Video: Zhailon Levingston & Bill Rauch on Their Tony Win- 'People Coming Together is the Only Path Forward'

Earlier tonight at the 79th Annual Tony Awards, Zhailon Levingston and Bill Rauch took home the Tony Award for Best Direction of a Musical for CATS: The Jellicle Ball. After leaving the stage at Radio City Music Hall, they checked in with BroadwayWorld's Richard Ridge to share their initial reaction!

"There's so little third spaces  in this world, in this country, and if CATS can be a part of  revitalizing this idea that there's other places we can be other than our phones, other than our workplaces, other than our fears! If we can ignite that spark at the Broadhurst, that's why we do it," said Levingston. "And so if this helps more people to come experience that, it's worth it."

Zhailon Levingston is a Louisiana-raised storyteller, director, and activist. He is a Board Member for the Broadway Advocacy Coalition, which he co-created, and teaches the Theatre of Change course at Columbia University. He is a Music Mentor Fellow and has done work with Idina Menzel’s A Broader Way Foundation. His directing credits include: Neptune (Dixon Place, Brooklyn Museum), The Years That Went Wrong (Lark, MCC), The Exonerated (Columbia Law School), Chariot Part 2 (Soho Rep., for The Movement Theatre Company), Mother of Pearl (LaGuardia Performing Arts Center). He is the associate director of Primer for a Failed Superpower with Tony Award winner Rachel Chavkin, and Runaways at The Public Theater with Sam Pinkleton. Most recently, he directed Chicken & Biscuits which premiered on Broadway in 2021 and Patience which premiered at Second Stage UPTOWN Summer of 2022. Zhailon is also the former resident director at Tina: The Tina Turner Musical on Broadway and the associate director of Hadestown in South Korea.

Bill Rauch is the inaugural Artistic Director of Perelman Performing Arts Center (PAC NYC), where he co-directed CATS: The Jellicle Ball. His work as a theater director has been seen across the nation, from community centers to Broadway in the Tony Award-winning production of All The Way (starring Bryan Cranston) and its sequel The Great Society (starring Brian Cox), as well as many of the largest regional theaters in the country. His other New York credits include the world premiere of Naomi Wallace’s Night Is A Room at Signature Theater, the New York premiere of Sarah Ruhl’s The Clean House at Lincoln Center Theater, and a site-specific Occasional Grace in multiple Manhattan churches for En Garde Arts. From 2007 to 2019, Rauch was Artistic Director of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival (OSF), the country’s oldest and largest rotating repertory theater, where he directed seven world premieres and 20 other plays including several by Shakespeare as well as innovative productions of classic musicals including a queer re-envisioning of Oklahoma! Among his initiatives at OSF, Rauch commissioned 37 new plays to dramatize moments of change in U.S. history.

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