High School Teacher Wins A Tony Award

A high school theater arts teacher, Gary Robinson, won the 2025 Excellence in Theater Education Tony Award last Sunday.

The Tony Awards are the most respected awards given to the best contributors of theater in the United States, including both performers and producers. It started in 1947 and was named after the middle name of Antoinette Tony Perry, who was one of the founders of the American Theater Wing. The organization is a non-profit group based in New York that helps support people learning theater by granting scholarships. As a result, the Tony Awards are always held in the state of New York and usually New York City. At its first ceremony, the rewards for winning were money for men and jewelry for women. Now people receive a nickel-coated bronze statue with a custom comedy and tragedy mask design. Even though the award now usually doesn’t give any money, it indirectly increases profit because of the fame of having a Tony to your name. Shows directed by or starring people who won these awards can attract more people to buy tickets to it.

This year at the 78th Tonys, Gary Edwin Robinson received an award for Theater Education. He has been a teacher for 35 years and currently has been at Boys and Girls High School teaching theater for 10 years. Before that, he taught 17 years of middle school theatre classes at Ronald Edmonds Learning Center, another school in Brooklyn. Surprisingly, this is the first time that someone from NYC had won it because even though most recipients in the past had been from the New York Broadway shows, no educator from this state had achieved it before.