Tony Awards: Hollywood A-listers brought the spotlight to Broadway, but stage thespians carried the day

Los Angeles Times

4 hours ago

Broadway finally got its groove back. The 2024-25 season was the highest-grossing season on record and the second-highest in terms of attendance.
Hollywood A-listers, such as George Clooney in 'Good Night, and Good Luck,' and Denzel Washington and Jake Gyllenhaal in 'Othello' got in on the action, raising Broadway's media profile along with its ticket prices. Two Emmy-winning alums of HBO's 'Succession,' Sarah Snook in 'The Picture of Dorian Gray' and Kieran Culkin in 'Glengarry Glen Ross,' have been treading the boards, as has Netflix's 'Stranger Things' standout Sadie Sink in 'John Proctor Is the Villain.' And though the experience seems to have been memory-holed, Robert Downey Jr. made a respectable Broadway debut in September in Ayad Akhtar's too-clever-by-half AI drama, 'McNeal.'
On Sunday, the Tony Awards paid homage to the astonishing array of acting talent that drew audiences back to the theater. But it wasn't star power that determined the evening's prizes. It was boldness — unadulterated theatrical fearlessness — that carried the day.
The ceremony, held at Radio City Music Hall amid the art deco splendor of old New York, was presided over by Tony-winner Cynthia Erivo, a natural wonder of the theatrical universe. One of the turbo-powered stars of the blockbuster screen adaptation of 'Wicked,' she was the ideal host for a Broadway year that owed its success to the unique ability of high-wattage stage performers to forge a singular connection with audiences.
Viewers watching the ceremony on CBS were offered a glimpse of the cyclonic energy she can generate in a bubbly opening number celebrating the nominees. It didn't matter that most watching from home hadn't seen the shows name-checked in the specially composed novelty song. The vivacity of the art form broke through the screen courtesy of Erivo's capacity to blast through any barrier with her truthful virtuosity.
Will Aronson and Hue Park's 'Maybe Happy Ending' was the evening's big winner, picking up six Tonys, including best musical. Branden Jacobs-Jenkins' 'Purpose,' which received the Pulitzer Prize for drama this year, was chosen as best play in a season showcasing a refreshingly wide range of ambitious playwriting.
Anna D. Shapiro's sharply-tuned production of Jonathan Spector's 'Eureka Day,' a bitingly funny satire on the vaccine debate, won for play revival. And Jamie Lloyd's radical reworking of 'Sunset Blvd.' took the prize for musical revival.
All in all, it was a strong season for directing. Michael Arden won for his exquisitely humane staging of the futuristic robot musical, 'Maybe Happy Ending.' And Sam Pinkleton was honored for his wild and whirling synchronization of Cole Escola's 'Oh, Mary!'
As a critic, I don't usually have to pay for theater tickets, but I got a taste of the ludicrousness when charged $500 to see Washington and Gyllenhaal in a flaccid revival of 'Othello.' Apparently, I got off cheaply compared to a friend who paid even more for a worse seat on the same night.
But the price-gouging didn't dent my appreciation for a season that reminded me of the privilege of being in the room where the theatrical magic happens. (Yes, even 'Othello' had its intermittent rewards.) Communing with audiences in the presence of gifted stage performers is one of the last bastions of community in our screen-ridden society.
I was grateful that CNN made the agonizingly timely 'Good Night, and Good Luck' available to a wider public, presenting Saturday night's performance live. But watching Clooney and company on TV wasn't the same as being in the Winter Garden with them during the performance. It wasn't simply that the camerawork profoundly altered the visual storytelling. It was that at home on my couch I was no longer enclosed in the same shared space that brought history back to the present for a charged moment of collective reflection.
The Tony Awards honored those actors who embraced the immediacy of the theatrical experience and offered us varieties of performance styles that would be hard to find even in the more obscure reaches of Netflix.
Cole Escola, the first nonbinary performer to win in the lead actor in a play category, accepted the award for their fiendishly madcap performance in 'Oh, Mary!' — a no-holds-barred farcical display of irreverence that ignited a firestorm of hilarity that threatened to consume all of Broadway. Snook won for her lead performance in 'The Picture of Dorian Gray,' a multimedia collage of Wilde's novel that had the protean 'Succession' star playing opposite screen versions of herself in what was the season's most aerobically taxing performance.
Francis Jue, who delivered the evening's most moving and politically pointed speech, won for his shape-shifting (and age-defying) featured performance in the revival of David Henry Hwang's 'Yellow Face.' And Kara Young, who won last year in the featured actress in a play category, repeated for her heightened artistry in 'Purpose,' the kind of extravagant performance no screen could do justice to.
Nicole Scherzinger, who was honored as best lead actress in a musical for her portrayal of Norma Desmond in a bracing revival of Andrew Lloyd Webber's 'Sunset Boulevard,' demonstrated the power of theater to seize hold of us when she performed 'As If We Never Said Goodbye' on the telecast. In her Broadway debut, Scherzinger, who came to fame with the Pussycat Dolls, faced stiff competition from Audra McDonald, the six-time Tony winner starring in 'Gypsy.'
No performance moved me more this season than McDonald's harrowing portrayal of Rose. In George C. Wolfe's revival, the character is a Black woman struggling not just with her frustrated dreams of stardom displaced onto her children but with the injustice of history itself. McDonald was given the impossible task of performing 'Rose's Turn' on the telecast, her character's Lear-like cri de cœur in song. She delivered, as she always does, but again I wish audiences at home could experience the broken majesty of this number in context at the Majestic Theatre, where theatergoers have been rising up in unison, wiping away tears, to express their gratitude for McDonald's sacrificial generosity.
Darren Criss, an alum of 'Glee,' received his first Tony for endowing an outdated robot with a sophisticated taste for jazz with a deft physical life and diffident (yet unmistakable) humanity. His lead performance in 'Maybe Happy Ending' (perfectly in sync with that of his impressive co-star, Helen J Shen) is as responsible for the musical's unexpected success as Arden's staging and Dane Laffrey and George Reeve's Tony-winning scenic design.
Natalie Venetia Belcon, the heart and soul of 'Buena Vista Social Club' along with the band, was honored for her featured performance in the musical that tells the story of Cuban musical style that defied history to seduce the world. And Jak Malone, who was responsible for the evening's second most riveting speech, won for his gender-blurring featured performance in'Operation Mincemeat: A New Musical.'
These performances, by names you probably don't know all that well, embraced the special properties of an art form that is larger than life and all the more acutely exposed for being so. It takes enormous skill and dedication to find the delicacy in such theatrical grandeur. These artists know that flamboyance needn't preclude subtlety, and that stardom neither guarantees nor bars revelation.
Actors from all ranks are clearly hungering for the kind of substance and freedom that the stage can uniquely provide. Off-Broadway has been filled with marquee talents connecting with audiences whose main interest is potent work.
Patsy Ferran, starring opposite Paul Mescal in the Almeida Theatre production of 'A Streetcar Named Desire' at the Brooklyn Academy of Music's Harvey Theater, was, hands down, the best performance I saw all year. Andrew Scott in 'Vanya' at the Lucille Lortel Theatre, Adam Driver in Kenneth Lonergan's 'Hold on to Me Darling' also at the Lortel, Lily Rabe in Mark O'Rowe's adaptation of Ibsen's 'Ghosts' at Lincoln Center Theater's Mitzi E. Newhouse and Nina Hoss and Adeel Akhtar in the Donmar Warehouse production of 'The Cherry Orchard' at St. Ann's Warehouse left me feeling, as only theater can, more consciously alive and connected.
The speeches at the Tony Awards, for the most part, skirted politics. This reticence was surprising given what we're living through. But there's something deeply political when we gather to look in the mirror that artists hold before nature. The politics are implicit, and this year Broadway reminded us that our humanity depends upon this ancient, timeless art.