Tony Awards contenders include 'The Lost Boys,' 'Titaníque,' 'Death of a Salesman' and 'Schmigadoon!' Courtesy Two-way races abound in the history of best musical at the Tonys. But a genuine three-way race? That’s rare. This is a bit subjective, but in the past two decades I would argue that we’ve only seen one race with at least three nominees being widely considered as potential frontrunners: Two years ago, when The Outsiders bested Hell’s Kitchen and Suffs for the top category.
Until, perhaps, this year. It might not be quite as tight as that 2024 race, but (with all due respect to Titaníque), you could make a compelling case for any of Schmigadoon!, The Lost Boys, or potentially Two Strangers (Carry a Cake Across New York).
Still, one of those three does have a lead. How do we know? Math. Every year, I plug in all of the Tonys data from that season – which other categories a show is nominated in, previous theater honors, aggregated critic predictions, and betting markets – to determine the odds that each nominee in each category goes home a winner. Let’s find out who’s ahead in this year’s particularly open-ended races.
We’ve got three contenders in double-digits, but one stands out ahead of the pack: Schmigadoon!, the sunny love letter to Golden Age musicals, has just better than a 50-50 chance to take the top prize. Still, The Lost Boys and Two Strangers (Carry a Cake Across New York) have plenty of reasons to keep their hopes high.
Best play isn’t quite as close as best musical. Bess Wohl already won the Pulitzer Prize for Liberation, and has a 3-in-5 chance to follow up with a Tony. If there’s to be an upset, look to David Lindsay-Abaire’s The Balusters, which won honors from this year’s Outer Critics Circle Awards and Drama Desk Awards.
Ragtime swept through the precursors, emerging as the favorite to finally win a best show trophy. The original Broadway musical won four categories but fell short against The Lion King for the final award, and the 2009 revival lost this category to La Cage aux Folles. However, it’s worth remembering that Cats: The Jellicle Ball debuted off-Broadway before this season, meaning it wasn’t eligible for all of the same precursors that Ragtime won this year.
The most confident prediction of the four best show categories is also the most familiar title. Death of a Salesman, after winning the second-ever Tony for best play, has gone on to win three separate Tonys for best revival. This would be its fourth, doubling up second place on the all-time play revival win list, A View from the Bridge.
Joshua Henry (Ragtime) will have to get past his own costar (Brandon Uranowitz) to win leading actor in a musical, but he shouldn’t have too much trouble. The math says he’s the most likely winner out of any of this year’s 41 acting nominees.
Caissie Levy (Ragtime) isn’t quite as likely as her costar Joshua Henry to go home a winner, but she does sit just above the 50-50 mark, well ahead of second place Marla Mindelle (Titaníque). If Henry and Levy make it a Ragtime sweep, it would be only the third time this century that a musical won both leading acting categories. The first two were Hairspray (2003) and The Band’s Visit (2018).
John Lithgow. Nathan Lane. This is as classic of a heavyweight title bout as it gets. It’s only the 15th time in Tonys history that two actors who have already won multiple acting awards are squaring up against one another. Of the previous 14, only four times has one of those multi-time winners gone on to win the category (in the other 10 years, a relative newcomer beat both of them). This has all the makings of a terrific Tony duel.
It’s a Tony almost 2,500 years in the making. Since the Tony Awards began, there have been six productions of the ancient Greek classic Oedipus to grace the Broadway stage, yet none has ever won a Tony. That looks to change this year, with Lesley Manville serving as the frontrunner for leading actress in a play. Sophocles would be proud.
With Cats: The Jellicle Ball opening off-Broadway in June 2024, many of the precursors get a little muddied. For example, André De Shields (Cats: The Jellicle Ball) won an Outer Critics Circle honor in 2025, Ben Levi Ross (Ragtime) won one in 2026, but we were denied a head-to-head face-off. Add it all up and De Shields carries a tiny 3.6 percent lead into a night when they most certainly will go head-to-head.
Best featured actress in a musical is a tricky category to predict, as it’s the only one of the eight acting categories in which none of the nominees received nominations from either the Drama Desk or Outer Critics Circle Awards. Still, the favored critical pick and betting odds leader is Shoshana Bean (The Lost Boys), so she comes out ahead in the model.
Hold your breath for this one. We have six nominees, but none of them reach 33 percent, the only category for which that holds true this year. That makes Alden Ehrenreich (Becky Shaw) the shakiest frontrunner headed into Sunday night, with Christopher Abbott (Death of a Salesman) oh-so-close on his heels.
Plenty of headlines deservedly went to 96-year-old June Squibb (Marjorie Prime), who broke Lois Smith’s record to become the oldest Tony nominee in history. And she does still have a chance to win, like Smith did five years ago, but it’s going to be an uphill battle against Laurie Metcalf (Death of a Salesman).
Best direction of a musical is effectively the same race as best revival – Cats: The Jellicle Ball vs. Ragtime – but potentially with the opposite result. After all of the data was tabulated and the model was run, the math slightly leans towards Cats in this race, but only by a 6 percent margin.
Joe Mantello is a mainstay of these awards, now spanning four decades’ worth of Tony nominations across both directing and acting categories. But his last win came 22 years ago for directing the musical Assassins. The math says it’s time for him to retake the stage on his sixth nomination for direction of a play.
The original production of Cats won seven Tonys, this year’s rendition is nominated for nine, and best costume design is the most likely overlapping winner between the two shows. Should it win for its feline creations, it would become the seventh musical to take home costume honors in multiple years.
Jeff Mahshie (Fallen Angels) has one prior Tony nomination: Best costume design of a musical for She Loves Me, ten years ago. That show had the deep misfortune to run up against the awards juggernaut known as Hamilton, for which Paul Tazewell won the costume design Tony. A decade later, and Mahshie has a chance to return the favor, with Tazewell sitting in second place for Joe Turner’s Come and Gome.
Michael Arden has already etched a unique place in Tonys history this season, by becoming the first person nominated for both directing and lighting design for the same musical (among plays, only Terry Hands has pulled off this dual nomination, for 1985’s Much Ado About Nothing). Now, Arden – along with co-lighting designer Jen Schriever – stands in pole position in this race for The Lost Boys.
The most Tony Awards ever won by play revival is four, a record shared by four shows including the 1999 revival of Death of a Salesman. The 2026 incarnation of that same play has a healthy chance to tie or even surpass that record, and lighting design of a play is one of the categories it has to win to have a chance at making that history.
The three-story, 80s-themed, supernatural-tinged set of The Lost Boys would be impressive enough if it just sat still for the entire show. Add in the fact that all of the puzzle pieces have to seamlessly move into and out of position to accommodate the occasional flying vampire, and you’ve got yourself all the ingredients for Dane Laffrey to win this category twice in a row, coming on the heels of Maybe Happy Ending.
The seven most recent Tonys for best scenic design of a play all went to designers who had prior nominations in their careers. So, it might be nice to see a fresh face on stage. The two leading contenders – Chloe Lamford (Death of a Salesman) and Hildegard Bechtler (Oedipus) – are first-time Tony nominees, unlike their three less-likely-to-win competitors.
Make that three musical categories in a row for The Lost Boys, though we can’t count out Cats: The Jellicle Ball in the sound design category. Should The Lost Boys go three-for-three on the categories that define the look-and-feel of the stage (lighting design, scenic design, sound design), it would become the 7th musical to do so, and the first since Moulin Rouge (2020).
In the brief history of the best sound design of a play category, Tom Gibbons (Oedipus) is tied with Ian Dickinson for the most solo nominations for this award without having won a Tony in this or any other category. He has a 58.3 percent chance to break through with a win against the night’s biggest awards favorite among plays, Death of a Salesman.
You have to stay on your dancing toes to keep up with all of the winking references to the Broadway of yore in Cinco Paul’s script for Schmigadoon!. I should note that there’s hardly any precedent for how voters will respond to a book based heavily off of a pre-exiting television show, though shows based on films (winners this century: The Producers, Hairspray, Billy Elliott, Once, The Band’s Visit, Tootsie) seem to have done just fine.
Best original score is going to be a massively important category this year, not just in its own right, but as a perfect mirror of the best musical race. The same three shows poised to slug it out at the top of the best musical standings are the top three contenders here, and practically tied with one another. We’ll find out if voters are inclined to tip their hands or to spread the wealth.
This may be the model’s most surprising set of odds. Cats: The Jellicle Ball is heavily favored in the public sphere by critics and betting markets alike. The model bakes all of that in, but it’s a little more impressed by Schmigadoon!’s run through awards season, including head-to-head at the Chita Rivera Awards and unopposed by Cats at the Outer Critics Circle Awards.
Best orchestrations marks the fourth predicted win for Schmigadoon!, but that musical is hardly alone in its projection to walk away a winner. If every single frontrunner listed in this article wins its category – a highly unlikely occurrence – this would be the first time in the history of the Tony Awards that four different musicals (Schmigadoon!, The Lost Boys, Cats: The Jellicle Ball, Ragtime) each won three or more categories.
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Whether it’s a two-race, a three-way race, or even more open-ended, every category announcement will be a career-defining triumph for one artist and an exciting conclusion for all of us viewers.
Ben Zauzmer (@BensOscarMath) uses data to write about awards shows for The Hollywood Reporter.
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