Tony Awards to Reinstate Competitive Sound Design Categories in 2018

The Tony Awards announced today that the categories of Best Sound Design of a Play and Best Sound Design of a Musical will be reinstated starting in the 2017-2018 season.

Over the last 18 months, the Tony Awards administration committee conducted an in-depth review of these categories as well as all of the 24 competitive categories. This review was conducted in consultation with industry professionals including several sound designers. As a result, the committee developed a plan to address previous concerns related to adjudicating these categories.

Starting with the 2017-2018 season, Best Sound Design of a Musical and Best Sound Design of a Play will be reinstated to the list of competitive Tony Award categories with a new voting process. In addition, it was determined that for similar reasons, the category of Best Orchestrations will adhere to this same new voting process. The Tony Nominators will nominate for these categories as in the past. However, voting on the winners of the three categories will now be the responsibility of a subset of the overall voter pool based on their professional affiliation.

The decision to eliminate the two sound categories was announced after the final Tony Awards administration committee meeting of the 2013-14 season, which took place less than a week following the annual ceremony. The last two winners of the award were Brian Ronan for Beautiful: The Carole King Musical and Steve Canyon Kennedy for Lady Day at Emerson's Bar & Grill. After the decision to eliminate the competitive sound design categories, the committee reviewed an appeal to reinstate them but decided against it at that time. The categories were first introduced in 2007.

The 71st Annual Tony Awards, hosted by Kevin Spacey, will air live from Radio City Music Hall on the CBS Television Network on Sunday, June 11, 2017 at 8:00pm EST. Nominations will be announced by Christopher Jackson and Jane Krakowski on May 2.