The Tony Awards: Broadway celebrates its rebels

last updated 8 January 2015

Broadway’s “stubbornly eccentric soul” isn’t dead yet, said Charles McNulty in the Los Angeles Times. Capping a season in which “commercialism ran amok” and the average ticket price topped $100, last week’s Tony Awards still managed to be a celebration of independent spirits. In the tough-fought Best Musical race, a show about a shoe factory saved by transvestites edged out a tale extolling a nonconformist bookworm. “This wasn’t a banner year for musicals by any stretch,” but when the two main contenders for Best Leading Actor in a Musical “came down to two men in dresses”— Kinky Boots’ Billy Porter and Matilda’s Bertie Carvel—“you know the year can’t be that bad.”

Consider Kinky Boots’ triumph over Matilda a “predictable upset,” said Richard Zoglin in Time.com. Though critics had been louder in their praise for the British import based on a Roald Dahl children’s story, Harvey Fierstein’s Kinky Boots had the hometown edge, plus “a feel-good vibe,” and a score by a faded pop star, Cyndi Lauper, whose award for Best Score makes a good comeback story. Far more surprising was Tom Hanks’s failure to win an award for his Broadway debut, as the reporter-protagonist of Nora Ephron’s posthumous hit, Lucky Guy. The prize instead went to Tracy Letts of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?—a revival that closed months ago but apparently lingered in voters’ minds.

“It did end up being a pretty great year for plays,” said Joe Reid in the A.V. Club. Christopher Durang’s comedy Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike took the top prize among non-musicals, but probably didn’t get the audience boost it should have because the producers of the Tonys still give all the TV airtime to the musicals. More troubling still was that none of the writers nominated for Best Play were under 55, said Misha Berson in The Seattle Times. Perhaps the only way to sell those high-priced tickets is to ignore young upstarts in favor of beloved big-name playwrights. But it makes you wonder: Is today’s Broadway shutting out the Ephrons and Albees of the future?