Tony winners announced: Cyndi Lauper's Kinky Boots wins at Tony Awards

In the press room backstage at Radio City Music Hall last night, after winning his Tony Award for Best Actor in a Play, Tracy Letts asked for the two of us by name. Exactly what he wanted to tell us, we don’t know; we were watching at home like regular folks. But we’re guessing he wanted to gloat a bit about his upset win; we had confidently predicted (along with pretty much everyone else) that Tom Hanks would take Best Actor for his performance in Lucky Guy.

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Okay: As far as predictions go, it wasn't our best year on record. We correctly called 18 of the 26 categories, but missed the boat on Letts and his Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf director, Pam MacKinnon—and the night’s biggest winner, Kinky Boots, which nabbed Best Musical over it chief rival, Matilda. Our poll of Time Out readers, in fact, bested us by one point, with 19 correct predictions. Score one for crowdsourcing! (Nineteen was also the highest score achieved by any of the 17 experts featured this year on the Gold Derby site.)
 
It was a night of small surprises. But no one who judged the shows based only on their Tony performances last night would be especially shocked at the Kinky Boots win. Neither musical came off smashingly. Matilda’s intelligent lyrics were largely unintelligible, and Kinky Boots’ “Everybody Say Yeah,” a major crowd-pleaser in the show itself, looked diffuse on the vast stage of Radio City Music Hall, which has been draining life from Tony musical numbers since 1997. Enjoyable as many of them were—A Christmas Story came off especially well—none joined the ranks of the classics.
 
The best parts of the telecast, in fact, were the bits that were written expressly for it: Host Neil Patrick Harris’s opening and closing numbers (featuring clever lyrics by Lin-Manuel Miranda, and the latter with a funny cameo by Audra McDonald), and an amusing midshow medley in which Broadway stars Laura Benanti, Andrew Rannells and Megan Hilty lamented their recent failed forays into television.
 
The humor in these segments had a distinctly insider edge to it, and that’s as it should be. The Tony Awards should be an insider thing; that’s what makes them special. Home viewers of the Oscars or Grammys or Emmys, after all, have often seen or heard many of the competing works. But the Tonys are essentially local. What the telecast offers—especially to non–New Yorkers—is a taste of a different world, with its own stars and community values.
 
It’s a world in which Tracy Letts can beat Tom Hanks for Best Actor. And, more to the point, it’s a world in which Hanks gamely gives out the award for Best Featured Actress in a Play early in the telecast, while the final two awards of the night—the money prizes, for Best Revival of a Musical and Best Musical—are presented by bona fide musical-theater stars Patti LuPone and Bernadette Peters. That’s what the Tonys delivered best last night: an advertisement not just for individual Broadway shows but for a Broadway way of life.

Here is the breakdown of awards per show:

Kinky Boots: 6
Pippin, Matilda: 4
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, The Nance: 3
Lucky Guy: 2
Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike, The Assembled Parties, The Trip to Bountiful, Cinderella: 1

COMPLETE LIST OF WINNERS & NOMINEES FOR THE 2013 TONY AWARDS: