Christiani Pitts got her first Tony Award nomination for playing Robin Rainey in the Broadway musical Two Strangers (Carry a Cake Across New York), a recognition that arrived with plenty of emotion. Pitts said there were a lot of tears when she learned she had been named in the best leading actress in a musical category.
The timing gives the nod extra weight. The Tony Awards were set for Sunday at Radio City Music Hall, putting Pitts and her two-person show in the middle of Broadway’s biggest night just as the industry prepared to hand out its top prizes.
For Pitts, the nomination also shines a brighter light on a production built on intimacy rather than scale. Two Strangers (Carry a Cake Across New York) opened on Broadway last November and follows an odd couple’s 36-hour trip across New York City. Pitts plays Robin Rainey opposite Sam Tutty, who portrays Dougal, in a musical she calls “the little show that could.”
That modest frame is what makes the nomination stand out. Pitts and Tutty are competing against musicals with far larger profiles, casts and sets, including Schmigadoon!, The Rocky Horror Show, Ragtime and Titanique, even as Pitts describes their production as the opposite of Broadway spectacle. She said the show’s appeal comes from human connection and the intimacy of “the fluff” being stripped away, with audiences reacting to it as a warm hug.
Pitts knows the Broadway path well by now. She played the female lead in the 2018 production of King Kong, and before that had been offered roles in both The Lion King and A Bronx Tale when she moved to Broadway, choosing the latter. Her career began much earlier, in Decatur and Atlanta, where she started acting at age 5 in a Nativity scene at her local church, later attended North Atlanta High School and earned a bachelor’s degree in music theater at Florida State University.
Whether the trophy comes home Sunday or not, the nomination already does something important for a show of this size: it puts Pitts, Tutty and their small musical in the center of Broadway conversation, on the same stage as the season’s biggest productions.
