Tony clip of the day

What better way to kick off our journey through Tony Awards history than with a spotlight-mad invocation from Lauren Bacall, in all her smokestack-voiced glamour?

If you feel like loving Elizabeth Taylor a little more today, watch as she enchantingly mangles her presentation of the 1981 Tony Award for Best Musical.

Presenters make mistakes all the time, of course, but sometimes a flub is so uncanny, so inexplicable, so jaw-droppingly weird that it seems to exit the realm of error entirely to inhabit a rarefied world of perfect absurdist art. So it is with Robert Goulet.

Bette Midler may seem to have emerged fully formed from the mists of the Continental Baths in the early 1970s, but the sassy singer-actor in fact paid her dues for years before that on the New York stage.

If you like your musical numbers big, showy, silly and glitzy, then you've hit the jackpot, friend: They don't get much bigger, showier, sillier and glitzier than this Las Vegas–themed blowout from 1968's Golden Rainbow.

No production number in Tony history has been bleeped as insistently as this rowdy locker-room hoedown from The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas.

Carol Channing gleamed her way to stardom singing "Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend" in 1949's Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, but it was rhinestones all the way in the 1974 musical Lorelei.

Liza Minnelli, Gwen Verdon, Chita Rivera, Dorothy Loudon and Raquel Welch in one fantastic medley? Say yes!

Garrett Morris, a go-go dancer, a giant phallic rat, a gruesomely extended death scene and a voodoo curse on the audience: Put them all together and you get the most shocking performance in the history of the Tonys. 

Musical theater doesn't get better than Michael Jeter's breathtakingly joyful and soulful performance in this 1990 number from Grand Hotel, and acceptance speeches don't get more touching than Jeter's either.