The Broadway season that just ended was the most robust since the pandemic, with record-setting grosses, a plethora of profitable plays and celebrities galore.
Serious challenges remain — vanishingly few new musicals are making money — but there is a rich subject and stylistic diversity of offerings. Now, industry insiders face a lot of tough choices as they determine which shows to honor at Sunday night’s Tony Awards ceremony, which airs at 8 p.m. Eastern on CBS.
Over the last few days, I asked Tony voters which productions, and which performers in leading roles, they deemed the best. After consulting with more than one quarter of the 840 voters, these are my predictions.
Expect wins for “Maybe Happy Ending” …
Tell people the plot summary for “Maybe Happy Ending,” and they immediately think they don’t want to see it: It’s about two lonely robots in Seoul who go on a road trip and find, well, each other. But over the last seven months, the show has steadily won over fans thanks to strong reviews and excellent word-of-mouth; it has clearly won over Tony voters too.
The show has what I believe to be an overwhelming lead over its closest competitors, “Buena Vista Social Club” and “Death Becomes Her,” both of which are based on existing material. That’s one part of what’s working for “Maybe Happy Ending”: Voters over and over say they appreciate that, in an era in which Broadway is dominated by big-brand titles adapted from movies, books or popular song catalogs, this musical has both an original story and an original score.
There are, of course, detractors, who find the four-performer show twee, but there are significantly more admirers, many of whom praise the way all the elements of Michael Arden’s production cohere — the performances, the direction, the story and the lavish set, with state-of-the-art automation and technology. “It’s delicate and intimate and engaging,” one voter told me, “and the scenic design came together to support the story in a very unified way.”
… and “Sunset Boulevard.”
In the race for best musical revival, I expect “Sunset Boulevard” to cruise to victory over its only serious competitor, “Gypsy.” A wise producer once told me that a Tony Award for best revival is really a prize for most improvement — that voters tend to honor productions that make them think differently about a title, rather than productions that simply remind them that a great show is still great. And that’s what’s happening here. This production of “Sunset Boulevard,” directed by Jamie Lloyd, is radically different from its predecessors, with a simplified set and color palate and a heavy use of projection technology. And it’s electrifying audiences, while George C. Wolfe’s production of “Gypsy,” often considered one of the greatest musicals ever, has proved more polarizing.
Voters are divided over which plays are best.
The play races are so tight all I can say is tune in Sunday.
Among new plays, it will be a three-way photo finish. “Purpose,” Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s Pulitzer Prize-winning drama about a prominent family in Chicago, appears to be tied with Kimberly Belflower’s “John Proctor Is the Villain,” about a group of high school girls grappling with echoes of “The Crucible” in their own lives, and Cole Escola’s “Oh, Mary!,” a farce with a distinctly ahistorical take on Mary Todd Lincoln, is only a tiny bit behind.
Each show has its pleasures, but “Purpose” is also benefiting from widespread admiration for Jacobs-Jenkins, while “John Proctor” has the surprise factor in its favor — voters had no idea what to expect, and they are liking the play. “Oh, Mary!” gets points for being a hit, and Broadway loves to celebrate success. Any of them could win.
The race for best play revival is also neck and neck. “Eureka Day,” Jonathan Spector’s comedy about a liberal private day school torn apart by vaccination politics, seems to have a slight edge over “Yellow Face,” David Henry Hwang’s self-satirizing piece about race-conscious casting, but this too could go either way.
Cole Escola and Sarah Snook should polish those speeches.
Broadway always loves a good Cinderella story, and this year, Cinderella is Cole Escola, an alt-cabaret performer who had an insane idea — what if Mary Todd Lincoln were a delusional alcoholic stuck in a loveless marriage to a closeted gay president, while aspiring to become a chanteuse? — and turned it into “Oh, Mary!,” which was a huge hit Off Broadway and is now a significant success on Broadway.
There are five other nominees for best actor in a play, including George Clooney for “Good Night, and Good Luck,” but Escola is trouncing all of them. This prize has been a foregone conclusion for months, because many people in the industry believe that Escola, who identifies as nonbinary and uses they/them pronouns, deserves to be recognized for starring in and making a success of an idiosyncratic idea — the kind of innovative artistic accomplishment that Broadway longs to believe in.
“They created something with such boldness and passion and surprise, and then conducted their Tony campaign brilliantly — they murdered it,” one voter told me, referring to Escola’s tireless and always joyful appearances in interviews and at industry events. “They are effortlessly brilliant in a play that defies all logic, so you have got to tip your hat and say ‘well done.’”
Sarah Snook, who is playing all 26 characters in a high-tech adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s “The Picture of Dorian Gray,” already has an Emmy for HBO’s “Succession.” For a stage performance that many consider a tour-de-force, she should easily win the Tony for best actress in a play. She not only effortlessly (at least seemingly) changes accents and carriage and costumes but also flawlessly executes an extended bit of stage magic, coordinating her movement with cameras and screens and filmed images of herself in a must-see-it-to-believe-it performance.
Momentum for Jonathan Groff; a McDonald- Scherzinger tossup.
Jonathan Groff, a much-loved Broadway star, won his first Tony Award last year for “Merrily We Roll Along,” and it’s likely, but by no means certain, that he will pick up his second this year for playing Bobby Darin in the musical “Just in Time.” The role showcases Groff’s strengths — his love of performing, his overflowing charisma, his gifts as a singing actor — and demonstrates that he can dance too. But if voters decide to give the prize to someone who doesn’t yet have one, it will go to Darren Criss, the star of “Maybe Happy Ending,” who is drawing on his training in physical theater to inform his uncanny incarnation of a humanoid robot.
The race for leading actress in a musical has been perceived as tight all season, and my exchanges with voters confirm that it remains that way. The two possible winners are Audra McDonald, a universally acclaimed Broadway star who has already won a record six competitive Tony Awards and is now being celebrated for her raw rendition of Momma Rose in “Gypsy”; and Nicole Scherzinger, a former pop star making a scorching Broadway debut as Norma Desmond in “Sunset Boulevard.” This race remains way too close to call.
Michael Paulson is the theater reporter for The Times.
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