“Hollywood stars and British imports” ruled this year’s Tony Awards, said Ellen Gamerman in The Wall Street Journal. Red, a high-minded work about abstract expressionist painter Mark Rothko that transferred to Broadway from London’s Donmar Warehouse, won six Tonys, including Best Play. La Cage aux Folles, another import from London’s West End, won for Best Revival of a Musical. The winners in this year’s acting categories, meanwhile, might easily have been mistaken for Academy Award winners. Hollywood heavy hitters Denzel Washington, Catherine Zeta-Jones, and Scarlett Johansson all took home acting awards.
The ceremony itself made clear that, these days, Broadway imports its musical sensibility as well as its stars, said David Hinckley in the New York Daily News. A surprisingly diverse set of performances celebrated not traditional Tin Pan Alley songwriting but “time-tested pop hits.” Imaginative music-and-dance numbers drew on the sounds of Green Day, Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley, and ’70s Afrobeat superstar Fela Kuti—all of whom had inspired “feel-good musicals” this year. Even Best Musical winner Memphis, an interracial love story set in the segregation-era South, featured original tunes inspired by 1950s R&B chart-toppers. For much of the evening, it seemed as if the Tony Awards had become “the TV show the Grammys have always wanted to be.”
Forgive me if I wasn’t having a great time, said Charles McNulty in the Los Angeles Times. This year’s Tonys showed, more clearly than ever, that in today’s theater, “box office potential and Hollywood celebrity trump quality and innovation.” Stage veterans barely had a chance in categories where stars like Zeta-Jones and Jude Law were nominated for merely average work. Awards should validate “excellence and originality”—not just serve as advertisements meant to drum up business. For the sake of Broadway’s own continued vitality, I can only hope that in the future, the industry as a whole might be daring enough to “bite the hand that feeds it” by challenging its audience a bit more.
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The winners
Best Play
Red
Best Revival of a Play
Fences
Leading Actor in a Play
Denzel Washington, Fences
Leading Actress in a Play
Viola Davis, Fences
Featured Actor in a Play
Eddie Redmayne, Red
Featured Actress in a Play
Scarlett Johansson, A View From the Bridge
Best Musical
Memphis
Best Revival of a Musical
La Cage aux Folles
Best Original Score
Memphis
Leading Actor in a Musical
Douglas Hodge, La Cage aux Folles
Leading Actress in a Musical
Catherine Zeta-Jones, A Little Night Music
Featured Actor in a Musical
Levi Kreis, Million Dollar Quartet
Featured Actress in a Musical
Katie Finneran, Promises, Promises
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If/Thenfeature Tony-winning Idina Menzel “looks and sounds sensational” in a role tailored to her talents.
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Rocky
feature It’s a wonder that this Rocky ever reaches the top of the steps.
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Love and Information
feature Leave it to Caryl Churchill to create a play that “so ingeniously mirrors our age of the splintered attention span.”
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The Bridges of Madison County
feature Jason Robert Brown’s “richly melodic” score is “one of Broadway’s best in the last decade.”
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Outside Mullingar
feature John Patrick Shanley’s “charmer of a play” isn’t for cynics.
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The Night Alive
feature Conor McPherson “has a singular gift for making the ordinary glow with an extra dimension.”
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No Man’s Land
feature The futility of all conversation has been, paradoxically, the subject of “some of the best dialogue ever written.”
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The Commons of Pensacola
feature Stage and screen actress Amanda Peet's playwriting debut is a “witty and affecting” domestic drama.