The Tony Awards took place in a glitzy Oscar-style (or is it the other way around?) ceremony at the Radio City Music Hall in New York city (NYC) earlier this week. This was the 73rd edition of an extravaganza that celebrates and recognises exemplary work in Broadway over the past year. It’s not pan-national, restricted only to 40-odd theatres located in the vicinity of the Big Apple’s Time Square. But like NYC, Broadway is a melting pot where what ultimately bubbles to the surface is the very best that theatre in the United States has to offer.
This year’s ceremony was hosted by British comedian James Corden, who’s been ticking off hosting gigs with alacrity, having hosted the Grammys twice and the BRIT Awards five times, as well as the Tonys in 2016.
He is also a Tony winner himself for best actor in a Play, for his role in the comedy One Man, Two Guvnors . His engagement with the play began in London with a National Theatre production directed by Nicholas Hytner in 2011 (duly screened at the NCPA for Indian audiences), before transferring first to the West End’s Adelphi Theatre, and then straight to Manhattan.
Musical night
Corden’s opening production number predictably extolled the virtues of the stage — for instance, the absolute thrill of performing live without retakes or cuts or smoking breaks — while throwing shade on the prevailing Netflix culture of binge-watching on the couch. His sultry Siri-like digital companion announced that he has 24,601 shows left in his queue, before the couch segues, theatre-style, to the auditorium itself. It was striking, and almost alienating, to observe how resolutely mainstream American theatre seems to be. It was an evening punctuated with specialty routines in which musicals were the mainstay, which isn’t what we think about when we think of Indian theatre since the song-and-dance rigmaroles have long been palmed off to Bollywood. Of course, it’s no secret that every theatre director worth their salt has a Broadway-style musical inside them, much like the book writers carry interred in their psyches.
Watching the Tonys is like watching the Oscars with far fewer familiar faces. Every now and then someone from ‘big cinema’ turns up as a presenter or a nominee — Marisa Tomei, criminally absent from film, still looks like she’s in her prime, and Lawrence Fishburne presented an early award — but by and large, with no exposure to international live entertainment, it was a line-up of veritable unknowns. Yet, they were legends and breakout stars among them, journeymen with great innings, industry heavyweights and talented ingénues. It was an eco-system in which everyone did have credentials, and some to spare. It’s a little like how we consider our own theatre warhorses who, mercifully perhaps, haven’t crossed over into celluloid. A different kind of fame doesn’t diminish them in the least, in fact it is quite chastening to experience the works of masters who are surreptitiously flying under the radar.
Among the big winners of the night were Hadestown, a musical about the underworld, with eight trophies and the Irish IRA drama, The Ferryman that bagged four. The 50th anniversary revival of the ground-breaking The Boys in the Band, which was among the first plays to unapologetically place gay lives, warts and all, centre stage, won best revival of a play — productions of ‘classics’ from the popular repertoire are excluded from the best play or musical categories; these are reserved for new productions.
Drama milestones
In keeping with these ‘woke’ times, diversity was of the essence. Were women, queers, blacks, or the differently-abled, all represented in the roster? Jessica Paz shared the Tony for the best sound design of a Musical with Nevin Steinberg for their work in Hadestown . She is the first woman to be nominated, let alone win, in this category. Her director, Rachel Chavkin, was also only the tenth woman in Tony history to win best director for a play or a musical, which is less than 8% of all winners. To put this in perspective, only one woman has won a best director Academy Award in 91 ceremonies. Chavkin said, “The lack of women on Broadway is not a pipeline issue, it’s a failure of imagination.” Also making history was Ali Stroker, the first actress in a wheelchair to win an acting gong, for Oklahoma!
It is sobering that although social change is glacial, even in 2019, so far removed from the pioneering civil rights movements, there are so many ‘first ever’ achievements.
