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| Steve Kazee and Cristin Milioti in Once |
There are so many shows opening these days on the Great
White Way, I don’t even have time to come up with a pithy opening
paragraph. Picking up right where I left
out, let’s talk about the Tony nomination prospects for:
The Road to Mecca
This has not been the best season for the Roundabout Theatre
Company. The once-mighty non-profit has
overindulged in its habit of producing merely adequate revivals of merely
adequate plays, trapping well-respected theatrical talent in productions that
are frankly beneath them. The Road to Mecca has done nothing to
change that trend, and will likely be forgotten by all of the major
awards-granting bodies.
Wit
Manhattan Theatre Club, on the other hand, continues to win
over both critics and audiences with highly praised revivals of acknowledged
classics in addition to their adventurous new works. The first Broadway production of the Pulitzer
Prize-winning Wit will certainly be
among this year’s Best Revival nominees, and MTC’s artistic director Lynne
Meadow is a contender for the Best Direction award as well. Cynthia Nixon’s universally praised star turn
makes her a shoe-in for a Best Actress nomination, although winning said award
will be a much trickier feat. On both
the musical and play fronts, there has been spectacular work from Broadway’s
leading ladies this season, and the Best Actress races are shaping up to be two
of the most exciting and unpredictable of the this year’s awards.
Shatner’s World: We Just Live In It
This one man show’s run was so brief that even if the Best
Theatrical Event Tony still existed, William Shatner might not qualify for
it. Without that category to compete in,
this show doesn’t stand a chance.
Death of a Salesman
Take an undisputed theatrical classic, add an unmistakably talented
Oscar winner in the lead role, mix well, and you have one of the event shows of
the spring. One of several Pulitzer
Prize winners to grace Broadway this season, Salesman is top tier material, and this revival has been embraced
by the entire theatrical community.
Although he is about 20 years too young for the role, audiences have
been entranced by Phillip Seymour Hoffman’s searing portrayal of the doomed
Willy Loman, and Tony voters will surely follow suit by granting him a Best
Actor nomination.
But Hoffman isn’t the only thing critics are raving about in
this Salesman. It scored high marks across the board,
making it a contender in several of the big categories and an assured Best
Revival nominee. Of the actors, Linda
Emond stands the best chance of being nominated alongside Hoffman for her
portrayal of Willy’s wife (also named Linda), but the supporting cast can’t be
counted out. With seven Tony Awards for
direction already to his name, Mike Nichols is in as good a position as anyone
to snag one of the five hotly contested Best Director nominations, and if it
wasn’t a reproduction of the original 1949 design and therefore ineligible, the
much-ballyhooed scenic design would be a contender as well.
Once
In recent years, the Best Musical race has invariably come
down to a competition between the slickly realized Commercial Success and the
artistically daring Critics’ Darling. Once will surely be this season’s
representative of the latter category, putting it in the company of shows like The Scottsboro Boys, Fela!, and Next to Normal that have all attempted
to take down their more mass-market competition. The good news for Once is that the Critics’ Darling always winds up with a host of
Tony nominations; the bad news is that it tends to lose out in the major
categories.
Once will surely
be nominated for Best Musical, Best Book, and Best Score, by virtue of its
strong reviews and weak competition. It
even stands a good chance of winning the latter two awards, although a Best
Musical victory is something of a long shot due to Tony politics best dealt
with at a later date. By virtue of
starring in one of the season’s best reviewed musicals, lead performers Steve
Kazee and Cristin Milioti cannot be counted out of the acting races, although
Kazee is more likely to actually score recognition than Milioti, whose category
is shaping up to be a bloodbath.
Jesus Christ Superstar
Let’s be honest: there’s really only one Best Musical
Revival slot still up for grabs. Follies, Porgy and Bess, and Evita are all but assured nominations,
and I suspect Jesus Christ Superstar will
end up with the fourth and final slot. I’ve
already mentioned how the critically lambasted On a Clear Day doesn’t stand a chance in this category, and Superstar is simply a better-realized
production than last fall’s Godspell. It doesn’t hurt that this Superstar arrived on Broadway due to
merit and popular demand, and it earns brownie points for solving a lot of the
problems inherent in mounting this notoriously hard to stage work.
Other than the revival race, its prospects for awards are
pretty grim. The acting amounts to
little more than pained looks, as all of the performers are clearly more
focused on getting through Webber’s beast of a score than emoting. I wouldn’t rule out Des McAnuff’s direction from
the nomination pool, as he is largely responsible for what makes this Superstar special, and has been
nominated for far less impressive work (Jersey
Boys remains one of the most overrated musicals of the past 10 years). I would really like to see a choreography
nomination for Lisa Shriver’s surprising work on the show, but with song and
dance spectacles making a comeback and several perpetually nominated
choreographers (Kathleen Marshall, Rob Ashford) eligible for this season’s
Tonys, Shriver faces an uphill battle.
I’ve just over a week to speculate on the 15(!) remaining
productions of this season, so look for another one of these Tony articles
sooner rather than later.
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