Musicals 'In the Heights,' 'South Pacific' top Tony nominees
For a snapshot of the current state of the Broadway musical, look no further than the two shows at the top of this year's list of Tony Award nominees, announced yesterday morning.
"In the Heights," with 13 nominations, is a fresh first effort by a young unknown, full of salsa-inflected tunes about growing up Latino in Washington Heights. "Rodgers & Hammerstein's South Pacific," with 11, is . . . well, it's Rodgers & Hammerstein's "South Pacific," the big, lush romance that's a genre standard. So, clearly, the Broadway musical is connecting with audiences by moving in a new direction. And, just as clearly, it's connecting with audiences by going back to its roots.
This is the danger of using awards as a barometer of anything other than what a given group of people happened to like in a given year. It's all too easy to make the numbers say anything you want. But what is certain in this year's Tony nominations is that the musical categories supply the most interesting, and occasionally the most surprising, news.
That's partly because the leader of the pack in straight plays is, to no one's surprise, "August: Osage County." Having already won the Pulitzer Prize, it's now the clear favorite in the best play category and scored six other nods as well, including dueling nominations for Deanna Dunagan and Amy Morton for leading actress.
But what's also interesting about the musicals is the multiple strands of vitality this year's choices reveal. Besides "South Pacific," two other revivals made strong showings: "Sunday in the Park With George," with nine nominations, and "Gypsy," with seven. (It's no accident that both bear the name of Stephen Sondheim, who'll receive a lifetime achievement award this year.) Tied with "Gypsy," however, is "Passing Strange," the remarkable, unclassifiable, and altogether inventive creation of the alt-rock musician Stew.
Like "In the Heights," "Passing Strange" feels like something truly new for Broadway: A musical that fully embraces rock and other popular idioms, using real rock to tell their stories rather than grafting some weird rockish sounds onto a bloated older formula. Maybe the best news this year is that the bid to keep that tedious method alive were largely snubbed: "The New Mel Brooks Musical Young Frankenstein" received just three nominations, and the latest Disney contraption, "The Little Mermaid," two.
True, the cynically shallow "Cry-Baby" is up for best musical against "Heights" and "Strange," but it's the only clunker in a category that also includes the unexpectedly appealing "Xanadu." And the best performance categories for musicals rightly shut it out.
In those lists, the actress award looks to be a battle between Patti LuPone in "Gypsy" and Kelli O'Hara in "South Pacific," though nominees Kerry Butler ("Xanadu"), Faith Prince ("A Catered Affair"), and Jenna Russell ("Sunday in the Park") all deserve their places. The actor nominees, meanwhile, are as diverse a bunch as you could ask for, each excellent in his way: Daniel Evans for "Sunday in the Park," Lin-Manuel Miranda in his own "In the Heights," Stew for his "Passing Strange," Paulo Szot opposite O'Hara, and Tom Wopat in "A Catered Affair."
On the dramatic side, the actors category is dominated by Brits: Only Laurence Fishburne, playing Thurgood Marshall, is an American. Early favorite Patrick Stewart ("Macbeth") faces strong competition from his compatriots Ben Daniels ("Les Liaisons Dangereuses"), Mark Rylance ("
Among those snubbed: Kevin Kline in "Cyrano de Bergerac," and the entire cast of the all-black revival of "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof."
"Rock 'n' Roll," by the way, is one nominated play that Boston audiences will be fortunate to see next season (though, alas, undoubtedly not with Sewell). The Huntington has scheduled it as its second offering in the fall. Two others on the list actually played here before heading to New York - again, both at the Huntington: "Mauritius" and "The 39 Steps."
And, with any luck, who knows? Coming seasons could see us welcoming grand tours of the latest new thing in musicals. The only question left to answer, of course, is just what that new thing is.
