Tomorrow night, I will be one of as many as a hundred people watching the Tony Awards on CBS. The annual celebration of Broadway's best never draws much of an audience and this year's nominees are of uncommon disinterest even to people who usually wouldn't miss the program. There are gay men who won't be watching. That's how little excitement there is over the ceremony this time.
There's also the matter of the Sopranos finale. That might lure away a viewer or two. Or three. Or almost everyone.
My pal Bob Elisberg has some suggestions on how the show could be improved. I'm pretty sure that if they followed everything Bob says, they'd have a much, much better show…and instead of a hundred people tuning in, they'd have two hundred.
The Tony Awards are the Tony Awards…and what's more, they will always be the Tony Awards. Even if someone could arrange for Paris Hilton to host, live and nude from the Correctional Treatment Center at Los Angeles County's "Twin Towers" jail facility and for the show to end with Bob Barker being spayed and neutered, the evening would still be about giving awards to people most of America has never heard of for performances in shows that most of America has never heard of, let alone seen.
There's a nugget of "advice" that I've come to dislike in most cases…the admonition to "Get over it," whatever "it" is. This has its applications. There are folks who obsess on certain issues long after the stage it's constructive, to the point where the obsession does more damage than the original issue. But too often, "Get over it" is a way of saying, "Yes, we know you have concerns about something and they may be legitimate, but we're just not going to deal with them so shut up." I'm not sure which this is. All I know is that there's no way to get even a significant section of America to watch the Tony Awards…so the people doing the telecast might just as well put on whatever kind of show they want. I'm thinking three hours of baton-twirling might be nice.