“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.”
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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.