75th Annual Tony Awards (White Cherry Productions,American Theatre Wing, CBS-TV, aired June 12, 2022)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Yesterday at 5 p.m. I watched the 2022 Tony Awards, the 75th annual event and the first one since 2019 that reflected a fully functioning Broadway free, at least at the moment, from pandemic restrictions. The awards show went on for three hours and four minutes – quickly enough that I was able to watch the Lifetime movie that aired immediately after it – and it featured some electrifying performances, including three numbers by the host, Ariana DeBose. She’s an African-American woman with long straight hair that she’s given blonde highlights without going completely Beyoncé on us, and she was dressed in a spangled white outfit of matching shirt and tights that showed off her excellent athletic dancer’s body. DeBose belted out three numbers, an opening song showcasing Tony award winners and nominees from years past, a closing song showcasing this year’s nominees, and in between a song called “In the Audience” that paid tribute to the people who attend Broadway shows and have resumed doing that in droves following the lifting of the pandemic restrictions.

The shut-down of Broadway theatres due to COVID-19 was the subject of some rather mordant jokes, including one from an actor who stated that he had been in both the fourth and fifth preview performance of his show – 17 months apart. I had already seen a PBS special on the revival of Stephen Sondheim’s 1970 musical Company by British director Marianne Elliott, who had the bright idea of changing the show’s lead character, Bobby/Bobbie, from a man to a woman, and also changing the marriage-sho Amy into Jamie, a Gay man who is debating whether to marry his partner Paul. Interestingly, I had assumed from the PBS special that the actors playing Paul and Jamie were a Gay couple in real life – but I was disabused of that notion early on when the Paul, Matt Doyle, winning the award for Best Performance by a Featured Actor in a Musical, thanked both his co-star for playing his husband on stage and then his reai husband. Company also won for Best Revival of a Musical and Best Director of a Musical for Marianne Elliott, as well as a predictable third Tony for the great Patti LuPonefor Best Featured Actress in a Musical.

The winner for Best Musical was something of a surprise – A Strange Loop, written by a heavy-set Black Queer writer named Michael R. Jackson and dealing with a heavy-set Black Queer writer working on a play about a heavy-set Black Queer writer working on a play. Since one of the shows it beat for the Best Musical award was M.J., a bio-musical about the late pop star, I couldn’t help but joke that Michael Jackson had beaten Michael Jackson. At least Myles Frost, who plays the “other” Michael Jackson in M.J., won the award for Best Actor in a Leading Role in a Musical (two other acctors of varioius ages play the younger Michael Jackson) and established that he deserved it by performing an uncanny reproduction of the original Michael Jackson video of “Smooth Criminal.” (It was an intriguing choice for a showcase because it’s one of the real M. J.’s most spectacular numbers even though it isn’t at the iconic level of “Beat It” or “Billie Jean.”)

Of course the most interesting parts of the Tony Awards are the performances of excerpts from the nominated musicals, things you’re unlikely to see unless you live in New York or catch the road companies of the big shows in the major cities, and to my mind by far the most powerful song rendition last night was Joaquina Kalukango’s breathtaking singing , with Ben Powerof “Let It Burn” from the musical Paradise Square. It’s set in 1863, at the height of the Civil War, and it tells an apparently true story of a dance hall that was open to both Black and white (mostly Irish) patrons who freely mixed racially, including having affairs with each other. When a gang of Irish thugs burned the place down, the survivors rallied and kept their pioneering experiment in breaking racial barriers going as long as they could. Though the song’s debt to “Let It Go” from the Walt Disney musical Frozen (also the subject of a stage adaptation that was a major Broadway hit and is now on tour) is pretty obvious, both the song itself and Kalukango’s powerful delivery of it were quite intense and moving – so much so that it’s easy to see why Kalukango won Best Lead Actress in a Musical.

The other most moving performance of a song last night was “Where I Go” from the original cast of Spring Awakening reunited for the show’s 15th anniversary; it’s based on an 1891 play by Frank Wedekind, a German playwright (I’ve often wondered why his first name was spelled “Frank” instead of “Franz” and it turns out from his Wikipedia page that his parents actually named him Benjamin Franklin Wedekind) called Frühlings Erwache (the English title is a literal translation of the German., except the German literally means Spring's Awakening, with the possessive) about adolescent rebels exploring their sexuality in ways their parents would not approve. One can see why American producers would think this would be a viable theme for a musical set today! Another especially moving performance was Billy Porter in drag singing "On the Street Where You Live" as part of the :In Memoriam" segment honoring the Broadway people who died in 2021, though he changed the last word of the title from this Lerner and Loewe classic from My Fair Lady to "On the Street Where You Lived" to express the memorial aspect of the segment.

As usual with the Tony Awards, the musician awards and perfrormances tended to outshine the ones for nonmusical productions, though the Best Play award went to something called The Lehman Trilogy by Italian playwright Stefano Massini, with Ben Power credited with the English-language “adaptation.” (According to Wikipedia, the play had its world premiere in French before it was ever staged in Massini’s Italian original.) It won for Best Play, Best Lead Actor in a Play for Simon Russell Beale, and Best Director of a Play for Sam Mendes – who seemed to have a major career as a filmmaker ahead of him when he directed the Best Picture Academy Award winner American Beauty, only his career was collateral damage from the “unpersonning” of that film’s star, Kevin Spacey, for alleged coming on sexually to 17-year-old boys. (Given that Spacey’s role in American Beauty is as a man who gets murdered over his unrequited crush on a teenage girl, that seems a bit like overkill.) The winner for Best Revival of a Play was Take Me Out, a 2003 play that not surprisingly given its title was about both baseball and homosexuality. It was inspired by the coming-out of Glenn Burke, who announced he was Gay after he retired from professional baseball after an eight-year career, and playwright Richard Greenberg imagined what it would be like if a professional athlete came out during his career.

Not surprisingly given the play’s subject matter, when Jesse Tyler Ferguson won Best Performance by a Featured Actor in a Play, he thanked his husband. In fact, the 75th annual Tony Awards began with a shout-out to diversity in general and gender-based diversity in particular, hailing the nominations of openly Transgender and non-binary performers (though given that the acting awards were still sex-segregated into “actor” and “actress,” I could see where this might cause problems down the road, especially if a gender non-binary person gets cast in a gender non-binary role and is so good the Tony voters want to give them an award). Given the long history of the theatre in general and Broadway in particular as a safe haven for Queer people – though the whole stereotype of Broadway as a home for Queer people in general and Gay men in particular comes from Lee Shubert, co-founder of the Shubert Organization (which still exists and largely controls Broadway theatres), who hired only Gays for the male cast and crew members of his plays because he didn’t want to have to compete with younger,hunkier straight guys for the affections of the chorus girls – it’s not surprising that the Tonys were well in front of other awards shows in acknowledging Queer sexuality, going as far back as 1983 when Harvey Fierstein’s openly Queer Torch Song Trilogy won Best Play and at least one of the producers, a man, thanked “my partner, Lawrence Lane.”