Tony Roundtable Wrestles With Fear, Fame and the Magic

Tony Roundtable – Six Broadway nominees heading to the 79th Tony Awards on Sunday, June 7, traded stories about what scares them most onstage—and what audiences do to steal focus. From a basement that turned into a worldwide hit, to weekly performances that leave performers exh

By late May at PMC’s New York headquarters, six Broadway standouts arrived with a shared reality: Sunday, June 7, would not just be another awards night. It would be a referendum on years of risk—on fear, on criticism, and on the strange discipline required to keep magic alive eight times a week.

The sextet—three men and three women. all headed to the 79th Tony Awards on Sunday. June 7. as nominees—sat down for The Hollywood Reporter’s Tonys Roundtable edition that brought together performers tied to some of the season’s biggest prizes. Two of them are frontrunners for best actor in a play: John Lithgow for his portrayal of Roald Dahl. the author of beloved children’s books with a darker side. in Giant. his 25th Broadway show that could bring him his third Tony; and Nathan Lane. receiving career-best notices for his interpretation of Willy Loman in the latest revival of Death of a Salesman. his 24th show on the Great White Way that could bring him his fourth Tony.

Joshua Henry joined them as a best actor in a musical nominee for Lincoln Center’s revival of Ragtime. expected to win for the first time this cycle on his fourth nomination. Shoshana Bean came in as a best featured actress in a musical nominee for The Lost Boys. an adaptation of the 1987 film. a production tied with Schmigadoon!. for the most nominations of any show this season and expected to win for the first

time this cycle on her third nomination. Rounding out the group were first-time nominees: Rose Byrne. nominated for best actress in a play for Fallen Angels. a revival of a Noël Coward comedy about two sexually frustrated women in 1920s London. and Marla Mindelle. nominated for best actress in a musical—and also for best musical and book of a musical—for Titaníque. Mindelle is the first woman ever to be Tony-nominated for a leading performance in

a show she also wrote.

The conversation began, fittingly, with the kind of fear that doesn’t announce itself. Mindelle described leaving Broadway years earlier, then falling into a hole in Los Angeles after chasing a different dream. She said she did Broadway show after Broadway show. and when she hit 30 she felt she “really have aspirations outside of this.” She recalled that in college she realized she loved writing and musical theater. but believed she could steer her career by moving to Hollywood and trying to become a writer—only to lose everything: “my money. my mind. my sense of self.” She said she wound up doing “crappy dinner theater in L.A. for $75 a show.”.

Then came Titaníque—born, she said, at a rock bottom. She explained that she was drunk in a bar when the co-author Constantine Rousouli suggested the concept. Mindelle said she thought. “That’ll never friggin’ happen. ” sat on the idea for two years. and then said Connie Rousouli and Tye Blue. the director. forced her to do it. With the tiny dinner theater money and “a glass of sauvignon blanc,” she described them as writing for fun.

When the show first reached New York, it was not glamorous. Titaníque. she said. started after the pandemic “in the basement of a Gristedes [supermarket].” She said it was supposed to be a three-month run with very little pay. She described the basement as smelling like beer and urine. with rats crawling around because the Gristedes was about to be condemned. She said she was singing “My Heart Will Go On” while trash juice leaked from the ceiling. Then, she said, “something switched,” and people started coming. She said it blew up—going from that basement to off-Broadway at the Daryl Roth [Theatre]. and now to Broadway and “all over the world.” She called it a “10-year process. ” adding. “Not to be emotional. but this is just a dream come true.”.

The roundtable kept circling back to what it takes to keep going once the dream becomes real—and what audiences do once they’re in the room.

Bean said she found audience behavior most annoying in 2026 to be the wrappers and the ice. saying it felt as if people were “taught them to begin to open them in the quietest moment.” Lane said phones were the problem: “They’re filming the curtain call with their phones!. They’re not experiencing it, they’re just filming it for later. It’s weird.” Mindelle pointed to a different kind of disruption—people rushing the stage and touching her as if she were Celine Dion. “We’ve had to get security down there,” she said.

Even the dream of performing the show as much as the public demands comes with a grim arithmetic of endurance.

When asked how they would feel about the performance schedule they wished they had. Byrne. Lane. and Lithgow all answered “Six.” Henry said he felt “like five. ” while Mindelle said “Four.” They also agreed on what they wanted to lose. “Matinées,” Lithgow said. “Matinées are inhumane,” Bean replied. Lithgow countered that his matinées have been “so crisp and wonderful,” and asked to cancel the Wednesday nights. Henry suggested just the Saturday matinée. Bean offered a different instinct for Sunday matinée because “your body knows Monday is coming.”.

For Lane, stamina is personal and physical, not theoretical. He described getting older as changing how he prepares. saying it’s “like an athletic event” that depends on “your stamina. ” adding that you need sleep and quoting Ethel Merman: “You’ve got to live like a fucking nun!” Death of a Salesman. he said. is a big challenge. He described what happens with a second show on a two-show day—“out-of-body experience”—and he tied it back to the role. saying Willy Loman is living in the past and the present at the same time. Lane said what makes Willy interesting is that he’s “fighting to the end. ” and that the character’s self-worth and idea of success are based on “the opinion of others. ” which Lane said actors can relate to.

Henry framed the show’s hardest moment in the language of music and repetition. He talked about a moment in “New Music. ” crafted by Lynn Ahrens and Stephen Flaherty with the late Terrence McNally. describing it as “one of the top three best numbers in musical theater.” In his telling. the song rises to a certain note. comes back down. rises a little higher. and then eventually Coalhouse Walker Jr. yells, “Sarah, come down to me!” Henry said doing it every night is where the challenge becomes real. He described it as a recurring moment where you get ready—“All right. here we go. here we go …”—and he noted he had even done an Instagram breakdown on training for it in 2024 before he was doing it on Broadway.

Mindelle and Bean spoke of their own version of that recurring dread. Byrne asked if it’s hard to play drunk. and Lane responded with the idea that the key is keeping it from turning into a caricature. “Usually when you’re drunk, you’re trying not to seem drunk,” he said. Byrne then described the structure of Coward’s play. saying it starts out like excited-drunk. then confessional—“I love you”—then falling apart. then turning violent. Byrne said it’s challenging because you have to “track it. ” and the drinking and eating details become “technical. ” “like a dance.”.

For Mindelle. the hardest moment wasn’t only vocal or emotional—it was improvisational. and it carried the uncertainty of nights that can’t be perfectly rehearsed. She said the show was born in a dinner theater. and they “didn’t know how to transition from one scene to another.” She recalled that they were told. “Marla. just improv something. ” and she said she was like “OK!” That small moment. she said. “blew up. ” and there’s now a whole section of Titaníque that is “completely improv’d by myself every single night.” She added that if you come see the show 30. 40. 80 times—she said someone has seen it 600 times—it will never be the same.

She described improvisation as sometimes political satire. citing a riff she did when a Kristi Noem and Bryon Noem thing came out. saying it involved a revelation that the husband of the secretary of homeland security. at the time. had a “bimbofication” fetish. She also said that because she hasn’t seen other Broadway shows. she sometimes imagines scenes from other shows—imagining what they’re about. Still. she called thinking about something to do eight shows a week “the hardest challenge of my life. ” adding it’s “like stand-up comedy.”.

The roundtable also made the stakes feel intimate by connecting fear to origin stories—why these particular people, on these particular nights, walked into roles that demand both confidence and constant recalibration.

Byrne traced her return to Broadway to connections that stretch back from You Can’t Take It With You to Fallen Angels. She said Scott Ellis directed You Can’t Take It With You. Years later, she said he did a benefit reading for the Roundabout [Theatre Company] and Todd Haimes. She said Todd had brought the play to Scott and that when Todd passed. Scott stepped in and they did the reading. She said it took a couple of years to find time. but that “it’s been been a dream of mine to do a true comedy.” She described her character shift: in You Can’t Take It With You. she was “really the straight man. ” but in Fallen Angels “the women are transgressive and lustful and violent and ridiculous and funny.”.

Henry explained how he ended up stepping into the large shoes of Brian Stokes Mitchell in the first Broadway revival of Ragtime. He said at the University of Miami. he listened to the Ragtime soundtrack and thought. “This is the kind of work that I want to do.” Then. after Carousel in 2018. he said he was “done with revivals for a little while.” He said he was directing a new piece of his called The Conversation. and during a reading in 2023. director Lear deBessonet took him aside during a 10-minute break and asked if he’d ever thought about playing Coalhouse Walker Jr. in Ragtime. Henry said he started laughing when she suggested it. but that the role connected to him as an artist. a “ferocious dreamer. ” and “as a family man.”.

Henry also described a family history that sits behind the craft. He said his parents are from Jamaica and came from Jamaica and went to Canada. where he and his siblings were born. and then were raised in America in Florida. He said they had dreams for him. and when he was going to be a musical theater major. they told him. in a heavy Jamaican accent. “What are you going to do now?!” He said his father is an engineer and his mother worked at an accounting firm—“that was just not in the cards.” Henry added that now his mother is going to be at the Tonys on June 7th.

Bean’s path raised another kind of fear: not whether she could do the job. but whether the industry would let her. She said she didn’t want to play another mom. She described how it feels to age in the business—being pigeonholed. feeling like you have more to offer and to prove. and navigating being seen as an underdog and unseen. She said that she navigated those pressures by saying yes to The Lost Boys. She

replaced Caissie Levy when Levy decided to stay in Ragtime. Bean said it was last-minute: they were going to start rehearsals in a month. and “on paper” it didn’t feel like the next thing she wanted. She said it changed through the song “Wild. ” where she felt she reclaimed empowerment at age 48—for both the character as a mom and herself aging and evolving in the business. “At this point, I cannot imagine not

having done this show,” she said.

Lane’s own fear—what people believe about him—arrived through an essay that stuck in his head. He was asked about a 2010 Charles Isherwood profile in The New York Times that declared. “I wouldn’t dare to venture an opinion as to who is the greatest actor to appear on Broadway in the past decade or so. Most accomplished diva?. Definitely won’t touch that. But the greatest entertainer?. That one is easy: Nathan Lane.” Lane said he could find a “dark cloud in any silver lining.” He was in The Addams Family at the time. which he said critics reviled while the public wanted to see it. He said the compliment “entertainer” rather than “actor” stuck in his head. He said he wondered if he could shift people’s perception. adding that in film and television he has no power. but in theater he has “a little bit.”.

Lithgow’s fear was tied to the nature of Giant itself. In his account, the show is thrilling and exhausting, but also demanding because of the character at its core. He described navigating “how cruel, wittingly and unwittingly, and indisputably antisemitic” the man is, even as he is adored. Lithgow said he had the advantage of knowing Maria Tucci. the widow of Bob Gottlieb. Dahl’s editor at Knopf who fired Dahl from Knopf though Dahl was a money machine for them. Lithgow said he went to Maria after reading the play and asked her to tell him everything. He said she loved him and hated him and could describe every aspect of his character—both the love and the hate—and that his job in playing the part is revealing. “like peeling an onion. ” the core of his cruelty and the reason it came from.

That conversation quickly met the wider cultural debate around children’s literature and the people who shape it. Byrne asked Lithgow about the overlap between Roald Dahl’s work and the TV series adaptation of Harry Potter written by J.K. Rowling, who has said things about trans people. Lithgow said he takes the transgender issue “very seriously.” He described being offered Dumbledore just after the Sundance premiere of a film called Jimpa. made with Australians in Amsterdam.

directed by Sophie Hyde. He said he played Hyde’s mother, with Olivia Colman playing her and Aud Mason-Hyde playing the trans teen. Lithgow described the film as “the best and the most warm-hearted. open-hearted and positive creation” in support of kindness and acceptance. and said it had a wonderful opening premiere at Sundance. He said that only months later did he understand the depth of the issue in many people’s minds.

Lithgow said Rowling created a canon for young people. He praised the Potter stories. describing Dumbledore as gay “incidentally. or not so incidentally. ” and said he believes the series is about empathy and love compared with cruelty and hate. He said he respects what Rowling has done, while disagreeing with some things Rowling believes. He added. “The other thing is. I still have not met her. ” and said she’s not directly involved with production. at least as far as he’s experienced.

As the roundtable closed, the group returned to the idea of daily labor—of fear tamed into ritual, not erased. Mindelle said if Celine Dion showed up she would “fully die onstage. ” then said the show would be exactly the same. Bean said she’d like to play Coalhouse Walker Jr. one day. calling it a best-written role and adding. “they don’t always write that shit for girls.” Lane said he would see how a different production might work. and Lithgow said he lets other people’s brainstorms surprise him. Byrne said she. like some of the group. likes admiration at a distance and is not someone who aggressively goes after things.

But Lithgow’s final note landed hard for anyone watching these actors build entire evenings that people rely on. Giant, he said, feels like “a complete experience.” He described it as thrilling, exhausting, and completely draining him. He said he turned 80 years old and can’t imagine doing another Broadway show. “I think this is the perfect way to round it up,” he said.

By the end, the roundtable didn’t read like a celebration of comfort. It sounded like a group of professionals describing how they manage the same question. in different costumes: how to turn fear into focus—so the magic can survive the next performance. and the next. and the next—eight times a week.

Tony Awards 2025-26 79th Tony Awards Broadway nominees Giant Death of a Salesman Ragtime The Lost Boys Fallen Angels Titaníque Marla Mindelle John Lithgow Nathan Lane Joshua Henry Shoshana Bean Rose Byrne roundtable