Tony Awards 1987

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Research record

Tony Awards 1987 · Staged record CTL-E-0171 · Entity Depth Program · 641 words · Evidence grade: VERIFIED (canonical master, carried unchanged) · Researched 2026-10-25

The 41st Tony Awards, honoring the 1986–87 Broadway season, are the ceremony at which August Wilson's Fences arrived at the center of the American theatre. Per the official Tony Awards winners record — the source that verifies this graph entry — Fences won four awards: Best Play; Director (Play) for Lloyd Richards; Actor (Play) for James Earl Jones, whose Troy Maxson was the season's defining performance; and Actress (Featured – Play) for Mary Alice, as Rose. Jones's win deserves exact statement, because it is sometimes loosely described elsewhere as a featured-actor award: the official record places him in the leading category, Actor (Play), the same category in which he had first won in 1969 for The Great White Hope. (The loose description appears in Yale University's own retrospective on the play; the staged entry follows the official record, and the discrepancy is flagged in the batch INDEX.) The graph wires Jones to this ceremony by an honored-by edge, and his person record and the Fences record are staged alongside this one in Batch 003.

The musical honors went overwhelmingly to a single import. Les Misérables took Best Musical and seven further awards: Book (Alain Boublil and Claude-Michel Schönberg), Score (Schönberg, Herbert Kretzmer, and Boublil), Director (Musical) for Trevor Nunn and John Caird, Actor (Featured – Musical) for Michael Maguire, Actress (Featured – Musical) for Frances Ruffelle, Scenic Design for John Napier, and Lighting Design for David Hersey. The remaining musical acting awards went to Me and My Girl — Robert Lindsay as Actor (Musical) and Maryann Plunkett as Actress (Musical), with Gillian Gregory's choreography — while Starlight Express took Costume Design, also for Napier.

In the play categories beyond Fences, Neil Simon's Broadway Bound won two acting awards, for Linda Lavin (Actress, Play) and John Randolph (Actor, Featured – Play), and All My Sons was named the year's Revival. The San Francisco Mime Troupe received the Regional Theatre award. The ceremony's Special Tony Awards went to the actor and producer George Abbott, honored on his one hundredth birthday, and to the comedian Jackie Mason.

The musical half of the night had its own completeness. Les Misérables, the London import adapted from Victor Hugo's novel, won eight awards of its own — Musical, Book, Score, Direction, both featured acting categories, and the scenic and lighting design awards — a dominance matching Fences' in the plays. Between the two productions, the 1987 ceremony's two sweeps accounted for twelve awards; the graph's interest is narrower and is stated by the Fences ledger: four Tonys for one Black-authored play, including the only Best Play award of August Wilson's career to that date and the second of James Earl Jones's three Tony honors.

The Fences wins sat inside the production's own history, which this batch's Fences record documents: developed at the Eugene O'Neill Theater Center in 1983, premiered at Yale Repertory Theatre in 1985 under Richards's direction, published in 1986, and opened on Broadway at the 46th Street Theatre on March 26, 1987 — weeks before the Tonys. The play had already won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama by the night of the ceremony, the first of Wilson's two. A single production thus arrived carrying the season's drama Pulitzer and left with Best Play, its director honored, its Troy honored in the leading category, and its Rose honored in the featured one — the complete sweep of the categories the production contested, and the ceremonial founding document of the Wilson era on Broadway.

In the CultureTechLens graph, the 1987 ceremony is an Event at VERIFIED grade, edition 41, in the Tony Awards list (CTL-L-0042). Measured by this batch's through-line — the graph's record of Black achievement on the Broadway stage — it is the pivotal ceremony of the four staged here: the night Wilson, Richards, Jones, and Mary Alice were honored together for a single production.

Sources for this record

• Winners — 1987 (official Tony Awards winners record) — Tony Awards
  Claims supported: Master verification source and the record for every win stated: Fences — Play; Lloyd Richards, Director (Play); James Earl Jones, Actor (Play) [leading category]; Mary Alice, Actress (Featured – Play). Les Misérables — Musical; Boublil and Schönberg, Book; Schönberg, Kretzmer, and Boublil, Score; Nunn and Caird, Director (Musical); Michael Maguire, Actor (Featured – Musical); Frances Ruffelle, Actress (Featured – Musical); John Napier, Scenic Design; David Hersey, Lighting Design. Me and My Girl — Robert Lindsay, Actor (Musical); Maryann Plunkett, Actress (Musical); Gillian Gregory, Choreographer. Starlight Express — Napier, Costume Design. Broadway Bound — Linda Lavin, Actress (Play); John Randolph, Actor (Featured – Play). All My Sons, Revival. Regional Theatre: San Francisco Mime Troupe. Special Tony Awards: George Abbott (100th birthday) and Jackie Mason.

Citations

Published October 25, 2026, from the head-verified staged record in the Entity Depth Program (Batches 001–003). Source: CultureTechLens