The Tony Awards will be handed out on Sunday, unnoticed by most. In the best of times (i.e., pre-COVID), very few Americans cared who won what and it's worse this time because so few shows were seen by so few audiences.
Here's an indicator: The nominee for Leading Actor in a Musical is Aaron Tveit in Moulin Rouge. That's nominee, singular. He's the only one. Instead of picking from a list, the Tony voters were asked something like, "Should Aaron Tweit win in this category?" If he received 60% "yes," he gets the trophy.
The telecast this year has been bisected. At 7 PM Eastern, Audra MacDonald hosts the Tony Awards on Paramount+. That will run two hours. At 9 PM, everyone theoretically switches over to CBS for a two-hour show hosted by Leslie Odom Jr. This one is called The Tony Awards Present Broadway's Back!, which sounds like it'll be a two-hour infomercial for all the shows that have just opened or reopened, or are about to open or reopen. I hope it is.
The three most important Tony Awards — Best Play, Best Revival of a Play, and Best Musical — will be presented on this show. All the other awards that are going to be televised at all will be given out on the earlier show.
They tried something like this years ago and it didn't work then…but it might be a good idea now.
Not all that long ago, the Tony Awards were thought of as a loser telecast, always finishing low in the ratings. CBS was willing to air it providing the show did not run a second over two hours…and they were very rigid about that. It presented a lot of problems because it meant a lot of awards had to be presented not on the air but before the telecast or during commercial breaks. Obviously, a lot of nominees and recipients were unhappy about that.
But the time problem had another downside. Giving out the trophies is Job Two on a Tony telecast. Job One is showing scenes from what's currently playing on Broadway to perhaps lure buyers to order tickets. Some shows have been saved from having to close by a surge of ticket-buyers following the Tonys.
One year, a nominee for Best Musical was a show called Ain't Nothin' But The Blues, which starred a friend of mine named Ron Taylor. That's Ron on the right in the above photo. He's no longer with us but he had a great voice and if you ever listen to the original off-Broadway cast album of the musical of Little Shop of Horrors, that's Ron singing as The Plant.
Ain't Nothin' But The Blues was not doing great business and might have closed except that the Tonys were coming up and there was the thought that doing a rousing number from it on the telecast might boost sales and keep the show alive. We'll never know if it would have because that year, portions of the telecast ran long and the number from Ain't Nothin' But The Blues never got on. The show closed soon after.
The Tony people tried one year to work around the two-hour limit by doing two hours of the show on PBS and then the two hours on CBS — kinda like what they're doing this year. That time, it was awkward and the PBS section went largely unwatched, plus of course there were huge arguments over what would be on the CBS section. The two-hour restriction ended about the time Les Moonves took over as the Head Honcho at CBS.
We can all think of bad things to say about Mr. Moonves but he did a lot of good things and one was this: It was he (reportedly) who decreed that not only could the Tony Awards run three hours but they could even run a little past 11 PM it they had to. On most Tony telecasts thereafter, you could usually see a shot of Moonves in the audience, enjoying the hell out of the show, as a little "thank you."
I am guessing that the decision to let the Tonys go as long as necessary was not because the show had become any more popular with viewers. It probably had something to do with the fact that most awards shows were down in ratings so the the Tony Awards' tune-in no longer looked as bad as it once had. Anyway, most of the televised ceremonies have been delightful since then — and probably somewhat responsible for Broadway doing as well as it was doing the last decade…up until the point when The Pandemic opened.
So this year, it's probably right 'n' proper that they turn the CBS telecast into a selling tool to lure audiences back. If you don't subscribe to Paramount+, this might be a good time to get a free seven-day trial of it, which is what I intend to do. I may or may not cancel before we get to the part where I have to start paying.
I do not expect to be back there soon. I'm still uncomfy with the idea of being on an airplane or even leaving my house for very long. I also don't see a lot playing or opening back there that lures me. The Hugh Jackman/Sutton Foster revival of The Music Man was very tempting until I saw what they're charging for good seats — and I don't mean what the scalpers are charging. I mean the price printed on the tickets. Harold Hill will not be the only con-artist in that theater.
But I'll watch all four hours of Sunday's festivities and see if anything else lures me…and I hope Broadway comes back, bigger than ever. Even when I'm on this coast, I like the idea that it's thriving on the east coast.