P!nk Opens Tony Awards with ‘Lady Marmalade’ Cameo-Packed Featuring Megan Thee Stallion, Neil Patrick Harris

P!nk used her first time hosting the Tony Awards to lean fully into the room’s musical theatre muscle. After a brief Peter Pan flight on wires, she pivoted into “Lady Marmalade,” the 2001 Moulin Rouge hit she originally recorded with Christina Aguilera, Lil’ Kim, and Mya. The opening number quickly became a parade of cameos, with former Tonys host Neil Patrick Harris, Dylan Mulvaney, Shoshana Bean, and a reworded verse that name-checked Lesley Manville, Rose Byrne, and Carrie Coon in the audience.

Lea Michele stepped in for a brief belted moment, June Squibb had a turn, and then Megan Thee Stallion took over Lil’ Kim’s rap. Megan’s presence was more than a surprise: she had left her own run as Zidler in Moulin Rouge! The Musical at the end of April, after a hospitalization forced her to exit early. The rapper was originally scheduled to stay with the Broadway production through May 17.

The performance drew no clean line between pop hit and theatre ritual. It treated the song as shared territory, and the staging nodded to its Grammy-winning history without sentimentalizing it. Megan later returned to present the award for Best Performance by an Actress in a Featured Role in a Musical, the category that, a few weeks earlier, her own Broadway chapter was not around to see out.