Tony Award for Best Play (formally, the Antoinette Perry Award for Excellence in Theatre) is an annual award celebrating achievements in live American theatre, including musical theatre, honoring productions on Broadway in New York. It currently takes place in mid-June each year.
There was no award in the Tony's first year. All My Sons has been incorrectly categorized as the Best Play of 1947, but it won the Best Author award for Arthur Miller. The following year Mister Roberts received the first Tony Award as Best Play. Authors and the producers are presented with the award.
British writer Tom Stoppard has won this award four times, more than any other playwright.
Famous quotes containing the words award and/or play:
“The award of a pure gold medal for poetry would flatter the recipient unduly: no poem ever attains such carat purity.”
—Robert Graves (1895–1985)
“He was high and mighty. But the kindest creature to his slaves—and the unfortunate results of his bad ways were not sold, had not to jump over ice blocks. They were kept in full view and provided for handsomely in his will. His wife and daughters in the might of their purity and innocence are supposed never to dream of what is as plain before their eyes as the sunlight, and they play their parts of unsuspecting angels to the letter.”
—Anonymous Antebellum Confederate Women. Previously quoted by Mary Boykin Chesnut in Mary Chesnut’s Civil War, edited by C. Vann Woodward (1981)