For the fourth year in a row, John Johnson, FCLC ’02, celebrated victory at the Tony Awards.
On Sunday night, he and his fellow producers took home two Tonys: for Arthur Miller’s A View from the Bridge (best revival of a play) and for The Humans (best play). Johnson served as an executive producer of both productions.
In recent years, the Fordham Theatre alumnus has emerged as one of Broadway’s most prolific producers. He got his start as an intern for Joey Parnes Productions during his junior year at Fordham, when he helped coordinate the annual Tony Awards show. It was then that he met Fordham alumna and legendary Broadway producer Elizabeth McCann, LAW ’66, who became a mentor to him. McCann has earned 19 nominations and nine Tony awards in her five-decade career, including one for the 1998 revival of A View from the Bridge. Now, just 14 years after graduating from Fordham, Johnson is quickly catching up: He has received a total of 11 nominations and six Tony awards.
This season was especially fruitful for Johnson, who served as a producer of four other Tony-nominated productions: the revivals of The Crucible and Blackbird, and Bright Star and Shuffle Along in the best musical category—won by Broadway sensation Hamilton.
But even after another year of successes, Johnson is not one to rest on his laurels.
“Every year you are doing a new set of shows that present challenges in terms of how to sell tickets, how to establish an audience, how to work with the artists,” he told FORDHAM magazine in 2014. “There’s no getting to that place where we can kick back and have some cocktails and just rake in the money.”
