Kristin Chenoweth and Alan Cumming during Broadway's biggest night
Someone once said that if you can make it in New York, you can make it anywhere. And that's usually true of Broadway productions. A typical Broadway musical can cost anywhere between
$7 to $15 million, with some of the more lavish productions getting close to nine-digit territory. And that's just the cost of getting things started, not taking into account the expenses related to keeping things going. This is ultimately an industry where
75 percent of the shows flop and recognition from the Tony Awards can determine which shows survive, actor salary and whether the production will go on tour.
However, in 2014, attendance for Broadway shows was up 13 percent and "The Great White Way" had its highest grossing calendar year. But last night's Tony Awards veered more toward rewarding artistic ambition than big names and big-budget commercial success, with Fun Home and The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time winning big.
So I thought this might be a good occasion to discuss song, dance and show tunes and posit a question: Which musicals and stage productions are your favorites and why? Continue below the fold for more.
The award for best new musical went to Fun Home. Adapted from the graphic memoir by Alison Bechdel, the story is about remembering coming-of-age as a lesbian girl while searching for clues about her father's closeted homosexuality after his suicide.
The production began in the off-Broadway Public Theater before moving uptown. And even though its subject matter is not what you would expect tourists to flock to, the musical has received rave reviews and sold-out crowds.
From Michael Paulson and Patrick Healy at the New York Times:
The musical, which won five prizes in total, triumphed over the presumptive favorite, An American in Paris, an eye-popping and dance-loving stage adaptation of the Oscar-winning 1951 film, as well as Something Rotten!, a rollicking tale about two 16th-century brother-playwrights seeking to compete with Shakespeare, and The Visit, an eerie satire about a wealthy woman who offers to endow her struggling hometown if its residents will kill a man who wronged her ... “Our show is about home, it’s about finding who you are,” said Michael Cerveris, who won a best actor Tony for playing the closeted gay father in Fun Home. In one of the few overtly political remarks of the night, he tied the themes of the musical to the same-sex marriage case now pending in Washington, saying, “I hope the Supreme Court can recognize that too.”
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time is a British import adapted by Simon Stephens from the best-selling novel by Mark Haddon. It concerns a 15 year old who seems autistic, but whose condition is not ever clearly defined, attempting to solve a crime in which his father is a principal suspect. The production won five Tony awards, including best play and lead actor for Alex Sharp, a relative unknown not long out of Juilliard.
The win by Sharp was a major surprise, since most critics had picked Bradley Cooper to win the category for his role in The Elephant Man.
From Charles McNulty at the
Los Angeles Times:
Marianne Elliott, upon accepting the award for best direction, spoke of how gobsmacked everyone associated with Curious Incident has been about the tremendous international success of a show originally intended for a small theater. Preserving the integrity of the drama, the way it attempts to theatricalize the autistic way of processing the world, was the priority, and Elliott and her team were richly rewarded for not compromising their plan.
A full list of winners can be seen
here.
Among the other notable events from last night were Helen Mirren winning a second award for playing Queen Elizabeth II. Her best actress in a play Tony for The Audience, a play by the British playwright and screenwriter Peter Morgan about the weekly meetings between the Queen and all the prime ministers from 1952 until the present day, joins her Oscar for 2006's The Queen. And Mirren's costar, Richard McCabe, also won for best featured actor in a play. The Tony for best revival went to Skylight, David Hare's play starring Carey Mulligan and Bill Nighy as a couple struggling to move past their own faults and past shames. The King and I, starring Ken Watanabe and Kelli O'Hara, won for best revival of a musical, with O'Hara finally winning best actress in a musical after 5 previous nominations. O'Hara's win came over Broadway vet Chita Rivera for her role in The Visit and Kristin Chenoweth for her performance in On the Twentieth Century.
Both Larry David's play Fish in the Dark and Harvey Weinstein's Finding Neverland were not nominated, even though both have been have been commercial hits, and that has become a source of comedy. And Robert Askins' Hand to God was shut in all nominated categories. However, there are those things not getting good Monday morning reviews from last night's telecast. Among them were the reduction in actual awards in the ceremony to make time for some of the performances that weren't so great, bringing back the In Memoriam segment but doing it in an odd and cheesy way, and CBS trying to squeeze every possible commercial opportunity out of the broadcast.
From Amy Plitt and Jenna Scherer at
Rolling Stone:
We should've seen it coming when the distinctly un-Broadway trio of Jennifer Lopez, Nick Jonas and Canadian musician Kiesza — shilling for a tribute album — came out to introduce the J.M. Barrie origin-story musical that didn't net a single nomination. J. Lo awkwardly staring down a silent, grinning Peter Pan gave way to "Stronger," a supremely ridiculous, unwittingly campy number. “YOOOUUU COWARD!” a Captain Hook-ified Kelsey Grammer bellowed, while projected waves crash in the background and nefarious organ chords play. Glee's Matthew Morrison rising from the stage fog and ripping open his shirt while sang about going "stronger" and "deeper" and "higher" had us cracking up — but we're pretty sure that wasn't the writers' intention. If this song was any indication, we'd have thought that Finding Neverland didn't so much get snubbed by the Tonys as quite rightfully ignored.