The Favorite
Stephanie J. Block didn’t get a feature article in the Tonys section, but she did win a vote of confidence. The Times’s top critics predicted she’d win for her role in “The Cher Show.” UPDATE: She did!
UPDATES (6-10-19) BELOW, IN BOLDFACE
I KNOW A LITTLE something about the special Tony Awards issues of The New York Times. Wrote for them for years. Edited too many of those articles to count. Even read page proofs on closing day (actually, that was my favorite part). And I can tell you, there’s always a lot of information there. So for those of you who just didn’t have time to plow through all 30 pages of this year’s section (published on May 19, 2019), here’s a handy summary compiled by one who knows. With links, of course — just in case you can find time now to read the whole thing.
THE COVER
The photo is the curtain call at “Ink.” The man in the center, with the startling forehead scar, is Jonny Lee Miller, who plays the editor chosen by Rupert Murdoch to turn The Sun, a staid London daily newspaper, into a ridiculous tabloid back in 1969.
BIGGEST AD SPENDERS
“To Kill a Mockingbird” (4 full pages), “What the Constitution Means to Me” (2 pages) and “Kiss Me, Kate” (2 pages). Lots of other full-page ads.
The headlines shown here, by the way, are the ones from the print edition.
PAGE 10: “HEAVEN OR HELL, OR MAYBE A BIT OF BOTH?”
Ben Brantley and Jesse Green, The Times’s chief theater critics, sat down for a Q&A with Scott Heller, the news organization’s theater editor. The “edited excerpts” (as we say now, since some readers apparently believed for years that newspapers and magazines were publishing verbatim transcripts of interviews — !!!!) are actually pretty entertaining.
BEST CHARACTER AND SETTING DESCRIPTIONS Brantley refers to the restaurant manager (Adam Driver) in “Burn This” as “a cokehead in mourning.” And to the location of “Hadestown” as “a honky-tonk on the edge of an abyss.”
Grieving Man
Adam Driver in “Burn This.” Tony nominee for best actor in a play.
BEST EXPLANATION OF THE VALUE OF “THE PROM”: “Using such an anodyne form to tell such a sly story … makes it almost subversive,” Green said. And it fulfills our “atavistic need for comfort without condescension.” (The premise involves actors on the brink of has-been-ness championing a gay couple’s right to go to their high school prom.)
Resolve
Heidi Schreck as her high-school-debater self in “What the Constitution Means to Me.” Tony nominee for best actress in a play.
HIGH PRAISE FOR “WHAT THE CONSTITUTION MEANS TO ME” Green said the play “best exemplified the change that’s in the air this year.” Brantley added, “Heidi Schreck is only a force for good.”
Shocker
Jeff Daniels and Gbenga Akinnagbe in “To Kill a Mockingbird,” which did not receive a Tony nomination for best play. UPDATE: But Celia Keenan-Bolger won for best featured actress in a play.
THE BIG SNUB “To Kill a Mockingbird” didn’t receive a nomination for best play. “That was the shocker for me,” Brantley said. Maybe, he mentioned, people were angry with the producer Scott Rudin for having other stage adaptations of Harper Lee’s novel closed down.
MAJOR PREDICTION It’s been such a diverse season that “I wouldn’t be surprised if 14 different shows pick up the 26 competitive Tonys,” Green said. UPDATE: Close! We counted 12 different shows: “Hadestown,” “The Ferryman,” “Oklahoma!,” “The Boys in the Band,” “Tootsie,” “Network,” “The Waverly Gallery,” “The Cher Show,” “Ink,” “To Kill a Mockingbird,” “Choir Boy” and “Ain’t Too Proud.”
OTHER THOUGHTS Brantley referred to Broadway as “the Staid White Way” in one answer but seemed to see hope for change.
FOOD FOR THOUGHT ON BROADWAY TRANSFERS “A move uptown doesn’t always mean coarsening or cheapening,” Green said. “It can help some works find their scale.”
PAGE 12: “SOLVING THE SIX BIGGEST MYSTERIES FROM THIS BROADWAY SEASON”
(1) Yes, that scene in “Network” that appears to be taking place on the sidewalk outside the theater is broadcast live every time. That’s it in the photo, with Tatiana Maslany and Tony Goldwyn. I was pretty sure of this already, because I saw the show on the day of SantaCon (New York’s peculiar annual celebration in which men in Santa Claus costumes go bar-hopping together); at least one pretend Santa walked by during the action.
PDA
Tatiana Maslany and Sam Goldwyn in “Network” on a West 44th Street sidewalk. Really.
(2) How does Fionnula Flanagan make her elderly character in “The Ferryman” seem so far away mentally? She gets into an uncomfortable position in her wheelchair, sucks on a cough drop and thinks about death.
(3) How tall is that really tall guy in “Hadestown”? Timothy Hughes is 6-foot-7. (So are/were Kobe Bryant, RuPaul, Hulk Hogan, Tom Noonan, James Cromwell, James Arness and Stedman Graham. According to famousfix.com.
Smooth
Ali Stroker on the opening night of “Oklahoma!” Tony nominee for best featured actress in a musical. (UPDATE: Tony winner.)
(4) Ali Stroker of “Oklahoma!” says that dancing in a wheelchair is a little like performing on ice.
(5) The debate in “What the Constitution Means to Me” is partly improvised, partly rehearsed.
(6) To help him sing like a woman, Santino Fontana, the star of “Tootsie,” says he uses breathing, resonance and imagining he has a smaller larynx.
PAGE 18: “PRIVACY IS ONE OF HER STRONG POINTS”
ANNETTE BENING, Tony-nominated for her role as the good wife in Arthur Miller’s “All My Sons,” didn’t want to answer the writer Alexis Soloski’s questions about her acting process, her current role, her husband (Warren Beatty) or her children.
Not Talking
Annette Bening (with Tracy Letts) in “All My Sons.” Tony nominee for best featured actress in a play.
But she did reveal that in real life an uncle of hers, fighting with the Royal Canadian Air Force, died in World War II because of technical failures in his plane. “All My Sons,” you see, is about two American manufacturers who sent their own country’s servicemen off to that same war with aviation equipment they knew was faulty. And only one of them has been punished for it. The article’s best quotation comes from Benjamin Walker, one of Bening’s co-stars. Working with her, he said, was like going “onstage with a toddler with a loaded gun.” She’s determined to surprise everybody, including herself.
PAGE 20: “MESSENGER OF GRACE, NOW A GOD”
André De Shields, who stars in “Hadestown” as Hermes (the narrator-emcee, among other things), answers all of the writer Laura Collins-Hughes’s questions — and then some.
We learn his definition of damnation on earth (“Hell could be something as complex as a white-supremacist complex. Hell could be living a life of denial”), one reason he believes black artists have come a long way (“We’ve been tacticians in terms of making ourselves welcome.” Where? “In terrain that has been traditionally inhospitable.”) and the secrets of living authentically (courage, confidence, tenacity, perseverance and “epic empathy for oneself”). In case some have forgotten, De Shields’s last Tony nomination was for the 2000 male-stripper musical “The Full Monty.” He stopped the show with his song-and-dance rendition of “Big Black Man.”
PAGE 24: “IT’S A HALF-HOUR TO SHOWTIME … “
A photo essay of 20 backstage shots from five shows — “Oklahoma!,” “Hadestown,” “Ink,” “Tootsie” and “Ain’t Too Proud: The Life and Times of the Temptations.”
Places
The special Tonys section includes a backstage photo essay. This is Anthony Cason, an “Oklahoma!” cast member.
My favorites: The table filled with period newspaper props from “Ink” and Julie Halston holding court with fellow cast members of “Tootsie.”
PAGE 27: “WHO WILL WIN (AND WHO SHOULD)?”
Brantley and Green again, this time making their predictions about Tony winners in 16 major categories. There were a few unanimous decisions (both critics predicted that the following not only would be the winners but also should be). UPDATE: They were right about every single one.
Sure Thing?
The Times theater critics predicted “Oklahoma!” would win the Tony for best musical revival. (UPDATE: And it did!)
“Oklahoma!” as best musical revival. YES!
Ali Stroker (who plays Ado Annie) in that same show, best featured actress in a musical YES!
Stephanie J. Block as superstar Cher in “The Cher Show,” best actress in a musical YES!
Santino Fontana as Michael Dorsey/Dorothy Michaels in “Tootsie,” best actor in a musical. YES!
Sam Mendes for “The Ferryman,” best director of a play. YES!
Other likely winners, according to the article: Elaine May in “The Waverly Gallery” (playing a sophisticate whose mind is going), Celia Keenan-Bolger in “To Kill a Mockingbird” (playing a little girl in 1930s Alabama) and Bertie Carvel in “Ink” (playing Rupert Murdoch). YES. YES. YES.
THE 73RD TONY AWARDS WILL BE BROADCAST ON SUNDAY, JUNE 9, AT 8 P.M. ON CBS. THE HOST IS JAMES CORDEN.