The Tony Awards: The year the Oscars met the Grammys

last updated 8 January 2015

“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.