1987-1988 award record

The Phantom of the Opera began Broadway previews at the Majestic Theatre on 9 January 1988 and opened on 26 January, which places it inside this season.

Maria Björnson designed both its sets and its more than 200 costumes. She is accordingly the winner in two separate categories on this page — the only person in this part of the record to take more than one award in a single season.

The production became the longest-running show in Broadway history, the first musical to pass 10,000 performances, and closed on 16 April 2023.

Andrew Bridge's lighting is the third of the production's three awards; the fourth award of the season went to Michael Smuin for the choreography of Anything Goes. A production taking three of four craft categories is rare in this record.

Into the Woods, Stephen Sondheim's musical reworking of classic fairy tales, drew three nominations this season — costume, lighting and set design — without converting any of them into a win, the widest nominated spread of any production that did not take home an award. M. Butterfly, David Henry Hwang's play, drew two: Eiko Ishioka nominated for both its costume and its set design, a single designer credited across two crafts on the same production.

Tony Walton, nominated for both costume and set design on Anything Goes, is a designer this record picks up again and again — his win for Guys and Dolls four seasons later is one of several appearances across the record, though this particular season he converts neither Anything Goes nomination into an award, unlike Michael Smuin, whose choreography win for the same production is the season's fourth award.

Fourteen names were nominated this season without winning, against the four who did — a roughly three-to-one ratio of shortlisted to honoured, spread across four categories where set, costume and lighting still ran as single undivided headings, before the record's later category splits widened the field further on both sides of the count.

The Phantom of the Opera connects four of the fifteen named people this season, not just the three award-winning credits already covered: Gillian Lynne was also nominated, for its choreography, against Michael Smuin's winning work on Anything Goes. Every other credit on the page belongs to a production that connects only the one or two names already named for it. Nothing else repeats.

Sources: The Phantom of the Opera (1986 musical), Into the Woods, M. Butterfly