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What happened to the In Memoriam segment of the Tony Awards?

At the end of Sunday night’s broadcast of the Tonys on CBS, some theater fans were confused by the absence of the annual photo montage honoring members of the Broadway industry who died during the past year. Cyndi Lauper memorably performed “True Colors” during the In Memoriam on the 2013 telecast, and such segments have been staples of the Oscars and other award shows.

“It’s usually a beautiful and moving moment, and a lot of people noticed it was gone,” said John Breglio, a longtime theater producer.

This year, Tony Award Productions and CBS decided to air the In Memoriam only for the audience at the Tonys ceremony inside Radio City Music Hall during a commercial break. It is also posted the segment online.

“Presenting in this manner allowed us to include more individuals than we have been able to include most years, and as a result, more accurately reflected the depth of loss suffered by our community this past year,” Shawn Purdy, a spokeswoman for Tony Award Productions, said in an email. This year’s montage was about two minutes and 40 seconds long, the same length as Ms. Lauper’s last year.

Ms. Purdy’s explanation did not sit well with some Broadway veterans.

“The montage should absolutely be included in the telecast, because it means a lot to people in the audience and theater lovers watching from home,” said Elizabeth I. McCann, a Broadway producer and a former managing producer of Tony Award Productions. “It looks like somewhere along the way theater people have lost control of the Tonys, and CBS is pushing them around. So we end up with a star like Jennifer Hudson singing a song from ‘Finding Neverland’ even though she isn’t in the musical – and the musical isn’t even on Broadway.”

The “Finding Neverland” number was out of step with tradition – usually only Broadway shows are represented with numbers on the Tonys – but CBS and the musical’s producer, Harvey Weinstein, engineered it to provide a sneak peek of the show. “Finding Neverland” is opening this summer at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Mass., but has no firm plans for Broadway at this point.

Two members of the Tony Awards Management Committee, which helps run the Tonys, insisted this week that the In Memoriam segment was not changed to make way for “Finding Neverland.” The committee members, who spoke on condition of anonymity because committee issues are meant to confidential, said they had mixed feelings about leaving the segment out of the telecast, admitting that they want to be included in the montage on live television when they die. They said they did not know if the segment would be restored next year.

Several artists said they were troubled by the omission from the contact, while others responded with a touch of gallows humor.

“Next year maybe they could make the In Memoriam segment even longer by reading it backstage, or in someone’s living room!” Tony Kushner, the Tony-winning playwright of “Angels in America,” wrote in an email. “Why should dead people expect special treatment? The composer/lyricist, book writer and designers who won this year were also upstaged by commercials, and unlike the stars of In Memoriam, they actually had to show up!”