www.cmu.edu/news: Carnegie Mellon University alumnus Leslie Odom, Jr. can check off another box on his accomplishments list. Odom Jr., who took home a 2016 Tony Award for best performance by an actor in a leading role for his portrayal of Aaron Burr in "Hamilton," will join CBS star Katharine McPhee to announce the 2018 Tony Award nominees. The Tony Awards announced his role today; the nominations will take place at Lincoln Center Tuesday, May 1, and will, in part, be broadcast on "CBS This Morning."
4 comments:
I am so honored to be a part of such an amazing drama program, and I don’t think there’s a better school out there to sponsor these awards. It is really exciting to say that someone that graduated from my college is announcing the Tony Award nominees and I can only assume that quite a few of the presenters will be graduates from Carnegie Mellon School of Drama. This article says that we have won 44 Tony Awards and hopefully that number will just continue to go up. I am curious to know how many of those awards are for design and production, and how many were for directing and how many were for acting. The one thing the Tony Awards are missing, however, is stage management, but I can understand how hard it would be to judge the best stage manager for a show, given their role is to be discreet.
Hey! Its so cool that Carnegie is so involved with the tonys and its even cooler when a recentish alumni gets to announce the tony nominations. I have been a big fan of his since I saw him in the short lived musical Leap of Faith. He was incredible in it and its wild that he did rent on Broadway at 17 before coming to school. One thing I did not like about this article is that it made it seem that he always had this huge success which is not true. One thing I like about him is that he is not afraid to say that his journey to get where he is, was extremely difficult. I am really interested in reading his book that he recently wrote about his journey. I am also really excited to see this year’s nominees. I know mean girls and a couple other shows have Carnegie Alumni in them and I hope they get nominated.
I love being a part of the school of drama, and being able to see what the alumni are doing in the news. It still baffles me that I am now in the same school that Leslie Odom Jr. went to along with hundreds of other wildly successful artists. I really love the title of his book, “Failing Up”. It reminds me of one of my favorite quotes from Samuel Beckett. “Ever tried, ever failed. No matter. Try again, fail again, fail better.” It evokes the idea that no matter what, if you keep trying and keep failing, each time you fail will be a little better than the last failure until finally it becomes closer and closer to success rather than failure. As much as it seems like this school is trying to kill us sometimes, we are all following this same idea of failing better and we will all make it through.
This is truly an excellent accomplishment for a truly talented artist and CMU alumni. Odom certainly deserves this honor (and more) given his historic achievement in playing Burr in Hamilton. His performance was extraordinary and the success of that show not only renewed interest in American history, but even more so reintroduced theater to a new generation of Americans. He also has a great personality, which will make for a great presentation and in turn will hopefully garner people’s interest in watching the actual award ceremony when the show comes around. Finally, it is nice to see Broadway’s commitment to diversity in its presenters. Broadway has always been at the forefront of promoting diversity in the entertainment industry in both a racial sense and an LGBT sense. This continues that tradition, in a meaningful way that will hopefully truly impact the community, and create a sense of renewed vitality to this cause.
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