‘You saw me onstage at the Tonys, didn’t you?” Thomas Perakos says gleefully during a phone interview between late-night airplane flights Wednesday.
Last weekend was a whirlwind for Perakos. On Saturday, the New Britain-raised entrepreneur and philanthropist attended the groundbreaking of the Thomas Perakos Arts and Community Center, which he has gifted to his alma mater, The Gunnery school in Washington, Conn. On Sunday, he was in the audience at the 72nd Tony Awards when “The Band’s Visit,” a play he was a producer on, won 10 out of 11 awards.
“There were 150 people” at the groundbreaking Saturday, he says. “I was inducted into the Arts & Letters Hall of Fame at the school. I was the guest of honor at the Class of ’68 dinner party,” which was followed by other gatherings.
Building the center — which will include a 415-seat theater space as well as galleries, studios, classrooms and rehearsal spaces — has been a longtime dream of his. He first conceived of the project after watching the movie “The Dead Poets Society” (about the importance of the arts in education) in 1989, and first approached the school with his idea in 2009.
But the groundbreaking was just the start of what he calls a “miracle” weekend.
On Sunday, Perakos traveled to New York City and saw the Sunday matinee of the Broadway musical “The Band’s Visit,” a show he became a key investor in more than three years ago when it was just a gleam in composer David Yazbek’s eye.
Perakos has now seen the show more than 20 times, starting when it was at the Atlantic Theater Company off Broadway in late 2016. He visited with the cast following the matinee performance at Broadway’s Ethel Barrymore Theatre.
Sunday night Perakos was in “seventh row of the second section, on the aisle” — at Radio City Music Hall for the Tony Awards ceremony honoring the best plays and musicals of the past Broadway season.
“The Band’s Visit” was up for 11 awards, but faced stiff competition from two musicals that got 12 nominations each: “Mean Girls” (based on the Tina Fey film) and “SpongeBob SquarePants” (based on the Nickelodeon cartoon series).
“At a party I gave Saturday,” Perakos says, “we were talking about the Tonys, and people said ‘No way, “The Band’s Visit” will get six awards, tops.’ Watching the awards, my jaw dropped. It won 10 of out 11 awards it was nominated for. When Tina Fey lost [for Best Book of a Musical] to Itamar [Moses, who adapted “The Band’s Visit”], no one could believe it. You could hear a pin drop.”
“The Band’s Visit” won Tonys for Best Musical, Best Book of a Musical (Itamar Moses), Best Original Score (David Yazbek), Best Direction of a Musical (David Cromer), Best Performance by a Leading Actor in a Musical (Tony Shalhoub), Best Performance by a Leading Actress in a Musical (Katrina Lenk), Best Performance by a Featured Actor in a Musical (Ari’el Stachel), Best Orchestrations (Jamshied Sharifi), Best Sound Design of a Musical (Kai Harada) and Best Lighting Design in a Musical (Tyler Micoleau). The only award the show was nominated for that it did not win was Best Scenic Design in a Musical; Scott Pask lost out to “SpongeBob SquarePants” designer David Zinn.
When the Best Musical award was announced at the end of the ceremony, Perakos got his moment onstage.
“Imagine!,” Perakos says, still incredulous. “The Gunnery school broke ground on the community center Saturday. Sunday was the Tonys. A miracle!”
Perakos has been investing in Broadway shows for years, but was in on the ground floor of “The Band’s Visit.” “I was one of four producers who were there from the beginning.” He got his brother Peter, an attorney based in Farmington, to invest in the show as well.
Other current Broadway shows Perakos has invested in include the acclaimed revivals of “My Fair Lady” and “Carousel.” As for new shows, he’s got money in “Jagged Little Pill” — based on the Alanis Morissette album and currently having its regional try-out at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Mass. — and “Ain’t Too Proud,” a jukebox musical about The Temptations which premiered at California’s Berkeley Repertory Theatre in 2017 and is in the midst of several other pre-Broadway engagements.
As a co-producer of “The Band’s Visit,” Perakos gets his own Tony statuette. On the night of the win, he posed for a photo with the Tony presented onstage to lead producer Orin Wolf. “I’m holding Orin’s Tony. They’ll send me one in the mail.”
He knows just what he’ll do with it when it comes.
“I’m going to give my Tony to the art gallery in the [Thomas Perakos Arts & Community] Center, to encourage young minds, and to show the students that dreams do come true.”
