Every May Mel Larch brings her listeners a special episode of Curtain Call devoted to the Tony Award Nominees for Best Musical. Since they were just announced yesterday morning, it’s time for the tradition to continue.

Wednesday afternoon on The AIR, you can hear samples of the nominees for this year’s Tony Awards for Best Musical as Broadway is back to normal, ready to be saluted by Curtain Call.

You can tune in at the website, or you can just stay on this page, and  listen to the convenient embedded radio player mere inches away from this text.

At 3 PM Mel Larch presents a new hour of great musical theater on Curtain Call. It’s our annual Tony Awards preview, with three songs each from the five nominated musicals,

Shucked is a countrified musical about corn in more way than one. With songs by the Nashville songwriters Brandy Clark and Shane McAnally and a book by Robert Horn, Shucked traffics in a humor that’s been called “low but hard not to laugh at.” This homespun story of a marriage put on hold until the corn crop can be saved has come out of nowhere to become a contender for Broadway’s top prize.

The musical comedy Kimberly Akimbo stars the 63-year-old Victoria Clark as a teenage girl with a medical condition that causes rapid aging. Based on a play by David Lindsay-Abaire, the show features music by Jeanine Tesori, the Tony-winning composer of Fun Home; a book and lyrics by Lindsay-Abaire, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his play Rabbit Hole; and direction by Jessica Stone, a longtime actress making her Broadway directing debut.

& Juliet is a jukebox musical inspired by the Shakespeare tragedy, and it features songs by the Swedish hitmaker Max Martin (Britney Spears, Katy Perry, Backstreet Boys and many others), a book by David West Read and direction by Luke Sheppard.  It doesn’t seem like a natural fit, but somehow they make it work.

Some Like It Hot is a tap-infused adaptation of the 1959 Billy Wilder film about two musicians on the run, and it’s this year’s breakout show, with 13 total nominations. The musical stars Christian Borle, J. Harrison Ghee and Adrianna Hicks, with songs by Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman, who previously wrote the Tony-winning score for Hairspray. Casey Nicholaw, the Tony-winning director of The Book of Mormon, directs and choreographs.

New York, New York, is a new musical very loosely based on the 1977 Martin Scorsese film about performers making it in the big city. The show juxtaposes new songs John Kander wrote with Lin-Manuel Miranda, like “Music, Money, Love,” with older ones set to lyrics by Fred Ebb. The show, which is directed and choreographed by Susan Stroman,has been praised by The New York Times for it’s tap number staged on high beams and “the visceral thrill of watching a big band rise up to the stage.”

The 2023 Tony Awards will be broadcast on CBS and streamed on Pluto TV and Paramount + on June, 11 (barring any delays caused by the WGA strike), so you can tune in and see who won this year’s prize.

Curtain Call can be heard on The AIR Wednesday at 3 PM, with replays Thursday at 8 AM, Friday at 10 AM, Saturday at 8 PM and Monday at 9 AM. A six-hour marathon of classic episodes can be heard Sunday evenings starting at 6 PM, and an all-night marathon of Curtain Call episodes can be heard Wednesday nights, beginning at Midnight.