Broadway Shockers 2025: Nicole Scherzinger Beats Audra McDonald for the Tony

As 2025 draws to a close, TheaterMania looks back on some of the most surprising stories of the year.

I would love to get my hands on the vote tally for this year’s Tony Award for Best Actress in a Musical. With only 831 voters, I suspect it was decided by a handful of ballots, perhaps the closest race in an otherwise predictable year.

Going into 2025, the smart bet would have been on Audra McDonald for her performance in the revival of Gypsy. She’s already the winner of six Tony Awards, more than any other actor who has ever walked the boards on Broadway. And she gave a critically acclaimed (though vocally controversial) performance as Mama Rose, a role that previously won Tonys for Angela Lansbury, Tyne Daly, and Patti LuPone (though not Bernadette Peters in the 2003 revival, nor Ethel Merman, who originated the role). The legend of Audra is so powerful that many of her most fervent supporters assumed her seventh Tony was a fait accompli, having learned nothing from the 2016 election and the gods’ propensity to humiliate human certainty.

By April, it was clear that McDonald would face real competition from newcomer Jasmine Amy Rogers, who made her Broadway debut in the short-lived Boop! The Musical. The show was a surprise charmer, an IP vehicle buoyed in no small part by its irrepressible leading lady, who seemed to represent the next generation of Broadway talent. Sure, Audra is great, the logic went, but doesn’t she have enough?

The Audra-Jasmine War was fully on by the time the New York Drama Critics’ Circle met on May 5 to vote on its annual awards, which included a new category for individual performance (yes, that’s right, one award to be given to the very best individual performer on or off-Broadway). McDonald and Rogers jockeyed for position over five ballots, eventually splitting enough of the vote to facilitate the victory of Andrew Scott in his off-Broadway one-man Vanya. It proved to be a harbinger of things to come.

In the end, neither McDonald nor Rogers took home the Best Actress Tony, which instead went to Nicole Scherzinger for her performance in the Broadway revival of Sunset Blvd. This happened despite the widely shared belief that her MAGA-adjacent social media behavior would ruin her chances (this is your annual reminder that Internet gadflies only have as much power as you give them). Scherzinger earned the win with a stunning vocal performance, recreated the night of the Awards, proving definitively that she’s more than just a Pussycat Doll.

As for Audra, she will almost certainly be nominated again and may even win. But her Gypsy will forever be the subject of heated debate over martinis at the upstairs bar at Sardi’s. Was she robbed? Or did her fan club turn a deaf ear to a performance that just wasn’t up to snuff? You be the judge: