2014 Tony Predictions

The Tony Awards will air on June 8 on CBS with host Hugh Jackman (above).

            After this, a hit-or-miss season, the Tony Award nominations have emerged as a mostly representative basket of the cream of the crop (with some exceptions—more on that later).  Here are my picks for the best of the best.

Best Play

All the Way: A fast-paced and well-written script by Neil Schenkkan traces the period of Lyndon Johnson’s career from November 1963-November 1964 in which Johnson becomes and is re-elected President.  Historical characters swim in and out of Schenkkan’s story (Robert Petkoff as Hubert Humphrey and Michael McKean as J. Edgar Hoover are notable examples), but that’s all white noise compared to Bryan Cranston’s white-hot starring turn as the President.  Though the play is well-conceived, here it’s Cranston, not Schenkkan, who really makes the show, endowing it with such energy as to catapult it above anything else this season.  It should win with some jostling over the admirable Act One.

Best Musical

A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder: Not since The Book of Mormon has there been such an obvious frontrunner for this award as Gentleman’s Guide.  An operetta pastiche concerning the travails of Monty Navarro, a poor boy who finds he’s ninth in line for an earldom and goes about dispatching those ahead of him, this musical is perfect in every conceivable way.  In terms of pure quality, it is one of the best new musicals I have seen in a long time, certainly the best since Book of Mormon, and by far the best on Broadway this season.  The book is magnificently witty, the score is ecstasy, and the performances have no rival on the Great White Way this season.  Years of tweaking by the team of Robert L. Freedman and Steven Lutvak have elevated this show to musical theater heaven.  I can only hope they work together again soon, as there is a limited number of times I can see this musical without being labeled a groupie.

Best Revival of a Play

The Glass Menagerie: Again, no contest.  John Tiffany has reinvented this greatest American play and earned it its first Tony nominations ever.  He will also earn it its first wins.  The story—an aging Southern matriarch tries desperately to find a husband for her crippled daughter, as her cynical son looks on—unfolds against the backdrop of the most beautiful set design in recent memory (by Bob Crowley).  Near poetic in its conception and practice, this show will live in the annals of Broadway history as not just the greatest revival of this show, but one of the greatest ever—or at the very least, one of the greatest I’ve ever seen.  Without Menagerie in this category, it would have been the most difficult to pick (Daniel Radcliffe brings great energy to The Cripple of Inishmaan and Denzel Washington to A Raisin in the Sun, and Twelfth Night is a masterpiece of traditional Shakespeare), but there it is, and it can’t be helped.

Best Revival of a Musical

Hedwig and the Angry Inch: It is a travesty that the still-lively Cabaret was not nominated in this category, pure and simple.  Late announcements in Tony eligibility confused the voters and resulted in its being left off the list, but had it been allowed on, it would have won, easily, thanks to Sam Mendes and Rob Marshall’s still-inspired direction and the tireless talent of Alan Cumming.  What’s left is a sorry sight, a three-musical category including the less-than-auspicious latest Les Mis, an exercise in money-making by Cameron Mackintosh, and the comparatively well-executed but somewhat boring Violet.  Hedwig and the Angry Inch, which I haven’t seen, has been well-reviewed, especially for Neil Patrick Harris’ apparently energetic performance.  By process of elimination, Hedwig walks away with an award at which it should never have had a chance.

Best Book of a Musical

A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder (Robert L. Freedman): While it’s difficult for me to pick anyone over Woody Allen, that artist’s book for Bullets Over Broadway was mostly a rehash—though a very funny rehash—of the 1994 film (Bullets’ pizzazz really comes from its ‘20s score).  Robert L. Freedman’s for Gentleman’s Guide, meanwhile, crackles with supremely British energy and moves the story along at an exciting pace.  Mr. Freedman’s inspired methods of murder for the eight D’Ysquith heirs (entirely unique from those practiced in the 1949 film that partially inspired the musical, Kind Hearts and Coronets) are as hysterically funny as murder can be.  Lutvak and Freedman both have a wonderful way of getting us to root against the loathsome D’Ysquiths and for the murderous yet somehow charming Monty Navarro.  (A warning—this is only the second of many predicted wins for this magnificent show.)

Best Original Score

A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder (Steven Lutvak and Robert L. Freedman): And here’s another.  Gentleman’s Guide has the best new score on Broadway in years.  It is roll-in-the-aisles funny in places and sweetly beautiful in others; in fact, it is often both at the same time.  Every note, every word is imbued with humor, wit, and knowing homage to the great operettas of the past—some of the best Gilbert and Sullivan comes to mind.  There isn’t a song I’d have removed from this production; unlike many others, it comes to the fore unburdened by narrative or musical dead weight.  In a category crowded with talented composers (though it should be noted that Alan Menken and the now-deceased Howard Ashman have written Aladdin, a good musical, while Tom Kitt & Brian Yorkey and Jason Robert Brown have written If/Then and The Bridges of Madison County, bad ones), this score should still win easily.

Best Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role in a Play

Bryan Cranston (All the Way): Had I seen Mark Rylance perform Richard III (the performance he is nominated for in this category) rather than Twelfth Night, this would have been harder to call.  I am certain that Mr. Rylance’s performance as that conniving hunchback was fantastic, but luckily (an odd choice of words) I missed it, so I can avoid having to choose between two great stage actors.  Mr. Cranston’s performance in All the Way, as I’ve previously said, made the play; he totally embodies Lyndon Johnson and, somehow, makes him loom larger than he already does.  Every second Mr. Cranston is on the stage (which is most of them), the theater crackles with electricity.  Regardless of Mr. Rylance’s probable talent, I would not be surprised if that life-changing performance of Mr. Cranston’s wins the Tony outright.

Best Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role in a Play

Cherry Jones (The Glass Menagerie): When I saw The Glass Menagerie in January, I called Ms. Jones’s performance “godly,” writing, “[She] shades her portrayal of the ultimate Williams mother with an acting ability developed over years as a paragon of her profession.  Like the play, there is not a wrong note in her rendering.  It could well change one’s perception of family, ambition, and that flighty characteristic we hesitate to call ‘sincerity.’”  There isn’t much else to say.

Best Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role in a Musical

Jefferson Mays (A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder): The ultimate challenge—two actors from Gentleman’s Guide nominated in the same category!  Choosing Mr. Mays (who plays the eight D’Ysquith heirs serially disposed of by Monty) over Bryce Pinkham (Monty himself) is rather easy, though, having seen the enormous effort necessary to play eight murdered aristocrats in the same evening (and twice on Wednesdays and Sundays).  The costume changes alone are worth some sort of special Tony.  The changes in character, both speaking and singing, and the utter embodiment of each D’Ysquith in a fashion that almost makes the audience forget that there is really only one of Mr. Mays, is worth a real one.  (Picking between Alan Cumming and Mr. Mays would have been a truly impossible task, but luckily the nominating committee forgot that Mr. Cumming existed.)

Best Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role in a Musical

Jessie Mueller (Beautiful: The Carole King Musical): Another snub—Lisa O’Hare as the conniving Sibella in Gentleman’s Guide was robbed of a nomination in this category, despite her surplus of talent.  There’s not much left to choose from, but Ms. Mueller’s performance is eerily similar to that of the real Ms. King, and she relaxes entertainingly into Douglas McGrath’s script.  This category is stuffed with talented women in average or below-average musicals (Sutton Foster in Violet, Idina Menzel in If/Then, Kelli O’Hara in The Bridges of Madison County), and Mueller is the only one who has some really good music to work with.

Best Performance by an Actor in a Featured Role in a Play

Mark Rylance (Twelfth Night): Hands down.  No contest.  Mr. Rylance plays the funniest Olivia I’ve ever seen, and commits to the role in a way I’ve never seen a male actor replicate.  Mr. Rylance is, alongside Kenneth Branagh, one of the greatest Shakespearean actors alive.  Twelfth Night has three actors nominated in this category and deserves three awards, but Mr. Rylance will walk away with the one available.

Best Performance by an Actress in a Featured Role in a Play

Celia Keenan-Bolger (The Glass Menagerie): From a slightly annoying turn in Peter and the Starcatcher last year, Ms. Keenan-Bolger has moved to a startlingly and starkly beautiful performance as Laura, the “shy and damaged daughter” of Ms. Jones’s Amanda.  Her movements across the stage, dragging a leg slightly, are hauntingly beautiful, her obsession with her glass animals and developing love for the Gentleman Caller the marks of a great actress on the rise.

Best Performance by an Actor in a Featured Role in a Musical

Nick Cordero (Bullets Over Broadway): I found Nick Cordero’s turn as the mobster/ghostwriter Cheech to be the best part of Bullets, and the nominating committee clearly agrees with me (see: Bullets’ single acting nomination).  He is a dancer and singer of impressive caliber, and, in a way, the glue that holds the big 1920s mess of Bullets together.  He brings a very funny casual bluntness to Mr. Allen’s writing in a way that Chazz Palminteri only touched on in the movie.

Best Performance by an Actress in a Featured Role in a Musical

Lauren Worsham (A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder): As one of the love interests for Monty Navarro, his distant cousin, Phoebe, Ms. Worsham masterfully satirizes the simpering damsel motif so common in operettas.  Her range is impressive, and she hits all her comedic moments with aplomb.  She’s the only stand-out in a barely competitive category.

Best Direction of a Play

John Tiffany (The Glass Menagerie): This revival moved with such fluidity and grace, it may as well have been a ballet.  The master behind the scenes, Mr. Tiffany, is clearly responsible for the innovations that made it all so memorable, as well as facilitating the stage relationships of the four marvelous actors.  He is truly a director in all senses of the word, capable of working fluently with all aspects of the theater.  He is an actor’s director, but also a stage auteur, and he deserves recognition for both.

Best Direction of a Musical

Darko Tresnjak (A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder): The clever machinations of the murderous protagonist are well-coordinated with the antics of his victims.  Mr. Tresnjak, Artistic Director of the Hartford Stage where Gentleman’s Guide premiered in October of 2012, knows how to lay it on just thick enough, and his style of homage is friendly, peppy, and hugely entertaining.

Best Choreography

Susan Stroman (Bullets Over Broadway): Susan Stroman, who also directed Bullets, seems the most obvious and the safest pick here.  Bullets is above-average work by the incomparable Ms. Stroman, the director/choreographer of The Producers and 2000’s The Music Man, and Bullets is similarly ebullient in its execution.  The spirit of the 1920s, so lovingly portrayed by Mr. Allen’s book and brought to life by his choice of the songs of the era, is equally present in Ms. Stroman’s wildly energetic dance numbers.  Each classic song is matched perfectly with one of her inspired creations, each more glorious fun than the last.  When you’re working with such eminently dance-worthy numbers as “Let’s Misbehave” and “Tiger Rag,” you can’t really go wrong.  It also helps to be Susan Stroman.

Best Orchestrations

Jonathan Tunick (A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder): Orchestral master and EGOT-award winner Tunick is, at 76, still riding high on a career peak that began around 1970.  He is the orchestrator of nearly every Sondheim musical since Company (and all their revivals)—Sondheim calls him “a standout in his field”—not to mention his arrangements for Promises, Promises, Dames at Sea, Titanic (the Best Musical of 1997, not the Best Picture of 1997), Nine, and The Color Purple (plus film work on Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein).  His work on Gentleman’s Guide is bright, exciting, and appropriately deferential to the tradition that inspired it.  It’s a worthy successor to his past work, and ought to wow the Theatre Wing into giving him his second, well-deserved Tony.

Best Scenic Design of a Play

Bob Crowley (The Glass Menagerie): The most talented contributor to an amalgamation of great talent, this season’s revival of The Glass Menagerie, is the scenic designer, Bob Crowley.  In Mr. Crowley’s reimagining, the Wingfield apartment, where the play is set, is done in three hexagons of varying sizes, sparsely furnished and dimly lit, set among a stage flooded with an inky black liquid—the ocean of the world, in which the Wingfields, on their island, are suspended.  As Tennessee Williams intended, the apartment is thus transformed into the dreamscape of Tom Wingfield’s past, a surreal time he can’t quite remember.  Mr. Crowley had more influence over the story and direction of this revival than any scenic designer had this season.  He deserves the Tony perhaps more than any of his colleagues on Menagerie do.

Best Scenic Design of a Musical

Santo Loquasto (Bullets Over Broadway): Mr. Loquasto’s set design is big, loud, and beautiful, like the decade in which Bullets takes place.  The enormous, open stage of the St. James Theatre functions equally effectively as a mob-owned jazz club and a balcony looking out over Broadway.  The memorable start of the show, wherein Cheech (Nick Cordero’s mobster) shoots the words “Bullets Over Broadway” into the stage’s backdrop is one of the many great moments made possible by Mr. Loquasto’s efforts.  It will take some effort to overcome Alexander Dodge’s clever designs for Gentleman’s Guide, but if anyone can, it’s he.  (Don’t forget, however, even in your happiness for the talented Mr. Loquasto, that Cabaret was robbed in this category too in the lack of a nomination for the illustrious Robert Brill.)

Best Costume Design of a Play

Jenny Tiramani (Twelfth Night): Brilliant work by Ms. Tiramani, among other behind-the-scenes professionals like musical director Claire van Kampen (Mark Rylance’s wife), brought to life the immersive 17^th-century experience that made Twelfth Night so joyously fun.  The tall black dress she designed for Mr. Rylance’s Olivia, with its capacity to aid in the frequent gag that made Mr. Rylance appear to glide across the stage, practically made the character.  Making the illusion real is the responsibility of the costume designer, and Ms. Tiramani has done her work with great gusto here.

Best Costume Design of a Musical

Linda Cho (A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder): Anyone who can design costumes that look like Ms. Cho’s but can be changed in to and out of in a matter of minutes deserves some sort of award.  Whether she will actually win it remains to be seen, given that William Ivey Long, Chair of the American Theatre Wing, is also nominated in the category for Bullets Over Broadway.  He’s deserving, too (and worked on The Producers, which gives me a bit of a soft spot for him), but the costumes in Bullets are slightly gaudier and less necessary than those in Gentleman’s Guide.  It’ll come close, but by all rights Ms. Cho should come out on top.

Technical Awards

Best Lighting Design of a Play

Natasha Katz (The Glass Menagerie)

Best Lighting Design of a Musical

Howell Binkley (After Midnight)

Best Sound Design of a Play

Dan Moses Schreier (Act One)

Best Sound Design of a Musical

Brian Ronan (Beautiful: The Carole King Musical)

Where Are Your Troubles Now?

Cabaret at Studio 54

 

Michelle Williams, Alan Cumming and the Kit Kat Girls in Cabaret.

            Though I wasn’t lucky enough to see the previous run of Kander and Ebb’s Cabaret, which premiered at Studio 54 in 1998 and ran through 2004 with a series of increasingly unlikely celebrity replacements (bringing to mind the current revival of that other Kander and Ebb classic, Chicago), I have been buffeted over the past year with news of the similarities between that production and the one now playing at the same venue through January 4^th of next year.  (I would be willing to bet the ridiculous price of a ticket to Cabaret that the Roundabout Theatre, strapped for cash as it is, will soon be extending the run, making room for a new list of replacements.  Hilary Duff, I’m sure, will make a serviceable Sally.)  For one, I’ve been told, that devilish Master of Ceremonies is again portrayed by Alan Cumming, one of the finest stage actors alive, and the production is again co-directed by Sam Mendes and Rob Marshall, two of the finest stage innovators of our time.  The imposing and gorgeous set design is once again by Robert Brill, and the shabby yet eye-catching costume design by William Ivey Long.  Most important, of course, is that the sleekly beautiful score by the John Kander and the now deceased Fred Ebb remains the same, but somehow that hasn’t come up more than in passing.  Did I mention Alan Cumming?

            If I haven’t, I should have.  Don’t mistake my list of similarities to that previous production to be a put-down of the current one.  From the perspective of one unfamiliar, if the 1998 production was anything like this one, it was probably unmissable then, too.

            For though Mr. Brill’s Kit Kat Club is a wonderful dreamscape and the marshaling of Messrs. Marshall and Mendes is unforgettable, this revival and, presumably, the 1998 revival are dominated by the enormous, life-changing, genre-bending performance of Alan Cumming as the dastardly Emcee, in a performance that won him a Tony and, if not for late announcements in eligibility this year, probably would have again.  Slimily slinking around the battlements of his castle, the Kit Kat Club, the Emcee, more sickly-pale snake than human, looks down upon the horror of the approaching Nazis and laughs, an agent of chaos in his native element.  Accompanied by the marvelous band, doubling as the ensemble as in 1998, Mr. Cumming is hypnotizing during the immortal “Wilkommen,” revelatory during “Money,” and suddenly terrifying during “If You Could See Her.”  The audience can’t help but follow Mr. Cumming above anyone else, and suddenly it becomes clear, however implausibly, that under Mr. Mendes’s direction Cabaret is, indeed, the story of the Emcee.  He accepts the Nazis at first as wickedly fun, is consumed by the uproar of their pseudo-patriotism (especially during the brilliantly written Rhineland pastiche number, “Tomorrow Belongs To Me,” when he flashes a swastika-besmirched buttock), and then gradually realizes what he’s endorsing, culminating in Mr. Mendes’s shocking ending, as powerful as ever here.  It’s a tour-de-force performance, what a critic could call the performance of a lifetime had Mr. Cumming, incredibly, not already done all of this before.  Broadway should prostrate itself in celebration of his return.

            It is in such a way that the A-story is relegated to the B-roll.  Pushed into the background by Mr. Cumming but valiantly fighting through are Michelle Williams as the talentless Sally Bowles and Bill Heck as the bisexual Christopher Isherwood substitute, Cliff.  (Linda Emond and Danny Burstein, in supporting roles and both Tony-nominated, are surprisingly dull in somewhat underwritten roles.  Their cast-mate Gayle Rankin, as the vibrant Fraulein Kost, is much more entertaining but was snubbed.)  Ms. Williams’s performance deserves a column all to itself, not because, like Mr. Cumming’s, it is altogether memorable, but rather because it is unsure whether it’s great or any good at all.  Ben Brantley, in the Times, dismissed her as being subsumed by “an air of high tension,” while Hilton Als in the New Yorker argued, convincingly, that her stuttering, stumbling performance is inspired, more worthy of one of her great films.  In, actually, a spot-on analysis, Mr. Als writes in the May 5^th edition of the magazine, “she speaks in a metallic voice, like the clatter of a typewriter; the voice is a defense, a remnant of the Jazz Age, out of synch with this corroding world.”  It is her performance of the title number that most supports Mr. Als's view.  Shell-shocked and scared, it is sung (quite well) as Sally's world is falling apart, and it's clear, when Ms. Williams sings "I love a cabaret," that this is a lie.  There are, however, instances between songs that support Mr. Brantley's less optimistic prognosis.  There is no obvious answer, but it is a turn that, I dare say, will be discussed by theatrical analysts for years to come, a descent so far into the character that it is difficult to tell whether she is unready for theater or Sally is.  Besides being fascinating, though, she is generally appealing and enjoyable to watch. 

Admittedly, it is painful—and this is one of the few painful parts of an immensely pleasurable production—to imagine the gifted Emma Stone, originally tapped for the part in April of 2013, playing Sally, and to think of how effortlessly she would have knocked the role out of the park.  Oh, well.  Maybe she’ll be one of those replacements.