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The best and worst moments from the Tony Awards

Top honors went to daring Broadway shows that took big swings, while solo performances lit up the telecast.

Nicole Scherzinger performs “As If We Never Said Goodbye” from “Sunset Blvd.” during the 78th Tony Awards. (Charles Sykes/Invision/AP)

Nicole Scherzinger performs “As If We Never Said Goodbye” from “Sunset Blvd.” during the 78th Tony Awards. (Charles Sykes/Invision/AP)

Ingenuity and reinvention won big at the Tony Awards, where host Cynthia Erivo heralded the big headline of the night: “Broadway is officially back!” This season’s high-flying box-office numbers were juiced by an influx of Hollywood star vehicles, but the biggest artistic honors went to outside-the-box shows that gambled on big risks.

“Maybe Happy Ending,” a jewel-box musical about obsolete robots who fall in love on a road trip, took the coveted best musical prize, awards for creators Will Aronson and Hue Park, director Michael Arden and its leading android Darren Criss, the first known Asian American to win best actor.

Cole Escola’s “Oh, Mary!,” a madcap comedy imagining Mary Todd Lincoln as a boozehound wannabe cabaret star, remains one of the season’s biggest success stories, despite missing out on the best play prize to “Purpose,” Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s roiling and incisive drama about a power couple of the civil rights movement. Escola won the best actor trophy for playing Mary Todd while dressed in homage to Bernadette Peters, a nod to the YouTube clips that made Escola an alt-comedy darling.

“Eureka Day,” a prescient satire written before the pandemic about parents debating immunization, was crowned best play revival. Producer Manhattan Theatre Club pulled the production from a planned run at the Kennedy Center this spring, a move that may have underlined its relevance to voters.

Nicole Scherzinger topped the nail-biting contest for best actress in a musical for “Sunset Blvd.,” which also won best musical revival, a category that tends to reward bold, imaginative swings like director Jamie Lloyd’s. (Audra McDonald still gave a shattering performance from “Gypsy.”) And Sarah Snook of “Succession” won the other big actress prize, for her head-spinning turn as every character in “The Picture of Dorian Gray.” Alongside other first-time winners, a pair of unsung Broadway vets finally got their due: Francis Jue, for “Yellow Face,” and Natalie Venetia Belcon for “Buena Vista Social Club.”

Erivo had jokes. Production numbers popped off the screen. And awards were spread among shows that dreamed big. Here are the best and worst moments from the night.

 

Audra McDonald performs “Rose's Turn” from “Gypsy.” (Charles Sykes/Invision/AP)
Audra McDonald performs “Rose's Turn” from “Gypsy.” (Charles Sykes/Invision/AP)

 

Best: Showstopping solo performances

Audra! Nicole! Jonathan! Next to winning, wowing TV audiences with a high-impact number can be a big box-office boon on Broadway, even for shows that aren’t nominated. Solo performances from the season’s most charismatic stars won the telecast. Erivo announced Jonathan Groff’s “Just in Time” number from the balcony, with jokes about the actor’s famous splash zone. He’s a spitter, a schvitzer and totally electric as Bobby Darin in the jukebox biomusical. (He also straddled the back of Keanu Reeves’s chair.) Tony winner Nicole Scherzinger’s full-throated take on “As If We Never Said Goodbye,” a five-alarm 11 o’clock number from “Sunset Blvd.,” was filmed like a high-gloss fragrance ad, with copious fog and close-ups that may light up the box office for the home stretch of the revival, which closes July 20. And Audra McDonald left everything on the stage with a wrenching “Rose’s Turn” that a new generation of “Gypsy” fans (and show-tune gays) will absolutely be poring over on YouTube.

Worst: A well-sung but underwhelming opening number

Of all awards shows, the Tonys really oughta open with a bang. Or at least a burst of razzle-dazzle. Cameos from Oprah and Adam Lambert couldn’t save the curtain-up number, which followed Erivo backstage (in a nod to a bit from “Sunset Blvd.”) where everyone had ideas for how the show should start. “Sometimes all you need is a song” was Erivo’s answer, and she tore up the vocals with backing from a gospel ensemble. But the nominees tucked into the lyrics came and went almost as quickly as the A.I.-looking projections. Erivo’s closing number, a riff on “And I Am Telling You I’m Not Going,” on the other hand, was the perfect mic drop.

 

Lin-Manuel Miranda performs a medley from “Hamilton” with the show's original cast. (Charles Sykes/Invision/AP)
Lin-Manuel Miranda performs a medley from “Hamilton” with the show's original cast. (Charles Sykes/Invision/AP)

 

Best: A resounding black-satin ‘Hamilton’

I’m in the minority as one of few theater professionals who hasn’t committed the “Hamilton” score to memory, but the 10th anniversary number was a slick and resounding reminder of why Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Obama-era juggernaut maintains such a hold on the culture. It was a delight to see the original cast reunite, considering their careers have soared to such great heights. Rarely does a Broadway production explode into such a phenomenon and birth so many bona fide stars. Hopefully it inspires more creators to keep swinging big.

Worst: Slightly long-winded winners getting sung off by Erivo

It was a cute idea in theory, but cutting off victors’ remarks is always an awkward proposition. Why get Erivo involved, even in recorded voice-over? Fortunately, this gimmick eventually went the way of the many deceased characters onstage this season.

Best: Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, period.

 

A hometown hero from Takoma, D.C., Jacobs-Jenkins brought home his second Tony in two years, winning best play for “Purpose.” (He won best revival last year, with “Appropriate.”) He joins the ranks of Tony Kushner and Terrence McNally as the third playwright to win Tonys in consecutive years, cementing his place as a defining voice of this fraught, slippery moment in American history. “My obligation is to write to people living in reality with me in the present,” he told me earlier this spring. He used the Tonys stage to call out the richness of regional theater, encouraging viewers to Google “local theater near me.” Of course, D.C. theatergoers already know.

Worst: What happened to producers beaming in remotely?

Broadway is expensive to make, most investors lose their shirts and everyone still crazy enough to chip in deserve all their flowers. But last year’s pivot to corralling the stampede of producers on-screen but offstage felt cleaner and more civilized. With the camera panning across their sea of faces, who knew where to look?

Best: A new reigning class of Tony MVPs

McDonald’s record as the most Tony-nominated (and winningest) performer spans more than three decades. But the past few years have minted a fresh crop of repeat Tony winners. Michael Arden, who was honored for his delicate direction of the whimsical and futuristic “Maybe Happy Ending,” previously won for his 2023 revival of “Parade” (which will play the Kennedy Center on tour in August). Kara Young has been nominated for four years in a row (!) for best featured actress, and has won back to back, with “Purlie Victorious” and now “Purpose,” which also minted Jacobs-Jenkins as a two-time Tony winner in two years. These are the artists helping to power the industry through a major rebound with their devotion to the craft.

 

Composer Will Aronson, center, accepts the award for best musical for “Maybe Happy Ending.” (Charles Sykes/Invision/AP)
Composer Will Aronson, center, accepts the award for best musical for “Maybe Happy Ending.” (Charles Sykes/Invision/AP)

 

Best: Sweet moments that didn’t make the telecast

If you didn’t make it over to Pluto TV for the awards handed out before the prime-time telecast, we saw designers, book writers, composers and other offstage talent accept honors with early-evening giddiness. Hue Park, one of the night’s big winners with “Maybe Happy Ending” co-creator Will Aronson, ​​clarified that he’s “very much single.” Costume designer Paul Tazewell won for “Death Becomes Her” the same year he nabbed an Oscar for “Wicked.” Harvey Fierstein welled up accepting a lifetime achievement award and Sara Bareilles and Celia Keenan-Bolger grew emotional remembering the late Gavin Creel, who died in September. Accepting an award for her humanitarian work, Keenan-Bolger announced the Gavin Creel Fellowships, grants of $25,000 and mentorship opportunities to aspiring actors.

Best: Happy Pride

The Tonys are always held during New York’s Pride Month, but shout-outs to the cause felt especially celebratory and defiant. Jak Malone, accepting a featured-actor award for “Operation Mincemeat,” said audiences who’ve fallen for his gender-fluid performance “might have just bid farewell to cynicism, to outdated ideas, to that rotten old binary” and opened themselves up to “a world that is out there in glorious Technicolor and isn’t going away anytime soon.” Performing “For the Gaze,” her homonym-fueled opening number from “Death Becomes Her,” Megan Hilty gave us everything we want: Liza, Judy and a fringy capelet in colors that said “trans rights.” A very happy Pride to that.

 

Cynthia Erivo performs. (Brendan McDermid/Reuters)
Cynthia Erivo performs. (Brendan McDermid/Reuters)

 

Author: Column by Naveen Kumar

Source: The Washington Post

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