dr_whom

My TV still can't receive the station that broadcasts the Tony Awards in the Toronto area, so I ended up tagging along to watch the Tonys at, like, a friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend's birthday party at a bar downtown. It wasn't great conditions for watching the awards show—the pop music playing in the bar proper kept playing on the speakers of the room we were in, and sometimes overpowered the Tonys show, and in a crowded room even in which most people were trying to watch the show the miscellaneous background chattering sometimes made it hard to follow what was going on as well. So I have the impression that the sound mixing for the show was really poor, but that might just be the interaction between the sound mixing of the show and the environment in which I was watching it.

Some miscellaneous thoughts:

Alan Cumming and Kristin Chenoweth were pretty terrible as hosts. Their jokes weren't funny (and they had basically one joke each, "I have sex with everyone" and "I'm an egotistical diva" respectively), their chemistry with each other was awkward, and the musical numbers they performed as hosts were pretty boring.

Helen Mirren, winning a Tony for playing Queen Elizabeth II: "Your Majesty, you did it again."

Starting the show with Best Leading Actress in a Play, but only coming back to the other lead-acting awards two hours later toward the end of the show, seemed like an odd order. I guess they wanted to lead off with Helen Mirren's star power to get the show off on the right foot? This brings me back to a question I've wondered about before: do the people who choose the order for the awards know who's winning?

Paule Constable was nominated for two Tonys in the same category! (Lighting design, for her work on both The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time and Wolf Hall.) I didn't know you could do that! Would they do that with a higher-profile award? Could the same actor be nominated for Best Actor twice if they happened to be in two shows in the same season?

Tommy Tune is super tall, you guys.

I'm sure John Rando is a great director, but his name really sounds like they just pulled some guy off the street. "Who's directing On the Town?" "I dunno, some John Rando I guess."

Comments I make every year: I really wish they could show clips of longer than a couple of seconds from the Best Play nominees. And I really don't understand how they can relegate the Best Book and Best Score awards to the commercial breaks. For people who can't get to New York to see the Broadway productions of these musicals, in a sense Best Book and Best Score are the most important awards, since the book and score of these shows is what they'll be engaging with once regional and community theatres start to perform these shows in a few years. And if Best Score had been during the commercials in 2008, we wouldn't have seen Lin-Manuel Miranda's acceptance speech for In the Heights that year, and that would have been a crying shame.

Speaking of the Tony for best score, go Jeanine Tesori! Fun Home is certainly the one of these musicals that I came away from this show most wanting to see. 11-year-old Sydney Lucas's spectacularly nuanced and affecting performance of "Ring of Keys" was the highlight of the show for me.

Way too many of the musicals performed medleys instead of a full number from beginning to end. I understand why they do that—they want to show off multiple members of the cast and the range of musical styles the show encompasses—but it means they don't perform anything long enough to get really interested or invested in it, and the result is kind of underwhelming. I love On the Twentieth Century, and I saw the production so I know how good it is, but their performance of, what, half a verse from "I've Got it All" and then one chorus of "Babbette" and so on didn't really sell the show very well.

An American in Paris looks amazing; I understand why it won the set design, lighting, and choreography awards!

Best name of a nominee: director Moritz von Stuelpnagel. (Also, his play, Hand to God, looks at least very weird and interesting.)

Some of the people at the party I was at knew Ruthie Ann Miles, so there was a lot of rejoicing when she won her Tony. In the okayish community theatre production of The King and I I saw last fall, Lady Thiang was by far the best actor, and as a result of that performance that I saw I've come to have a much deeper interpretation of this really interesting character, so I'm glad that the current Broadway production has a great actor in the role now.

The Visit looks super-weird. That video doesn't show you the backup dancers in creepy mime makeup. But you could tell as soon as the music started that it was Kander and Ebb.

In the recent tradition of having performances from new musicals that weren't nominated, Matthew Morrison and Kelsey Grammer performed "Stronger" from Finding Neverland… and I see why the show wasn't nominated. The lyrics were the most inanely generic thing this side of "This is the Moment", and the context is a vision of Captain Hook persuading J.M. Barrie that he's strong enough to take the bold step of… writing Peter Pan? I'll pass.

On the other hand, It Shoulda Been You at least looks interesting, and the performances were good. And David Hyde Pierce's introduction of it, reading an email from a fan about how much the show meant to her, was really sweet.

Is The King and I really one of Rodgers and Hammerstein's "most beloved shows"? I mean, it might be their best show, but I'd guess The Sound of Music and Oklahoma! are both probably more beloved.

With the other nominees for Best Revival being On the Twentieth Century and On the Town, I kept hoping someone would slip up and say On the King and I.

At every commercial break, Kristin Chenoweth and Alan Cumming kept kvelling about how the audience should stay tuned for JOSH GROBAN!!!, because JOSH GROBAN!!!! would be performing soon. It turns out Josh Groban was singing for the "In Memoriam" segment, which in retrospect makes all the hype for his upcoming performance seem even tackier than it seemed at the time.

Bernadette Peters introduced the Best Actor in a Musical award, I think. She read her remarks off note cards rather than the teleprompter, for some reason; it was a little awkward, but seemed more authentic to me. I kind of liked that.