The 2006 Tony Telecast: A Review from the Couch
That personal disclaimer aside, this Man in Chair found the 60th annual Tony broadcast as efficient and painless as the Broadway season was painfully uneven. Most of the reminders of what made the Great White Way so much less than great in 2005-2006—Lestat, Lennon, In My Life, Ring of Fire, Tarzan, The Woman in White—were mercifully absent, though the Roundabout's egregious Threepenny Opera revival did get to fly its freak flag at half-mast for the relatively watchable and only lightly censored "Tango Ballad," and a terrible montage of un-nominated plays Latinologues? After the Night and the Music? only emphasized the season's slim pickings in the straight-play column.
The latter meant that History Boys had altogether too easy a time mowing down the competition, with a total of six wins, including play, director, actor, and featured actress. But even in a somewhat bleak year for musicals, the top crop presented a tougher field: Those other boys, the Jersey variety, walked away with the top musical nod but only a total of four Tonys, compared to the five earned by sleeper favorite The Drowsy Chaperone, including best book and score. Director John Doyle took the only award nabbed by darkly brilliant Sweeney Todd, while the Roundabout's Pajama Game tied up only two, for revival and choreography.
But the real horse race of the Tony broadcast, and the math that matters, is which musical excerpt sold more tickets, both for its New York run and for its touring future. On this scorecard there was no contest: With its sleek, TV-ready concert format, Jersey Boys strutted away with the prize, ensuring that this exuberant tribute to Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons will be selling out on Broadway for at least the next four seasons. The earnest speeches of acting winners Christian Hoff and John Lloyd Young, paying homage to the struggles of their real-life dads, only solidified this show's cred as the preeminent musical for straight guys to take their dates.
That honor might have gone to The Wedding Singer, which wisely chose its hyperactive opening number but less wisely focused its cameras on bland leading man Stephen Lynch rather than on Rob Ashford's hilarious choreography. And Pajama Game made the most of the tireless Harry Connick, Jr., trotting him out for a sampler of the show's high points, "There Once Was a Man" and the sizzling "Hernando's Hideaway."
The other numbers preached their show's charms to the already converted, with variable success. Despite the palpable spunk of lead Sutton Foster, The Drowsy Chaperone's "Show Off" number seemed quaint and tinny out of context, while Sweeney Todd labored nobly but not quite convincingly to cut out highlights from a necessarily seamless, immersive experience. The Color Purple trotted out its big gun—mother hen Oprah, "Hell, No," and the soaring title tune—in a display that would have had more impact if it hadn't already been in regular rotation on its producer's own daytime TV show.
The rest of the host-free telecast was show business as usual—which is to say, a polite orgy of self-congratulation, TelePrompTer kerfluffles, and more commercial breaks than the last quarter of a playoff game. Though some theater folks may have hoped that Connick could be the new Hugh Jackman—a triple threat who seemed to give Broadway a virile but playful glamour, not to mention crossover cachet—the N'awlins crooner seemed too slippery and cool to the touch to assume that mantle. His opening number, with its lazy-swinging takes on hoary showtunes "Give My Regards to Broadway"?, invited the clicking accompaniment of a million remote controls across America.
The show survived without a nominal emcee by mixing and matching celebrities and previous Tony honorees, with pairings that ranged from logical Huff castmates Hank Azaria and Oliver Platt to telegenic Lauren Ambrose and Paul Rudd, from faintly odd Hal Holbrook and Kristen Bell to outright perverse Rosie Perez and Richard Thomas.
Acceptance speeches were short and mostly poised, particularly when compared to the breathless, beat-the-clock litanies that make the Oscars so tiring. Kathleen Marshall, accepting for her Pajama Game choreography, came closest to mimicking the encyclopedic name-check, while Richard Griffiths, accepting for his lead role in History Boys, bloviated a bit too long, earning the show's only time's-up music cue.
The night's classiest moment came when Bill Irwin, in a purportedly unscripted moment, presented his co-presenter, Patricia Neal, with an award. Neal, he explained, had been given the first Tony for "outstanding newcomer" actually, it was a featured actress award for her 1946-'47 appearance in Lillian Hellman's Another Part of the Forest, but her statuette was rumored to have been stolen soon after. After a brief moment of suspense as he put this proposition to the vaguely bewildered Neal, Irwin happily presented her with a replacement statuette. Which only begs the graceless question: It took 60 years to spring for a new one?
A memorial moment for August Wilson and Wendy Wasserstein hovered uneasily between classy and silly: While they sounded weirdly abrupt out of context, it was still striking to hear actual speeches from non-musical plays delivered live by James Earl Jones and Cynthia Nixon, respectively. If only current plays by living playwrights received the same treatment rather than mere snippets and stills.
Brief flashbacks to former Tony broadcasts and winners were so undefinitive as to be almost pointless, though the first one—Jane Krakowski recalling Michael Jeter's extraordinary 12-step affirmation during his 1990 acceptance speech from Grand Hotel—was a jarring reminder of the kind of spontaneity, even messiness, that was missing from this year's broadcast. Apart from some frightening facial hair David Gallo's fierce eyebrows, Michael David's garden-gnome beard, theater folks these days are mostly a well-behaved, eminently professional, ever so slightly dull lot. The show's one political joke—a quip about Avenue Q's Rod being a "Republican puppet"—was a toothless non-sequitur. And the closest the show came to transgression was some same-sex dancing in the aforementioned Threepenny number.
In its undisguised role as an annual three-hour commercial for Broadway, particularly Broadway musicals, this year's Tony broadcast managed to put a game face on a bumpy season for new productions. Not that producers are having too many sleepless night lately: Ticket sales are at record highs, thanks in part to celebrity casting, but thanks even moreso to the staying power of shows born well before 2005-'06. Clearly the Main Stem can survive a season that's light on new megahits, just as surely as the Tonys can survive a year without Hugh Jackman. A holding pattern can't hold forever, though.