Jun 9, 2013 2 min read

NEW YORK (AP) – Cyndi Lauper, making her Broadway debut, won a Tony Award Sunday for writing the 15-song score to “Kinky Boots” and Christopher Durang’s comical “Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike” has won the best play Tony.

Lauper thanked her old friend Harvey Fierstein, the book writer for “La Cage aux Folles” and “Newsies,” to lure her to Broadway. “Kinky Boots” also won for choreography and two technical awards, and Billy Porter won for leading man in a musical.

Porter beat “Kinky Boots” co-star Stark Sands and said he would share the award. But “I’ll keep it at my house,” he joked.

Durang, whose other works include the play “Beyond Therapy,” was a Tony nominee for “A History of the American Film” and his “Miss Witherspoon” was a Pulitzer Prize nominee in 2006.

Girls were having fun elsewhere as well, as Diane Paulus and Pam MacKinnon both won for directing – the first time women won directing Tonys for both a musical and a play in the same year.

Paulus won her first Tony for directing the crackling, high-energy revival of the musical “Pippin.” MacKinnon won for directing the play “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?,” a year after earning her first nomination for helming “Clybourne Park.” Her revival of Edward Albee’s story of marital strife won the best play revival and earned Tracy Letts his first acting Tony, beating Tom Hanks.

Andrea Martin, 66, who won as featured actress in a musical, plays Pippin’s grandmother and sings the music hall favorite “No Time at All,” stuns audiences nightly by doing jaw-dropping stunts that would make someone a fraction of her age blanch.

The Tonys are being broadcast live by CBS from Radio City Music Hall. Neil Patrick Harris is back for his fourth turn as emcee and leads a show featuring talented children and pulse-pounding musical numbers.