The Tony Awards are an annual award for distinguished achievement in American theater. The awards were named after the actress-producer Antoinette Perry and were intended to recognize excellence in plays and musicals staged on Broadway.

This year, some of these awards were given to Gary Edwin Robinson, a Brooklyn theater teacher, and Cole Escola for Best Theater Education and Best Actor in a Play, respectively.

“It’s not every day you get a notice saying that you’re winning an award for the work that you do and you love to do,” says Robinson, the head of the theater arts program at Boys and Girls High School in Brooklyn. He has been developing this theater program for about nine years and he prepares his students by letting them work with other professional people.

By winning this award, he received $10,000 for developing his theater program at school to help train the next generation of theater professionals. Even after teaching for 35 years, Robinson still does not plan to stop. “I will never retire from the theater, this is what I do,” he said, “I get up and I go to work every day and I report to a black box theater. It just so happens this theater is at a school.” With this determination, he will most likely make good use of the award money he got.

Another Tony Award was given to Cole Escola, who won Best Actor in a Play for their performance in the “outlandish, historic comedy ‘Oh, Mary!’” Even though this was the first time Escola went on stage on Broadway, Escola has already won an award.

In the play, Escola plays a “self-indulgent, scheming” Mary Todd Lincoln who wanted to become a singer. However, her boredom leads to her doing many foolish but very amusing behaviors throughout the play.

https://www.britannica.com/art/Tony-Awards