What the Tony nominations got right — and wrong

Chicago Tribune

02-05-2025

Pity poor Jake Gyllenhaal. Rich, original and cliché-free, his riveting, Tony Award-worthy Iago was, in fact, as dynamic and distinctive a Shakespearean performance as Broadway has seen in years. And yet the show that surrounded him, 'Othello' starring Denzel Washington, was so otherwise dismal that Tony nominators could not see beyond the noise and confusion to find the one living, breathing reason to spend the big bucks at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre.
A cautionary tale: Do great work in a bad production and Tony nominators likely will pass you by.
But the reverse can be true, too. The number one reason the Tony-nominated 'Maybe Happy Ending, ' a sweet and deeply thoughtful romance between two retired robots, was such a sleeper hit was the achingly vulnerable performance of Helen J. Shen.
Guess who did not get a Tony nomination.
Darren Criss was impressive in that show, too, but his was a stylized and somewhat self-protected performance that relied on his well-honed technique. Playing a robot with abandonment issues, Shen laid out her heart at the Belasco Theatre. There's no question Nicole Scherzinger produced the most astonishing musical performance of the Broadway season. But the second best? Shen's work, for sure.
Pity David Foster, too. Here you have an enormously accomplished, 75-year-old composer — 16 Grammy Awards, co-writing credits on megahits like Earth Wind and Fire's 'After the Love Has Gone,' Whitney Houston's 'I Have Nothing' and Chicago's 'Hard to Say I'm Sorry,' to name but three — who dreamed up a delightful and fully accessible score for 'Boop! The Musical.' This lush, dreamy and string-heavy affair is so instantly pleasing to the ear that director Jerry Mitchell is able to persuade the audience to enthusiastically sing along with a number, 'Why Look Around the Corner,' they'd heard for the first time just a few minutes earlier.
Foster, who also penned one of the season's best new songs in 'Where I Wanna Be,' lost out on the nomination list to the cheerfully rudimentary score for 'Real Women Have Curves.'
I doubt many who had been in that show's audience could tell you the name of a single song one day later. But Foster, a Canadian who has worked mostly in Hollywood, has never been a Broadway insider and no nomination came for him. An egregious omission. 'Death Becomes Her' is a very entertaining show, score included, but it's a lively pastiche. The music in 'Boop!' is far superior to that, too.
Tony nominations are complicated affairs: Since the competitive field is different in every category, some illogicalities are inevitable. Director David Cromer's work on 'Good Night, and Good Luck' was far more complex, and yet more impressive, than his work on 'Dead Outlaw,' a fine and worthy show but very much in his pre-existing wheelhouse. The Tony nomination went to the wrong one; the same was true for lighting designer Heather Gilbert, whose work on the George Clooney CBS studio extravaganza was simply astonishing.
Branden Jacobs-Jenkins' 'Purpose' rightly enjoyed many nominations, but the most complicated performance on that stage, the one from Alana Arenas, was missed. And both Michael McKean and Bill Barr were better than Bob Odenkirk in 'Glengarry Glen Ross,' which is no knock on Odenkirk; he just wasn't cast in the best role for him.
To their credit, the Tony nominators did indeed nominate the best five new plays of the year, and I have few quibbles with nominators' choices for best leading actor and actress in either play or musical. It was good to see Danya Taymor nominated for her remarkable direction of 'John Proctor is the Villain,' a work of such craft that she made a mostly predictable and overpraised play feel exciting and spontaneous.
Precisely how Brooks Ashmanskas could be considered a featured performer in 'Smash,' — despite seeming to be present at every moment in a problematic musical he basically held together by sheer force of personality — is a mystery to me. But he deserves some nod for that feat of endurance, anyway.
Nominators flipped far more than me for 'Buena Vista Social Club,' a formulaic musical in every way except for the excitement generated by its music. And while I greatly enjoyed 'Death Becomes Her,' a show that survived a very quiet change in its lead producer, its whopping 10 nominations perhaps go too far.
Award slates are always going to start arguments, of course. But the painful truth in a spring where few of the new musicals are grossing enough to cover their weekly running costs is that shows beyond the Best Musical nominees are going to struggle to survive the summer. We'll have to see how much audiences agree with the Tony nominations; sometimes they pick different favorites.
Originally Published: May 2, 2025 at 10:47 AM CDT