NEW YORK, June 8 -- Joshua Henry had been nominated before. So had Shoshana Bean, and so had Caissie Levy. Broadway had put all three of them in the room, given them the categories, placed the statuettes nearby - and then, for years, handed them to someone else. Sunday night at Radio City Music Hall, the 79th annual Tony Awards settled the debt on all three at once.

Schmigadoon! won Best Musical, and Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman swept six awards to lead the night. But the ceremony's emotional weight landed somewhere else entirely: on a generation of Broadway performers whose careers had been measured, quietly, by what they hadn't yet won. Henry, in the lead role of Coalhouse Walker Jr. in Ragtime, took Best Actor in a Leading Role...