On Sunday evening, after host Cynthia Erivo closed the Tony Awards 2025 with a powerful rendition of Dreamgirls’ “And I Am Telling You I’m Not Going,” summing up the top moments of Broadway’s biggest night, a flurry of exclusive after-parties kicked off throughout New York City that went on until the early hours of Monday morning.
Darren Criss celebrated his two Tony wins by partying until 5 a.m. The former Glee star and Emmy-winning actor made Tony history by becoming the first actor of Asian descent (he’s half Filipino on his mother’s side) to earn best actor in a musical, for his uncanny performance of a lonely humanoid robot in Maybe Happy Ending. The original musical won the most awards at Sunday’s ceremony: six, including best musical, score, and director. Criss nabbed his second Tony for producing.
At 12:53 a.m, Criss arrived at the Maybe Happy Ending cast party held at the Bryant Park Grill. He arrived and was greeted by loud cheers and applause. He met up with his mother and his wife, Mia, whom he referenced in his acceptance speech. Ben Stiller and his daughter, Ella, soon said hello and Tony Award winner Lea Salonga gave him a hug.
“It’s enormously exciting. I’m just elated,” Criss told Vanity Fair about his historic win. “I’m honored that I can hold up the torch and be a small part of representation and visibility. Me winning signals what’s possible, and I’m proud to be a part of that.”
When Criss’s name was called as the winner, he was admittedly “nervous because I spent all night wondering what my night was going to be like,” he said. “And then there’s a speech…all I was thinking about is, I hope to articulate all the things I wanted to say and not get too frazzled, which I certainly did. I’m already going through all the things that I meant to say that were in my head, but didn’t come out the way I hoped. Hopefully people could feel it from my heart.”
So how did he celebrate? “The other half of me is Irish—a glass of scotch and dancing and singing with my friends,” he said. Around 3 a.m., Criss met with Julianne Hough to cohost an after-after Tonys celebration at the Crane Club, a swanky new cocktail lounge in downtown Manhattan, that raged until 5 a.m. Criss, dressed in a ruffled, sleeveless Christian Siriano top—his third look of the night—put on an invigorating rock concert by strapping on an electric guitar and singing a medley of hits from the ’90s that included Third Eye Blind’s “Semi-Charmed Life,” Sublime’s “Santeria,” and Lit’s “My Own Worst Enemy.” He even persuaded Mia to join him for “What’s Up?” by 4 Non Blondes. For his finale, he belted out Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” and started a mosh pit with the crowd that included Criss’s Glee costar Chris Colfer, Tony nominee Daniel Dae Kim, ’NSync’s JC Chasez and Joey Fatone, Ben and Ella Stiller, Zoey Deutch, Nina Dobrev, and Criss’s costars from Maybe Happy Ending.
