Geoffrey Block, Distinguished Professor of Music History at the University of Puget Sound, is the author of Enchanted Evenings: The Broadway Musical From Show Boat to Sondheim and Lloyd Webber. The book offers theater lovers an illuminating behind-the-scenes tour of some of America’s best loved, most admired, and most enduring musicals, as well as a riveting history. In the original post Block challenges readers to test their Tony knowledge. We will post the answers next Wednesday so be sure to check back.
1. Who is Tony?
2. What was the first musical to win the Tony for Best Score?
3. What was the first musical to win the Tony for Best Musical?
4. What was the second musical to win the Tony for Best Musical?
Hint: This show made its debut only a little more than three months after the first winner.
5. In what year were the Tony Awards first nationally televised?
6. Who has the most Tony Award wins in the Best Score category?
7. What other lyricists and composers (or lyricist-composers) have won two or more Tony’s in the Best Score category?
8. Who has received more Tony’s than anyone else since the awards were established?
9. One winning musical in the Best Score category was the only musical nominated that year.
10. What year produced arguably the most impressive line-up of Tony nominated musicals?
11. So far there has been only one tie in the Best Musical category? Name the two shows.
12. Fourteen times in the last fifty years the Best Musical and Best Score winners were not the same. No less than half of these disparities have occurred in the past twelve years. What are the names of these last seven shows that won the Tony for Best Musical but not Best Score? What shows did win for Best Score in those years?
13. Name the two Best Musicals that went on to win Best Picture Oscars.
14. Name the three Best Musicals losers that went on to win Best Picture Oscars.
15. Starting in 1994, the Tony Awards decided to make the Best Musical Revival its own category instead of forcing musicals to share the award with revivals of plays. In the years since, the Best Musical Revival category has often proven to be fiercely competitive. Name the three winning revivals that first appeared before the launching of the Tony Awards and the four winning revivals that did not win a Tony Award for Best Musical the season of their Broadway debut.
16. The Four Questions: What show won the Tony for Best Musical in 1984? What Pulitzer Prize winning show lost that year? Who wrote the winning score? What controversial remarks did the winner utter on national television?
17. One composer had been dead for nearly 70 years when he won for Best Score. Who was this composer and what musical did he write?