Tony Awards 2025: Gazing Beyond the Stars

Hindustan Times

03-06-2025

George Clooney in 'Good Night, and Good Luck.'If this booming Broadway season had a principal theme, it was that celebrity is the ever-jingling coin of the realm, with star-driven vehicles such as 'Othello' with Denzel Washington and Jake Gyllenhaal, and 'Good Night, and Good Luck' with George Clooney, setting records with dizzying frequency. The latter made Broadway history by grossing more than $4 million in one week—the biggest haul ever for a straight play. This, despite the fact that neither production was particularly distinguished, and 'Othello' was an outright debacle—notching zero nominations for the Tony Awards, which will be presented on Sunday.
With these productions and the star-bedecked revival of 'Glengarry Glen Ross' leading the way, the season as a whole became the most financially robust ever, with grosses totaling almost $1.9 billion. A primary reason for that powerhouse number was, unsurprisingly, the prices being charged for tickets, up to $800 or $900 a seat for 'Othello' and 'Good Night, and Good Luck.' These eye-watering figures proved that, increasingly, Broadway has become a marketplace catering to the elite. The Metropolitan Opera, where there are even good seats for under $100, seems a populist playground by comparison.
But if it's easy to hand-wring over the seeming celebrity money-grab, it's also pointless. Broadway producers are not philanthropists (although given that most shows never recoup their investments, which can be used as tax write-offs, they come close), and if people are willing to shell out more than a mortgage payment to be sprinkled in stardust, that's their choice. Savvy theatergoers know there are many mechanisms in place to buy cheaper tickets even to the scalding-hot shows.
The more heartening story of the season was the wealth and variety of productions on offer. Broadway is often derided as a marketplace where innovation is rare and formulas reign supreme: Proven brands—a movie, a pop catalog—are repurposed for the stage. But as this year's sometimes startlingly strange breadth of offerings proved, that's increasingly not the whole story.
Consider this peculiar bit of trivia: Two shows in contention for the best musical Tony featured corpses in leading roles. In the appealingly loopy 'Dead Outlaw,' Andrew Durand, a worthy nominee, spent roughly half the show encased in an open coffin, his character—a hapless criminal—having been killed midway through the musical. And while the dead guy isn't really a notable presence in 'Operation Mincemeat,' this jolly British import revolved around the bizarre but true tale of a World War II espionage plot in which a corpse bearing false documents was dumped overboard near Spain to divert attention from an Allied maneuver. If you include the glossy 'Death Becomes Her,' in which the principal female characters essentially die midway through, having secured an eternal afterlife, that makes three Tony-nominated musicals with the queasy subject of mortality at center stage.
The musical that's all but guaranteed to take home the top prize, with good reason, also had a novel plot. The bewitching 'Maybe Happy Ending' depicts a romance between robots who have been put out to pasture to wait for their batteries to die. Directed with ingenuity by Michael Arden (who should win his second Tony in three years, after the revival of 'Parade'), the show is a moving exploration of the difficulty—and necessity—of committing to love. (The most egregious Tony omission is the lack of a best actress nomination for Helen J Shen, although that category is the most hotly contested, with Audra McDonald potentially winning a seventh Tony for 'Gypsy,' facing stiff competition from the luminous Nicole Scherzinger in 'Sunset Blvd.,' and the highly praised Jasmine Amy Rogers of 'Boop!' possibly playing the spoiler.)
The best-play nominees also illustrate how Broadway has become increasingly open to fresh voices and unlikely subjects. Exhibit triple-A would be 'Oh, Mary!' Written by and starring Cole Escola, whose fierce and funny performance as a deranged (and decidedly ahistorical) Mary Todd Lincoln will surely win a Tony, this exuberantly vulgar romp became the season's most unlikely smash, and has a strong chance of taking home the play prize, which would make the playwright and performer the owner of very fancy bookends.
The other nominees also cover a wide range of subjects. Most conventional is Branden Jacobs-Jenkins's powerful if prolix Pulitzer Prize winner 'Purpose,' in the time-hallowed American tradition of fractious-family plays, and probably the chief competitor to 'Oh, Mary!' But the other three works nominated would also be worthy winners: Sanaz Toossi's Pulitzer-winning 'English,' about a class of adults learning the titular language in Iran; Kimberly Belflower's 'John Proctor Is the Villain,' a sharp, funny dive into the troubled, inquisitive minds of high-school students critiquing Arthur Miller's 'The Crucible'; and Jez Butterworth's mournful 'The Hills of California.' (Further encouraging evidence that the Tonys aren't just rubber-stamping branded vehicles: the omission of the dreary stage spinoff of 'Stranger Things' from the category.)
Taking in the entirety of the nominees in all categories, I was struck by how few, if any, I could possibly quibble with. (A critic without quibbles? Show me a unicorn.) Given the superb work presented on Broadway this season, that sugary cliché—it's an honor just to be nominated!—rings true. For once.
Mr. Isherwood is the Journal's theater critic.
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