76th Annual Tony Awards (American Theatre Wing, White Cherry Entertainment, CBS-TV, aired June 11, 2023)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Sunday, June 11) I watched the 76th annual Tony Awards, a fascinating spectacle and not like other awards shows because, while it’s relatively easy to see a movie, watch a TV show or hear a record, it’s considerably more complicated to go to a stage show, especially the big Broadway productions that get nominated for Tony Awards. Either you actually have to travel to New York and somehow score a ticket to a big hit, or you have to wait until the producers start sending out road companies, usually with inferior casts. So for a lot of people the Tony Awards telecast is the only chance to see numbers from Broadway musicals with their original performers and at least a simulacrum of their original staging. According to Rachel Sherman’s New York Times article (https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/11/theater/tony-award-winners.html), though her byline says she merely “compiled” instead of actually writing it, “This year’s awards ceremony, which was nearly called off amid the Writers’ Guild of America strike, was presented without a script in an agreement reached with the union. (When the screenwriters’ strike last month threatened the broadcast, playwrights banded together to save the telecast.) The ceremony also went without a custom-made opening number and writers were encouraged to pre-record their acceptance speeches,” though I’m not clear just how many did that. Hosted by actor Ariana DeBose, the show began with a spectacular dance sequence consisting of jazz dancers performing to a stunning medley of songs, opening with Billy Strayhorn’s “Take the ‘A’ Train” and segueing into Louis Prima’s “Sing, Sing, Sing,” Billy Joel’s “New York State of Mind,” the Barry Mann-Cynthia Weil-Jerry Leiber-Mike Stoller “On Broadway” (incidentally Cynthia Weil’s death was noted later as part of the show’s “In Memoriam” segment) and a Latin number I didn’t recognize before a reprise of Strayhorn’s jazz classic.

The big winners were Kimberly Akimbo for Best Musical and Tom Stoppard’s Leopoldstadt for Best Play. Leopoldstadt – the title is a reference to the Jewish quarter of Vienna – takes place in Vienna between 1899 and 1955, and according to its official online synopsis it deals with a well-to-do Viennese Jewish family who “face the grief of losing a son and nephew in the First World War, navigating the family business through the depression and the rise of Bolshevism, and the onslaught of Nazi invasion.” From what we saw of it, Leopoldstadt appears to be about people who, because of their wealth and influence, think they’ve insulated themselves from the horrors of anti-Jewish prejudice only to find that they haven’t. Tom Stoppard mentioned in his acceptance speech that he won his first Tony Award for Best Play in 1968 for Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead – his bold re-telling of the events of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet through the eyes of its minor characters (though years later I saw Shakespeare’s own Troilus and Cressida and realized Shakespeare had done the same thing to Homer!) – though he didn’t mention that his award for Leopoldstadt is actually his fifth Tony Award for Best Play: the three intervening ones are Travesties (1976), The Real Thing (1984), and The Coast of Utopia (2007). The Best Musical winner, Kimberly Akimbo, is if anything even more of a downer; it was originally a non-musical play by David Lindsay-Abaire premiered in 2001 and 20 years later Lindsay-Abaire worked with composer Jeanine Tesori to turn it into a musical. The plot deals with Kimberly Levaco, a teenage girl afflicted with a (real) disease called “progeria,” which means she ages at about four or five times the normal rate, so she will look like an old woman even when she’s still in her teens, and will almost certainly die shortly after. The number the Kimberly Akimbo cast presented last night was called “Anagram,” in which Kimberly (Victoria Clark) and her sort-of boyfriend Seth Weetis (Justin Cooley) get to know each other by playing anagrams, including one Seth makes up from Kimberly’s name called “Cleverly Akimbo.”

One thing I’ve noticed about awards shows in general is that they generally make clear just what side of America’s cultural divide its creative artists are on – the progressive side that’s perfectly O.K. with people of color, women having control over their own bodies, Queer people and even Trans and non-binary people. The Tony Awards were well ahead of the other big awards shows on this one – dating back to 1984, when Harvey Fierstein’s Gay-themed Torch Song Trilogy swept the Tonys and one of the male members of the producing team thanked “my partner, Lawrence Lane.” As I’ve noted before in these pages, the association of Broadway with Queer people in general and Gay men in particular dates back to the 1920’s, when Lee Shubert, co-owner with his brother Sam of most of Broadway’s biggest theatres, deliberately made it his policy to hire only Gay men both to play the male roles in his shows and to work on the crews because he didn’t want younger, hunkier straight guys around to compete with him for the affections of the women in his casts. The inclusiveness went so far this year that both the Lead Actor in a Musical and the Featured Actor in a Musical awards went to “out” non-binary Trans people, J. Harrison Ghee and Alex Newell, respectively. Given the obsession of today’s radical Right with Transwomen allegedly having an unfair advantage competing in sporting events with women-born women (that’s actually not true because the hormones given as part of gender transition tend to reduce muscle mass to more like that of genetic females), it struck me as ironic that Transwomen had shut out males in both the “musical actor” categories. It also calls into question why awards shows still sex-segregate the acting categories when they don’t do that for anybody else. At least the show J. Harrison Ghee won for was Some Like It Hot, a musical adaptation of Billy Wilder’s classic 1959 film about two musicians who witness the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre in 1929 and disguise themselves as women to join an all-girl band, in which Ghee played the part Tony Curtis played in the film, and while I’m not sure how Wilder would have felt about a genuinely Trans person being in a stage adaptation of his film, the film’s star, Marilyn Monroe, probably would have loved the idea. After she finished Some Like It Hot Monroe took a vacation to San Francisco with some friends and specifically wanted to see the famous drag show at Finocchio’s bar, where she went backstage to speak to the drag queen who played her in the show and gave her some pointers on how to do Marilyn’s famous walk better.

Kimberly Akimbo won both the Lead Actress and Featured Actress in a Musical categories; the Lead Actress award went to Victoria Clark and the Featured Actress went to Bonnie Milligan, a “woman of size” who played Kimberly's teacher and whose role includes a bizarre joke about her breast catching fire. The Best Leading Actress in a Play award went to Jodie Comer for Prima Facie, a one-person show in which she plays Tessa, a woman lawyer who specializes in defending men accused of sexual assault whose point of view dramatically changes when she’s sexually assaulted herself. The Best Leading Actor in a Play was Sean Hayes for Good Night, Oscar, in which he played a real-life person: Oscar Levant, a great classical pianist who also became a celebrity for his witty asides on radio shows and in films, and struggled all his life with depression and other mental illnesses. Hayes thanked his husband but then pretended to forget his name – “Scottie, or something like that” – and given that my own husband Charles had come home from work by then, I inevitably joked, “Hi, Carl.” As usual with the Tony Awards, the high points were the performances of numbers from the nominated shows, including Leona Courtney’s absolutely searing performance of the song “Eye of the Tiger,” written in 1982 by the rock band Survivor for the film Rocky III and shoehorned into a new musical called & Juliet, which re-imagines Romeo and Juliet and asks the question, “What would have happened if Juliet hadn’t killed herself?” (Actually it’s not a new idea: when Leonard Bernstein, Stephen Sondheim and Arthur Laurents created West Side Story in 1957, transposing the plot of Romeo and Juliet to rival street gangs in New York City, they had Maria, Juliet’s equivalent, live at the end.)

Among the nominees for Best Revival of a Musical were two Stephen Sondheim shows, Sweeney Todd and Into the Woods, and Sweeney Todd was represented by the opening “Ballad of Sweeney Todd” (regrettably omitted by Tim Burton in his film version) while Into the Woods was represented by a duet, “You’ve Changed/It Takes Two,” by Sara Bareilles and Brian D’Arcy James. But both these shows lost the Best Revival of a Musical award to Parade, about the real-life lynching of Leo Frank, a white Jewish man who was convicted of the murder of 13-year-old Mary Phagan in 1913 and murdered by a mob who kidnapped him from prison and lynched him after the governor of Georgia commuted his sentence from execution to life imprisonment. Given how the real story turned out, it was a bit ironic that the show was represented on the Tony Awards by “It Is Not Over Yet,” a song in which Leo Frank thanks his wife for having kept working on his case and unearthed the evidence he hopes will lead to his exoneration. Next to Leona Courtney’s impeccable performance of “Eye of the Tiger,” the most moving song of the night was Jacquina Kalakugo’s singing “Wishing You Were Somehow Here Again” from the longest-running Broadway musical of all time, Andrew Lloyd Webber’s The Phantom of the Opera, which finally closed this year after a 35-year run, and which was used to pay tribute both to the show itself and to accompany the “In Memoriam” segment listing artists, producers and crew members who had died in 2022-2023. I was also quite impressed with Lea Michele’s rendition of “Don’t Rain on My Parade” from the current revival of Funny Girl, especially given how she has the long shadows of both Fanny Brice and Barbra Streisand looming over her. Like most awards shows, this year’s Tony Awards was kind of a lumbering beast, but it certainly paid tribute to the continued vitality of live theatre as an art form!