Highlights of the Tony Awards

[dr_whom]

The 2012 Tony Awards were last night! Here's some comments on the show and what I thought were some of its highlights:

• Neil Patrick Harris's opening and closing numbers were a lot of fun, as usual. Also, he introduced the Best Score award presentation by singing a medley of excerpts from past Best Score–winning shows, which was pretty hilarious.


• Speaking of Best Score, this was apparently a weak year for musicals with original scores—of the four shows nominated for Best Score, only two were even musicals, and the show that won, Newsies, was only half-original (since half of the score was written for the movie). I kind of wanted one of the non-musicals to win Best Score, actually. Newsies is Alan Menken's first Tony, but it's far from his best Broadway score.


• They usually don't have any performances at the Tonys from non-musical plays, but three of them appeared this year. I hope they'll do that again in future years: half of the awards are for non-musical plays, after all, and I feel like the viewing audience rarely gets a good idea of what any of them are like. Of course, the three plays they had performances from were the two nominated for Best Score and a play about Judy Garland, but they weren't all musical performances: the performance from One Man, Two Guvnors was a great slapstick monologue by James Corden.


• The highlights among the performances from musicals included Danny Burstein doing "Buddy's Blues" from Follies; Audra McDonald in the Porgy & Bess medley; and a song from Once. While watching that video of the song from Once just keep your eye on Cristin Milioti: she doesn't speak or sing (or even play an instrument) during the entire song, but her performance totally owns the scene.


• Acceptance-speech highlights include Jordan Roth's meditation on theatre in his acceptance speech for Clybourne Park and Mike Nichols's anecdote about a pie-eating competition in his acceptance for Death of a Salesman. (By the way, if any of you didn't get the joke about Mike Nichols "earning his dime" in Neil Patrick Harris's closing song, do yourself a favor and watch this skit.) James Corden's acceptance speech included a salutation to his girlfriend, about whom he said "She made me say 'us' instead of 'I' and 'we' instead of 'me'," which is touching but seems to have some case issues.


• Some records: Audra McDonald won her fifth acting Tony last night, tying Julie Harris and Angela Lansbury for the record; Death of a Salesman won a fourth best-production Tony (Best Play, 1949; Best Revival, 1984, 1999, 2012), breaking the record it had previously shared with La Cage aux Folles.


• Leap of Faith seemed like a bit of an afterthought, didn't it? How often is something nominated for Best Musical and absolutely nothing else?

Peter and the Starcatcher is the play that this awards show left me most wanting to see.

Comments

[tiamat360.livejournal.com]

Dude. Thank you for this review, it was awesome. We have no TV (besides what we can get on the internet) but now I kind of want to find a way to watch the Tonys live next year.

Audra McDonald is amazing. I was watching the new(er) movie version of Annie to prep for the show, and they had a black woman playing Grace! And I was all, hey, that's a cool idea. And then she started singing, and I was like, hot damn that woman can sing! And then I looked at the credits and realized it was Audra McDonald. Welp, I'm dumb, that's cool.

I rather like the song from Once. It kinda hits my folk-rock sweet spot. Perhaps I'll have to check out the rest of the show!

[dr_whom]

That version of Annie has a pretty great cast—Alan Cumming, Kristin Chenoweth, Kathy Bates...

[http://users.livejournal.com/-mycroft-holmes/]

Oh, I'm glad they included excerpts from non-musicals. That's been annoying me for years, because they performed excerpts from all the nominated straight plays in one of the first Tony broadcasts I remember watching (I'm not sure what year it was, but there was a scene from Proof, and Brian Stokes Mitchell did an excerpt from King Hedley II), and ever since then I've been frustrated by the absence of straight plays from the performances. They usually read short summaries of the nominees, but that doesn't do much to convey the substance or tone. It doesn't help that the straight plays have such short runs-- usually, by the time I hear about ones that sound really interesting, they've already closed or are about to. Actually, now that I think about it, that must be one of the reasons it's difficult to get excerpts performed on the Tonys: most of the nominees have long since closed by the time they hold the ceremony.