The 74th Tony Awards Winners
We finally have the Tony Award winners for the 2018-2019 Broadway season.
I’m trying to take a more positive outlook on this but it is hard. Both ceremonies were surprisingly good, but the decision to hide half of the ceremony behind Paramount Plus still baffles me. I love theatre. I appreciate the Tony Awards and what they stand for. Even I wouldn’t subscribe to Paramount Plus just to watch them. Shoot, it’s why I still haven’t seen Schmigadoon!, a show that looks like it was written for me; I’m not paying for a streaming service to get one show.
By the end of the ceremony, I was disappointed. Slave Play walked away empty-handed. I feared it would happen and I was right. I’m not going to speculate why. You can start pulling at those threads yourself.
The big winner of the night was Moulin Rouge, the safest Best Musical nominee. Of course, there were only three Best Musical nominees after the nomination/rules committee was so hard-pressed to stop Lighting Thief from being called a Tony-nominated show that they suddenly changed a lot of language about quality and worthiness during the nomination process. I digress.
Moulin Rouge is a musical spectacle adapted from the Baz Luhrmann film of the same name. Aaron Tveit avoided going down in history as the only Tony-nominated actor to lose in a category with one nomination with his Leading Actor win (see The Lighting Thief nonsense for that one) and Danny Burstein won Featured Actor. The show also won Best Director for Alex Timbers; Best Choreography for Sonya Tayeh; Best Orchestrations for Katie Kresek, Charlie Rosen, Matt Stine, and Justin Levine; and every design award: Scenic Design for Derek McLane; Costume Design for Catherine Zuber; Lighting Design for Justin Townsend; and Sound Design for Peter Hylenski.
Adrienne Warren picked up the Leading Actress in a Musical award for her role as Tina Turner in Tina and Lauren Patten won Featured Actress for Jagged Little Pill.
Jagged Little Pill is in a firestorm of controversy right now that has been brewing since the show transferred to Broadway. If you’ve been here long enough, you know Sketching Details is a safe space to be a Diablo Cody fan. I still believe she is an incredible writer and deserves a lot more recognition for her skill at story structure and writing about mental wellness. However, Jagged Little Pill will go down as a black mark on her record.
The show originated in Boston with Patten’s character Jo explicitly written as non-binary representation. It was a major element of the character and the show. By the time the show opened on Broadway, it was gone. These things happen. Scripts change as shows develop. However, the producers and creative team of the show engaged in a pretty unprecedented gaslighting campaign to convince anyone who saw the earlier version or knew the show that Jo was never non-binary. This included speaking out against actors who discussed it.
That’s just the tip of the iceberg and we’re getting off-track here a bit. Just look up the growing list of actors leaving or not returning to the production to see what they have to say about an alleged pattern of abusive behavior behind the scenes at this show.
Anyway, congratulations to Diablo Cody for winning Best Book of a Musical for Jagged Little Pill.
My dream Tony Award outcome finally came true by default. A play won Best Original Score. Full disclosure: no musicals were nominated for Original Score as the only three musicals permitted to be nominated were jukebox musicals. This is, again, a category where The Lightning Thief was deemed to be not of sufficient enough quality to even be nominated. Meanwhile, I’m here at my job tossing out the incredible character-driven songs of the show to my students like candy at a parade. I digress.
Christopher Nightingale won for composing the music to A Christmas Carol, a beautiful new adaptation of Charles Dickens’ classic novel. The play also swept the design categories, winning for Scenic Design and Costume Design for Rob Howell; Lighting Design for Hugh Vanstone; and Sound Design for Simon Baker.
Only seven shows took home any awards last night. The Inheritance won for Best Play for Matthew Lopez, Best Director for Stephen Daldry, Best Actor for Andrew Burnap, and Featured Actress for Lois Smith. A Soldier’s Play won for Best Revival and Best Featured Actor for David Alan Grier. Finally, Mary-Louise Parker won Leading Actress for The Sound Inside.
And thus ends the weirdest Tony Awards season ever. The new season is already packed with almost all of the new musicals from the shortened 2018-2019 season officially opening over the coming weeks and months and an exciting new crop of plays that jumped in to reopen Broadway. Hopefully the people setting the rules don’t try to smother the life out of the ceremony again by encouraging people not to vote for individual productions just because they didn’t personally enjoy them this year.
