Tony Award for
Best Original Score
Best Original Score
Jeanine Tesori and David Lindsay-Abaire for Kimberly Akimbo (2023)
History[edit]
The award has undergone a number of minor changes. In 1947, 1950, 1951, and 1962, the award went to the composer only. Otherwise, the award has gone to the composer and lyricist for their combined contributions, except for 1971 when the two awards were split (although Stephen Sondheim won both, for Company).
In only nine years have non-musical plays been nominated for Tony Awards in this category: Much Ado About Nothing in 1973, The Good Doctor in 1974, The Song of Jacob Zulu in 1993, Twelfth Night in 1999, Enron and Fences in 2010, Peter and the Starcatcher and One Man, Two Guvnors in 2012, Angels in America in 2018, To Kill a Mockingbird in 2019, and A Christmas Carol, The Inheritance, The Rose Tattoo, Slave Play, and The Sound Inside in 2020. Because the Broadway season of 2019-2020 was shortened due to the COVID-19 pandemic, only four musicals were eligible for Tony Awards. Three were jukebox musicals and the fourth was The Lightning Thief, the only musical of the season with original music. The Lightning Thief was not nominated for any Tony Awards, meaning that every nominee in this category in 2020 was a play rather than a musical.
In 2013, Cyndi Lauper became the first woman to win the award solo for Kinky Boots. In 2015, Lisa Kron and Jeanine Tesori became the first all-woman team to win the award for Fun Home.[1]
Toby Marlow is the youngest person to win the award; he was 27 when he won in tandem with Lucy Moss for SIX. Adolph Green is the oldest person to win the award; he was 76 when he won for The Will Rogers Follies. If T. S. Eliot were alive when he won for Cats, he would have been 94. Eliot is one of two people to receive the award posthumously, the other being Jonathan Larson, who won for Rent. He would have been 36.
Only eight women have won this award, five of whom won without male writing partners, and for only ten shows: