The Battle Royal has been set for this year’s Tony Awards: The American-made “Kinky Boots” versus the London import “Matilda” for Best Musical — arguably the only award which means anything at the box office. The other two nominees in the category, “A Christmas Story” and “Bring it On!” closed months ago and are not really considered contenders. “Kinky Boots,” about a drag queen who re-boots a failing British shoe factory, took the most nominations, 13 in total. (Hope nobody on the team is triskaidekaphobic.) “Matilda” came a close second with 12 and no doubt would have tied had not the Tony Administration Committee made a special ruling in the case of the musical. The grueling lead role of Matilda — the preternaturally bright young girl who uses her special powers against her vulgar parents and a gorgon of a teacher — is alternately played by four different tykes over the eight-performance schedule. The committee recently ruled that they received a special Tony, thereby taking them out of the competition for Best Performance by a Leading Actress in a Musical.
The second headline to this morning’s announcement is “Who Got Snubbed?” In fact, in one of the starriest seasons in recent years, only one box-office powerhouse was nominated: Tom Hanks for his role as the ambitious and ruthless columnist Mike McAlary. Among the bold-faced names who failed to make the cut were Bette Midler (“I’ll Eat You Last”), Jessica Chastain (“The Heiress”), Katie Holmes (“Dead Accounts”), Scarlett Johansson (“Cat on a Hot Tin Roof”), Alec Baldwin (“Orphans”), Sigourney Weaver (“Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike”), and Al Pacino (“Glengarry Glen Ross”). Still, there will be some familiar faces in the audience when the Tonys are doled out on CBS-TV on June 9. These include Cicely Tyson and Laurie Metcalf — both heartbreaking in their respective plays, “Trip to Bountiful” and “The Other Place” — and Holland Taylor, who has created a wry portrait of Texas Governor Ann Richards in her self-penned monologue, “Ann.” Also nominated in that extremely competitive race are Amy Morton, brilliant in the revival of “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf” and Kristine Nielsen, who is giving the funniest performance of the year in “Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike,” a hilarious Chekhovian parody of a dysfunctional family in Pennsylvania countryside.
Christopher Durang’s “Vanya,” nominated for six Tonys, leads the pack among the non-musicals, including Best Play, a category which is rounded out with nods to Richard Greenberg’s “The Assembled Parties,” a tragi-comedy about families of Upper West Side Jews; “The Testament of Mary,” Colm Toibin’s radical reinterpretation of the Mother of God; and “Lucky Guy,” in which the late Nora Epron recaptures the kinetic excitement of 1980s newsrooms.
There are more than a few ghosts haunting this season. “Lucky Guy” was the last work of the celebrated and much-admired Ephron, who’d long been a New York literary fixture as essayist, screenwriter, and playwright. That it was about McAlary, who died tragically young, at 41, of cancer only heightened the meta of mortality surrounding the production. In “I’ll Eat You Last,” Midler, in a masterful comic performance, resurrects the acerbic and once-powerful Hollywood agent Sue Mengers, who died in 2010. (I’m sure she’s rolling in her grave that her alter-ego was snubbed; Graydon Carter, editor of Vanity Fair, who produced the play, is also understandably upset.) And Taylor, of course, is almost uncanny in her exacting reincarnation Ann Richards, that great American hero (at least to Democrats).
In the musical revival categories, Diane Paulus’s stunning “Pippin” took top honors with ten noms, followed by “Rodgers +Hammerstein’s ‘Cinderella,’” which is up for nine. Arguably, the nods to “Pippin” should have included Matthew James Thomas, egregiously overlooked for his amazing performance in the title role. Still, the nominators did justice to Patina Miller as the Leading Player and chilly ringmaster in this remake of the 1972 Bob Fosse musical, made vibrant with circus arts; and Andrea Martin, almost a lock in the featured category, with her show-stopping turn as an admirably supple granny.
“Motown,” the box-office juggernaut of the season thanks to its legendary brand, had to suffice with four nods, two in the featured acting categories (Charl Brown as Smokey Robinson and Valisia LeKae as Diana Ross) and a couple in sound and orchestrations.
Perhaps the people most upset with the snub of “Motown” in the top category — next to its lead producers Berry Gordy, Doug Morris, Kevin McCollum — are Ricky Kirshner and Glenn Weiss of White Cherry Entertainment, who produce the telecast. Each of the Best Musical nominees gets four minutes of airtime. And in this case, those precious minutes will go to two closed shows, “A Christmas Story” and “Bring It On!” instead of the popular “Motown.” I’m sure they’ll find some way to include in the telecast one or two of the 60 — count ’em, 60 — songs from the jukebox-gone-wild show. “Maybe You’re Nobody Until Somebody Loves You”?
Image: Stark Sands, Billy Porter, The Angels (L-R: Kyle Taylor Parker, Charlie Sutton, Joey Taranto, Kevin Smith Kirkwood, Paul Canaan, and Kyle Post), and cast of “Kinky Boots”/ © Matthew Murphy
