A scene from Fela!, starring Sahr Ngaujah.
By Hap Erstein
This season’s Tony Award nominations were announced this morning. So let the gripes and snipes begin, as well as the closing notices for the snubbed shows.
No one – except the consistently upbeat Tonys, a marketing cheerleader for New York’s commercial theater – is going to try and claim that this was a strong season on Broadway. But at least there were enough shows so that some worthy candidates did not make the nominations list. This was the case even if the committee had to reach back to some long-closed productions, to be able to leave off some fairly prominent, likely shoo-ins.
Unexpectedly, the new musical with the most nominations (11) was Fela!, the high-energy, political biography of Fela Anikulapo Kuti, the Nigerian composer-nightclub owner-rabble rouser. By most predictions, the front-runner was supposed to be American Idiot, the staged rock concert based on a pre-existing Green Day album, which got a paltry three nominations, including best musical. Notably snubbed was director Michael Mayer and performer John Gallagher, Jr., probably because they were both said to be channeling their work from the earlier youth-rock phenomenon, Spring Awakening.
The other two best musical nominees were Memphis and Million Dollar Quartet, neither of which was well-received critically. They elbowed out the final opening of the season, Sherie Rene Scott’s Everyday Rapture, which the New York Times at least considered a close second to the Second Coming. Also coming up short was the underappreciated Sondheim on Sondheim and the generally reviled The Addams Family, which continues to do sell-out business despite its rotten reviews.
Among revivals of musicals, a cutdown, glitz-challenged British production of La Cage aux Folles walked off with 11 nominations, including nods for both of its leading men, Douglas Hodge and Kelsey Grammer. It looks like the prohibitive favorite to win, even though a far lesser La Cage revival was victorious in this category only five years ago, in a woefully slow season for revivals.
The only other musical revival nominee still running is A Little Night Music, said to be a pale imitation of the Tony-winning original, despite the star power of Catherine Zeta-Jones and Angela Lansbury, both of whom were nominated Tuesday. Also in the running, in theory, will be Finian’s Rainbow and an admired condensed version of Ragtime, which failed to find much of an audience. Both place-holders beat out the recently opened, underwhelming revival of Promises, Promises, even though the nominating committee is urged to favor shows that are still running.
The same snubbing could be seen in the best play category, which includes Red and Next Fall, both generally acclaimed and still running, plus two long-closed productions – In the Next Room (or “the vibrator play”) and Time Stands Still. Their nominations are more startling, since their edge out three worthy plays that are open – Enron, A Behanding in Spokane and Race.
Enron, which arrived from London with “snob hit” written all over it, was not well-reviewed and had to settle for one performance nomination (Stephen Kunken as accounting whiz Andy Fastow), two in design categories and, strangest of all, a nomination for Adam Cork’s musical score.
On rare occasions, non-musicals have made it into the score category, but this year it happened twice. Branford Marsalis got nominated for his score to August Wilson’s Fences. In this case, there were no snubs involved, since only two new musicals had original scores, an eligibility requirement – not that anyone can muster much enthusiasm for the songs in The Addams Family or Memphis.
Probably the most eyebrow-raising snub was to Nathan Lane, who works very hard lugging The Addams Family on his back eight times a week. The two-time Tony winner and occasional host of the Tonys can take that night off now. Chances are he was beaten out by Grammer, whose performance in La Cage is overshadowed by his flashier co-star Hodge.
The Tonys seem to like rewarding TV and movie stars who come to Broadway. Among the bold-face names on this year’s Tony nominations list are: Jude Law (Hamlet), Liev Schreiber and Scarlett Johansson (A View From the Bridge), Christopher Walken (A Behanding in Spokane), Alfred Molina (Red), Valerie Harper (Looped), Linda Lavin (Collected Stories), Laura Linney (Time Stands Still), Catherine Zeta-Jones and Angela Lansbury (A Little Night Music) and David Alan Grier (Race).
In local angles, Harper’s Looped played the now-shuttered Cuillo Centre on its way to Broadway and Marcia Milgrom Dodge, nominated director of Ragtime, has twice staged works at the Maltz Jupiter Theatre, most recently Anything Goes.
The Tony Awards will be broadcast on CBS on Sunday, June 13.