By Mark Kennedy – Entertainment writer for The Associated Press
New York (AFP) – After a frantic end to the Broadway season and some tense moments as shows struggled to reach the qualifying deadline amid the new COVID-19 outbreak, nominations for the Tony Awards are finally on hand.
Tony Award winner Adrian Warren and three-time nominee Joshua Henry were due to help reveal the list of 26 categories Monday morning on Tony’s YouTube channel.
The season – which features a whopping 34 new productions – marks a complete return to theaters after nearly two years of pandemic-imposed shutdowns. Also of note is a wave of plays by black playwrights, reflecting the impact on Broadway of global conversations about race after the murder of George Floyd in 2020.
Potential shows eligible for nominations are a very diverse group, from a David Mamet revival to a Paula Vogel show. There are golden age classics like “Funny Girl” and “The Music Man” and ultra-modern entries like “Ideas for a Colored Man” and “Swipe.” There is a gender-changed Stephen Sondheim “company” to celebrate Michael Jackson.
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One of the season’s most acclaimed new musicals is “A Strange Loop,” playwright Michael R. Jackson’s meta-journey — a musical about a black gay man writing a show about a black gay man. It’s a brave act that put Tony’s candidates in a bind, beaming with her freshness and candor, but perhaps worried about her commercial viability outside of New York.
Notable potential contenders for the best new musical crown include “Six,” a corrective feminist corresponding to the six English wives of Henry VIII, and “Girl From the North Country,” which uses Bob Dylan’s songs to weave a Depression-era story. in the Midwest.
There’s also “Lady. Doubtfire,” based on a Robin Williams movie about an actor who pretends to build his kids, a Scottish nanny to spend time with them after their divorce, and “MJ,” a King of Pop musical, stuffed with top hits, including “ABC ‘, ‘Black or White’, ‘Bad’, ‘Billie Jean’, ‘Off the Wall’, ‘Thriller’ and ‘I’ll Be There’.
Top new gameplay entries could include two about economics – “Skeleton Crew,” Dominique Morisseau’s play about the job insecurity of blue-collar owners at a Detroit auto stamp plant in 2008, and “Lehman’s Trilogy,” Stefano Massini’s 150-year play about What led to the collapse of the financial giant Lehman Brothers.
There’s also The Minutes, Tracey Letts’ depiction of a small town council meeting exposing backstabbing, greed, and the biggest delusions in American history, and “Ideas for a Man of Color,” Kenan Scott’s second examination of being black in America, narrated in a series of vignettes over the course of one day. .
There were four musical revivals during the season – “Funny Girl,” the classic American show starring Beanie Feldstein about the rise of a comedy star for Ziegfeld Follies, and “The Music Man,” which celebrates the spirit of America with a mobile con man in a small Iowa town starring Hugh Jackman and Sutton Foster, each with two Tonys, are likely to be nominated this time around.
The other two possible entries in the Musical Revival category are “Caroline, or Change,” a Tony Kushner and Janine Tesori show that explores America’s racial, social, and economic divides in 1963’s Louisiana, and “The Company,” a sounding exploration of one person’s conflicting feelings about commitment, this time around. With the change of gender of the main character.
Strong contenders in the play’s revival category are “A Trouble with the Mind,” Alice Childress’s play about the Broadway play that explores the racial divide in the 1950s, and “How I Learned to Drive,” the Pulitzer Prize-winning memory play by Vogel, a childhood sexual abuse survivor, starring two Possible candidates: Mary Louise Parker and David Morse.
Others are “Take Me Out,” Richard Greenberg’s exploration of what happens when a baseball star appears as gay, and “For Girls of Color Who Contemplate Suicide / When the Rainbow Is Enough,” playwright Ntozaki Chang explores black femininity. There’s also “Macbeth” with an experimental sense of theater starring Daniel Craig and Ruth Negga.
The best actor in a musical trio will likely feature veterans – Jackman in The Music Man and Rob McClure in Mrs. Doubtfire and Billy Crystal from the movie Mr. Saturday Night”—and two newcomers, Jaquel Spivey from “A Strange Loop” and Miles Frost starring in “MJ.”
Likely nominees for Best Actress in a Musical nomination are Sharon De Clark for “Caroline, Or Change,” Foster for “The Music Man,” Katrina Lenk for “Company,” and Joaquina Kalukango for “Paradise Square.” Other possibilities include Brittney Mack (“Six”) and Mare Winningham (“Girl From the North Country”).
The vote could make history if A Strange Loop’s L Morgan Lee snatches a Featured Actress in a Musical nomination, which would make her the first transgender female vocalist to be nominated for a Tony Award.
The cut-off date for the 2021-2022 season has been pushed back to May 4 after several Broadway shows had to cancel shows due to reported cases of COVID-19 among the cast and crew.
The Tony Awards will take place at Radio City Music Hall on June 12. The concert will be broadcast live on CBS and Paramount+ starting at 8 p.m. ET. Film and theater star Ariana Deboss will host.
Tony’s producers were keen to tell this year’s attendees that she has a “strict nonviolence policy,” an apparent reference to the fallout when Will Smith slapped comedian Chris Rock on stage at the Academy Awards.
Mark Kennedy in http://twitter.com/KennedyTwits
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