by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night CBS-TV aired a three-hour presentation of the 73rd
annual Tony Awards, hosted by James Corden — one of the blandest and least
interesting personalities in modern entertainment. When he stopped in the
middle of the show to do a number from a restroom — the gag being that hosting
the Tonys is such an arduous gig that whoever does it spends literally the next
year hiding out in a restroom stall — the lyrics he was “singing” (if, to
appropriate Dwight MacDonald’s description of Haya Harareet’s “acting” in the
1959 Ben-Hur, “I may use the term for
courtesy”) contained references to all the tweets he gets saying he has no
discernible talent at all, to which I replied, “I agree!” Corden started the
show with an opening “song” about the glories of live theatre and in particular
the thrill of being in the same room, in real time, as the people who are entertaining
you, as well as the demand that you have to be there on a certain date at a
certain hour and you can’t just “stream” it later.
The big winner last night
was the musical Hadestown, which
judging from the number presented in the show (the main reason I watch the Tony
Awards is for these snippets of performances that are as close as those of us
who don’t have the money to travel to New York and score tickets for these
shows will come to seeing them — the Tony Awards have also preserved snippets
of performances otherwise lost, including Julie Andrews in My Fair
Lady and Katharine Hepburn in Coco) is a recasting of the Orpheus and Eurydice myth in
which Orpheus is white (and, this being the 21st century, plays an
electric guitar — actually guitars are pretty recherché by now but he could hardly be expected to trundle a
synthesizer or a DJ’s turntables and mixing board with him into Hades!),
Eurydice is racially ambiguous but the waitstaff of Hades seems to be Black
(and their song, which seemed to be a mashup of two numbers called “Wait for
Me” and “Who Are You?,” was yet another knockoff of African-American gospel). Hadestown won for Best Musical, Best Score (Anaïs Mitchell)
and Best Director of a Musical — and the winning director, Rachel Chavkin,
mentioned in her acceptance speech that she was the only woman nominee in that category and turned it into a
heartfelt plea for greater diversity and more women and people of color on both
sides of the Broadway stage. “There are so many women who are ready to go, there
are so many artists of color who are ready to go,” she said. “It is a failure
of imagination by a field whose job it is to imagine how the world could be.”
Right on, Rachel Chavkin! Though Chavkin was essentially calling theatre in
general and Broadway in particular for being far more committed to equality in
rhetoric than in real life, it was clear from the political references in the
show (the Donald’s name was never mentioned, but it didn’t have to be) about
breaking down barriers and showing the commonality of people from different
racial and cultural backgrounds that in the hyper-partisan America of today,
the people who make theatre and hand out Tony Awards are in the anti-Trump
party of cosmopolitanism and inclusiveness, the side Trump’s supporters believe
has virtually destroyed America and needs to be pushed back into its “place” in
order to “make America great again.”
The Best Play winner was The
Ferryman, which I might have thought was
also a reference to the Hades myth but it’s actually about the second “Time of
Troubles” in Northern Ireland (the war between the Roman Catholic Irish
Republican Army and the Protestant Ulster Unionists between 1969 and the
1990’s, when Irish-American U.S. Senator George Mitchell brokered a peace deal
— the first “Time of Troubles” occurred between 1916 and 1922 in what is now
the Republic of Ireland and was between people who were content with a
so-called “Free State” in which Ireland could essentially govern themselves but
acknowledge Britain as being under ultimate control, and those who rejected the
“Free State” and sought full-out independence). The Best Revival of a Play
award went to a new production of Mart Crowley’s pioneering 1970 drama about
Gay men, The Boys in the Band —
and to my astonishment Crowley himself was alive and well enough to accept the
award personally even though a number of the original members of his cast were
among the earliest victims of the AIDS epidemic. Though one would think The
Boys in the Band would seem so horrendously
dated now the only way to do it
would be as a pre-Gay Liberation period piece, reviving it now in an age in
which the vice-president of the United States is on record as wanting to
eliminate all government
protections for Queer people and supporting so-called “conversion therapy”
aimed at turning Queer people straight (at best it turns people totally asexual
and at worst it produces more sexually and psychologically screwed-up Gay and
Lesbian people) is almost as radical as it was to produce it in the first
place.
The Best Revival of a Musical award had only two nominees, Oklahoma! (actually the official title of the production is Rodgers’
and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma!, presumably to
avoid confusion with the Oklahoma!
George Gershwin started writing in 1937 and Kurt Weill finished after
Gershwin’s death — memo to my readers: I made that up) and Kiss Me,
Kate, and it went to Oklahoma! even though I’d rather have seen it go to Kate, if only because Kate was done as a straight (an unfortunate word choice
given that its composer/lyricist Cole Porter was Gay!) revival without any
rewrites or reconceptualizations to make it more “relevant” to today’s
audiences. Oklahoma! was done
with the original book intact but with an on-stage “audience” as well as the
real audience, but I liked the fact that the winner for Best Featured Actress
in a Musical was the Ado Annie in Oklahoma!, Ali Stroker. When the cast of the Oklahoma! revival was brought on for the song “I Cain’t Say
No,” a problem I have myself, Stroker was in a wheelchair and I assumed she was
using it onstage to create a character. When she won her award and came out to
accept it in her wheelchair, I realized she needs it in real life — and I was
delighted with the decision to cast a disabled woman as the town slut. (Needless
to say, Stroker’s acceptance speech contained a plea to producers to cast more
actors and personnel with disabilities as a part of the overall goal to make
theatre more inclusive.)
The Best Book of a Musical award went to Robert Horn
for Tootsie, a stage adaptation
of the 1982 movie in which struggling actor Dustin Hoffman suddenly finds
success when he dons drag and auditions for a female character part in a soap
opera. One Los Angeles Times
article said that the musical Tootsie was more “Jewish” than the film — which seemed strange considering
that the leading actor in the movie was Jewish and his part was played onstage
by non-Jew Santino Fontana (who won the Best Actor in a Musical award and said
in his speech that he was one of those people who lay awake in bed at age 2 or
thereabouts and already dreamed of stage stardom). All too many of the shows
being honored by the Tonys were rehashes of hit movies from long ago (Bryan
Cranston won for playing Peter Finch’s old role in a stage adaptation of Paddy
Chayevsky’s and Sidney Lumet’s film Network, and in his speech he warned of the dangers of
demagogues — ironic since he’d won the award for playing a demagogue!), and
frankly instead of just doing Tootsie the way it was on screen in 1982 I would have rather seen a remix of
the original plot in which the experience of “playing” a woman leads the
leading man to realize he’s always been Transgender and “really” a woman in his
inner being.
The one thing that really annoyed me about this year’s Tony Awards
is that, while they continued the traditional practice of having the actors
from the musical casts perform numbers from their shows, they did not include featured scenes from the nominated
non-musical plays. Instead, they simply had the playwrights come out and give
short speeches about their works — and for a play called Choir Boy, which got nominated in the “Play” rather than the
“Musical” category even though music is integral to it, they had the playwright
(Tarell Alvin McCraney, who also wrote the script for the Academy Award-winning
film Moonlight — also a tale
about a young Black man coming out as Gay) give a speech and then performed a
scene from the play. Choir Boy
seemed to me the most interesting of all the shows nominated and the one I’d
most like to see; it’s about a boarding school for young Black men that has a
music program that trains people to sing spirituals and gospel music as part of
the school’s choir — only the male lead is a closeted Gay man who tries to
negotiate the contradiction between the school’s idea of ethics (and the
religious tradition whose music he is being trained to sing) and his own inner
life. I give McCraney a lot of points for his speech, especially his use of
“Queer” as an inclusive term for our community instead of that preposterous
series of letters we got stuck with (one woman, announcing the winner of the
humanitarian award, praised the honoree’s work on behalf of the “LGBTQ+”
community — the sentiment is nice but the ugliness of the designation still
appalls me). Charles would have liked his speech less than I did because, while
the first time he said “often” he kept the “t” silent, the second time he
pronounced it.
Overall the 73rd annual Tony Awards was worth
watching — in terms of Queer inclusion I should also mention that one of the
nominated musicals was The Prom,
in which four over-the-hill actresses descend on a small town that has decided
to cancel the high-school prom altogether rather than follow a court order that
a Lesbian student be allowed to attend it with a female date (the other
nominees were Tootsie, Beetlejuice — another
rehash of a 1980’s movie with a leading actor considerably larger and less
entertaining than Michael Keaton — and The Cher Show, which made me groan if only because it threatens
the depressing prospect that Cher’s endless cycle of “retirements” and
“comebacks” will continue even after she’s dead, since they’ll just get other
people to “play” her — apparently Cher is played by three different people in
this show, reflecting her at different ages, and I wonder whether Sonny Bono
appears as a character or not), along with Ain’t Too Proud, a biomusical about the Temptations (though the
number that showcased it featured a James Brown-style soul screamer and I don’t
think anyone actually in the Temptations
ever sang like that). It was fun
watching the numbers and getting a feel for the current state of Broadway
theatre, at least the musical end of it, as well as watching a bunch of people
on TV who think inclusivity and cosmopolitanism are virtues while our country
is governed by people who think they’re vices!
