Othell-No: Who Didn’t Get Nominated for a 2025 Tony Award?

Denzel Washington and Jake Gyllenhaal are both A-list Hollywood actors who regularly make appearances on Broadway. The former is already a Tony winner (for Fences), while the latter was nominated for Sea Wall/A Life in 2020. They’re both starring in one of the hottest tickets on Broadway, the revival of Shakespeare’s Othello, which boasted an average paid admission of $374.17 last week. The show announced its recoupment this morning at 9:54am — and that will have to be its own reward, because neither man was nominated for a 2025 Tony Award this morning.

Othello was shut out of this year’s nominations, shocking not one critic who saw the mediocre revival, but perhaps adding insult to injury for the people who paid $897 a ticket.

Glengarry Glen Ross, another starry revival raking it in at the box office, was also largely shunned by the nominators. Only Bob Odenkirk was nominated in the Featured Actor category, with nothing for Bill Burr or Kiernan Culkin, whose quest to place a Tony on his mantle next to his newly minted Oscar (for A Real Pain) ended today.

Good Night, and Good Luck, the third play breaking box office records this season, fared better with five nominations: all four design categories (though not direction) and George Clooney for Best Actor in a Leading Role. It was not nominated in the Best Play category, which this year actually comprises the five best plays to appear on Broadway this season.

Clooney is the only big household name actor to make it into the Leading Actor in a Play category, with Robert Downey Jr. also excluded for his Broadway debut in McNeal, which closed months ago. In a somewhat surprising reverse snub, the nominators did remember Mia Farrow in the now-closed two-hander The Roommate, which she starred in opposite Patti LuPone (not nominated).

With 14 new musicals opening in the 2024-25 season, the nominators had to make some difficult choices, knocking out shows that might have received a courtesy nod in thinner seasons: Smash, Boop!, and Real Women Have Curves were not included in the Best Musical category, although all three shows received multiple nominations in other categories.

The same cannot be said for Redwood, the new musical starring Idina Menzel as a distraught New Yorker who finds solace in the treetops of California. That currently running musical received nothing, not even Featured Performance for Zachary Noah Piser, who is bringing the house down at the Nederlander 8 times a week with his eleven o’clock number. “Still.”

Also totally snubbed: Stephen Sondheim’s Old Friends, which stars Bernadette Peters and Lea Salonga (she really should have been nominated for her Mrs. Lovett alone). Of course, the show is a revue of Sondheim’s greatest hits, not a new musical in the truest sense. And why give a Tony to old friends when there are so many new ones to consider?

While I didn’t much love Pirates! The Penzance Musical, I expected it to do better than the one nomination it did receive, in the Best Revival of a Musical category. That means no nominations for its three stars, David Hyde Pierce, Ramin Karimloo, and Jinkx Monsoon.

The Broadway debut of Jason Robert Brown’s The Last Five Years, starring Nick Jonas and Adrienne Warren, was also left off the list (having debuted in Chicago in 2001, it was eligible for Best Revival). It’s something of a shock for such a well-regarded musical—that is unless you saw the production.

I was disappointed to see that Helen J Shen was not nominated for her powerful performance in Maybe Happy Ending, which received 10 total nominations and is the frontrunner for Best Musical. But she’s a genuine star and I have no doubt that we’ll see her on a list of nominees in the future.

Two Tony-winning veteran directors, Susan Stroman (Smash) and George C. Wolfe (Gypsy), were left out of the Best Direction of a Musical category. The exclusion of Stroman is a real surprise, since her direction is really the main thing holding that messy Franken-musical together.

But sometimes the nominators overlook essential elements. That’s certainly the case with Sunset Blvd., which received seven nominations, including Best Revival, Direction (Jamie Lloyd), and Lead Actors (Nicole Scherzinger and Tom Francis). But there was no nomination for Nathan Amzi & Joe Ransom, whose video design is crucial to the storytelling. Video design does not have its own category at the Tonys, so they would have been considered under scenic design; and since the stage of the St. James is mostly empty, I suspect the nominators were hesitant to include Sunset when there are so many big moving parts in other productions.

I was also surprised by the exclusion of Heather Gilbert from the Lighting Design of a Musical category. Her work on Dead Outlaw is finely calibrated and stunning, making it feel like the ghosts of the past are emerging from the shadows of memory. In my book, it’s the most outrageous snub of the season.

But the nominators were spoiled for choice this year: 14 new musicals, 14 new plays, seven play revivals, and seven musical revivals. Only one Broadway theater is vacant right now (but won’t be come May 24), with an untold number of productions waiting to rush in when one of the above-mentioned shows inevitably announces its closing. Five years after the pandemic shutdown, there’s no question that Broadway is back with a vengeance. That’s something to celebrate, even if your favorite actor won’t win a Tony in June.

Click here for a full list of nominees.