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| Matthew Broderick and the cast of Nice Work If You Can Get It celebrate their Best Musical Tony nominaton. |
We’re in the home stretch of the spring season. Only five more shows to discuss before next
week’s Tony nominations, and they are:
The Lyons
When Tony Award winner Linda Lavin passed on the Broadway
transfers of both Follies and Other Desert Cities in order to play the
lead role in The Lyons, she raised
quite a few industry eyebrows. But
something about the script for this Off-Broadway premiere – which at the time
had no intention of transferring – caught her eye, and in hindsight it’s clear
Lavin knew what she was doing. The play’s
strong reviews prompted a late season Broadway transfer, where it again opened
to much critical praise for the play as a whole and Lavin’s performance in
particular.
It will be interesting to see just how far The Lyons can infiltrate the Tony Awards
in this very crowded season. Its
transfer to Broadway has been entirely merit-based, and opening just before the
Tony eligibility cutoff date ensures it is fresh in everyone’s minds. Will that be enough to net the work a Best
Play nomination against its higher profile competition? It just might be.
Lavin is in a very strong position to secure a Best Actress
nomination, and some of her costars may even join her for the ride. Fellow Tony-winner Dick Latessa is
well-respected in the theatrical community and giving another critically
praised performance, and the young Michael Esper is so strong in the show that
he’s managed to stand out next to such industry heavyweights. Neither performer can be ruled out of the
Supporting Actor race, and The Lyons could
well end up being the Little Show That Could.
Nice Work If You Can Get It
One of the biggest question marks heading into the spring
season was the “new” Gershwin musical Nice
Work If You Can Get It. A thorough
reworking of Oh Kay, one of George
and Ira’s lesser known musicals, Nice
Work sports a cast and creative team with plenty of Tony pedigree. Both of its stars have multiple Tony
nominations to their name, and director/choreographer Kathleen Marshall is still
riding high on the success of last season’s hit Anything Goes. Yet the show
received little pre-opening press or buzz, with many taking the lack of info as
a sign that the show was on the road to disaster.
But now the show has opened to good if not great reviews,
and more importantly has performed quite strongly in New York’s other
theatrical contests like the Drama Desk and Outer Critics Circle Awards. Like The
Lyons, being so new has certainly helped Nice Work in this area, and all that momentum makes the show a
serious Tony contender. I predict it will
indeed manage to nab one of the four coveted Best Musical nominations, a major
victory for a show no one was even talking about a month ago.
Other all-but-guaranteed nominations: leading lady Kelli
O’Hara for Best Actress and Kathleen Marshall for Best Choreography (and
possibly Best Direction), as the latter is definitely working within her
wheelhouse here. Another likely nominee
is Judy Kaye for her scene stealing comic turn, and while his lukewarm reviews
aren’t very encouraging, Matthew Broderick cannot be completely ruled out of
the Best Actor race. And I expect one or
more of the show’s design elements to get nominated, with Martin Pakledinaz’s flapper
era costumes a particularly strong contender.
The Columnist
This new play from Manhattan Theatre Club certainly has a
Tony-worthy pedigree. Written by
Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright David Auburn (Proof) and directed by Tony-winning director Daniel Sullivan (also Proof, as well as last season’s Merchant of Venice), the show stars
multiple Tony winner John Lithgow as a 1960s era newspaper columnist named
Joseph Alsop. Unfortunately, The Columnist seems to have been lost
among the plethora of shows that have opened in the past two weeks, and I don’t
foresee it being much of a contender for this year’s awards.
Don’t Dress for Dinner
Hopefully Roundabout will finally learn a lesson after their
extremely anemic offerings this season.
They need to stop producing subpar Broadway revivals of plays no one has
heard of or cares about. With tens of thousands
of existing plays to choose from, not to mention the thousands more awaiting a
first production, there’s no excuse for Roundabout to continually pick such poor
material. Don’t Dress for Dinner has earned some of the worst reviews of the
spring, and the best it can hope for is to finish out its limited run without a
premature closing.
Leap of Faith
An extremely last minute addition to the Broadway season
facilitated by the closing of the Harry Connick Jr. bomb On a Clear Day, the new musical Leap
of Faith ended the Broadway season on a whimper. Critically reviled, I
can’t imagine Faith ended up among
this year’s Best Musical nominees, even with such weak competition. The score by perpetual Tony bridesmaid Alan
Menken has a better chance at a nomination, especially since it was just
announced that the score for Once will
be ineligible since it was written for the movie and not specifically for the
stage.
Since by all accounts the libretto for Faith is one of the show’s primary problems, I’m ruling it out of
the Best Book category, which leaves Raul Esparza as the only other real chance
the show has at some Tony love. And even
then, it’s entirely possible that the four-time Tony nominee will find himself
excluded from the Best Actor race due to the poor quality of his star vehicle.
And that, ladies and gentleman, brings us to the official
end of the 2011-2012 Broadway season! Be
sure to check back on Tuesday when the Tony Award nominations are announced to
see how I did with my predictions, and look for further Tony chatter throughout
the month of May leading up to the big night on June 10th. I can’t wait to talk more, and I hope you’ll
join me for the ride.
And in case you missed my previous Tony Watch articles, you
can catch up on them here:
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