As invariably happens the morning after a big award show, you have folks all over the Internet saying, "Worst Oscars/Emmys/Grammys/Tony/Whatever ever!" Awards shows are rarely as good as we want them to be but we keep forgetting that and imagining that last year's — which they hated the next day — was wonderful. That always bugs me a bit as does when folks complain that the wrong people were nominated and the wrong people won, like that's the fault of the producers of the telecast.
I thought Kevin Spacey was an okay host. I may be the only person who likes him better as Kevin Spacey than as Bill Clinton, Johnny Carson or Jack Lemmon. The opening number was probably a bit of a muddle to the more than 95% of viewers, myself included, who haven't seen all the referenced shows…but that's an intrinsic problem for the Tonys: They're about shows that few viewers have seen and about the people involved in them. There's not much anyone can do about that except to not start off the show by leaving so many of us out of the gags.
Once they got down to presenting awards and excerpts, the festivities went pretty well. I still don't get why Bette Midler couldn't do some number from Hello, Dolly! If they couldn't do the title song because of logistics, how about…oh, say, any of the seven other numbers she sings during it? I guess since tickets are scarcer than a straight choreographer, the producers weren't worried about not having an exciting, showy number on the Tony Awards. David Hyde-Pierce doing the cut song that's been added back into the show might have been the least commercial sampling they could have presented.
Hero of the night? Whoever thought of having Spacey (and it may have been Spacey) deliver that great line about Bette Midler as President Underwood. Wonder what he would have said there if she hadn't gone on and on thanking people.
(And did you notice? The camera cut to various folks in the audience laughing and one of them was Les Moonves, CEO of CBS. Moonves is the reason she was able to do that. Not all that long ago, the Tony telecast was on a rigid time schedule and not allowed to go even thirty seconds over its allotted slot. Moonves did away with that rigid timing.)
Some of the speeches were really good. Some of the numbers were really good. The whole thing felt long but 3+ hours of that kind of thing will always feel long. It was nicely produced. Our buddy Ken Levine was there for the rehearsals and he has a good post up about how utterly impossible it is to do a show like this…but they do it. Rachel Bloom's little spots, which included coping with some rude and unprofessional folks entering or exiting the stage, were even fun.
All in all, if I had to judge this Tony Awards Broadcast, I'd go out on a limb and say it was a Tony Awards Broadcast — no more, no less. I look forward to next year when we'll hear the folks calling it "the worst ever" call next year's "the worst ever" and lament that it wasn't as good as the marvelous one this year.