The Outsiders may have had the inside track at the Tony Awards after all.
In awarding Best Musical to the $22 million adaptation of the S.E. Hinton novel and Francis Ford Coppola movie about an ill-fated gang of teenagers in 1967 Tulsa, Oklahoma, voters rewarded Danya Taymor’s meticulously staged production over the propulsive glitz of Alicia Keys’ Hell’s Kitchen, the presumptive favorite in the category going into the evening.Continue Reading
Tony Award leaders today affirmed their decision to bar Broadway co-producers from the stage of the David Koch Theater on June 16, while offering the investors and bundlers a consolation prize: live shots of them elsewhere in the theater on Broadway’s big night.
According to a Tony Awards memo circulating this afternoon, a “Voice of God” in the Koch Theater will announce a specific category during a commercial break and invite co-producers to gather in the lobby off the first tier. When a winning show is named, the triumphant cluster will congregate on a riser for their live moment on primetime television.Continue Reading
The Tony Awards are enmeshed in a high-stakes dispute over who gets stage time on Broadway’s big night.
Some co-producers — whose primary role is to invest or raise money for shows — have been informed by Tony Award staffers that they aren’t welcome onstage at the David H. Koch Theater on June 16. In recent years as production budgets swelled, swarms of co-producers have taken the stage when awards were handed out for the categories of best musical, play, musical revival and play revival.Continue Reading
It doesn’t suck to be David Stone today.
Nineteen years after the satiric Avenue Q (“It Sucks to Be Me”) upset the Stone-produced blockbuster Wicked at the Tony Awards, the 56-year-old won his first Best Musical Tony, for Kimberly Akimbo, and his second for best play revival, Suzan Lori Parks’ Topdog/Underdog.Continue Reading
Maybe Usher can finally quit his day job.
A Strange Loop — Michael R. Jackson’s deconstructionist portrait of a musical theater artist as a young, Black, insecure gay man — was named best musical at the 75th Tony Awards tonight. A former Lion King usher, Jackson spent nearly two decades working on his sacred-cow-slaughtering show about a “Disney ushering, broke-ass middle-class politically homeless normie leftist Black American” aspiring composer-lyricist.Continue Reading
There’s cause for celebration in Bet Hatikva and Petah Tikva.
The Band’s Visit, a drama about acceptance, missed connections and the romance and ennui of everyday life, won 10 Tony Awards, including best musical. The triumph raises the profile of the quiet show about an Egyptian police band marooned in a sleepy Israeli town, who’d intended to go to a cosmopolitan city with a similar-sounding name.
Some takeaways from the CBS telecast:Continue Reading
EXCLUSIVE: On Broadway, selling out isn’t a prerequisite for cleaning up.
The Band’s Visit, which is considered a lock for best new musical at the Tony Awards tomorrow, has repaid well over half of its $8.75 million capitalization, according to two people familiar with the production. They report that it’s on track to make its investors whole by Labor Day.
Matt Polk, a production spokesman, declined to comment.
Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812, Hello, Dolly! and A Doll’s House, Part 2 got the most Tony Award nominations this morning in their respective categories.
Natasha competes against Dear Evan Hansen, Come From Away and Groundhog Day the Musical in the all-important new musical category. Among the high-profile snubs, the new musicals A Bronx Tale, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and Amelie got no nominations. Also bageled was the hit musical revival of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Sunset Boulevard, although star Glenn Close, who won for the role in 1995, was out of contention.
