The Lost Boys and Schmigadoon! lead Tony nominations with 12 each
Two adapted new musicals, The Lost Boys and Schmigadoon!, led the Tony race with 12 nominations each, while film stars including Daniel Radcliffe and Rose Byrne broke into the Broadway spotlight.
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New musicals adapted from familiar screen properties dominated the Tony race, as The Lost Boys and Schmigadoon! each collected 12 nominations and set the pace for a season that showed Broadway leaning hard into both reinvention and commercial recognition.
The 79th annual Tony Award nominations were announced Tuesday, May 5, with Uzo Aduba and Darren Criss delivering the live reveal and some of the biggest categories unveiled on CBS Mornings. The awards ceremony is set for June 7 at Radio City Music Hall in New York City, with Pink scheduled to host. The field reflected a Broadway season that ran from April 28, 2025, through April 26, 2026, and it was crowded enough that no single production emerged as an obvious runaway favorite.
The Lost Boys, based on the 1987 vampire film, and Schmigadoon!, built from the Apple TV+ series that parodied Golden Age musicals, both landed in the Best Musical category. Their shared lead at 12 nominations is a sign of how Broadway is rewarding projects that arrive with recognizable brands but are still being shaped for the stage. In a year with fierce competition across the top categories, the nominations rewarded risk, but risk backed by built-in audience awareness.
The film-to-stage pipeline was also visible in the acting races. Daniel Radcliffe, Rose Byrne, John Lithgow and Lesley Manville were among the nominated performers, underscoring how much Broadway continues to draw on marquee names from film and television to broaden its reach. That mix of star power and adaptation has become a central part of the season’s commercial strategy, especially as producers look for projects that can travel beyond the theater crowd.
Other major contenders were close behind. Ragtime earned 11 nominations, while Death of a Salesman and Cats: The Jellicle Ball each received nine. The spread suggests a season without a single dominant title, but with several productions strong enough to compete across acting, directing and design categories. For Broadway, that is the larger story behind the numbers: new musicals are leading, adaptations are thriving, and the industry is still finding ways to balance artistic ambition with the audience pull of familiar names and titles.
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