Cyndi Lauper over the moon on first Tony awards for Kinky Boots musical
Pop queen wins best score for Kinky Boots musical, her maiden Broadway effort
Musical Kinky Boots won six Tony awards, including gongs for best musical and for composer Cyndi Lauper.
Lauper won best score for her first Broadway musical, Kinky Boots, an adaptation of a British film about a struggling shoe factory reinventing itself by making boots for drag queens.
The hit musical topped the nominations with 13 and also won best actor in a musical for Billy Porter, best choreography, orchestrations and sound design at Sunday's awards show.
A tearful Lauper said, "I can't say I wasn't practicing in front of the shower curtain for the past couple of days … "thank Broadway, for welcoming me".
Porter, as the strong, proud drag queen at the show's heart, said he first watched the Tony telecast at 11, and recalled a performance from the musical Dreamgirls by saying, "That moment has changed my life."
The best play Tony was won by Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike, a comic riff on Anton Chekhov's Uncle Vanya by veteran playwright Christopher Durang that stars Sigourney Weaver and David Hyde Pierce.
In an unexpected win, Tracy Letts was named best actor in a play for his strongly praised performance in the revival of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, which was widely predicted to go to Tom Hanks making his Broadway debut in the late Nora Ephron's Lucky Guy. The Edward Albee classic also won the Tony for best revival of a play.
Cicely Tyson, 79, won best actress for her portrayal of an elderly woman returning to her former home in The Trip to Bountiful .
Matilda the Musical, an Olivier award-winning production based on a Roald Dahl tale about a precocious girl that received ecstatic reviews and 12 nominations, came away with four awards, including best book of a musical and best featured actor in a musical for Gabriel Ebert.
Andrea Martin won best featured actress in a musical for an acclaimed circus-themed revival of the 1970s hit Pippin, which won four Tonys, including best director for Diane Paulus, and Pam MacKinnon took home the Tony for play direction on Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?