It was an exciting evening for Pratt at the 78th Annual Tony Awards, where awards were presented to two acclaimed alumni: Harvey Fierstein and Paul Tazewell.
Harvey Fierstein, BFA Art Education ’73, took center stage at Radio City Music Hall to accept the 2025 Special Tony Award for Lifetime Achievement in the Theatre. “There’s a line in [my acceptance] speech that I hope people heard, which is no one does theater alone,” he told Playbill. The Brooklyn-born writer and actor studied at Pratt Institute before going on to create a name for himself as a giant in the theater world.
Over the course of his illustrious career, Fierstein has received four Tonys—for Torch Song Trilogy (Best Play and Best Actor in a Play), La Cage Aux Folles (Best Book of a Musical), and Hairspray (Best Actor in a Musical). The prolific writer’s résumé also includes the Tony-winning Kinky Boots, as well as Newsies, Casa Valentine, A Catered Affair, Safe Sex, Bella Bella!, Legs Diamond, Spookhouse, Flatbush Tosca, and Common Ground, among others.
In the award announcement on the Tony Awards website, President & CEO of the American Theatre Wing Heather Hitchens and President of the Broadway League Jason Laks commended Fierstein’s extraordinary and lasting contributions to American theater “both as an artist and activist.”
Alumnus Paul Tazewell made a splash by winning a Tony within months of taking home a historic Oscar for his costume design on the film Wicked. On Sunday, Tazewell was awarded a Tony for Best Costume Design in a Musical for Death Becomes Her. This marks Tazewell’s second Tony; he previously won Best Costume Design for Hamilton. “It is a culmination of an amazing year and I’m just so thrilled and blessed to have been offered these amazing design opportunities…for Death Becomes Her, when I was designing it, I wasn’t designing it to receive the Tony, I was having a great time telling a story,” Tazewell told Playbill in an exclusive interview.
With this most recent win, Tazewell joins the ranks of the select few who have swept both an Oscar and a Tony Award in the same year, including Audrey Hepburn, Mike Nichols, Bob Fosse, and Benj Pasek and Justin Paul.