“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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