The Tony Talk Podcast-Episode 6: The Tony Nominations

If you're reading this blog, then you already know that the Tony nominations were announced yesterday.  And depending on how you look at it, this year's nominators had one of the toughest assignments because there were so many strong contenders or one of the easiest jobs because there was so much good stuff that it was almost impossible for them to choose wrong.  Still, a few shows clearly won their hearts.

Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812, Dave Malloy's musical version of an excerpt from Tolstoy's "War and Peace," got 12 nominations.  It and the other three shows in the Best Musicals category-—Come From Away, Dear Evan Hansen and Groundhog Day—all also nabbed nods for Best Book, Best Score and Best Director of a Musical.

Meanwhile, five of the remaining new musicals, including such previously-anticipated titles as Amélie, starring Hamilton's Phillipa Soo, and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, with two-time Tony winner Christian Borle, got no love at all.

But the acclaimed revival of Hello, Dolly! got plenty of it, including for its stars Bette Midler and David Hyde Pierce and for its director Jerry Zaks, who got his first nomination in 21 years.  

On the straight play side, A Doll's House, Part 2, young playwright Lucas Hnath's sequel to the Ibsen classic about a mother who abandons her family, lead that pack with eight nominations, including one for each of the four actors in the cast—Laurie Metcalf, Chris Cooper, Condola Rashad and Jayne Houdyshell—as well as for their director Sam Gold.  

Doll's House's worthy competitors are Indecent, Oslo and the Pulitzer Prize-winning Sweat. All four were written by American playwrights and each of them, including the 65-year-old Paula Vogel, is making his or her Broadway debut.

You can find the official full list of the nominees by clicking here.  You can keep up with all the Tony news over the next five weeks until the winners are announced on June 11 by reading the Tony Talk magazine on Flipboard, which you can find here.  

And you can hear what my pals Chris Caggiano, Patrick Pacheco, Bill Tynan and I think about the nominations by clicking the orange button below or by going to the Tony Talk homepage by clicking here:

Hi's and Lo's of Some Tony-Nominated Shows

As usual, I haven’t gotten around to weighing in on all the shows that opened during the run up to the Tony nominations. Although I have managed to have my say in these posts on all four of the Best Musical hopefuls—After Midnight (click here to read my review of that), Aladdin (click here)  Beautiful (click) and A Gentleman's Guide to Love and Murder (here)—I’m no where near as caught up in the other categories. So, now that we’re in the final days before the awards will be given out, I’m going to do another of my quick rundowns of the highlights and lowlights of some of the remaining contenders. There are an even dozen of them and so you may want to spread your reading out over the next few days:

ACT ONE. Everyone knows that Moss Hart’s “Act One” is more a romantic fable than a factual account of his life but it’s hard to think of a book more beloved by people who love theater than Hart’s memoir about his early days in show business including his big break collaborating with George S. Kaufman on the 1936 hit You Can’t Take It With You. And now James Lapine has turned that tale into a play that perhaps only true theater lovers will love. 

Highlight: Lapine, who also directed, has remained faithful to the book, to the relief of those of us who consider it almost a sacred text. 

Lowlight:  Lapine has remained faithful to the book and as a friend less enraptured with the theater said to me, “who wants to sit around for two hours watching two guys write?” 

Tony Spotlight: The show has been nominated for Best Play and both Tony Shalhoub (who does triple duty as Kaufman, Hart’s immigrant father Barnett and Hart as an older man) and Andrea Martin (who does the same as Kaufman’s wife Beatrice, Hart’s agent Freida Fishbein and his Aunt Kate, who first introduced the young Moss to the theater) have been nominated too but the production’s best hope for a win seems to be for Beowulf Boritt’s revolving Erector set which fills the huge stage at Lincoln Center’s Vivian Beaumont theater.

ALL THE WAY.  Playwright Robert Schenkkan’s dramatized history lesson uses two-dozen actors and three hours to chronicle the take-no-prisoners campaign Lyndon Johnson waged to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964. 

Highlight:  It’s great to see the theater dealing with such an important subject, particularly at a time when the 50 year-old law is coming under pressure from conservatives, including those on the Supreme Court. 

Lowlight: Because Schenkkan tries to cover so much territory—the self-interested maneuvering of politicians like the liberal Hubert Humphrey and the segregationist Richard Russell, the political infighting among black leaders like Martin Luther King Jr. and Stokely Carmichael—and director Bill Rauch drives through it in such a straightforward manner, much of the drama gets lost and what’s left is the kind of historical pageant that you find at a history museum. 

Tony Spotlight: Despite my carping, this seems to be the frontrunner in the Best Play category and even I agree that Bryan Cranston, who’s making his Broadway debut, is as good as everyone says he was on the TV series “Breaking Bad” and turns in a powerhouse performance as Johnson that’s deserving of the Best Actor in a Play nod he got.

BULLETS OVER BROADWAY THE MUSICAL. There were high hopes for this musical adaptation of Woody Allen’s 1994 movie about an idealistic playwright who gets involved with a mobster who agrees to finance his show, the mobster’s no-talented girlfriend who wants to be an actress and the mobster’s henchman who turns out to have a surprising talent for dramaturgy.  

Highlight: The TV and movie star Zach Braff is charming in his Broadway debut as the playwright and Nick Cordero brings an appealing tough-guy charisma to the role of the henchman Cheech.

Lowlight: Almost everything else—Allen’s jokes, Susan Stroman’s dance numbers and even some of the actors—pushes too hard. Plus there’s no original music and no one has figured out how to interpolate the period songs from the 1920s that are pinch hitting for the score. 

Tony Spotlight: Although shut out of the Best Musical category, the show picked up six nominations including for Cordero as Best Featured Actor in a Musical, for the ever-popular costume designer William Ivey Long and, inexplicably, for Allen’s book.

CABARET. Back in 1998, director Sam Mendes turned Studio 54 into the Kit Kat Klub, the titular seedy nightclub that provides the backdrop for the Kander and Ebb classic about Germany during the Weimar period when the Nazis came to power. Now Mendes has brought nearly the same production back to Studio 54, with Alan Cumming again playing the club’s sexually ambiguous emcee and the film actress Michelle Williams stepping into the shoes of the late Natasha Richardson as the free-spirited cabaret singer Sally Bowles.

Highlight: The great Kander and Ebb score, Joe Masteroff’s masterful book and moving performances by Linda Emond and Danny Burstein as Fräulein Schneider, the German owner of a boarding house, and Herr Schultz, the Jewish butcher who loves her. 

Lowlight: It’s hard to shake the been-there-seen-that feeling. 

Tony Spotlight: Cumming was disqualified because he won the Tony for his performance back in ’98 and although the production was somehow still eligible in the Best Revival of a Musical category, the folks on the nominating committee snubbed it but they did give nods to Williams, Emond and Burstein.

THE CRIPPLE OF INISHMAAN. Martin McDonagh’s dark comedy about a close-knit community of Irish eccentrics whose lives are disrupted when a film company arrives in a nearby town has its fans. But most of the people lining up outside the Cort Theatre are there because Daniel Radcliffe is playing the title character.  

Highlights: This is the erstwhile Harry Potter's third time on Broadway (after Equus and How To Succeed in Business Without Really Trying) and Radcliffe keeps getting better and better as an actor, this time painfully contorting his body to more accurately simulate the deformity that shapes his character’s life. 

Lowlight: The play has always been a bit twee for me and the affected Irish brogues make some of the dialog difficult to follow. 

Tony Spotlight: Radcliffe’s was one of several worthy performances that got left out of the running in this year’s particularly strong derby for Best Actor in a Play but the production is still up for six awards including Best Revival of a Play and Michael Grandage for Best Director of a Play.

HEDWIG AND THE ANGRY INCH. The most popular new show of the season stars the ever-popular Neil Patrick Harris as the titular German chanteuse who recounts the droll tale of how she got a sex change so that she could follow her American G.I. lover to the U.S., only to get jilted by him and left with some unwanted genitalia as the result of a botched operation.  

Highlight: NPH, slimmed down to waif-size but rocking it heavy in eye glitter and high heels. 

Lowlight:  Not any that I can think of right now. Even the sound design is noticeably good. 

Tony Spotlight: Both Harris and the show are widely considered to be shoo-ins for Best Actor in a Musical and Best Revival of a Musical and there’s also the possibility that Lena Hall, who does some impressive gender bending of her own, could end up with the Best Featured Actress in a Musical prize as well.

IF/THEN.  The creative team behind Next to Normal—composer Tom Kitt, book writer and lyricist Brian Yorkey, director Michael Greif—has reunited for another musical about a woman at a crossroads in her life. This time, she's a fortysomething divorcee played by Idina Menzel and the musical explores how a simple decision about how to spend a Saturday afternoon might lead her into two radically different life stories.  

Highlight:  It’s nice to see African-American and Asian-American actors cast in non-race specific roles and nice, too, to see same-sex couples treated just as matter-of-factly. Plus people who love Menzel will love all the power ballads she gets to belt. 

Lowlight: The bouncing back and forth between story lines gets confusing and makes it difficult to develop a real rooting interest in the characters in either of her lives. Also, while the melodies are lovely, the lyrics too often fall back on profanity; one song is actually called "What the Fuck."  

Tony Spotlight: Kitt and Yorkey are nominated for the score and Menzel for Best Actress in a Musical but I don’t think any of them should be clearing off space on their mantels.  

LADY DAY AT EMERSON’S BAR & GRILL. Legend has it that a few months before she died in 1959, the great jazz singer Billie Holiday, accompanied by a small combo, her Chihuahua Pepi and the demons created by a tragic girlhood marked by rape and prostitution and years of drug and alcohol abuse, performed for just seven people at the small Philadelphia night club that gives this show its name. But audiences have been packing into Circle in the Square to see Audra McDonald recreate that evening as imagined by playwright Lanie Robertson.  

Highlight: McDonald’s impersonation of Holiday’s look, mannerisms and distinctive raspy sound is uncanny. 

Lowlight: Despsite director Lonny Price's attempts to, well, jazz things up, this isn’t a play so much as a 90-minute concert with dramatic interludes. 

Tony Spotlight: Already a five-time Tony winner, McDonald just might take home a sixth. 

MOTHERS AND SONS.  A sequel to the 1990 TV movie “Andre’s Mothers” about a mother whose son has died of AIDS, Terrence McNally’s new play picks up the story 20 years later when the still-grieving mother makes a surprising and disquieting visit to her son’s former lover who is now married to a younger man with whom he is raising a son. 

Highlight: No other playwright has so assiduously explored the changes in gay men's lives over the last four decades and there were moments in this play that really brought home what a thankfully better world we live in now. 

Lowlight: But while McNally gets points for having so many meaningful things to say, he racks up demerits for being so intent on getting his message across that he forgets, at least in this staging by Sheryl Kaller, to dramatize it. 

Tony Spotlight:  Mothers and Sons is a contender for Best Play and the-can't-help-but-be-dynamic Tyne Daly, for whom McNally says he wrote the mother’s role, is up for Best Actress in a Play.

A RAISIN IN THE SUN. Even in the age of Obama, Lorraine Hansberry’s classic play about a black family aching to have a piece of the American dream in an America that refuses to recognize their right to have it still resonates.  

Highlight: Denzel Washington’s name may be above the title on the marquee but he doesn’t approach his role as a star turn but as a member of an ensemble that works so well together it actually seems as though they really are related. 

Lowlight: Director Kenny Leon hits the comedy a little too much and the audience at the performance I attended broke into laughter at inappropriate moments. 

Tony Spotlight: LaTanya Richardson Jackson is just five years older than Washington and she stepped into the role of the family matriarch Lena after Diahann Carroll dropped out, giving Richardson Jackson just a few weeks to get up to speed before previews began. Yet she has crafted a beautiful performance that anchors the production and has deservedly earned a Tony nomination for Best Actress in a Play. This is one of the strongest categories filled with several other commanding performances but it would be lovely to see her rewarded for such valiant work.

ROCKY. Sylvester Stallone won the Oscar in 1976 for his movie about a palooka who yearns to just go the distance with the champ and to win the shy girl who considers herself to be as much a loser as he is. But just about everyone, including me, laughed at the idea of "Rocky" as a musical. And yet, this show, with a book by Stallone and three-time Tony winner Thomas Meehan, music by Stephen Flaherty and lyrics by Lynn Ahrens, packs an affective punch.  

Highlight: Nearly all the talk has been about the last 20 minutes of the show when a full-sized boxing ring is rolled right into the middle of the audience but I think I got an even bigger kick out of watching how director Alex Timbers and set designer Christopher Barreca found theatrical ways to recreate iconic scenes from the film, like Rocky’s workout in the meat locker and his run up the steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. 

Lowlight: I can’t remember any song from the show, except the iconic Rocky anthem from the movie. 

Tony Spotlight: The role of Rocky is so identified with Stallone that Karl deserves his nomination for Best Actor in a Musical for remaining true to the character Stallone created and played in umpteen sequels, while still finding a way to make it distinctively his own.

VIOLET. Jeanine Tesori and Brian Crawley’s adaptation of a short story about a young woman disfigured in girlhood by an accident with an ax, her journey to find a faith healer she believes can remove the scar and the life-changing encounters she has with two soldiers she meets along the way has been a cult favorite ever since its inaugural one-month run at Playwrights Horizons back in 1997.  

Highlight: The score is a cornucopia of American roots music and the singers, lead by Sutton Foster, Colin Donnell, Alexander Gemignani and the show-stopping Joshua Henry, are all terrific. 

Lowlight: The production is so modest—straight-back chairs filling in for the bus the characters travel on, jeans and military uniforms for costumes, and not only no scar but no makeup of any kind on Foster—that it’s hard to justify the $142 ticket price. 

Tony Spotlight:  The show has picked up nominations in most of the major categories in which it was eligible—Best Actress in a Musical for Foster, Best Featured Actor in a Musical for Henry, Best Director of a Musical for Leigh Silverman, the only female director to get a nod this year, and Best Revival of a Musical—but I think it may take a miracle for it to take any prize home.

Taking Time Out for Tony Talk

You don’t even have to be a theater lover to know that the Tony nominations were announced yesterday. There were, as usual, the fairly predictable nods. Hollywood heavyweight Tom Hanks got a nomination for Lucky Guy, the love song to old-school journalism that is itself a frontrunner for Best Play because it’s the final work of the much-beloved writer—and big theater booster—Nora Ephron, who died last summer.  

And, of course, there were the somewhat surprising omissions. Neither Alan Cuming nor Bette Midler got recognized for their performances as, respectively, all the characters in Macbeth and the only person onstage in I’ll Eat You Last, the one-woman show about the late Hollywood superagent Sue Mengers.  

After Fiona Shaw failed to get a nod for her controversial portrayal of Jesus' mother in The Testament of  Mary, the producers announced that the show will close this coming Sunday.

Al Pacino also got passed over for his idiosyncratic performance in Glengarry Glen Ross. In fact, large swatches of the disappointing fall season got deservedly passed over. Luckily the shows that opened in the spring brought some razzle dazzle back to Broadway and there’s stiff competition in several categories.

Hank’s competitors for best actor in a play include the perennial favorites Nathan Lane for The Nance and David Hyde Pierce for Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike. Not to be counted out are Tracy Letts who gave a revelatory performance in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and the young scene stealer Tom Sturridge from Orphans. 

The best featured actress in a musical category is equally fierce, with every single one of the nominees—Kinky Boots’ Annaleigh Ashford, Cinderella’s Victoria Clark, Pippin’s Andrea Martin, Hands on a Hardbody’s Keala Settle and Lauren Ward from Matilda—having performed a number that stopped her individual show. 

Meanwhile, any one of the guys (the first three of them previous Tony winners) who are up for best choreographer— Andy Blankenbuehler for Bring It On, Peter Darling for Matilda, Jerry Mitchell for Kinky Boots and Chet Walker channeling Bob Fosse for Pippin—could dance away with that prize. The chance to see their numbers will definitely be a win-win for the viewers who tune in to the awards broadcast.

But this year’s biggest showdown will be between the cheery homegrown musical Kinky Boots (which picked up 13 nominations) and its leading rival, the witty British import Matilda (which got 12).  Both are big shows and neither fills the underdog role that made Once a winner when it faced off against Newsies last year but they do represent different wings of the answer to the question “what should a 21st century musical be?" 

The Tonys are unlikely to have a definitive answer for that but all the winners will be announced at the ceremony, back this year at Radio City Music Hall, on Sunday June 9 and broadcast on CBS.

However, the fun has already begun as everyone has started second guessing the choices that the nominators made. And this year, my theatergoing buddy Bill and I decided that we’d chime in too.  So, click the orange button below to hear us sound off on what we thought of the nomination choices and of the 2012-2013 season as a whole:

Tony Love...But Not for Magic/Bird

The Tony nominators spread around their love this year.  When the nominations were announced yesterday, 30 of the 37 eligible shows were named in at least one category. And some of the face-offs—the little chamber musical Once against the big Disney song-and-dance show Newsies; four-time winner Audra McDonald vs. four-time bridesmaid Kelli O’Hara vs. Once’s bright-eyed newcomer Cristin Milioti; campy humor god Douglas Carter Beane taking on campy humor god Harvey Feirstein—have the potential to be showdowns that are as exciting for us theater geeks as the ones between the New York Yankees and the Boston Red Sox almost always are for sports fanatics. 

But there still wasn’t enough love to go around for everybody and closing notices have already gone up for two of the shows left out in the cold, including Theresa Rebeck’s Seminar, which will shut down on Sunday, and Magic/Bird which will give its final performance on May 12 and which my theatergoing buddy Bill and I only got around to seeing last night.  

To be honest, we’d put it off because we knew the show, produced by the same folks who did last year’s short-lived football show Lombardi, is about the rivalry and unlikely friendship between the basketball stars Earvin “Magic” Johnson and Larry Bird and neither of us is really that into hoops.

But sometimes having low expectations can be a blessing because, as it turned out, we didn’t have nearly as bad a time as we thought we would. Thomas Kail, who helmed both Lombardi and In the Heights, has put together a sprightly production with some nice basketball choreography and some great video clips from the players’ heyday back in the ‘80s that were fun to see even for a basketball no-nothing like me.

And he’s got an engaging cast lead by Kevin Daniels and Tug Coker as the genial stand-ins for the title characters (click here to read about them). But the show’s true MVPs are the supporting cast members who take on multiple roles. 

Peter Scolari is a hoot even if he does have a little problem making each of the major coaches in the stars’ lives truly distinctive. Francois Battiste is totally winning even if he does makes gratuitous fun of newscaster Bryant Gumbel who interviewed the players over the years.  Meanwhile, Deirdre O’Connell—always a favorite of mine—is just perfect, particularly in the role of Bird’s mom.  

In fact, the only thing wrong with the show is that it simply has no story to tell.  Instead it just rolls along just one scene following after another for 90 minutes, with very little tension along the way, although playwright Eric Simonson tries to create some by opening with Johnson’s 1991 announcement that he was retiring from basketball because he had contracted the HIV virus. 

But that doesn’t really go anywhere because we know that Johnson has survived and thrived as an AIDS activist and businessman, having just this year become co-owner of the L.A. Dodgers  

Some critics have suggested that Magic/Bird might have had more bite if it hadn’t had the cooperation of its subjects, who reportedly not only shared their remembrances with Simonson but showed up at some rehearsals and even made a joint appearance on “Letterman” to hawk the show (click to here read how Simonson put the show together).

But none of that bothered the man sitting behind Bill and me who whooped with delight as he recognized each key moment in the players’ bio. Alas, for Magic/Bird, there weren’t enough others like him showing up at the Longacre Theatre—or on the Tony nominating committee

Time Out for Tony Talk

As usual, so much has been written in the less than 24 hours since the Tony nominations were announced that there isn’t much left to say (although if you’re still in the market for some smart commentary click here to read the recap by my fellow blogger The Playgoer).  So instead of chiming in my two cents about the slaps in the face to The Addams Family, Enron, Race and Daniel Craig, or the pats on the back for Fela!, In the Next Room, Next Fall and Jan Maxwell, I’m going to talk about just one thing: how very sad it is that there are so few musicals with original scores this season that the nominators had to include music from the straight plays Enron and Fences. 

I’m not trying to diss the work done by Adam Cork for Enron or Branford Marsalis for Fences.  I haven’t even seen either of those shows yet.  But I am lamenting the fact that the Broadway musical is in such a dismal state that it can’t fill out the music part of its own category. You could blame the whole thing on the current obsession with branding.  At least that’s what I’m doing.

Branding has taken over the entire culture.  That’s why we get movie sequels and remakes, novels based on characters from other novels and, in the theater, jukebox musicals.  Producers know that it’s easier to sell shows with built-in name recognition so they build them around movies and TV shows like The Addams Family or repackage a musician’s past hits be they from the Green Day album American Idiot or the Stephen Sondheim songbook that fuels Sondheim on Sondheim.

And speaking of Sondheim, there’s no question that he’s a genius but so were Cole Porter, George and Ira Gershwin, Oscar Hammerstein and Richard Rodgers and the theater of their day found a way to nurture their very different talents.  As it did the varying musical styles of Sondheim and his contemporaries Jerry Herman and John Kander and Fred Ebb. 

We need to find a way to do that for a new generation of musical talent today. That means not putting down Elton John or Phil Collins or Paul Simon (I still love his score for The Capeman) when they write shows that don’t sound like Sondheim’s (the schadenfreude when John lost last year’s award for Best Original Score was thicker than the jam on a Linzer torte). 

Instead, we should all welcome the fact that these songwriters, who’ve already made their bones in the pop field, want to write for Broadway and we should encourage them to keep trying their hand at it.  We should champion new talents too.  Which means a few less revivals, a few more original musicals by folks like Next to Normal’s Tom Kitt, In the Heights’ Lin-Manuel Miranda and Passing Strange’s Stew. 

All their shows may not be great ones. But Sondheim, Porter, Herman, Kander & Ebb and Rodgers and Hammerstein flopped at times too.  Maybe Broadway, where musicals now routinely cost eight figures to produce, can’t afford that kind of experimentation any more but isn’t that what nonprofits like Roundabout, Lincoln Center and the Public Theater should be doing?  Which is why, even though I wasn’t crazy about the show, I give the Public Theater props for mounting the emo musical Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson.

I love a show tune as much as the next theater geek but I tell you, I’d be delighted if the Best Original Score ballot in 2020 were composed of Lady Antebellum, Radiohead, Jay-Z, Tom Kitt for his fourth or fifth Broadway show and some 25 year-old wunderkind who'd recently come out of the BMI Musical Theater Workshop. 

The Morgan Puts a Spotlight on Set Design

If you’re a theater lover, this has got to be the best time of the year. In the four-week period between the announcement of the Tony nominations and the handing out of the awards, it seems as though the whole world (and not just we theater geeks) starts thinking and talking about Broadway. And the buzz is even louder than usual this year.

The June issue of the glossy mainstream magazine Vanity Fair has a photo spread with 25 stars who have appeared on Broadway this past season. Just this week, PBS aired a documentary on the making of In the Heights, which took home Tony’s Best Musical honors last year. Recent guests on “The View's" daily gabfest have included David Hyde Pierce (star of Accent on Youth), Nathan Lane (co-star of Waiting for Godot) and, coming next Friday, Neil Patrick Harris (the host of this year’s Tony Awards show).

The New York Times has already devoted an Arts & Leisure section to the Tonys and continues to run features about the nominated shows. There are also interviews with nominees on the Playbill website, on the BroadwayRadio podcast, on blogs, in tweets. And, of course, there are predictions everywhere; one of the best is NY1 critic Roma Torre’s chats with some actual Tony voters.

Now, even the Morgan Library & Museum, which usually celebrates printed text, has gotten into the act with a new show, “Creating the Modern Stage: Designs for Theater and Opera.” The exhibit, which opened last week and runs through Aug. 16, traces the history of set design in the 20th century and although it displays more drawings from opera productions than the theater ones that most fascinate me, it is still a terrific introduction to a field about which I know far too little.

The exhibit is small, with only around 50 drawings, which means you can really focus on each one, without worrying that you won’t have time to get through the whole thing as is the case with so many megashows. Most of the drawings are drawn from a gift by the widow of Donald Oenslager, the prolific set designer who got his start as an actor with the Provincetown Players but went on to create the sets for such shows as the original productions of John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men and Cole Porter’s Anything Goes and to teach at the Yale School of Drama for 45 years.

Oenslager was clearly a student of set design as well as a master of it. His collection includes drawings by the pioneers Adolphe Appia, the Swiss designer who led the move away from painted scenery to what he called “living” sets; Edward Gordon Craig, son of the celebrated British actress Ellen Terry, whose influential book “The Art of the Theater” advocated experimental lighting techniques and expressionistic sets like the one he did for the 1906 production of Hamlet in the drawing at the top of this entry; and avant garde Russian designers like Erté, who brought the art deco look to the Ziegfeld Follies; and Serge Soudeikine, who cut his design teeth with the Ballets Russes and later did the sets for the original 1935 production of Porgy and Bess.

American masters like Robert Edmond Jones, Norman Bel Geddes, Jo Mielziner, Oliver Smith and Ming Cho Lee are also represented. One display card tells the story of how Mielziner’s set drawing for the final act of Maxwell Anderson’s 1935 play Winterset was so impressive that Anderson changed his text to better correspond with Mielziner’s interpretation. I wish there had been more behind-the-sets stories like that one.

I also wished the exhibit had included more of what it calls the “ephemera” related to some of the productions like those in a display case near the Of Mice and Men drawing that include opening night tickets ($3.30 each for orchestra seats), Oenslager’s written account of a production meeting that Steinbeck attended, and a copy of the script, annotated by its female star Claire Luce in now-faded red pencil.

Another treat was being able to compare Soudeikine’s original 1935 set for Porgy and Bess with the one Juozas Junkas did for another production 30 years later. It all made me hungry for more exhibits like this one. And they'd be just as welcomed even when it’s not Tony season.

Time Out for Talk About Tony Nominations

What is there left to say about the Tony nominations? The New York Times live blogged the event. And by the time the sun set yesterday, about 11 hours after Cynthia Nixon and Lin-Manuel Miranda announced the nominees, Google News had aggregated 950 articles about them. During that same time, the All That Chat chatroom had racked up 183 responses on its “2009 Tony Award® Nominations” conversation thread (Click here to read them). And chatters who thought their comments might get lost in that din had started at least nine other threads on various aspects of who got nominated, who didn’t get nominated, who should have gotten nominated, and who shouldn’t have.

Still, I can’t resist chiming in too. Some folks complained that, as has become the custom with the Oscars, it was better for shows that opened late in the season so that their productions were fresher in the memories of the nominators. And indeed, all four Best Revival of a Play nominees opened in April, pushing out The Seagull, the snob hit of the fall, and my personal fave Exit the King, which opened in March. On the other hand, that approach didn’t work for 9 to 5, which opened on April 30, the very last day of eligibility, and still didn’t earn a Best Musical slot.

But there was so much good stuff to choose from this season that it’s inevitable that some standout performances would get left out. I’m particularly sorry that Patrick Page didn’t get some love for his best-thing-in-the-play performance as Henry VIII in last fall’s A Man for All Seasons and that Carey Mulligan wasn't recognized for her a-star-is-born turn as Nina in The Seagull. But you might also argue that John Goodman was robbed when he got overlooked for his larger-than-life Pozzo in Waiting for Godot. And weren’t Amelia Bullmore and Ben Miles just as funny and touching as the other four nominated cast mates in The Norman Conquests? I agree with New York Magazine's Jesse Green that it's time for the Tonys to give an award for Best Ensemble (click here to read his proposal).

For the most part, however, the nominating committee appears to have acted like the good citizens of Lake Wobegon who believe that all the town's children are a little better than average. The nominators, who gathered on Monday, cast secret ballots, there’s no debate during the voting process, and lobbying is discouraged before it. Still, they managed to give a little something to as many shows as they possibly could. Twenty-seven of the 43 productions that opened this season got at least one nomination. Big names like Jane Fonda and James Gandolfini got nods, as did Broadway favorites like Raúl Esparza and Sutton Foster, but so did lesser-known actors like Roger Robinson of Joe Turner’s Come and Gone and Marin Ireland of Reasons to be Pretty. (Click here to see the full list).

Of course, there's no denying that the big trend this season has been for TV and movie stars to do Broadway shows. Some theater snobs complain about their presence, arguing that they take jobs away from “real actors.” But, all in all, I think it’s a good thing that those Hollywood folks think theater is important enough that they want to do it and, in the process, bring their glamor to it, reminding people that Broadway is a cool place to be.

As a result even people who don’t normally care much about the theater are paying attention. In fact, the most surprising theatrical honor this season may have come from the magazine Vanity Fair, which usually devotes its glossy pages to Hollywood starlets. But in its June issue, which hits newsstands today, the magazine features a photo spread with 25 stars who have appeared on Broadway over the past six months. The magazine’s website also has a behind-the-scenes video about the photo shoot (click here to see them both).

It’s great to have everyone talking and even arguing about the theater. It's even greater to have so much quality theater around. So go see a show or a few and, at the very least, tune in to the Tony Awards broadcast on June 7 to get a peek at the folks and the shows that have made this such a great season.