NEW YORK, May, 1, 2018 — Two popular entertainment brands — Tina Fey's high school morality tale "Mean Girls" and the goofy undersea cartoon "SpongeBob SquarePants" — lead the Tony Award nominations with 12 apiece. Another massive property, a play based on the wizard Harry Potter, also cast a spell, earning 10 nods. Fey, who adapted the story of her oft-quoted 2004 movie with her composer husband, Jeff Richmond, admitted they awaited Tuesday's announcement with bated breath. "We're new to this whole Broadway thing and this whole musical thing so it was hard to tell which way everything could swing," Richmond said. "We're delighted." A British revival of "Angels in America," Tony Kushner's monumental, two-part drama about AIDS, life and love during the 1980s, grabbed 11 nominations — the most for any play this season — 25 years after it first appeared on Broadway. Denise Gough, who plays Harper Pitt in "Angels in America," was 'just pleased that the British import landed so gratefully on Broadway. "We're doing New York's play! That is a total privilege," she said. "Wouldn't that be terrible if we came back and you were all like, what have you done with our play?"
