Forbidden Broadway, that delicious satirical revue about the commercial New York theater, used to do a number declaring Thoroughly Modern Millie as “the worst best musical ever.”
But that was before Once won the top Tony Award on Sunday night. And seven other Tonys, too.
Mind-boggling. OK, chalk my derision up to sour grapes, since I did terribly at predicting the winners of this year’s ceremony. But I remain immune to the charms of Once and nothing about the showcase it got on the Tonys telecast leads me to reconsider my opinion.
That said, it was not a bad three hours of TV, mainly because of emcee Neil Patrick Harris, who finessed his way through his opening number, What If Life Were Like Theater (Life Wouldn’t Suck So Much).
He then won us over completely with a clever nod to Spider-Man: Turn off the Dark ― which was otherwise ignored in the awards department. Harris was suspended upside-down on a wire, where he remained ― apparently stuck ― throughout the next segment, an obligatory salute to the American Theatre Wing that no one was going to listen to anyway.
He also deftly delivered a tongue-twisty medley of songs from the past 66 years of musicals. And with the show running long, but presumably given dispensation to run over past the 11 o’clock hour, Harris closed the show with another piece of specialty material, a recap song called But There’s No Time.
Some fast, funny writer was obviously backstage scribbling lyrics up to the final minutes of the broadcast, and the unflappable Harris delivered them with ease. (Here’s hoping his sitcom gets canceled soon and he comes back to Broadway in a new show.)
There were plenty of surprises among the awards recipients (Translation: A lot of my predictions were wrong.), but the biggest surprise was probably Porgy and Bess winning for best musical revival. I was delighted, having loved the production, but it had been shrouded in controversy and negative reaction since its inception. As much as I am taken aback by the wins of Once, the victory of Porgy and Bess ― yeah, I know the full title is The Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess, but I cannot bring myself to use the needless possessive ― restores my faith in Tony voters.
The broadcast had the usual tugs-of-war, between musicals and plays and between being an awards program and being an entertainment show. Musicals got most of the air time, as usual, though you could see the effort to promote the season’s plays, not always successfully.
Traditionally, only the nominees for best musical and best musical revival had the opportunity to perform a number or medley on the telecast. That policy got junked in favor of air time for such also-rans as Ghost: The Musical and Godspell, both of which looked terrible. To clear time for these extra musical numbers, nearly half of the awards were presented before the Tonys show was aired. Obviously this is a play for ratings, but it seems unlikely to work and it demotes all the design category winners to “not-ready-for-prime-time” second-class citizens.
Then there was the much-promoted first-time-ever live broadcast ― or so it was touted ― of a show from a cruse ship at sea. A chunk of time was taken up with an excerpt from a production of Hairspray on Royal Caribbean Lines’ Oasis of the Seas. And what a coincidence: Royal Caribbean was one of the telecast’s sponsors.
CBS, which controls a lot of the Tony show’s content, continues to favor television and film stars as award presenters. And this year, a new twist was featuring performers who have never been on Broadway, but have appeared in movie musicals of Broadway shows (Amanda Seyfried of Mamma Mia! and the upcoming Les Miserables, James Marsden of Hairspray).
Why not just celebrate the theater with folks from the theater, and accept that the ratings will be small? Or put the show on public television again, a more natural fit for it, where ratings are less important and the show could breathe a little?
Oh well, thanks for listening to my rant. On balance, it was a better Tonys show than the Broadway season deserved. Soon the ratings will be announced, a few CBS executives will jump headlong out of windows, and few changes will be made for the 2013 Tony Awards show.
But maybe the stage productions next season will be a bit better.