When they recently announced the nominees for the Broadway awards named for one Antoinette Perry, to be broadcast on Sunday, June 7 on CBS-TV, I posted that I was one of maybe three dozen people who cared. The Tonys, in terms of the TV audience, is paltry, compared with the Oscars, Grammys, and Emmys It has only two things going for it:
1) It is the most entertaining program of the four
2) When these shows go on tour, and come to my neck of the woods – i.e., Proctors Theatre in nearby Schenectady, NY – I’ll be familiar with them. Not incidentally, I’m seeing Pippin in May and Kinky Boots in June at Proctors.
There was a lot of speculation about who would host this year’s ceremony. Neil Patrick Harris was a popular choice in 2009, 2011-2013, but he hosted the Oscars recently. Another possibility was Hugh Jackman, who had done a fine job in 2003-2005 and 2014.
If not them, speculation centered around James Corden, CBS’s late, late night host, or especially Stephen Colbert, who left his Comedy Central show about a half year ago, and won’t replace David Letterman for a couple more months.
The hosting choices turned out to be Kristin Chenoweth, a long-time Broadway actress nominated this year for Best Actress in a Musical for On the 20th Century; and Alan Cumming, probably best known for Cabaret on Broadway, and on The Good Wife on TV.
Here are the nominees. Some folks seem irritated that folks better known for TV or film hog the Tony spotlight. That’s true again this year, with Helen Mirren, Elisabeth Moss, and Carey Mulligan up for leading actress in a play, and Bradley Cooper and Bill Nighy as lead actors in a play.
I saw a couple of pieces on CBS Sunday Morning recently. One was about Cooper’s transition to the Elephant Man, and it was extraordinary. Mirran as Queen Elizabeth II in The Audience was quite funny.
From the New York Times:
The nominators were smitten with four musicals – “An American in Paris” and “Fun Home” (with 12 nominations each), “Something Rotten!” (10), and “The King & I” (9) – and ready to dispense with several others that received few nominations (“The Last Ship,” “Gigi”) or none at all (“Finding Neverland,” “Doctor Zhivago,” “It Shoulda Been You,” “Honeymoon in Vegas,” “Side Show,” “Holler if Ya Hear Me”). The nominations are usually spread around a bit more widely: Is this year’s slate a reflection of the strength of those four musicals with the most nods, or the weakness of the rest of the pack?
I do have a rooting interest, and it’s for “Fun Home.” A coworker has a cousin in the cast. Here’s the whole soundtrack of the off-Broadway cast, prior to its Broadway opening.
