Mark Shenton offers a Broadway round-up of Tony-nominated musicals…
The nominations for this year’s Tony Awards – due to be presented at Radio City Music Hall on 12 June 2022, hosted by West Side Story Oscar winner Ariana DeBose – were delayed this year. Usually they are announced a few days after the eligibility deadline for shows to have opened (supposed to be 28 April), but they finally got announced on 9 May, owing to challenges for the nominators being able to catch all of those eligible for awards, given multiple Covid cancellations and delays.
In a year full of anomalies, the list of shows competing for this year’s all important Best Musical on Broadway —usually capped at five nominees — has stretched to six this year, which means that when the 29 nominators met to decide their choices, there was a tie in their voting.
So first off, which shows didn’t make the cut? It was no surprise that Diana the Musical, the short-lived musical about the late Princess of Wales, failed to secure a nomination in the best musical category (though it did secure a single nomination for William Ivey Long’s costumes, and has since been named in the audience-driven Broadway.com awards in its own favourite new musical category. It also, more dubiously, earned the Worst Picture award for its Netflix produced film version at the annual Razzie awards, the ceremony that celebrates the worst films of the year, with its star Jeanna de Waal – who played the title role – also winning the worst actress award.
It also spawned an entirely delightful cabaret show, Kev Berry is Diana the Musical, a one-person trawl through the musical’s lowlights, in which Mr Berry performed many of the songs, without any lyric changes, in a variety of low-rent drag costumes, accentuating just how absurd the show was. I saw it at the Green Room club inside the Yo Hotel on Ninth Avenue, suggesting that the show will at least live on in cult status.
Also passed over for Best Musical were Flying Over Sunset, a new musical that had already come and gone at Lincoln Center Theatre, though Tom Kitt and Michael Korie’s score earned a nomination along with Carmen Cusack’s leading female performance, and a couple of design nominations for set and lighting.
And more damagingly overlooked still, as it is still running, is Mrs Doubtfire, based on the 1993 film of the same name, which secured a single nomination for leading actor Rob McClure in the title role, but nothing else. The show, which opened in December, had already suspended its run in January with the emergence of the Omicron Covid variation. It has now been announced that it will close on 29 May, just over a month after its April reopening at the Stephen Sondheim Theatre.
Six The Musical (Picture: Joan Marcus), A Strange Loop, Paradise Square (Picture: Julieta Cervantes), Mr Saturday Night, Girl From The North Country (Pictures: Matthew Murphy) and MJ (Picture: Emilio Madrid)
In a statement, producer Kevin McCollum said: “Even though New York City is getting stronger every day and ticket sales are slowly improving, theatre-going tourists and, especially for our show, family audiences have not returned as soon as we anticipated. Unfortunately, it isn’t possible to run the show without those sales, especially when capitalising with Broadway economics on three separate occasions.” A UK production is currently scheduled to launch at Manchester’s Opera House in September.
Of the half dozen shows that have been nominated for Best Musical, two are imported from the West End – Six, the history lesson about Henry VIII and his six wives, presented as a pop concert at the Brooks Atkinson; and Girl from the North Country, which sets a story by playwright Conor McPherson to songs by Bob Dylan. The latter had only just opened at the Belasco Theatre when the pandemic shut it down. It returned, only to be suspended when Covid resurfaced, and the Belasco was promised to another tenant in the fall. But the producers made good on their promise to bring it back – and in the event, it was to its original home, the Belasco, but only on a strictly limited run to 19 June.
Six, of course, was famously due to officially open on Broadway on 12 March 2020 — the night that Broadway was officially shut down for the longest period in its history, thanks to Covid; but it also became the first big musical to open after the shutdown ended in September 2021, and quickly became Broadway’s first post-shutdown hit. Born at the 2017 Edinburgh Festival Fringe, before going on to triumph in the West End (where it is now on its third home, the Vaudeville), it feels unstoppable
It has an original score by Toby Marlow and Lucy Moss, but oddly feels like a jukebox show as many of the audience arrive already very familiar with its pastiche pop songs.
Mrs Doubtfire. Picture: Joan Marcus
Another Tony-nominated biographical musical is MJ with an entirely familiar score, but has an original book by Lynn Nottage, who has been Tony nominated for her work which threads a careful path through the complicated offstage life of its title character, the iconic Michael Jackson. Animated by fierce choreography by British ballet choreographer Christopher Wheeldon, who also directs, and featuring an amazing performance from Myles Frost in the title role, it is one of slickest, and most enjoyable, jukebox musicals around.
That leaves three musicals with properly original scores. A Strange Loop has book, music and lyrics by Michael R. Jackson, for which he has additionally been twice nominated for Best Score and Best Book of a Musical, amongst a slate of 11 nominations that make it the year’s single most nominated show.
It is also the year’s most radical and adventurous new musical, putting forward as its protagonist a version of Jackson himself: an aspiring writer of a new musical called Strange Loop that he writes while ushering at Broadway’s The Lion King, and tells of his own deep insecurities as a 25-year-old black, overweight gay man negotiating the perils of Manhattan’s dating scene as he also seeks professional and personal validation for his work and from his family. Originally premiered at Off-Broadway’s Playwrights Horizons in 2019, its appearance is part of a renewed commitment on Broadway to platform the work of black voices.
It’s a bold and brilliant piece of autobiographical writing, and thrillingly staged by director Stephen Brackett, with a central performance by Broadway debutant Jaquel Spivey in the lead role of Usher that is full of vulnerability and feeling.
Far more conventionally structured and presented is Mr Saturday Night, based on the 1992 film that starred and was co-written by Billy Crystal, about a stage comedian attempting a late career comeback to television. Mr Crystal reprises his own role as Buddy Young Jr from the film along with David Paymer, also reprising his Oscar-nominated role as Buddy’s brother and manager Stan. It folds in new songs by Jason Robert Brown (music) and Amanda Green (lyrics) that are not in Brown’s usual keys of emotional rawness, but are a bit more like comfort food.
Surprisingly, Paradise Square – which has transferred from an out-of-town try-out in Chicago – is a bolder, better show, with a suite of powerful new songs by composer Jason Howland and co-lyricists Nathan Tysen and Masi Asare, that vigorously and rigorously draw together this portrait of a 19th century Manhattan melting pot of a community, at a time when the American civil war is raging and slaves are fighting for their freedoms.
A creative team led by director Moisés Kaufman and choreographer Bill T Jones give the show a propulsive momentum, and a sensational performance from Joaquina Kalukango as the owner of the bar where the show is set, lifts the drama and intensity of it into another realm, with her rousing rendition of ‘Let It Burn’ towards the end of Act II.
So what does Mark Shenton think of the Tony Award contenders for Best Musical? See below!
- Girl from the North Country, Belasco Theatre, running to 19 June 2022. Star rating: four stars ★ ★ ★ ★ ✩
- Six the Musical, Brooks Atkinson Theatre, booking to 20 November. Star rating: three stars ★ ★ ★ ✩ ✩
- MJ the Musical, Neil Simon Theatre, booking to 30 December 30. Star rating: five stars ★ ★ ★ ★ ★
- A Strange Loop, Lyceum Theatre, open-ended run, currently booking to 4 September 2022. Star rating: five stars ★ ★ ★ ★ ★
- Mr Saturday Night, Nederlander Theatre, open-ended run, currently booking to 4 September 2022. Star rating: three stars ★ ★ ★ ✩ ✩
- Paradise Square, Barrymore Theatre, open-ended run, currently booking to 27 November 2022. Star rating: four stars ★ ★ ★ ★ ✩
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