Imagine Roy Cohn, Harry Potter, Joan of Arc, and Eliza Doolittle all at the same dinner party. Oh, and SpongeBob SquarePants. You’d get something approaching the 2018 Tony nominations, which were announced on Tuesday. It’s an odd race, reflecting an odd season, in which Broadway refracted pop culture in eye-popping bursts. Just take the four-way contest for Best Musical. In one corner, you have “The Band’s Visit,” a quietly poignant, near-plotless musical about an uneventful evening in an unremarkable Israeli town. In the other, you have “Frozen,” “Mean Girls,” and SpongeBob SquarePants. (Those last two got the most nominations, at twelve apiece.) It’s less apples-and-oranges than dried-dates-and-pineapples.
And then there’s “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child,” the two-part extravaganza coursing on a broomstick through the non-musical categories. A magic chest of stagecraft, it got ten nominations, including Best Play, with competition including Ayad Akhtar’s “Junk” (an indictment of nineteen-eighties capitalism) and Lucy Kirkwood’s “The Children” (an ethical nail-biter about a nuclear disaster)—both of which have been off the boards for months. Though “Harry Potter” is not a musical, it has the sweep and swirl of one, and its secret weapon, the movement director Steven Hoggett, deservedly wound up in the Best Choreography category. It would be easier to sneer at this season’s big-budget, name-brand entertainments if they weren’t so expertly crafted, from David Zinn’s Rube Goldberg-esque set for “SpongeBob” (nominated for Best Scenic Design of a Musical) to Tina Fey’s crackerjack script for “Mean Girls” (nominated for Best Book of a Musical).
While theatregoers had many chances to tap into their inner child, the pickings were slimmer, and bleaker, when it came to the complications of adulthood, from the boozy self-delusions of Eugene O’Neill’s “The Iceman Cometh” to the poisoned motherhood of Edward Albee’s “Three Tall Women.” Albee was squeezed out of a strong Best Revival of a Play category, in which “Iceman” will face off against Kenneth Lonergan’s “Lobby Hero,” Tom Stoppard’s “Travesties,” and Tony Kushner’s “Angels in America,” in a seven-and-a-half-hour revival directed by Marianne Elliott, who will get a shot at her third Tony. For Best Direction of a Play, she’s up against her fellow-Briton John Tiffany (“Harry Potter”), both of them having delivered day-long epics stuffed with theatrical wonders. “Angels” received eleven nominations—a record for any play—including one for Adrian Sutton’s original music, which will compete against the scores for “Frozen,” “Mean Girls,” “The Band’s Visit,” and “SpongeBob.” The latter has a list of songwriters including Steven Tyler, Cyndi Lauper, the Flaming Lips, and John Legend; if it wins, they might as well kill two birds with one awards show and hand out the Grammys.
The race for Best Revival of a Musical could well have been called Best Handling of Problematic Gender Roles. The three competitors, all warmly received, are “My Fair Lady,” “Carousel,” and “Once on This Island.” Bartlett Sher’s production of “My Fair Lady,” at Lincoln Center Theatre, probably has the edge, thanks to its sheer handsomeness. For Best Direction of a Musical, Sher has tough competition in David Cromer (“The Band’s Visit”), Tina Landau (“SpongeBob”), Casey Nicholaw (“Mean Girls”), and Michael Arden (“Once on This Island”), whose production has the distinction of employing two live goats and four chickens.
The acting categories also reflect a divide between the fantastical and the earthbound. For Best Leading Actor in a Musical, the spark plug Ethan Slater, who plays the titular sponge in “SpongeBob,” is up against Tony Shalhoub (nearly wordless in “The Band’s Visit”), Joshua Henry (self-destructive and devastating in “Carousel”), and Harry Hadden-Paton (plummy and rueful in “My Fair Lady”). Slater’s castmate Gavin Lee, whose Squidward Q. Tentacles steals the show with a four-legged tap number, will compete for Best Featured Actor in a Musical against such bipedal contenders as Norbert Leo Butz (“My Fair Lady”) and Ari’el Stachel (“The Band’s Visit”).
There are six women up for Best Leading Actress in a Musical. Lauren Ambrose is both fierce and vulnerable as Eliza Doolittle, in “My Fair Lady”—but so is Taylor Louderman, as the mean-girl-in-chief Regina George. I’d give the edge, though, to Katrina Lenk, whose performance as a world-weary café proprietress gives “The Band’s Visit” its yearning heart. Best Featured Actress in a Musical features two living legends, Renée Fleming (“Carousel”) and Diana Rigg (“My Fair Lady”), as well as the memorable upstarts Ashley Park (as Gretchen Wieners in “Mean Girls”) and Lindsay Mendez (Carrie Pipperidge in “Carousel”). Somewhat surprisingly, the acting categories found room for two Donna Summers (LaChanze and Ariana DeBose, of “Summer”) but iced out the princesses of “Frozen.”
At eighty-one, Glenda Jackson, as the dyspeptic matron in “Three Tall Women,” is all but a lock for Best Leading Actress in a Play, a category that also includes Amy Schumer (from Steve Martin’s comedy “Meteor Shower”), Condola Rashad (the martyr of “Saint Joan”), and Lauren Ridloff (the deaf heroine of “Children of a Lesser God,” in the play’s sole nomination). As Jackson’s younger incarnation, last year’s Tony winner Laurie Metcalf is in the Best Featured Actress in a Play category, but not the third tall woman, Alison Pill; instead, there’s Noma Dumezweni (as the grown-up Hermione Granger, in “Harry Potter”), Deborah Findlay (“The Children”), and two actresses from “Angels in America,” Denise Gough and Susan Brown.
Andrew Garfield has a good chance at Best Leading Actor in a Play against two big-name showboats, Denzel Washington (“The Iceman Cometh”) and Mark Rylance (“Farinelli and the King”); the race also includes Tom Hollander (“Travesties”) and Jamie Parker, as the middle-aged Boy Who Lived. Bruce Springsteen and John Leguizamo will both receive special awards for their respective one-man shows, but, in a twist, Leguizamo’s “Latin History for Morons” also made the cut for Best Play, edging out last summer’s “1984.” The prize for Best Featured Actor in a Play will likely go to Nathan Lane, as Kushner’s version of Roy Cohn, but the category could have easily included his castmates James McArdle, Lee Pace, and Nathan Stewart-Jarrett. Instead, the nominators included two actors from the smart Second Stage revival of “Lobby Hero,” Michael Cera and Brian Tyree Henry, as well as David Morse (“Iceman”) and the standout performer of “Harry Potter”—Anthony Boyle, as Scorpius Malfoy. And there you have the 2018 Tony Awards in a nutshell: a closeted Republican power-monger versus a spastic teen-age wizard. We’ll have to wait until June 10th to see who’s got more dragon energy.
Sourse: newyorker.com
