NEW YORK – Joy Woods is a first-time Tony Awards nominee for her performance alongside Audra McDonald in director George C. Wolfe's revival of the Broadway musical "Gypsy." Ahead of Sunday's award show, the Chicago-born actress asked McDonald, who is also nominated, how she should prepare.
"(McDonald) said to expect chaos," Woods, 24, tells USA TODAY. "But it's also a celebration. So it's not a bad kind of chaos. It's one that we can look forward to."
Woods also decided that she'll face the "chaos" without any family nearby.
"My brother or my parents or my grandma are usually at openings with me," she says. "Those things, you get pulled in so many directions that you never really get to see them. So I was like, 'I'm going to do this alone. I'm going to take my Kind bars and my Celsius (drink) and wing it honey, and I think that's going to be really good for me."
"Gypsy," based loosely on the memoirs of striptease artist Gypsy Rose Lee, first came to Broadway in 1959. It and several of the subsequent revivals earned Tony recognition. The original earned eight Tony nominations, and the 1989 production won the Tony for best revival. Patti LuPone played Gypsy's mother, Rose, in the 2008 revival and won the Tony for best leading actress in a musical. This year, McDonald, the first Black actor cast in the role on Broadway, is nominated in the same category for the same role.
