2012 Tony Predictions - Best Revival

Now that we’ve discussed the creative categories and the acting nominees, all that’s left to predict are the production awards.  These awards are arguably the most prestigious, as theatre is a collaborative medium and a production win is an acknowledgement of excellent in all aspects of a particular show.  As I prepare to predict the season’s best revivals, please keep in mind my two caveats: 1) I have not necessarily seen all of the nominated productions; and 2) I am predicting who will win, which is not necessarily the same as who should win.  Any discrepancies in the two will be discussed in the body of the article.

Best Revival of a Play

Nominees:  Death of a Salesman, The Best Man, Master Class, Wit

Master Class is an extreme long shot in this category, as it opened and closed during the summer of 2011.  Tony voters have notoriously short memories, and given the sheer number of shows that have opened since then, Master Class should consider itself lucky for having been nominated at all.  It is particularly telling that the production’s star, Tyne Daly, failed to receive a Best Actress nomination despite her much ballyhooed turn as opera diva Maria Callas in a piece that is essentially a one woman show with interruptions. 

Wit suffers from a less severe version of the same problem.  Historically, winning a Best Revival trophy has been very difficult when a show isn’t being performed nightly to remind voters how good it is, and Wit has been closed for months.  Cynthia Nixon’s Best Actress nomination proves the show is still present in people’s minds, but despite being highly regarded I don’t think the production as a whole made enough of an impression to secure a Best Revival win.

The Best Man has the distinction of being the only nominated revival that is still running, an invaluable asset in any Tony race.  Unfortunately, it also received the least encouraging reviews of the bunch.  While many critics praised the star-studded cast, they found the show itself a tad slow, indicating that for whatever reason the individual performances aren’t adding up to a satisfying whole.  A show perceived as a disappointment, whether due to unreasonably high expectations or actual shortcomings, rarely wins the big awards.

I think Death of a Salesman will easily win Best Revival tonight.  The play is an acknowledged masterpiece, and you couldn’t ask for much better material.  But rather than rest on their laurels, Mike Nichols and his entire team pushed themselves to deliver the most universally praised revival of the year.  The presence of Oscar-winner Phillip Seymour Hoffman made the show a box office bonanza, and the level of buzz surrounding the production was deafening.  Critical acclaim, a towering central performance by an A-list celebrity, and box office success amount to a Tony-winning trifecta, and I would be shocked to see anything other than Salesman win this award.

Will and Should Win:  Death of a Salesman

Best Revival of a Musical

Nominees:  Evita, Follies, Porgy and Bess, Jesus Christ Superstar

The Tonys have often been accused of being too commercially-minded, favoring box office success over artistic merit.  While there is certainly some truth to this (producers of touring houses make up a large percentage of Tony voters, and they want to be able to book Tony-winning shows that will also make them lots of money), the revival categories seem to be less prone to this phenomenon.  That is why I think despite Evita’s enormous financial success, it has very little chance of winning the big prize.  This current revival has been unfavorably compared to memories of the original 1979 production.  Leading lady Elena Roger has proven to be a divisive Eva, and I would agree with the many audience members who feel her voice simply isn’t up to the challenge of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s demanding score.  Despite a visually stunning physical production and top-notch direction by Michael Grandage, this Evita lacks spark, and has been deemed a disappointment by many of the show’s fans.

The other Lloyd Webber revival of the season, Jesus Christ Superstar, is a much stronger contender.  Though Superstar is far inferior to Evita as a piece of musical theatre writing, director Des McAnuff and his team have polished it to a high gloss.  The end result, which wisely emphasizes the pseudo-love triangle between Jesus, Judas, and Mary, is so good that it managed to win me over despite my deep dislike of Lloyd Webber in general and Superstar in particular.  It helps that McAnuff cast leads that are actually capable of handling the insane vocal demands of the score, but Superstar’s low number of overall nominations indicates it will have a tough time winning against its stiff competition.

The real contenders here are Follies and Porgy and Bess, two fantastic shows which have received first rate productions.  The Stephen Sondheim revival boasted an impeccable cast, a sumptuous physical production and excellent direction, and I truly believe that it will be talked about for years to come as a definitive version of that landmark show.  While there is much to love about Porgy, including an astounding central performance by the incomparable Audra McDonald, purists have been vocally upset about director Diane Paulus’ retooling of a four hour opera into a two-and-a-half hour musical.  Even though Porgy is still running (a major advantage for any Tony-nominated production), I expect the ire over Paulus’ judicious cuts to keep it from taking the big prize, which is as it should be.  Follies was a truly transcendent theatrical experience, and deserves to be recognized as the best revival of the season.

Will and Should Win:  Follies

The only races left to predict are the two biggest, Best Play and Best Musical.  Stay tuned for my thoughts on each, and catch up on the rest of my Tony predictions in the meantime:

Best Actor

Best Actress
Best Featured Actor
Best Featured Actress
Best Book and Score
Best Direction and Choreography

Tony Watch: Assessing the 2011-2012 Broadway Season Part 4

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.