The Historic Moment That Wasn’t Televised

During Sunday night’s 69th Annual Tony Awards, Fun Home’s Jeanine Tesori and Lisa Kron made history by becoming the first all-female writing team to win a Tony for Best Original Score. It was a big moment! It also would’ve been awesome if it hadn’t happened during a commercial break.

To be fair, the Tonys have been giving out creative awards during commercials for years; last year’s Best Original Score winner Jason Robert Brown didn’t have his speech televised, either. But this year’s milestone underscored just what a shame that is. We could’ve been watching live as Tesori said, “We stand on the shoulders of other women who have come before us…For girls, you have to see it to be it.” Instead, we were probably watching a Porsche ad.

Let’s not be too hard on this year’s Tony Awards, though—it was a huge night for women overall, with women taking home statues for directing and lighting design. And Fun Home, which won Best Musical and five awards in total, happens to be the first-ever Broadway musical that features a lesbian main character. (It’s based on the autobiographical graphic novel of the same name by Alison Bechdel, the woman who invented the Bechdel test.)

So three cheers for women of the theater world! And Tony producers: the next time they shatter a glass ceiling, please put it on television so we can clap along with the audience!

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