What a night. The 2016 Tony Awards made history on Sunday, June 12, when all four musical acting categories were won by people of color. The official Twitter account for the show tweeted about the monumental moment after the curtain closed.
Three of those awards went to actors featured in the smash hit Hamilton. Leslie Odom Jr. won for Best Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role in a Musical, Renée Elise Goldsberry won for Best Performance by an Actress in a Featured Role in a Musical and Daveed Diggs took the Best Performance by an Actor in a Featured Role in a Musical category. (The show, created by Lin-Manuel Miranda, won 11 Tonys in total.)
Additionally, Cynthia Erivo won the Best Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role in a Musical category for her work in The Color Purple. Just moments earlier, she had received a standing ovation for her performance of the show’s song “I’m Here.”
Before the winners were announced, host James Corden joked about how diverse the Broadway community is. “Think of tonight as the Oscars, but with diversity,” he said in his monologue. “It’s so diverse that Donald Trump has threatened to build a wall around this theater.”
Back in February, some stars (such as Will Smith, Jada Pinkett Smith and Spike Lee) decided to boycott the Oscars because of the lack of diversity in the main acting categories. The hashtag #OscarsSoWhite trended on Twitter, and the Academy released a statement promising that the board would make “substantive changes designed to make the Academy’s membership, its governing bodies and its voting members significantly more diverse.”
Watch the biggest highlights from the Tony Awards in the video above.
