Why "A Disappearing Number" Doesn't Add Up

“So what part of the theater are you involved in?” asked the puppyish young man in the seat next to mine at A Disappearing Number, the challenging British production that made a brief appearance last weekend as part of this month’s Lincoln Center Festival. His question seemed to suggest that only theater insiders (he confirmed my guess that he was an actor) would want to see the show. And I have to confess that it did take me a while to make up my mind about whether I wanted to go.

On the one hand, the play is the creation of Complicite, the experimental British company that is a chief proponent of the highly stylized, multimedia approach to theatermaking that I’ve come to love.  On the other hand, its subject is mathematics, which I haven’t loved since 12th grade calculus and which has never struck me as inherently theatrical.  But on yet another hand, the play won the Critics Circle, London Standard and Olivier awards for the Best New Play of 2007.  That made the final count two hands to one. So I bought the ticket.

I’m not sorry I did.  I’m very seldom sorry whenever I go to the theater.  But I can’t say I had a  good time either.  A Disappearing Number follows two loosely connected storylines.  One involves the scholarly relationship that began in 1914 between the Cambridge mathematician G.H. Hardy and Srinivasa Ramanujan, a brilliant Indian autodidact who made valuable contributions to number theory before he died in 1920 at just 33.

An almost self-consciously parallel plot follows the contemporary love story between a female mathematician and an Indian-American hedge fund manager. The action jumps back and forth between continents and multiple periods in time. There are allusions to chaos theory, the joys of creativity, globalization, immigration and the human need to connect. All heady stuff.  But, as presented, too heady for me.

Complicite, under the direction of its co-founder Simon McBurney, employed its trademark creative stagecraft.  There were dazzling video projections, evocative lighting, an onstage musician playing Indian instruments and actors who performed traditional Indian dance steps. The entire eight-member cast, half of whom took on multiple roles, was excellent. (Click here to hear an NPR interview with McBurney about the genesis of the show.)

But because the underlying world of high-level math is foreign territory for most viewers, a great deal of the 110-minute show (which is performed without intermission) has to be devoted to exposition, which despite the best efforts of the actors and a few self-deprecating jokes quickly lost my interest. The jumping back and forth further undermined my ability to establish empathy with any of the characters. Some critics found the show mesmerizing.  All the talk and the overlapping and repetitive action put me in a trance too, but it was a soporific one.

The young actor in the seat next to me leaned forward when the play began, eagerly laughed at the funny lines and nodded in agreement to the more thought-provoking ones. But as the show went on, he, too, occasionally nodded off. In alert moments, he checked his watch.  Still when the show ended, he leapt out of his seat to lead the applause.

The New York Times critic Charles Isherwood, who I'm certain stayed awake all the way through, liked it even more.  In fact, he seemed to particularly appreciate the way the play “avoids linear storytelling, creating instead more complicated spatial and temporal patterns, refracting the narrative to mirror the complex ideas being discussed.” (Click here to read his entire review.)

I like being mentally challenged too. But I also like to be entertained and A Disappearing Number didn’t add up that way for me.  But you can judge for yourself because the production will be coming to a Cineplex near you as part of next season’s NT Live series that broadcasts stage productions to movie theaters around the world (click here to read my thoughts about those productions). The date for this one is already set for Oct. 14.

Turning on the Ghost Light

Yes it’s Saturday but there will be no new post today because (1) Wednesday’s longer-than-usual post covered two plays and (2) there’s been very little else to see and not much more to talk about and (3) that may be a good thing because I’ve succumbed to the sloth of the hot summer weather.  So, as theaters do when they’re temporarily empty, I’m turning on the ghost light. But there are a couple of upcoming shows on my calendar so I’ll be back to talk about them next week.  Until then, stay cool.

Scoring A Shakespeare Double-Header

Sometimes it seems that I’ve been seeing The Public Theater’s productions of Shakespeare in the Park since Hamlet was a happy toddler.  In the old days the play was the thing.  It’s not that the actors weren’t great.  They obviously were with folks like James Earl Jones, Colleen Dewhurst and George C. Scott in the casts.  It’s just that those folks weren’t then the names they are now.  In recent years, however, it’s the name casts that have been the thing. The park productions now boast famous movie stars and familiar TV faces as well as Broadway stage stalwarts. Sometimes all in the same person.  

The challenge for directors who put these shows together is finding a way to blend the varied acting styles and stage expertise that come with such a motley crew.  And this year, the task has been made even greater because the Public Theater has decided to present The Merchant of Venice and The Winter’s Tale in repertory with actors appearing in both productions on alternate nights. To up the ante even more, two directors with very different styles were brought in to shape the shows—Michael Greif for Winter’s Tale and Daniel Sullivan for Merchant of Venice.

Perhaps to compensate for Merchant's notorious anti-Semitism, Sullivan has re-imagined the play making it less of a comedy and more of an existential tragedy, which seems to have appealed to most of the critics who liked it far better than they did A Winter’s Tale.  I felt pretty much the opposite way.  Sullivan’s Merchant is darker and edgier, qualities that carry more weight in the current cultural landscape.  But I liked the lighter, more optimistic approach to Greif’s Winter’s Tale, which reminded me of those straight-ahead productions of my youth.

Just about everyone agrees that the acting in the shows is a mixed bag. Of course, most people want to see Al Pacino as Shylock (both Senator Charles Schumer and “Glee”’s Matthew Morrison were in the audience the night my husband K and I saw Merchant).  And Pacino’s fine in the role but the standout in this show is Lily Rabe who makes a fabulous Portia.  On the other hand, alas, the usually dynamic Ruben Santiago-Hudson is far too tepid as Leontes, the jealous King of Sicilia in Winter’s Tale. 

While the actors playing the male and female leads appear only in those shows, other members of the casts do double duty with roles in both, albeit with only varying degrees of success. The goodies are Jesse L. Martin, charming as Polixenes, the wrongly accused King of Bohemia in Winter’s Tale, and as Gratiano, one of the courtiers in Merchant; the patrician-looking and sonorous-voiced Byron Jennings, sheer perfection as the noblemen Camillo in Winter’s Tale and Antonio in Merchant; and Marianne Jean-Baptiste, particularly fierce as Paulina, the noblewoman who dares to defy King Leontes in Winter’s Tale.

The not-as-goodies include Francois Battiste, who has been terrific in contemporary roles in The Good Negro and Broke-o-logy but seems far out of his comfort zone as Florizel, the love-struck prince of Bohemia in Winter’s Tale, and Salerio, one of the courtiers in Merchant; and Heather Lind, a recent graduate of NYU, who is lovely to look at as the ingénues Perdita in Winter’s Tale and Jessica in Merchant but hasn’t found a way to make her characters more than mere pretty faces. 

But most egregious for me was Hamish Linklater, who seems to have let the raves he earned for his comedic turn as Sir Andrew Aguecheek in last summer’s all-stars production of Twelfth Night go to his head. This time out, he’s so desperate to maintain his funny-man rep that he resorts to the cheapest of laugh-getters and literally moons the audience as Autolycus, the supposedly lovable rascal in Winter’s Tale. Linklater does do better in Merchant but he still seems miscast as Portia’s suitor-of-choice Bassanio and it’s hard to see what a smart gal like her would see in him. 

Of course desirability—and one’s view of Shakespeare—often rests in the eye of the beholder. My husband K likes to know as much as he can about a Shakespeare play before he sees it and he spends days reading both the text and commentaries about it. We had a good time over a late dinner at a nearby Columbus Avenue restaurant after the show comparing his take on Merchant to Sullivan’s concept of it, even though K didn’t care at all for the latter.

My sister Joanne, who went with me to see The Winter’s Tale, takes the opposite approach to seeing Shakespeare. She won’t even read the notes in the Playbill while waiting for the show to start because she likes being surprised by the play as it happens and her responsive laughs and groans would do a 16th century groundling proud.  She also got a kick out of matching the famous faces on stage to their day jobs on TV series (Jean-Baptiste from the old CBS show "Without a Trace," Linklater and the recently canceled CBS sitcom “The New Adventures of Old Christine,” Santiago-Hudson on the ABC crime series “Castle,” and Martin, who spent nine years as Det. Ed Green on NBC's “Law & Order.”)

What I liked best was simply watching the shows in the middle of Central Park on two beautiful summer nights (I lucked out both times and suffered no stifling heat, no rain showers). And clearly others feel the same way.  People are camping out overnight for the free tickets to the shows.  The man sitting behind K and me at Merchant said he got there at 5 a.m. and was the third from the last to get tickets that day. 

The shows are only running until Aug. 1 but I’ve heard talk that Merchant may transfer for a limited run on Broadway so there’s a chance you can see it without sleeping on a bench or under a tree.  What you won’t get, of course is the magic of seeing Shakespeare in the Park

"The Grand Manner" Isn't Quite Grand Enough

Like most theater junkies, I’ve got a jones for backstage plays.  So there was no way I was going to miss The Grand Manner, playwright A.R. Gurney’s autobiographical memory play about meeting the legendary actress Katharine Cornell that is playing at Lincoln Center’s Mitzi E. Newhouse theater until Aug. 1. 

Grand dames pretty much ruled the American stage during the first half of the 20th century. At one time or another, Ethel Barrymore, Lynn Fontanne, Helen Hayes, and Eva Le Gallienne  laid claim to the title of “First Lady of the American Theater” but perhaps the grandest of them all—and the one I knew the least about—was Katharine Cornell.

I’d seen the others in the occasional movie, the odd TV show episode and even on PBS documentaries (earlier this year my husband K and I saw a particularly good one about Fontanne and her husband Alfred Lunt). But Cornell only made three filmed appearances and those in cameos that only hint at the stage magic that drew ardent fans when she barnstormed the country performing Chekhov, Ibsen, Shakespeare, Shaw and her signature role as the Victorian poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning in The Barretts of Wimpole Street (click here to see Cornell's brief appearance in the movie “Stage Door Canteen”).

That creates a bit of a problem for Gurney, known to his friends and in the play as Pete. Apparently worried that contemporary audiences won’t know who Cornell is, he spends far too much of his 90-minute play on clunky exposition. But the bigger problem is that Gurney, who says he has waited 60 years to write this play, isn’t sure what his story is. 

In a brief prologue, the Pete character explains that the real meeting in 1948 lasted just about five minutes.  The young fan and the star traded a few niceties about their mutual hometown Buffalo, she signed his Playbill and that was it. So Gurney imagines how the meeting might have gone if he’d been able to stay longer. But, alas, not much happens then either.

That’s too bad because Cornell’s life offers lots of dramatic material and The Grand Manner alludes to several of those possibilities but doesn't flesh them out. There’s Cornell struggle to remain relevant as the genteel manner of acting that made her famous began to lose ground to the rougher naturalism championed by Marlon Brando and other Method actors. There’s the inherent tension in how Cornell and her husband and director Guthrie McClintic managed to maintain a loving marriage despite the fact that they were both gay and sexually attracted to others. I would love to have seen either of those plays.

But this one might have worked better had Kate Burton, who plays Cornell, been able to convey the grand manner that the older actress was known for and that gives the play its title. Burton is a fine actress in her own right but in interviews this daughter of Richard Burton and stepdaughter of Elizabeth Taylor prides herself on being down-to-earth and she chooses to play Cornell that way (click here to read an interview Burton gave Theatermania.) It’s a valid choice but I can’t help thinking that the play might have had more energy had she been more highfalutin' (click here to see an excerpt from the play).

The other cast members come off better.  Bobby Steggert brings his usual boyish charm to young Pete (click here to read an exchange between him and the playwright) and Brenda Wehle is appropriately tart as Cornell’s assistant and lover Gertrude Macy. Boyd Gaines almost saves the day with his deliciously flamboyant portrayal of McClintic.

So, should you see it?  Well, Red (which won the Tony for Best Play and which I enjoyed but never got around to reviewing) closed last week and Fences (which won the Tony for Best Revival of a Play and which I loved but never got around to reviewing) closes tomorrow so there aren’t a lot of other straight play options.  Plus theater history buffs will enjoy The Grand Manner's inside references, even down to the photos hanging the wall of the set. 

And seeing The Grand Manner provides the chance to pick up The Lincoln Center Theater Review, a terrific but undervalued quarterly about Lincoln Center productions that out does itself this time around with smart articles about Cornell, Burton and the burdens and rewards of being a leading lady of the theater. It’s truly grand.

NT Live: It's the Real Thing

One of the big surprises of the last theater season has been the emergence of NT Live as an option for theater lovers who don’t live in cities where top-shelf theater is readily available.  It’s been great for the rest of us too. I’ve now seen three of these simulcasts that beam live performances of plays at London’s National Theatre into movie theaters and other venues around the world. I think they’re swell.  And, apparently, I’m not alone. 

According to the BBC, a recent report by Britain’s National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts found that audiences “watching a live screening of a National Theatre play were more ‘emotionally engaged’ than those watching it in the theatre.” But what really pleases the theater populist in me is that, according to the report, the relatively low-cost screenings (tickets were $25 bucks here in New York, which is just slightly more than it cost to see the IMAX version of  the blockbuster movie “Avatar”) seem to be drawing people who don’t usually go to the theater. 

The Endowment’s survey found that only 41% of the British viewers who saw Phèdre, the inaugural NT Live offering with Helen Mirren in the title role (click here to read my review), had been to the National Theatre in the previous 12 months. That may have been because they couldn’t afford the pricier tickets. One quarter of the cinema audiences had incomes of less than £20,000, or around $30,000, a year. (Click here to read the BBC report on the study.)

The audience didn’t look quite that diverse when my buddy Bill and I saw the NT Live production of Dion Boucicault’s 1841 comedy London Assurance at the NYU Skirball Center last week.  We spotted lots of familiar theatergoing faces including my sister blogger Sarah B of Endless Adventures in the Pursuit of Entertainment and the actress Estelle Parsons. But I think we still got as big a kick out of the show as the folks in the survey.  Or at least Bill and I did. 

London Assurance is a frothy satire about the mores of the British gentry and it’s filled with deliciously eccentric characters including the foppish Sir Harcourt Courtly, the ebullient outdoorswoman Lady Gay Spanker, and the levelheaded young heiress Grace Harkaway, who is wooed by both Sir Harcourt and his son Charles. There are comic disguises, comic duels, and all kinds of other comic merriment.  Hilarity ensues.

The trick with this kind of comedy is to dance right up to the top of ridiculousness and then frolic on the edge without tipping over. This production, a great hit in London and with the New York Post’s Michael Riedel (click here to read his rave), was brilliantly choreographed by the National’s artistic director Nicholas Hytner and a crackerjack cast, lead by Simon Russell Beale as Sir Harcourt and Fiona Shaw as Lady Gay who perform near-perfect pirouettes, pliés and grand jetés.

Of course one of the things I most love about theater is its ephemeral, you-have-to-be-there quality.  But sometimes you just can’t be there.  Which is why I’m so taken with these NT Live performances.  The great thing about them is that they aren’t movies—you see the actual performance that London theatergoers see.  But they aren’t the static filmed stage productions that bore you to death either.  

They are a splendid hybrid and as the series has progressed, the folks behind the cameras have gotten better at knowing when to zoom in for close-ups and pull back for reactions shots (click here to read a TDF story about how they do it).  Of course, you don’t see everything that's happening on stage and you can’t linger on an actor who has caught your eye but you do get the frisson of the live performance.

The U.S. season is over but you can still catch London Assurance if you happen to be in Malta (on July 8th) Australia (on the 24th or 25th) Mexico (on the 29th) or in post-World Cup South Africa (on the 23rd, 24th, 25th & 28th).  Or you can just keep an eye out for the new NT Live season, which will begin on Oct. 14 with the Complicite Theatre Company’s production of A Disappearing Number about the Indian mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan.  The season continues with a Hytner-directed production of Hamlet starring the up-and-coming actor Rory Kinnear, a new version of Frankenstein directed by "Slumdog Millionaire's" Danny Boyle, Fela! and The Cherry Orchard with Zoë Wanamaker as Madame Ranevskaya.

So I’ll see you at the movie theater.  I’ll be the one with the Bon Bons.

Theater Books for Summer Reading 2010

The hot weather came early this year so I’ve been lolling out on the terrace for weeks now, with a book (well, increasingly a Kindle) in one hand and something cold and pink-colored (I’ve been bouncing back and forth between tangy cosmos and dry rosés) in the other.  But the summer solstice arrived last week and Independence Day is this coming weekend, which means the kick-back-and-relax season is officially here.  And so, below is my fourth annual list of theater-related books to keep you company on your lazy summer days and nights. This year, the list includes four novels and four memoirs:

THE NOVELS:
Night at the Vulcan: by Ngaio Marsh.  Who doesn’t love a good-old fashioned British murder mystery?  This one is set in a London theater run by an Olivier-like actor-manager right after WWII.  Shortly after a mysterious ingénue joins the company, an unpopular actor is killed in his dressing room during a performance.  Only someone in the company could have done it and just about everyone had motive to do it.  Marsh’s Inspector Roderick Alleyn arrives to sort it all out.  But there is plenty of romance, rivalry and other backstage shenanigans to keep you riveted before he reveals the culprit.  

Morality Play by Barry Unsworth. Short-listed for Britain’s prestigious Man Booker Prize, this Medieval mystery centers around a monk who joins a band of traveling players in 14th century England.  It’s a terrific re-creation of the theater world at the time when some daring actors were beginning to move away from performing Church-sanctioned Bible stories in favor of plays that dealt with more secular concerns.  A film version starring Paul Bettany and Willem Dafoe, and blandly renamed “The Reckoning,” came out in 2003 and is available on DVD.  But the book is far better, especially at conveying the almost religious calling that so many actors feel about their craft.

The Confessions of Edward Day by Valerie Martin.  Novels about the theater tend to divide into two camps:  backstage mysteries or comic romps, the latter often centered around a gay protagonist. This one is something different. It’s a lovely literary novel about a promising young actor trying to break into the New York theater scene in the mid-‘70s when groups like Manhattan Theatre Club and the Roundabout Theatre were just starting up. The plot centers around a romantic triangle but the true love affair here is with the theater itself.

Next Season by Michael Blakemore.  Theater lovers already know that he's a terrific director and now it turns out that Blakemore, whose stage credits range from City of Angels to the recent revival of Blithe Spirit, is also a wonderful novelist. His story of a moderately talented actor who gets a job in a summer-stock type repertory company focuses not on the above-the-marquee names but on the journeymen who play the character roles and bit parts not for money or glamour but for love of the craft.  It’s one of the best theater novels I’ve ever read.

THE MEMOIRS:
Supporting Player: My Life Upon the Wicked Stage by Richard Seff. Over his 60 years in the business, Seff has been an actor, an agent, a playwright, host of a radio show about the theater and a philanthropist (he funds a lifetime achievement award for character actors).  He tells stories about it all from his discovery of the young Chita Rivera to his writing the book for the cult musical Shine.  Reading this delightful memoir is like having a long gossipy lunch with a friend who knows everybody’s business and just how much of it to tell.

The Gentleman Press Agent: Fifty Years in the Theatrical Trenches with Merle Debuskey by Robert Simonson.   PR guys are usually behind-the-scenes players but Simonson, the former editor of Playbill.com, puts the spotlight on one of the major publicists of Broadway’s Golden Age.  He has interviewed dozens of people who knew and worked with Debuskey, like the actress Ruby Dee and the producer Bernard Gersten, but he tells the story primarily from Debuskey’s perspective and often in his words. Simonson may be a bit too besotted with his subject but that doesn't overshadow the glimpses he offers into the even more dazzling heyday of New York theater.

A Year with The Producers: One Actor's Exhausting (But Worth It) Journey from Cats to Mel Brooks' Mega-Hit by Jeffry Denman.  Whenever I’ve seen him on stage, Denman, a veteran song-and-dance man who also choreographed the recent off-Broadway production of Yank!, radiates so much joy in what he's doing that I thought his book would be just as much fun.  And it almost is. As the subtitle makes clear, this is an account of the year that Denman spent being cast for, rehearsing and appearing in the ensemble of The Producers. It’s kind of a Rosencrantz-and-Guildenstern-Are-Dead view of the show, whose star Nathan Lane only makes cameo appearances. No dirty linen is aired.  Denman thinks everyone—writer Mel Brooks, director Susan Stroman, the stage doorman—is great.  But that’s due less to sycophancy than to his—and his book's—innate buoyancy.

Diary of a Mad Playwright: Perilous Adventures on the Road with Mary Martin & Carol Channing by James Kirkwood. The play Legends is legendary for its many-rumored backstage battles and for having toured around the country with two of Broadway's biggest-ever stars but never making it to the Great White Way. In this take-no-prisoners account of how it all happened (really, Kirkwood names names and tells stories about famous people that made me gasp out loud) the show’s playwright, who also wrote the book for A Chorus Line, gives his side of the saga.  If you can find a more naked account of what goes into making a show, email me immediately.

PLUS:
The Season: A Candid Look at Broadway by William Goldman. Yep.  It’s back again. I’ve said it in the past and I know I’ll be saying it in the future, I simply cannot imagine a theater reading list without Goldman’s classic account of the 1967-68 Broadway season.

Now, My husband K and I are going away for the weekend so there’ll be no Saturday post but I’ll be back next Wednesday.  In the meantime, Happy 4th of July and, of course, happy reading.

Broadway's Divisive Star Wars

Is there a litmus test that can determine who’s a true Broadway star? I ask because ever since Scarlett Johansson, Denzel Washington, and Catherine Zeta-Jones picked up Tonys earlier this month, some people have been griping that the awards, and spots on the Tony broadcast, should have gone to real Broadway stars.  So I’m trying to figure out what a real Broadway star is.

Does he have to do a certain number of roles on New York stages before he can qualify?  Or have served time in one of the seemingly countless revivals of Grease? Does her primary residence have to be in New York or at least Connecticut?  Does her bank account have to be no higher than the low six-figures?

Hunter Foster clearly has a firm definition in mind. A few days after the Tony Awards were given out, Foster, who’s currently in Million Dollar Quartet, began his Broadway career as a replacement in the original production of Les Misérables back in the early ‘90s and actually lives right in the theater district (I’ve no idea what his bank account is like,) set up a Facebook page called GIVE THE TONYS BACK TO BROADWAY!! 

Over the past two weeks, nearly 9,000 people have signed up and scores have left thoughtful comments (click here to read some of them.) Foster's campaign also has drawn attention from the New York Post, L.A. Times, Village Voice and New York Times. As well as smart commentary from my fellow bloggers Theater Aficionado at Large, Gratuitous Violins and BroadwayGirlNYC.

The subject also has gotten a workout in the theater chatrooms (some wags suggest the campaign may be the result of sour grapes cultivated when Foster and his actress wife Jennifer Cody didn’t get the red carpet treatment they expected at the Tonys). Even Scarlett Johansson has chimed in (click here to read the interview she gave the online gossip monger Perez Hilton).

I usually try to stay out of these identity politics debates, be they about who’s Black enough, authentically gay, a true Jew or, now, a real Broadway star. I figure if you quack like a duck, you get to call yourself a duck with all the rights and privileges thereof. 

But three things about the current dustup annoy me enough to speak out. The first is that it’s such a total diss to the folks who worked hard and won the awards. They may not all have been my first choices but they deserve this time to bask in their success.

That’s particularly true of Washington and his co-star Viola Davis. They may be better known for the movies they’ve appeared in but both cut their teeth on the New York stage and both are giving sensational performances in the current revival of Fences that is playing to sold-out houses at the Cort Theatre until July 11.

Similarly, Johansson may be a stage newcomer but she was singled out for praise in almost every review of the revival of A View From the Bridge that closed after a limited run in April. Don’t we usually celebrate a breakout performance like the one she gave? 

The second thing that’s bothered me about this debate is that no one seems to care much about what the audience might want. People like to see actors they know. It was probably the same back in Sophocles’ day. And what’s wrong with that? 

Yes, Broadway used to mint more of its own stars but it always made room for—and at times rewarded—Hollywood stars like Bette Davis, Katharine Hepburn and Henry Fonda when they wanted to do plays. Seeing Fonda in his final Broadway production is still one of my most treasured theater experiences.

The job of the people who make shows is to make ones that audiences want to see. Sometimes they can do it with compelling stories (as with August: Osage County or Next to Normal, neither of which had Hollywood stars.) At other times it will be with familiar titles and tunes (as with the high-grossing The Addams Family and the long-running ABBA show Mamma Mia!.) And sometimes it will mean casting stars. 

Seeing a show today is more expensive than ever and people who buy the tickets shouldn’t be looked down on for how they want to spend their theater dollars.

Finally, how exactly would giving the Tonys back to Broadway work?  Should we start redlining leading roles on Broadway so that anyone with a 90210 zip code has to go to the back of the line until all actors living in New York are cast?  Or should anyone who has an Oscar or who has appeared in a movie that’s made over $100 million be disqualified from Tony nominations or appearances on the Tony broadcast?

“We want the [Tony] evening to be about Broadway and for the fans of Broadway,” says the call to arms on Foster’s Facebook page. Well, I love Broadway too but the populist in me doesn’t believe Broadway should be a private club.