1974-1975 award record
- Categories
- 4
- Honoured
- 4
- Nominated
- 19
- New this season
- 1
4 awards were given across 4 categories, chosen from 19 nominated entries listed below. The entries have been checked line by line against published records. One category appears for the first time this season: Outstanding Lighting Design.
Four craft categories, split evenly between two productions: The Wiz took two and Sherlock Holmes took two. Nineteen names were shortlisted across the four headings.
This is also the season lighting design enters the record. It is the last of the three original craft headings to be named, five seasons behind costume — a gap worth noting given how central lighting is to how a production reads from the house.
Both winning productions that season were adaptations. The Wiz reached Broadway at the Majestic Theatre on 5 January 1975, retelling L. Frank Baum's 1900 novel The Wonderful Wizard of Oz; it was nominated for eight Tony Awards and won seven.
Its costumes were by Geoffrey Holder and its choreography by George Faison. Those are exactly the two categories it takes on this page. That kind of independent agreement is worth noticing in a record assembled from period announcements.
The other two awards went to Sherlock Holmes, for Carl Toms's set and Neil Peter Jampolis's lighting. It was the Royal Shakespeare Company revival of the play William Gillette wrote, with Arthur Conan Doyle credited as co-author because the plot was drawn from his stories.
Directed by Frank Dunlop and starring John Wood, it moved to Broadway in November 1974 and was performed 471 times. Between them the four awards cover a set, a lighting rig, a wardrobe and a dance vocabulary — the whole craft list as it stood in 1975.
Franco Zeffirelli, nominated for set design of Saturday Sunday Monday, was already an internationally known opera and film director by this season — his 1968 film of Romeo and Juliet had been a major commercial success — which places a nomination on this page alongside names whose reputations lay entirely off-Broadway and beyond.
Equus, John Dexter's production of Peter Shaffer's play, carries three nominations this season — for costume, lighting and set design — without converting a single one into a win, the same fate its three credits meet against The Wiz and Sherlock Holmes's four awards between them.
Carl Toms wins one of the four awards this season, for Sherlock Holmes's set design, and is also nominated for costume design on the same production — the closest anyone comes to a double win this season without actually taking one, a designer credited across two crafts on a single show in a way the record's later, more specialised categories would make harder to see on one page.
Seventeen of the nineteen nominated entries this season went to productions that took nothing home at all — only The Wiz and Sherlock Holmes convert any nominations into a win. Reading the full nominee field, not just the four names that won, is what shows how competitive a single season's four craft categories actually were. Winning was the exception, not the rule.
Sources: The Wiz, Sherlock Holmes (play), Franco Zeffirelli
Outstanding Choreography
Winner
- George Faison The Wiz
Also nominated
- Dennis Denehy The Lieutenant
- Donald Saddler Good News
- Margo Sappington Where's Charley?
- Roger Morgan Saturday, Sun, Moon
Outstanding Costume Design
Winner
- Geoffrey Holder The Wiz
Also nominated
- Carl Toms Sherlock Holmes
- Fred Voelpel Seascape
- John Napier Equus
- Willa Kim Goodtime Charley
Outstanding Lighting Design
Winner
- Neil Peter Jampolis Sherlock Holmes
Also nominated
- Andy Phillips Equus
- Feder Goodtime Charley
- Julia Trevelyan Oman Brief Lives
- Roger Morgan Saturday Sunday Monday
Outstanding Set Design
Winner
- Carl Toms Sherlock Holmes
Also nominated
- Franco Zeffirelli Saturday Sunday Monday
- John Conklin Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
- John Napier Equus
- Julia Trevelyan Oman Brief Lives
- Scott Johnson Dance with Me
- Tom H. John The Wiz
- William Ritman God's Favorite
Outstanding Lighting Design enters the record here, for the first time in any season. The design categories in full →
Questions about this season's record
Is this the first season here that lists nominees?
Yes. Every season on this record before this one names only the people honoured, because shortlists were not published. Nineteen nominated entries appear here, and from this point on a reader can see who was considered as well as who won. That change is what makes the page long.
Which award appears for the first time this season?
Lighting design. It is the last of the four craft headings on this page to arrive, five seasons after costume design and six after set design. Anyone who lit a production before this season is absent from the record entirely, however well the work was received at the time.
Why do The Wiz and Sherlock Holmes each appear three times?
Because each is credited three times over. The Wiz takes both the choreography and costume awards and a set design nomination; Sherlock Holmes takes lighting and set design and a costume nomination. Equus matches their three credits but converts none of them into an award.
Did one person win more than one award this season?
No. The four awards go to four different people. Carl Toms comes closest: he wins set design for Sherlock Holmes and is also nominated for costume design on the same production, which is the sort of double credit that becomes common once the craft categories split further apart.
How many of this season's nineteen names recur elsewhere in the record?
Seven of them — well under half. Twelve names, more than half of everyone honoured or nominated in 1974-1975, are a single appearance limited to this one season, a lower recurrence rate than several of the seasons around it in the record.
Who else on this page appears elsewhere in the record
7 of the 19 names on this page appear in at least one other season held here. Reading a person as a run rather than a single entry is the point of an index like this one. A designer's work shows up under two or three different category names as the headings were renamed.