Tony Talk: Best Score, David Yazbek

David Yazbek has won the 2018 Tony Award for Best Original Score (Music and/or Lyrics) Written for the Theatre for THE BAND'S VISIT.

A varied career as a recording artist, Emmy Award-winning TV and screenwriter, music producer, and pianist has somehow led Yazbek to become one of Broadway's preeminent composer/lyricists. His three shows, The Full Monty, Dirty Rotten Scoundrels and Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown have received a combined 24 Tony Award nominations, including three for Best Score.

His newest musical, The Band's Visit, earned him an Obie, New York Drama Critics Circle, Lucille Lortel, Outer Critics Circle and two Drama Desk awards for the Off-Broadway engagement at Atlantic Theatre Company. As a recording artist, Yazbek is responsible for five albums: The Laughing Man, Tock, Damascus, Tape Recorder and Evil Monkey Man. He has written and/or produced for such acts as XTC, Ruben Blades, The Persuasions, Joe Jackson, Tito Puente and many others. He also produced the original cast albums of his Broadway shows.

He has three Grammy Award nominations. In the past couple of years, he has scored the final season of HBO's "Boardwalk Empire," composed music for Larry David's Fish in the Dark and written songs and music for Much Ado About Nothing at Central Park's Delacorte Theater, all while opening productions of Scoundrels and Women on the Verge in London's West End. In past lives, he has written dozens of scripts and many songs for television and film, won an Emmy Award for his stint on "Late Night with David Letterman" and wrote the unrelenting theme song for "Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?"

We're in the winners room with Yazbek below!