This Sunday evening, when the American Theatre Wing hits the airwaves with the 66th annual Tony Awards show ― Broadway’s prime national marketing tool ― it will put on its bravest face and claim that the commercial theater is better than ever.
In fact, by most subjective opinions ― including mine ― this was the worst season for new musicals in decades.
Even the Tonys’ nominating committee, which is specifically charged with pasting a smile on the past 12 months on Broadway, had to concede the poverty of writing in musicals these days. To fill the category for best score, it resorted to naming two non-musicals with incidental music ― Peter and the Starcatcher and One Man, Two Guvnors. That meant a few new musicals got snubbed ― like Leap of Faith, Ghost: The Musical and Lysistrata Jones ― but apparently the committee felt that recognizing any of them would have been even more embarrassing.
Then there is the musical that began the season, and set the tone of wrongheadedness. It opened on June 14, 2011, after a record-breaking 192 performances, with a record cost estimated at $80 million. Records are not officially kept for personal injuries or lawsuits filed, but Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark surely set new milestones in those categories as well.
The high-flying, special effects-heavy show probably also now holds the record for reviewer disdain, for few new musicals have elicited such vitriol. But theatergoers kept coming, many of them new to Broadway, so Spider-Man regularly posted weekly million-dollar box office grosses.
Basing musicals on recent, popular movies is nothing new, but the habit accelerated this season, with shows of unswerving fidelity to their celluloid sources. These include two likely commercial successes, Newsies and Once, a probable money-loser in Ghost: The Musical and such fast flops as Leap of Faith and Bonnie and Clyde.
Newsies, a Disney production about a turn-of-the-last-century newsboy strike, stems from a 1992 live-action movie musical that flopped at the box office, but became a cult favorite. After recent dismal efforts on Broadway (Tarzan, Little Mermaid), Disney was more cautious with its marketing for Newsies, calling it a “limited engagement” that would only run through Aug. 19. But with strong business and likely Tony Awards coming its way, the Mouse Factory relented and switched to an open-ended run, probably for a long time to come.
Its only serious competition for the top Tony is the tiny Once, about a romance between an Irish songwriter wannabe and a Czech waif, based on a 2007 art film that won an Oscar for its love song, Falling Slowly. The match-up is very David-versus-Goliath, art-versus-commerce, not unlike the race eight years ago when Avenue Q eked out a win over Wicked. If nothing else, it should add a little suspense to the Tonys telecast.
Musicals generate most of the business on Broadway, but the story this season was the number of good, solid non-musicals that arrived and drew audiences, long after plays had been declared dead in the commercial theater because of rising costs and sinking audience interest.
Where would the American theater be without dysfunctional family dramas, anyway? There is life in the genre yet, as the star-fueled Other Desert Cities has proved, still going strong after opening off-Broadway almost a year and a half ago. It later moved to Broadway, where it was joined by the racial satire Clybourne Park, 2011’s Pulitzer Prize winner, which has settled in for a commercial run. So have the Peter Pan prequel Peter and the Starcatcher and the adult sexual tug-of-war, Venus in Fur.
Add The Lyons and The Columnist to the mix and it was the best year for plays on Broadway in a long time, even though these last two seem to be hanging on, hoping for a Tony win to keep running.
In revivals of a play, the field is led by Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, a perennial Tony winner one should never bet against. It won in 1949 when it premiered, and again for best revival in 1984 (with Dustin Hoffman as Willy Loman) and 1999 (with Brian Dennehy). This season, it is the odds-on favorite to win again for Mike Nichols’ reproduction, starring Philip Seymour Hoffman. The only other nominated revival still running is Gore Vidal’s drama of political intrigue, The Best Man, which is proving to be surprisingly relevant in today’s campaign climate.
For musical revivals, it is also a two-show race, between the Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess and Stephen Sondheim’s Follies, with two Andrew Lloyd Webber shows ― Evita and Jesus Christ Superstar ― as place holders.
The late George and Ira Gershwin have had a good season, with the admirable, though controversial return to Broadway of their 1935 folk opera masterwork and a “new” jukebox musical of their pop standards, Nice Work If You Can Get It. The Porgy and Bess has been fiddled with, given new, more compact arrangements, some script revisions including a more upbeat conclusion that was fortunately jettisoned in Boston and a more intimate, less epic production. Purists are incensed by it, but the leading performances by Audra MacDonald and Norm Lewis, plus the transcendent Gershwin score, put this year’s new musicals to shame.
Still, the flap over this Porgy and Bess, a firestorm fueled by a letter by Sondheim to the New York Times, will probably tip the revival Tony to Follies. Come to think of it, if Spider-Man is not the symbol of this so-so season, maybe follies are.
TOMORROW: An overview of the Broadway season: What to see, what not to see.