'South Pacific' enchants the Tonys
"South Pacific," in its first Broadway revival since the 1950s, topped the list of Tony Award winners at last night's Radio City Music Hall ceremony in New York.
Seven prizes, including best revival of a musical, went to the Rodgers and Hammerstein classic. "August: Osage County," as widely expected, took best play, along with four other awards, including best direction for Anna D. Shapiro.
Bartlett Sher also won for best direction with "South Pacific," and the design team cleaned up as well: Its sets, costumes, lighting, and sound design all won. But three of four musical performance awards went to the show's leading rival in the revival category, "Gypsy": Patti LuPone for best actress, and Boyd Gaines and Laura Benanti for their featured roles. Only Paulo Szot scored for "South Pacific," as best actor - a slot for which "Gypsy" has no part.
"In the Heights," named best new musical, also took awards for best original score, best choreography, and best orchestrations. Stew's "Passing Strange" won one award, for best book of a musical.
In the most eagerly watched acting contest, Deanna Dunagan took home best actress in a play over her "August" castmate Amy Morton. The prize for best actor in a play, unusually, went to a comic performance: Mark Rylance in "
That may have been the evening's biggest surprise - unless you count the moment when a "Phantom of the Opera" tribute morphed, just as you were wondering why the heck it was onscreen, into a comic turn by host Whoopi Goldberg. That turned out to be just one of several "musical" numbers by the amusing but never overbearing host, including an airborne Mary Poppins, an armor-stripping knight from "Spamalot," and, thanks to the wonders of modern technology, a whole "Chorus Line" of nothing but Whoopis.
Even for the Tonys, it was an unusually musical-heavy night - not just with Goldberg, but with a total of 13 other performances. Besides the obligatory numbers from all eight nominees in the best-musical and best-revival-of-a-musical categories, the show featured bits from the other three musicals that opened this season - "The Little Mermaid," "A Catered Affair," and "Young Frankenstein" - as well as special tributes to past winners "Rent," set to close this fall, and "The Lion King," now celebrating its 10th year on Broadway.
That spectacle's "Circle of Life," which kicked off the live broadcast on CBS (after an hour of online coverage of the craft awards), gave Goldberg an opening for her first gag of the night. As the giraffes and zebras and cheetahs whirled around, she emerged in a crab costume, singing a few bars of "Under the Sea."
"They said put a costume on, they said Disney, I put on the crab, I'm really sorry," Goldberg said. She soon followed with a line about presenter Laurence Fishburne's current Broadway role as Thurgood Marshall, "the first African-American Supreme Court - actually the only African-Am - no, that's not true, I forgot!"
But the oblique Clarence Thomas reference was a rare political moment in a broadcast that, aside from a few nods to the anti-racism of "South Pacific" and the multiculturalism of "In the Heights," kept its focus on entertainment. Playwright Tracy Letts, accepting the award for his "August: Osage County," did offer a slightly pointed comment on the state of Broadway these days: "They did an amazing thing," he said of his producers. "They decided to produce an American play on Broadway with theater actors."
The award for most mystifying acceptance speech, meanwhile, would have to go to Rylance, who offered advice on what to wear in the city or in the woods. Even his castmate Mary McCormack was caught on camera shaking her head in bewilderment at that one.
Oh, well. No doubt in 20 years, when they need another "Tony moment" like the Madonna one they dredged up for last night's broadcast, that bit of British whimsy will be just tickety-boo.
Correction: Because of a reporting error, yesterday’s story on the Tony Awards that ran in the City & Region section contained wrong information about the nomination of Mary McCormack. McCormack was nominated in the featured actress in a play category and lost to Rondi Reed.
