NEW YORK >> “Maybe Happy Ending,” a rom-com about a pair of androids falling in love, took home the Tony Award for best new musical on Sunday.

Its star, Darren Criss, had won the leading actor in a musical award just minutes before. He also hosted the Tonys pre-show.

The best new play trophy at went to “Purpose,” Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’ drawing-room drama about an accomplished Black family exposing hypocrisy and pressures during a snowed-in gathering.

It caps a remarkable year for Jacobs-Jenkins, who in addition to winning back-to-back Tonys — his “Appropriate” won best play revival in 2024 — earned the Pulitzer Prize for “Purpose.” (That win came the day of the Met Gala, where he served on the host committee.)

Jacobs-Jenkins becomes the first Black playwright to win for best new play since August Wilson took home the trophy in 1987 for “Fences.” He urged Tony viewers to support regional theaters; “Purpose” was nurtured in Chicago.

Kara Young — the first Black female actor to be nominated for a Tony Award in four consecutive years — became the first Black person to win two Tonys consecutively with the featured actress in a play trophy for her work in “Purpose.” Young thanked her parents, Jacobs-Jenkins, her cast and director Phylicia Rashad.

“Theater is a sacred space that we have to honor and treasure, and it makes us united,” she said.

“Sunset Blvd.,” with Nicole Scherzinger starring as a fallen screen idol desperate to reclaim her fame, won best musical revival, handing composer Andrew Lloyd Webber his first competitive Tony since 1995 — when the original show won. The current version is a stripped-down, minimalist production.

Sarah Snook took home the trophy for leading actress in a play for her tireless work in “The Picture of Dorian Gray,” where she plays all 26 roles.

“I don’t feel alone any night that I do this show,” Snook said, dismissing the idea of her play as a one-woman show. “There are so many people onstage making it work and behind the stage making it work.”

Downtown cabaret star Cole Escola took home the best actor in a play trophy for playing a deranged, repressed and over-the-top ahistorical version of Mary Todd Lincoln in “Oh Mary!,” beating such Hollywood stars as George Clooney and Daniel Dae Kim.

Sam Pinkleton won best director for “Oh, Mary!” and thanked Escola, saying they taught him, “Do what you love, not what you think people want to see.”

Francis Jue won best actor in a featured role in a play for his work in a revival of “Yellow Face.” He said he was gifted his tuxedo from another Asian actor who wanted him to wear it to the Tonys.

Jak Malone won best actor in a featured role in a musical for the British import “Operation Mincemeat: A New Musical,” playing a woman every performance. He hoped his win could be a powerful advocacy for trans rights.

“Eureka Day,” Jonathan Spector’s social satire about well-meaning liberals debating a school’s vaccine policy, won the best play revival trophy. It made its off-Broadway debut in 2019.

First-time host Cynthia Erivo kicked off the show from her dressing room in Radio City Music Hall, unsure of her opening number as the stage manager urged her to get to the stage. As she made her way through the backstage warren, she ran into various people offering advice until she reached Oprah Winfrey, who advised, “The only thing you need to do is just be yourself.”

In her opening comments, she singled out first-time nominees Escola, Louis McCartney, Sadie Sink, and “an up-and-comer that I think you’re going to really be hearing quite a bit about — George Clooney.”

She noted that the 2024-2025 season took in $1.9 billion, making it the highest-grossing season ever and signaling that Broadway has finally emerged from the COVID-19 blues.

“Broadway is officially back,” Erivo said. “Provided we don’t run out of cast members from ‘Succession,’” a nod to appearances this season by former co-stars Snook and Kieran Culkin and last season by Jeremy Strong.