2017 Tony Picks

Kevin Spacey will host the 71st Tony Awards, live from Radio City Music Hall, on June 11th at 8 on CBS.

It’s not a competitive season on Broadway, despite what the critics and pundits would have you believe.  No use pontificating – we’ve got ourselves another Hamilton situation, or at least we should, with the modern masterpiece Dear Evan Hansen.  At the ceremony on June 11^th, which will be hosted by Kevin Spacey (an agreeably unorthodox choice), Hansen should sweep and then we can all go to bed.  Despite the writings of Michael Schulman in the New Yorker, who, in a worryingly misguided turn of phrase, described Hansen as a “musicalized Y.A. novel,” or the hand-wringing of the Statler-and-Waldorf team of Jesse Green and Ben Brantley for the Times, who are trying to frame a predictable year as a horse race between Hansen, the treacly Come From Away, and the musically uninteresting Natasha, Pierre, and the Great Comet of 1812, we all know how this is going to end.  Or if we don’t, something’s gone horribly wrong.

Nonetheless, a nominating committee that spread its net just wide enough to appear to be spreading it but not too wide to include any genuinely interesting choices (where’s Oh, Hello on Broadway? The Price? Heisenberg?) has snubbed a vertigo-inducing number of deserving performers and productions, most of whom I’ve tried to include in my comments on my picks for this year.  As always, I quote liberally from my reviews.

Best Musical: Dear Evan Hansen

Steven Levenson and Pasek and Paul’s pop-musical is the best version of itself and the strongest work any of its participants will probably ever do; while not quite flawless (there are tonal inconsistencies in the broad strokes of its morality), it is melodically pure and dramatically relevant, and it’s rare both of these things can be true of a single musical, especially one written in this century.  In a hugely competitive season, one including musicals (like Groundhog Day) that would be equally deserving, Hansen should take the cake – my only fear is that the hero-worship of its fan-base might warp it into a tourist trap from what it is – a truly great piece of art.

Best Play: Oslo

In my review of the Off-Broadway iteration of this historical drama about the organization of the 1993 Oslo accords, I described J.T. Rogers’ play (his Broadway debut) as a “masterfully done,” “thoroughly exemplary play” with a “diamond-perfect gaze.”  Its transfer to Broadway has only broadened its impact – Bartlett Sher’s production of this never-didactic, deeply accessible piece is more relevant now than ever.  It’s only a pity that, in a season strong on absurdism, Nick Kroll and John Mulaney’s genuine theatrical masterwork Oh, Hello on Broadway was robbed of a nomination in this category.

Best Revival of a Musical: Hello, Dolly!

Full disclosure – I have not seen Hello, Dolly!.  In fact, I know of very few people who have.  Demand for Bette Midler’s first Broadway appearance in nearly fifty years is high enough that the production’s TV commercials now smugly declare, “Best availability in September.”  This was, actually, a strong season for musical revivals – Sarna Lapine’s production of Sunday in the Park with George and Lonny Price’s Sunset Boulevard were both excellent.  But the former withdrew from Tony consideration, and the latter wasn’t nominated.  I don’t know for sure if Hello, Dolly! is any good.  I know for sure it will win this category.

Best Revival of a Play: Present Laughter

In a relatively unexciting category – Present Laughter, Jitney, and The Little Foxes being the only nominees of note – this “fully old-fashioned,” “thoroughly entertaining production,” as I called it in March, has a fair chance of winning despite not being a particular world-beater.  Director Moritz von Stuelpnagel has constructed a professional Coward revival that goes beyond being a star vehicle for his leading man, Kevin Kline, and adopted the reverent attitude toward original intent of the author that has proved a success for directors like Jack O’Brien of last fall’s The Front Page revival (which should have been nominated here).  No telling this one for sure, though – if I’m right, call it a lucky guess.

Best Book of a Musical: Steven Levenson, Dear Evan Hansen

Levenson’s book is effectively a great play set to music, a repudiation of the years of post-Kander and Ebb shows when musicals became dramatically impotent melodic showcases.  His “adrenaline shot” of a plot is dizzyingly complex and wounding enough to strike an audience to the heart and scar them, collectively, for life, but unlike some other twenty-first century pieces I could name, he doesn’t scar merely for the sake of scarring.  Rarely has a Broadway librettist displayed such a well-developed sense of dramatic integrity.  He should leapfrog over Danny Rubin’s admirably funny but essentially rehashed book for Groundhog Day to the finish line.  (A note: I am beginning to tire of nominating musicals without books, like the sung-through Natasha, Pierre, and the Great Comet of 1812, for Best Book.  Perhaps it’s an after-effect of our collective Hamilton haze, but, American Theater Wing – get your act together.)

Best Original Score: Benj Pasek and Justin Paul, Dear Evan Hansen

To the extent that Dear Evan Hansen represents a significant entry in the broader history of musical theater, rather than merely the modern history – which I’m convinced it does – it’s largely because of the breathless melodic experiments Pasek and Paul, late of La La Land, Dogfight, and A Christmas Story, undertake in their score.  While their lyrics are not always flawless, their music is, as I wrote in January, “nearly unclassifiable, completely unique, and gorgeous beyond reasonable expectation.  Everything – everything – is in the service of the story, and not a note” rings false.  Expect to see a lot of these two in the coming years.

 

Best Leading Actor in a Play: Jefferson Mays, Oslo

Mays is “phenomenal,” I wrote of him last summer, “perfect as the intellectual who thinks – knows – he can do better than the bureaucrats, with all of the well-meaning arrogance that entails.”  His Terje Rod-Larsen fits into the same buffoonish sophisticate  category as his supporting role in The Front Page or his Tony-nominated performance in 2013’s A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder.  What really makes him stand out, however, is his pitch-perfect collaboration with his female lead, Jennifer Ehle, who should win in her own category as well.

Best Leading Actress in a Play: Jennifer Ehle, Oslo

As I wrote last year, “Ehle, sporting a flawless accent and a presence somehow simultaneously steely and maternal, fulfills the promise” of her foreign-office maven character, Mona Juul – “beloved by all on both sides” for “her ability and willingness to bring people together.”  She plays Mays’ wife, and her collaboration with him ensures the play will be anchored in the union of “teammates in the grandest sense.”  With a hop, skip, and a jump over Laura Linney for The Little Foxes, she should easily win her third Tony for this performance.

Best Leading Actor in a Musical: Ben Platt, Dear Evan Hansen

Ben Platt’s performance in Dear Evan Hansen could be the greatest feat of acting in the history of musical theater.  If he loses this award there is a nonzero chance that there exists a malevolent God, manipulating the travails of mankind to the benefit of ultimate chaos.  That is all.

Best Leading Actress in a Musical: Bette Midler, Hello, Dolly!

See: Best Revival.  I liked Denée Benton in Natasha, Pierre, and the Great Comet of 1812, but not enough to pick her over the obvious winner with a straight face.  In another universe, either the ineligible but magnetic Glenn Close, reprising her role in Sunset Boulevard, might’ve snatched this prize up, or Annaleigh Ashford would have wiped the floor with Bette with her extraordinary performance in Sunday in the Park, but thanks to that inconceivable awards withdrawal, here we are.  Here’s hoping this’ll be a more interesting category next year.

Best Featured Actor in a Play: Nathan Lane, The Front Page

By a long shot the most competitive category of the year, Best Featured Actor pits Danny DeVito’s remarkable Broadway debut in The Price against Nathan Lane’s star turn as Walter Burns in last fall’s The Front Page.  It's a clash of the titans, but in a squeaker, it goes to Lane, if only because it is a joy to find that at 61 his raw comic power on the stage is lessened not one hair.  In a part perhaps smaller than he’s played since pre-Guys and Dolls days, Lane walks away with the show, an explosive force detonating in the middle of this un-explosive revival.  DeVito is as great as ever, but Lane’s the king. 

Best Featured Actress in a Play: Cynthia Nixon, The Little Foxes

Absent Kristine Nielsen in Present Laughter, the finest comic performance of her career despite her snub in this category, Cynthia Nixon, with her impressive role-switching repertory in The Little Foxes, is really the only thing left – the other four nominations go to Sweat and A Doll’s House, Part 2 – neither one an actor-focused play, and certain to split their respective votes.

Best Featured Actor in a Musical: Mike Faist, Dear Evan Hansen

Compared to Ben Platt, with whom he shares most of his scenes, Mike Faist, as the suicidal misanthrope Connor Murphy, is deeply understated.  Actually he spends much of the show (spoiler – kind of) literally dead, popping up here and there as a ghost or memory.  But he’s got a sweet – if greasy – energy that justifies the fuss that’s made over his death, plus a relatively strong voice and a key part in Hansen’s most high-energy number, “Sincerely, Me.”  Any actor in the show who isn’t Ben Platt is unfortunately fated to be overshadowed, but Faist is something of the yin to Platt’s yang – impressive enough, certainly, to best his closest competition, Lucas Steele as a rock-star Russian aristocrat in Natasha.

Best Featured Actress in a Musical: Rachel Bay Jones, Dear Evan Hansen

This category – to be honest – is wide-open, the most uncertain this year, especially minus the bravura performance of Amber Gray in Natasha -- another snub.  I could see any of the nominees winning, particularly Jen Colella for her buzzed-about turn as a pilot in Come From Away, but Jones is my personal choice if only for her wrenching number late in Hansen, “So Big/So Small,” an intimate mother-son ballad that’s one of the more overtly tear-jerking in the show.  Jones has a hippie-type edge about her that you either love or hate, but she’s certainly orders of magnitude better in this role than in her unmemorable performance in the Pippin revival four years ago.

Best Direction of a Play: Bartlett Sher, Oslo

In my review of Oslo, I referred to Bartlett Sher as the Lincoln Center Theatre company’s “patron saint,” and he really is – he spearheaded their productions of South Pacific and The King and I as well as their upcoming My Fair Lady, and his classed-up spectacles are the Vivian Beaumont’s bread and butter.  Chalk another one up for the LCT, then – Oslo is a triumph, “a real window into a history-making process,” and Sher should get his due credit.  This, his third Tony, won’t come easy – he’ll have to get through Ruben Santiago-Hudson’s acclaimed work on Jitney – but it would be well-deserved.

Best Direction of a Musical: Matthew Warchus, Groundhog Day

My only Hansen upset – for a reason.  In any other year Groundhog Day would have a solid shot at the proverbial brass ring of Best Musical, but these aren’t good days for pluralism on Broadway.  Tim Minchin’s intricate score and Danny Rubin’s gut-busting book, not to mention Andy Karl’s near-heroic lead performance, will all go unsung at Radio City this year, but Matthew Warchus’ direction should get the recognition it deserves – especially because Michael Greif’s direction of Hansen, unlike his work on earlier pieces like Rent, doesn’t necessarily transgress any boundaries.  Warchus, on the other hand, creates a carnival of effervescent effects that go way beyond anything traditional stagecraft has done before.  As I wrote in March, “never ostentatious but constantly wondrous, [Warchus] establishes here definitively that the theater is capable of anything film is.”

Best Choreography: Sam Pinkleton, Natasha, Pierre, and the Great Comet of 1812

I didn’t like Natasha.  I thought it was needlessly amelodic, ostentatiously operatic in a musical landscape moving in just the opposite direction, and lacked lyrical effort on the part of its composer, lyricist, and “librettist,” Dave Malloy.  But if there were a Tony Award for Best Opening Number, this show would win hands-down.  In “Prologue,” one of the greatest openers of the season, and of the last few besides, Malloy, with the help of director Rachel Chavkin and the jittery, roaring choreography of Pinkleton, lays out the basic structure of War and Peace for an audience unfamiliar with his source material – as the lyric puts it, “It’s a complicated Russian novel / Everyone’s got nine different names / So look it up in your program.”  For this number, which spills out from the stage into the bizarre stage/audience hybrid that is currently the Imperial, and for a few blinding and fascinating nightclub numbers, too, Pinkleton should take home this award just barely over Denis Jones’s more traditional work in the moribund Holiday Inn.

Best Orchestrations: Alex Lacamoire, Dear Evan Hansen

Lacamoire orchestrated Hamilton and looks to be on track to work on every musical phenomenon of the next decade; he’s on as much of a roll right now as anyone in his profession can ever expect to be.  His work on Dear Evan Hansen, while not as self-evidently brilliant as his nearest competitor in this category, Dave Malloy, orchestrating his own work on Natasha (an impressive feat -- he could win), is rewarding to repeat listeners.  There’s something about his unapologetically contemporary style, and concern for the smallest details that emerge even from the smallest orchestras, that screams genius.  Listening to Hansen is overwhelming, and Lacamoire is much of the reason why.

Technical Awards (with snubs)

Best Scenic Design of a Play: Douglas W. Schmidt, The Front Page

SNUBS: David Zinn, Present Laughter

Derek McLane, The Price

Best Scenic Design of a Musical: Rob Howell, Groundhog Day

Best Costume Design of a Play: Susan Hilferty, Present Laughter

SNUB: Emily Rebholz, Oh, Hello on Broadway

Best Costume Design of a Musical: Paloma Young, Natasha, Pierre, and the Great Comet of 1812

Best Lighting Design of a Play: Donald Holder, Oslo

SNUBS: David Weiner, The Price

Austin R. Smith, Heisenberg

Best Lighting Design of a Musical: Japhy Weideman, Dear Evan Hansen

Multiple Awards

Dear Evan Hansen, 8

Oslo, 5

Groundhog Day, 2

Natasha, Pierre, and the Great Comet of 1812, 2
The Front Page, 2

Present Laughter, 2

Hello, Dolly!, 2