What Should Have Been A Night to Remember

What a shame. What a bore. What should have been a celebration of a pretty great Broadway season was, instead, the Berlin Alexanderplatz of commercials, a three hour blitzkrieg of advertisements interrupted every few minutes for a quick snippet of an awards show. I can't remember when the Tony Awards have ever been stripped of their customary razzle dazzle as they were this evening. You can't blame Christine Ebersole or Raul Esparaza or the cast of Spring Awakening (or Fantasia, for that matter) for doing their best, but they fought a losing battle.

In recent years the Tonys, overproduced and overlong, have only hinted at the horrors of what could be. Tonight, it all came to pass. The show was not about excellence on Broadway, but about corporate shilling.

What should be remembered for The Coast of Utopia’s seven awards (a record, I think, for a non-musical), the canonization of Spring Awakening, the crowning of Ebersole and Wilson, the surprise victories of Julie White and David Hyde Pierce, and all the other fun stuff that came and went too quickly, will instead be remembered for the eight thousand commercials for some godawful-looking show called Viva Laughlin which CBS clearly thinks theater enthusiasts are going to embrace simply because it features Hugh Jackman (Tony winning wonderboy who saved The Boy From Oz from oblivion a few seasons past and proved to be a delightful Tony host on more than one occasion). How sad, we saw much more of Jackman’s costar, Melanie Griffith, than we did Vanessa Redgrave and Angela Lansbury combined.

It’s unlikely that anyone had it tougher than Jane Alexander. She appeared in the pre-show webcast to present the Regional Theatre award, then had to come back on at the end of the broadcast, nine hours later, to announce that she had given the award earlier in the evening. Poor thing. In between appearances, I hope she got to go home and take a nap.

Tony Vs. Tony

It’s just about an hour until the Tony Awards kick off… and the webcast is streaming from the red carpet…Christine Ebersole looks great, by the way, and so does Donna Murphy (but God help whoever sits behind her and that huge hair), ...and tonight’s show should be pretty great, even though that other big event is taking place over on HBO.

This has always been my favorite of all the award galas. Recently, while watching lots of this season’s big moments on YouTube (especially Spring Awakening and Company), I remember getting my first VCR just in time to record the telecast from 1984; that was the year Julie Andrews and Robert Preston co-hosted, when La Cage beat Sunday in the Park with George for the Best Musical prize, when Chita Rivera finally won her first Tony, when Bea Arthur and Angela Lansbury were reunited for a show-stopping rendition of “Bosom Buddies.” It was almost too much. Every single viewer had no choice but to embrace, with pride, their inner gaiety, if only for the remainder of that singularly sensational evening.

That was also the year that the original production of The Real Thing swept the non-musical field. That was a great production: Jeremy Irons, Glenn Close, Christine Baranski (all winning Tonys), not to mention Peter Gallagher and Cynthia Nixon, all under Mike Nichols’ direction. To this day, one of those “great nights in the theater” that you never forget. Now, I also recall how the great Rosemary Harris was nominated that season for the revival of Heartbreak House. She lost to Close who played Annie in The Real Thing. Many years later, Harris would be nominated for Waiting in the Wings, and she lost again, this time to the actress playing Annie the revival of The Real Thing who also happened to be her daughter, Jennifer Ehle.

I’ll probably be one of about ten viewers outside of New York who tune into CBS tonight and then catch The Sopranos a little later. I doubt that David Chase will disappoint us with anything like the ultimate M*A*S*H or Seinfeld sendoffs, and even if it doesn’t reach the brilliance of, say, “White Caps” or “Long Term Parking,” it’s already guaranteed a place in TV history simply for being the last one. I’m not really sure what to look for this evening since my expectations have been so wonderfully undermined during the past two seasons. However, in retrospect, everything makes sense within the world of these characters. (Of course Tony had to kill Christopher.) I think I actually gasped when Adriana showed up in Carmela’s dream during the Paris visit. And there is a look that Aida Turtorro gives Steven Schirripa in the recent “Soprano Home Movies” that is so great, so heartbreaking, that you knew, then and there, Bobby was doomed. Edie Falco’s Carmela is the one I’ll miss the most (we even named our dog after her) with Lorraine Bracco’s Dr. Melfi pulling a close second. And I think she should still get a retroactive Emmy for the “Employee of the Month” episode.

Gotta wrap this up. It’s almost curtain time at Radio City.