The Critic’s Notebook
If the roster of Tony Award nominees announced on Monday looks even weirder and more random than usual, then it’s been a strange and random season. It wasn’t even really a season, by the way. The profusion of kinks — many categories that usually have five nominations this year are six or seven — pales in comparison to the scope of the eligible productions, the first of which (“Girl From the North Country”) opened in March 2020. , just before the pandemic blew an 18-month hole in Broadway. If my math is correct, that was 100 years ago.
The pandemic that disrupted the season also disrupted the award process. Of the 34 productions that the 29 nominees were allowed to consider, 15 opened in April – six in the last week of that month alone. It couldn’t have been easy. I know for critics it was a maddening game of Whac-a-Mole, trying to hit every show as it popped up before suddenly disappearing, filled with shutdowns and star absences. I ended up missing two: “Mr. Saturday Night,” which received five nominations, and “The Little Prince,” which was ineligible and incomprehensible in every way.
The nominators presumably missed none, and of those 34 eligible productions, they honored a whopping 29. Not a single musical, not even the awful “Diana, the Musical” got skunked, even as some really good plays, including ” Pass Over” and “Is This is a Room,” they were forgotten. Was it because they were among the first to step into the wishing post-Covid Broadway reopening that began in August? Maybe open too early, closing definitely too soon.
But those shows are also more sophisticated than commercial pricing usually manages, using inner-city theater formats to present difficult dramatic material. (“Pass Over” is a surreal take on violence against young black men; “Is This a Room,” a spoken transcript of a government secret interrogation.) The nominations suggest a willingness to take on just one of those challenges—just as At the other end of the spectrum, they seemed ready to welcome plays that are hackneyed in form or content, but not both. The revival of Neil Simon’s “Plaza Suite,” starring Matthew Broderick and Sarah Jessica Parker, received one nomination for Jane Greenwood’s costume design.
Still, I’m impressed by the nominators’ determination to spread the wealth as I go through my personal Tonys spreadsheet, which I keep in a special air-sealed safe with my original cast vinyl recordings and Playbills printed on papyrus.
There are, of course, many household names, including previous Tony winners Mary-Louise Parker, LaChanze, Hugh Jackman, Sutton Foster, Phylicia Rashad and Patti LuPone – the latter two superlative in supporting rather than leading roles.
But there are also plenty of breakthrough names. The contest for the best performance of a lead actor in a musical will likely pit Broadway newbies Myles Frost (star of “MJ”) against Jaquel Spivey (star of “A Strange Loop”) — let alone Jackman or Billy Crystal in the same category. First-time nominees Sharon D Clarke (“Caroline, of Change”) and Joaquina Kalukango (“Paradise Square”) are also the pair to beat for Best Performance by a Leading Actress in a Musical – let alone Foster.
That those four main contenders are Black underlines that, like the season itself, the Tonys are making some progress in their pursuit of greater diversity. By my count, over a third of the total of 136 nominations were honored for shows and people you may not have seen much of on the Great White Way before – which I think we can finally stop calling that name.
Not that you ‘see’ all that diversity already. We also benefit from diversity backstage, including many of the directors, designers, and choreographers behind “For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow Is Enuf,” “Paradise Square” and “The Skin of Our Teeth.” Inclusion is not enough if it is only about the public.
Much of that new-to-Broadway talent arrived not individually but en masse, thanks to black authors, directors and producers making diverse hiring a priority. As a result, this was a season of ensembles, including the six “thoughts” from “A Strange Loop,” the seven abstract nouns portrayed by the cast of “Thoughts of a Colored Man,” and the seven colors of “For Colored Girls”. †
In some of those shows, as well as in “Six”, “The Minutes”, “Clyde’s”, “Skeleton Crew”, and “POTUS”, there are no lead roles at all; the group is the star. If that’s the case, it can seem perverse to pick just one artist from a carefully balanced troupe, though the nominees did just that with their nods to Kenita R. Miller in “For Colored Girls,” Rachel Dratch, and Julie White in ” POTUS,” and John-Andrew Morrison and L Morgan Lee in “A Strange Loop.”
Those performers earned their nominations, but so did many of their castmates; for that reason, as critics and others have repeatedly argued, the Tonys should create a few Best Ensemble categories, for musicals and plays, awarded when appropriate. Especially this year it would have made sense.
Not that that makes sense with the Tony nominations. I don’t believe in snubs, except for the time when somehow I wasn’t invited to my own birthday party, but the arbitrariness inherent in a process with so few nominators covering so much territory leaves me with mixed feelings about it. to strive.
Of course I’m thrilled to see so much beautiful work, much of it really new, being noticed in the nominations. But even for a critical critic, excellence doesn’t seem to be the only important yardstick right now. As Polish as it may sound, I think everything that has managed to open up during this hectic, often terrifying season, and anyone who took the stage before an audience of beaming and masked faces, deserves a bow, if not a nod.
Even, I think, ‘Diana’.
May 9, 2022
An earlier version of this article misspelled the month “Girl From the North Country” opened. It was March 2020, not February 2020 (when the show started preview performances).