West End hits face tough race at the Tonys

When the Tony awards for American theatre were launched at the Waldorf Astoria in 1947, winners received a scroll and a cigarette lighter; the women also received 14-carat gold compact mirrors, and the men equivalently solid money clips. This year’s victors will have to make do with a brass and nickel medallion on an acrylic stand. (The Tony itself got a bit bigger in 2010 for more credible holding-it-aloft-for-the-cameras moments.)

The ceremony – being held tonight at Radio City Music Hall in New York – has long since stopped measuring its US viewing figures against those of the Oscars (3.5 million compared with 19.7 million last year). It retains a proper cachet, though, and much of the red-carpet focus will be on George Clooney, who made his Broadway debut in Good Night, and Good Luck, (though he is likely to lose out to the playwright-comedian Cole Escola, starring as an unhinged Mary Todd Lincoln in the farce Oh, Mary!)

There is plenty of British interest. The West End hit Operation Mincemeat is selling out on Broadway but faces competition as best musical from the endearing Maybe Happy Ending, about two retired robots who fall in love as their batteries fade. The leading actress in a play category, meanwhile, reprises last year’s Olivier awards. Succession’s Sarah Snook, shape-shifting through all 26 roles in The Picture of Dorian Gray, is up against Laura Donnelly, transforming from mother to daughter in Jez Butterworth’s The Hills of California. Snook is poised to win again.