A Reflection on the 74th Annual Tony Award Nominations
On 15 October, the Tony Award nominations for the truncated 2019-2020 season finally came out. We all knew that it was going to be a different kind of list since so few shows opened between May 2019 and March 2020, but I don’t think anyone anticipated some of the more unusual results.
No, I’m not talking about Aaron Tveit being the only nomination for Best Performance by a Leading Actor in a Musical. That was a likely outcome. The only other eligible musical in the category, The Lightning Thief, went from positive reviews off-Broadway to critical pans on Broadway. The Broadway run was a low budget tour stop and, as often happens in NYC theatre, what’s charming in an intimate house feels empty in a 500+ seat theatre with a mezzanine. Chris McCarrell is a talented musical theatre performer who had the bad luck to give a good performance in a poorly received show. It happens.
The biggest surprise for me is something I’ve advocated for for years. This is the first time in the 74 year history of the Tony Awards that a play with music is going to win Best Original Score. What has always happened in this category is a clear trend: if at least two musicals are nominated, a musical will win.
This is not to discredit the wins of those shows. Shows like Memphis and Newsies have great music and are worth recognition. But to award Memphis, the voters had to ignore the electrifying score of Enron and the beauty of Fences. To crown Newsies, One Man, Two Guvnors and Peter and the Starcatcher had to be cast aside. That was a particularly strange year, as Newsies was nominated for adding additional music (great music, don’t get me wrong) to the existing film score, while both One Man, Two Guvnors and Peter and the Starcatcher had to be evaluated by the Tony committee to determine if they were plays or musicals. They featured sung through scores that helped drive the plot, but not enough songs used in a traditional way to be labeled a traditional musical. Meanwhile, plenty of schools do Peter and the Starcatcher as their school musical and I still drive to the catchy score of One Man, Two Guvnors.
There has never been a year with only one musical nominee; 2020 is the first time no musicals are nominated at all. Five plays are nominated for Best Original Score. None are traditional musicals even if you look at them just the right way. The closest is A Christmas Carol, which does feature actors singing traditional carols, but the show was nominated for the beautiful underscoring throughout all the book scenes; the vocal score was not eligible as it wasn’t written for the show.
Slave Play is not a musical by any means, though its score does play an integral part in the production. You’ll definitely recognize some of the music, which is the point in those moments. Act I is about pushing boundaries, including the use of anachronistic contemporary music in an Antebellum setting. The characters have a discussion in the second act about why music was playing during their activity in the first act. That whole play is about setting up and knocking down expectations and shocking the audience into viewing the world in a different way, so meta commentary on narrative role of theatrical underscoring is another layer of meaning in the show. If you’ve not read Slave Play and believe you can safely handle the material being discussed, please do. Jeremy O. Harris’ play is wonderful.
The Inheritance, The Rose Tattoo, and The Sound Inside are the other three nominees. These are more traditional uses of theatrical scoring. They help set tone, mood, and style throughout the performance. As someone who’s done a lot of theatrical scoring in the past 14 years for a wide variety of shows, I know how much work goes into this style of music. I have incredible respect for all the nominees.
My guess is A Christmas Carol takes the prize here. It is the closest to a musical (even if those sung moments are not eligible, it’s very hard to ignore the songs you can sing along with when judging the entirety of a theatrical score). That whole production is beautiful and lush in all the ways you expect that story to be and is likely to win most of the design categories for plays at the ceremony.
Do not count out Slave Play. There’s are a few reasons for that. One, there has never been another play like it on Broadway. It’s a truly unique experience. You could not leave that theatre without having a strong reaction to the piece; love it or hate it, you remember it.
Two, it broke the record for most nominated production of a play. The 2018 revival of Angels in America had 10 nominates; Slave Play received 12. It’s even more remarkable since it is a new play and the Tony Awards as an institution tend to recognize good productions of revivals over good productions of new plays. Think of all the times where the Best Play category has featured plays online nominated in Best Play. It’s the only category that four or five new plays are guaranteed a nomination in.
Three, the score becomes a topic in the play itself. The Tony Awards love recognizing musicals about music, so the narrative sequence about music might help Slave Play come out on top. It’s really going to come down to how much love there is for Slave Play among the full voting body. I’m hoping it takes all the categories it’s nominated in. That was a once in a lifetime experience on Broadway.
Everything about the world is different right now due to Covid-19. Broadway and the Tony Awards are no exception. Professional theatre is still largely shut down in the United States, leaving many theatre artists out of work. Those of us who teach are being pushed to keep producing live theatre even as it potentially puts our children, our families, and our educators at risk. Professional theatres do not have that option unless explicitly permitted by state government. Even then, Equity productions are having to go above and beyond the minimum standards set by local government to even put on smaller productions. It’s not just the actors onstage; there’s stage crew, lighting, sound, stage managers, costumes, props, musicians, house staff, managers, box office staff, and the audience to worry about. Theatre artists are stuck in a horrible reality where we can either be put in a dangerous situation to keep working, not work at all and hope more relief comes in, or leave the art we’ve dedicated our lives to and bring a new meaning to survival jobs. It’s awful.
As strange as a Tony Awards ceremony will be with only three musicals competing in every category, we still have the privilege of seeing it happen. The entirety of the 2020-2021 season has been cancelled as Broadway will remain shut down through May 2021. I think the shutdown will likely extend into Fall 2021, if not Winter. It needs to be safe to present our art onstage and right now it’s not. It won’t be until there’s a vaccine and wide enough administration to keep the majority of the population safe. Even then, audiences will have to regain their trust for being in close proximity to each other. I’m still at the point of just walking out of the grocery store if there are too many people inside.
The Tony Awards are a celebration of theatrical achievement in the largest NYC theatres. This time, all these incredible productions that would have been closed for months before the nominations would typically be announced in May are the stars. This is especially significant for new plays that are defining the artistic narrative of the season.
The 74th Annual Tony Awards will air soon, though the date has not been announced.
