I haven't seen everything, but this season I was thrilled to see the very faithfully revived Kiss Me Kate!!! Kelli O’Hara is giving another once in a lifetime performance. I would hate to be a Tony voter having to choose between O’Hara and Stephanie J. Block, who I loved in The Cher Show.
As much as I enjoy usually Sorkin's writing I found To Kill a Mockingbird to be dull and a reconstitution of the movie, mostly. The Ferryman provided a great experience for the audience on a high theatrical level Broadway seldom gets to see anymore.
It's interesting to see only 15 comments here, while something as trivial as de Blasio running for President is up to 460 comments. Maybe it's because this is the second Tonys article.
This is where I miss ‘Theater Talk’. Susan Haskin’s great show was a wonderful arena for theater critics to duke it out over which of the latest Broadway shows was Tony worthy....or not. Miss all the witty banter. A printed discussion just isn’t the same.
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I ran to see The Prom after the NYT review and it was better than the review! I sat there in a kind of audience I had never seen before. The audience was never still. What I mean by that was that they were always laughing or crying. Their shoulders would shake silently at the little laughs and of course they would move more with the big laughs and they would vibrate with the tears or the trying not to cry.
There was also maybe silent but I heard and felt it, a kind of gurgling of satisfaction through whole audience the whole night. I said to the one unmoved person sitting next to me who said he was a producer and had stakes in some Broadway show coming up, of course he must have gotten his tickets from tdf as I had and we were sitting upstairs, I told him that this show was going to win the Tony for Best Musical. He smirked. And I felt the same way when I saw Two Guvners and one man or what ever it was that James Cordon was going to get Best Actor Tony, and he did.
I love how perfect the prom is, I love how well crafted it is using old Broadway traditional stuff. And I loved being part of a gurgling audience.
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@cheerful dramatist, it's likely the smirk was more about hey, it's just November; with so much more coming, how can you know already? Even now, it's still too early to be sure.
Shows that draw in a general Broadway and tourist audience yet sneak in education (that dreaded word) almost unnoticed - shows like The Prom and Tootsie, pulling off opening minds without the people realizing it or resenting it while they're enjoying the show - are rare. Having two that seem to be working in the same season is a wonder, especially since both seem destined to have a nice after Broadway, in the way of "La Cage." That the conceiver of "The Prom" feels human rights rules are terrific for fictional characters and as plot devices so the shows can make a profit, but that he has no use for those human rights for real human beings if those parts of the laws get in his way, remains one of the sad mysteries of the decade to me. But thank heavens he came up with the idea, and a great team ran with it - and the show will have a far-reaching like, Best Musical Tony or not!
@Freddie
Both The Prom and Tootsie feel like shows hatched for the Pant Suit Ladies that Group Sales Companies thrive on. There was a time
when Broadway meant Top of the Heap, not Bottom of the Barrel.
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@Jim Mc Donald - It's 3:30 a.m. and I was drawn to the living room by what felt like Siri screaming "Freddie, there's a scary commenter that thinks Broadway is about quality first, not money. What if the comment box is closed before morning?" Ok, actually, I was just going to the bathroom. I think we think of the "Top of the Heap" because to 98% of the showgoers in the country, when a show fails, the theater buffs debate it forever, but to 98% of them, those shows might as well have never existed. We think only of R&H's successes, but even though Me and Juliet, Pipe Dream and Allegro took as much of their talents and grit as South Pacific, from 2019, it's like they never existed. Likewise Jerry Herman's Grand Tour, though people seem determined to save Dear World and Mack and Mabel.
About the Pant Suit Ladies, I never imagined when I saw "Victor/Victoria" at the Marquis, two decades later, I'd watching "Tootsie" dressed for comfort, and drinking from a Vegas-style cup being hawked in the aisles so that we can drink during the show. (It isn't the seats that got smaller - actually, I think they have gotten smaller. Looking at a Stubs from the 1990s, there are often 13 premium-potential seats in the center where there were 11 in the 1990s. That's possibly where that theater restoration fee went.) Ryan Murphy is moved enough to do his best to make sure the message of "The Prom" reaches the whole country via Netflix. Remember "La Cage" and the movie "Birdcage."
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The snubbing of Mockingbird shows the arrogance of the nominations voters who yearn to show their taste is better and trendier than mere audience members.
I found it far superior to Ferryman, a good play but one in which the size of the cast and the length of the play added little value to a predictable storyline. When a live goose is cited as a creative leap, you know some people swoon for anything British.
Cranston deserves the Tony, as does Elaine May.
The weak performer playing Orpheus knocks Hadestown down a notch and The Prom was more clever, but less creative.
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@DSM14, this was mentioned by a commenter in another site, that there were years where the nominators found enough work, like in 1965
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/19th_Tony_Awards
that they had separate awards for
Best Author - won by Neil Simon for "The Odd Couple"
Best Producer (Dramatic) - won by the producer of "Luv"
Best Play - won by Frank Gilroy for "The Subject Was Roses"
If they had the Best Producer (Dramatic) award before the show, there would be no chance of the playwright being cut off when a producer speaks too long. Then, there would be no need to limit the number of producers who come onstage. I wonder why they cut that back and put the producer and playwright on one award. (or during the ads, maybe?).
They were certainly plays that we now know have stood the test of time, so it certainly wasn't in retrospect a "showing up" medal for just being on Broadway.
@Freddie Interesting information and thoughts, thanks
"the Bob Mackie parade of frocks was a hoot"
I'd never lost the power of the parade of hats in "Far Away" and wondered (unfortunately aloud to a theater-savvy riend who answered "Far a-what?") if at least a TV version of the Caryl Churchill play could work with the sinister parade on that production level, maybe even right there on that stage. PBS probably could have afforded it in the 1970s or 1980s, and their pledge phones would have been ringing off the hook back then.
The three-actress concept, with one of them being central and the biggest name, for a jukebox/catalog musical seems to trace back to "Eli's Comin" the Laura Nyro musical that Diane Paulus created off-Broadway just before "Mamma Mia" made the genre explode. I have great memories of (and emails about) enjoying seeing that show, though nothing specific about why three actresses.
That Sorkin omission had some folks think something must have been inadvertently left off the Best Play list. Although the “Best Play” category has had an odd history against rewarding then writing for plays based on novels in the past decades.
Tune of “Mockingbird”
Mock? Whe-ere?
Ing? Whe-ere?
Bird? Whe-ere?
Shocking? Yea-eah!
Mockingbird? Where?
Everybody spread the word.
Gonna write in Aaron’s “Mockingbird”
And if that write-in vote won’t count
We’ll console ourselves as grosses mount.
And if the grosses drop a bit somehow
Which could happen six or seven years from now.
That’s the time when -
We’ll bring Jeff Daniels back
And sell big again, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Eileen Heckart (at the late, lamented Promenade) and Elaine May (at the Golden, where she and Mike Nichols had performed their "Evening With" nearly 60 years earlier) gave distinctive, touching, memorable performances in The Waverly Gallery almost two decades apart. I'm thrilled to have seen both. Here's hoping the play wins Best Revival and May wins Best Actress, an award for which Heckart was not eligible in the original off-Broadway production.
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Thank you for reminding us of Eileen Heckart's brilliant
performance at the Promenade Theater. Both she and that greatest of theaters are lost treasures.
Mostly junk. Some good acting and staging, but not much else of merit.
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So glad you saved Elaine May till the end of your piece. Maybe that's the last thing Tony voters will read before they cast their votes. May was magnificent. She has my vote--if I could vote. To watch this sharp-witted real life icon descend, in character, into dementia was a stunning was both moving and miraculous.
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@SNA I agree completely that Ms. May gave a rare and remarkable performance. I pondered the psychic toll the role must have taken for someone in full control of her exceptional facilities to portray the heartbreaking descent that befalls so many of her contemporaries.
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Broadway is commerce masquerading as art. The most challenging stage work takes place far from the Great White Way. Many Broadway producers today, more excited by an Opening Night party or seeing their name in a Playbill, have no idea what constitutes good theatre. Innovative shows like 'The Ferryman' or 'Gary' or the newly-reworked 'Oklahoma' have short lives on Broadway where it's always been about the bottom line, not art.
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Jeffrey Seller was speaking at a seminar, and was asked what gave him the instinct trust director Jason Moore with a multi-million dollar musical. I can only paraphrase, but his answer was that didn't trust Jason Moore with a multi-million dollar musical, he trusted Jason Moore to direct a musical for the Vineyard and the New Group for a few hundred thousand dollars. And that worked and why would they replace him? (And of course, they're still working together- on "The Cher Show" this season.)
PS -to writers of musicals, Mr. Seller also said that day to writers to put an example of the score's best work as the first thing you want him to listen to, even if it's not the opening number.
Alan,
While I share your disdain for a lot of what passes for theatre on Broadway, you’re quite incorrect in your assessment of both The Ferryman and Oklahoma as short-lived. The Ferryman is well past its originally planned limited run, now with a replacement cast, and Oklahoma runs in to 2020 along with a planned national tour.