Inside the Tonys’ most legendarily debauched after-party: Fights, fires and passed-out-legends
A few years ago, a well-known Broadway producer stood outside the Carlyle Hotel — fuming.
He had just won a coveted Tony Award, and yet the big shot was appalled to discover that he was not on the door list for the hottest afterparty in town.
Meanwhile, the cast of his play was inside the iconic East 76th Street building having a blast. And, adding insult to injury, so was the irate man’s assistant.
“Give me your wristband!” the producer allegedly demanded of the underling, who had been ordered to come outside, according to a source.
He then attempted to cut off the paper admission bracelet.
But the knife slipped.
“There was blood on the sidewalk!” the source told The Post.
If you think Broadway is Hollywood’s classier cousin, get a load of the annual Tony Awards Carlyle party.
Practically a college kegger for 500 theater folks and A-listers in frocks and tuxes that rages till well past dawn, it’s the Great White Way’s most outrageous event of the year.
Expected attendees on Sunday night — after the Tony Awards, which air at 8 p.m. on CBS — include Oscar winners Eddie Redmayne, Jessica Lange and Ariana DeBose, along with other boldfacers such as Daniel Radcliffe, Rachel McAdams and Nicole Scherzinger.
Hillary Clinton, a producer of Best Musical nominee “Suffs,” is also invited.
Past revelers?
Bruce Springsteen, Scarlett Johansson, Andrew Garfield, Olivia Wilde, Sally Field, Adam Driver, Jessica Chastain and Glenn Close, among many others.
Even Bono showed up in 2011 to support his notorious flop “Spider-Man: Turn Off The Dark.”
After the stiff official fete at Lincoln Center fizzles and the nominated shows’ individual bashes — especially those of the losers — cool down around town, the Carlyle rages past sunrise.
Post gossip queen Cindy Adams reported last June that Tony-winning “Shucked” actor Alex Newell strolled in at 6 a.m.
“It was already ‘Last call.’ The hotel venue was officially shutting. And in flounces Alex,” Cindy wrote.
Unhinged glamor is the vibe of the gathering, hosted by PR man Rick Miramontez and his husband, Jamie DuMont, since 2009, when it was a more intimate (and secret) affair in the Royal Suite with the ragtag hippies of “Hair.”
Their 15-year-old soiree, which is also co-hosted by John Gore, was inspired by the wild dinners Joan Didion and her husband would throw in Malibu, Calif., during the 1960s and ’70s, when they’d make 2 a.m. omelettes for famous friends who’d overindulged.
That spirit — and poured spirits — live on. Booze-soaked stars run rampant (and sometimes pass out), brawls break out in upscale attire and Lord Andrew Lloyd Webber occasionally mans the DJ booth.
The ball spans the entire ground floor of the hotel, including the lobbies, hallways, Café Carlyle and Bemelmans Bar.
In the past, the crowd also spilled upstairs into the more exclusive Empire Suite and Royal Suite, where Princess Diana spent many nights.
I once watched as a disappointed Tony-winning composer, who had accepted the award on national TV hours earlier, was not allowed into the elevator to the Royal Suite because the room was already at capacity.
However, the suite life went kaput after a buzzed Broadway star of plays and musicals, who’s been nominated for a Tony but never won, broke a Venetian glass pane worth thousands of dollars in 2018.
Not their first smash hit.
These days, well-heeled attendees book their own rooms at the Carlyle months in advance to throw private after-after-afterparties for when the hotel kicks everybody out of the main spaces.
Whatever floor you’re on, the Veuve Clicquot flows like tap water.
One year, an over-served legend of the West End stage fell asleep on a bed right in the middle of the bash, a source said.
“No, she was in the Champagne bathtub!” refuted another.
And a 2015 attendee watched as a spat over Best Musical winner “Fun Home” besting “An American in Paris” got heated. And the men weren’t even involved with the shows.
“It escalated into them pushing each other!” the onlooker recalled.
In 2011, “Mad Men” star Christina Hendricks’ trench coat caught fire on a Diptyque candle in the Empire Suite.
“You could see smoke coming out of the bathroom,” a witness said. “The coat was singed terribly. She left it there.”
And Page Six reported in 2017 that a belligerent, uninvited producer tried to hurl himself past security through the revolving doors to get inside. He was quickly apprehended and forced to the ground.
But the evening is not all fire and fists. The Carlyle is always full of unforgettable showbiz moments, like Bette Midler holding court after winning Best Actress in a Musical for “Hello, Dolly!” in 2017.
“That was her year,” Miramontez told The Post. “We called the disco ‘Disco Dolly.’ Everything had to be just so because it was her big night, and she had a fabulous time.”
Twelve months later came “Disco Lloyd Webber,” when the “Phantom of the Opera” composer first tried his hand at DJing.
“His playlist was singular,” the host added of Lloyd Webber, who accepted a lifetime achievement Tony that night. “It started with ‘Itsy Bitsy Teeny Weeny Yellow Polkadot Bikini’ and ‘Disco Duck,’ which is a connoisseur’s track. He had been working on that for a month.”
Last June, there were some particularly unusual guests at the Carlyle — New York Jets quarterback Aaron Rodgers and the team’s then-tight end C.J. Uzomah, who was a producer of the play “Ain’t No Mo.”
Sports and Broadway are strange bedfellows — save for “Damn Yankees” — but in a surprise move, the football duo attended the award show and hit up the famed after-afterparty.
Yet in Bemelmans Bar, where the most famous Rodgers is the one who wrote “Oklahoma!,” nobody recognized them.
“Rodgers looked liked a lost puppy at the Carlyle,” said one of my only sources who knows what a field goal is. “Barely anybody knew who he was.”
Amusingly, Rodgers walked right up to Tony-winning writer Robert Horn — about half his size — and gushed about how much he enjoyed his musical comedy “Shucked.”
Said a source: “It was clear Lombardi Trophies and Super Bowl MVPs didn’t matter as much as Tony Awards.”
