dr_whom

Sara Bareilles and Josh Groban were pretty good emcees. They had decent chemistry together, sang some good songs, and mostly stayed out of the way.
I really liked the opening number—in general, I really like whenever there's a number at the Tonys whose theme is just how delighted everyone is that they get to do theatre.
Andrew Garfield's acceptance speech set a tone for a lot of the speeches tonight, in dedicating his award to LGBTQ people who have "fought and died to protect... the right to live and love". Other speeches gave recognition to diversity, representation, and immigration. Overall a lot of these acceptance speeches led to a more somber awards show than usual—the recurring theme of these was "the world is in a bad way and we have to work to protect it."
Garfield's acceptance speech also seemed really long, but since his was the first I don't know if I'm comparing it fairly to the others. He had a lot to say, and it was valuable and a good speech, so maybe the producers just held off from cutting him off. (And maybe, earlier in the show, it's easier to be lax about time limits.)
I was very disappointed when I realized the joke about "if your acceptance speech runs long, the Angel from Angels in America will shoo you offstage" was a joke... though I am glad it meant that Beth Malone didn't have to stay in costume as the Angel the whole night.
The number from Mean Girls was... okay? It certainly didn't leave me feeling like there was any particular reason for a musical version of Mean Girls to exist, though.
A recurring annoying trend: revivals that have the authors' names added as if they're part of the titles. This year's offenders: Edward Albee's Three Tall Women, Rodgers & Hammerstein's Carousel, and Eugene O'Neill's The Iceman Cometh.
The pictures of the presenters doing theatre as children was a cute runner. Andrew Lloyd Webber looked kind of embarrassed by the picture of Josh Groban as a kid performing Cats in his backyard. The invitation for the TV audience to post their own #TonyDreams pictures, and then showing some of them on the bumpers into and out of the commercial breaks, was an interesting gimmick but I don't think it really worked.
I was underwhelmed by Lauren Ambrose's performance of "I Could Have Danced All Night". She seemed very stilted—which may have been intentional, since at that point in the play Eliza is just beginning to master standard pronunciation; but it didn't seem appropriate for the song and didn't come off as intentional, anyway.
Billy Joel is old.
Having recently watched a lot of Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, my main impression of Tituss Burgess's introduction of Best Featured Actress was "he sure does have a consistent stage persona".
The number from Spongebob was actually pretty good! And I approved of the way the show seems to have chosen to do its costumes—more abstract and suggestive than actually trying to make Gavin Lee look like a squid and Ethan Slater look like a sponge and so on. (And the extra feet on Gavin Lee's costume were just the right combination of weird and entertaining, and made his dance more interesting.) Spongebob also came up with a good answer to the conundrum of what to do when your lead performer isn't in the song you want your company to perform—they had him introduce the number in character with a goofy little song of his own.
I was so gratified that Best Book of a Musical was actually awarded during the broadcast instead of skipped over during commercials as it is most years—it's a really important award! But Best Score was still relegated to the commercials, which struck me as a really odd choice, since that strikes me as a more high-profile award than Best Book. Maybe they just didn't want to have to figure out what to do if the 27-or-so credited composers of Spongebob won and had to be squeezed into the broadcast time.
"Blow High, Blow Low" is an unexpected choice for the performance from Carousel—excuse me, Rodgers & Hammerstein's Carousel—because it's not one of the most well-known songs from the show, but I see why they picked it. They really showed everyone why they won their Best Choreograpy award,
The awarding of the Theatre Education award to the drama teacher from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School was a really touching moment.
Did they say Patti LuPone was in You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown in high school? That's very confusing, since I don't think the show even had its first professional production before LuPone was 18 years old.
I was not impressed by the performance from Frozen, especially "Let It Go"—which mainly seemed to be Caissie Levy singing the song on a bare stage front of a screen showing what looked like a simplified version of the animation from the movie. I dunno, maybe there's more complex practical effects in situ at the St. James Theatre, which they couldn't port over to Radio City? In any event, I was underwhelmed. Also, it appears that the Broadway version changes the melody and rhythm of the last line of the song, to make it end on a long high note that says "THIS IS THE END OF ACT ONE OF A BROADWAY MUSICAL!!!!" It certainly communicates that, but is waaaay worse than the original version of the song.
Chita Rivera and Andrew Lloyd Webber won lifetime achievement awards. It would have been nice to see their acceptance speeches. Instead, we got a weird medley of songs from some of their famous shows—mostly orchestral, but with Sara Bareilles and Josh Groban each singing like half a line here or there. It didn't really work.
John Tiffany using his acceptance speech to get the audience to sing Happy Birthday to his boyfriend was a little self-indulgent, but adorable.
Why are there three people playing Donna Summer in the Donna Summer musical? When they first mentioned it I assumed it was, like, a kid, a teenager, and an adult, playing Donna at different ages, like the way Fun Home works, but that didn't seem to be what they were going for, so like... what?
The Best Play nominees were really shortchanged this year. Usually there's at least a brief segment where all the nominees are introduced, with little synopses of what they're about or something; last year was great, where the authors of the nominated plays were invited to say a few words about what they'd written. This year had nothing at all.
Also, why did the presenters for Best Play begin by talking about awards for school musicals? At least the presenters of the non-musical play award should be able to talk about the medium of non-musical drama.
The Best Play acceptance speeches for Harry Potter and the Cursed Child ended weirdly, though. The band began playing "(You Make Me Feel Like) a Natural Woman", presumably to cut off the speeches running overtime and play on the next presenter, Melissa Benoist. But Benoist took a long time to enter, so there was just the crew of Harry Potter standing there awkwardly on stage for quite some time, not sure if they were supposed to have exited already, with nothing else happening.
I love Once On This Island, and the production looks amazing. I was a little disappointed that "Mama Will Provide" was the song they performed, since that was the song that was performed the last time Once On This Island was up for a Tony, in 1991; but it was a great performance so I got over my disappointment pretty quick. Did they have a whole mini-audience up on stage with them surrounding their performance on the Radio City stage, in order to emulate the show's in-the-round production? Who got to do that?
I'm very glad Once On This Island won Best Revival. The production team that accepted the award seemed... awfully white, though.
I spent most of Bruce Springsteen's performance being like, is he going to sing a song, or is he just reminiscing?
I got the sense that The Band's Visit was an underdog nominee, though as the evening wore on and it won basically everything it was nominated for it became pretty clear that it was going to win Best Musical too. I certainly found Katrina Lenk's performance of "Omar Sharif" the most captivating performance of the night. I wonder if it received a boost from a backlash on the part the voters against mega-franchises like Spongebob and Disney—though Harry Potter still won Best Play, so it couldn't have been that much of a backlash. Anyway, The Band's Visit is definitely the show this year that I came away from the Tonys most interested in seeing.
Well, that and the revival of Once On This Island.