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Texas Connections At The Tony Awards

Aaron Uhrmacher
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Flickr

This Sunday’s Tony Awards presentation has some Texas roots to root for among the nominees.

In particular, Dallas’ own Roger Horchow – who famously won a best musical Tony Award for producing the Gershwin revisal-musical Crazy for You in 1992 and then won another for reviving Cole Porter’s Kiss Me Kate in 1999 – is back again as a nominee with his daughter, Sally Horchow. Their production of Annie is up for best revival (although the favorite in that category seems to be Pippin or Drood).

Another Dallas local is Stark Sands, who’s nominated for his lead performance as the young shoe-factory owner in Kinky Boots who enlists a drag queen for help in turning around his struggling business. The Harvey Fierstein-Cyndi Lauper musical leads the pack with thirteen Tony noms, including best musical. It’s a nice turn-around for Sands, who started acting at Highland Park High School. He’d previously played Clyde Barrow in the Bonnie & Clyde musical – another quick flop from composer Frank Wildhorn.

Other Texas connections include Holland Taylor. She isn’t from the Lone Star State but she portrays former Governor Ann Richards in the play Ann. And her acclaimed performance is up for best actress, which unfortunately, is a crowded category with strong contenders, notably Laurie Metcalf in The Other Place and Cicely Tyson in The Trip to Bountiful.

Finally, Hands on a Hard Body – the musical based on the 1997 documentary about the last-person-standing-holding-on-to-a-truck contest in Longview – has a slew of nominations, notably for Keith Carradine as best featured actor in a musical and best score for Trey Anastasio and Amanda Green. But the Tony Awards generally have a strong, pro-box office outlook, meaning they like winners or at least shows that are still up and running (so the award can make a difference in ticket sales). And Hard Body folded quickly, disappointingly, after getting good to fair reviews.

Catch the show Sunday night at 7 p.m. on CBS. Hear from some North Texas teens with Broadway in their sites here.

Courtney Collins has been working as a broadcast journalist since graduating from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University in 2004. Before coming to KERA in 2011, Courtney worked as a reporter for NPR member station WAMU in Washington D.C. While there she covered daily news and reported for the station’s weekly news magazine, Metro Connection.