Tonys’ Musical Chairs

Last year, Julie Andrews brought more attention to the Tony Awards than ever before by rejecting her best actress nomination for “Victor/Victoria,” the mediocre musical about a cross-dressing nightclub singer. Complaining that the show, which was directed by her husband, Blake Edwards, had been “egregiously overlooked” by the Tony nominating committee, she also refused to appear on or attend the Tony telecast. “Mary Poppins Hoppin’ Mad!” crowed the New York Post.

Things are different this year. For one, Andrews, who is not a contender, will appear on tonight’s telecast. And for another, no mediocre musicals were “egregiously overlooked”--in fact, quite the opposite. Two shows that never cohered onstage managed to spear the lion’s share of nominations and subsequent free publicity: “The Life,” a hopelessly tacky tale of prostitutes and pimps, got 12 nominations, and “Steel Pier,” a dreary love story between a 1930s marathon dancer and a dead pilot, got 11.

These shows are better than last year’s “Victor/Victoria” and “Big,” the aggressively irritating adaptation of the Tom Hanks movie about a boy in a man’s body. But they’re not much better. Still, they captured what last year’s producers had counted on and were bitterly disappointed not to have gotten: nominations for best musical in lieu of any really good new shows.

This was a much better year for drama--even though the most nominated plays (David Hare’s “Skylight” and Alfred Uhry’s “The Last Night of Ballyhoo”) collected only four nominations apiece. The Tonys are weighted toward the musical, both in air time and in number of awards. (There are 11 possible awards specifically for musicals, seven for plays. In addition, most of the design nominations go to musicals--as 11 of the 12 possible spots did this year.)

Musicals bring in the most cash, given their higher ticket prices and the larger houses they tend to play. Plus, they are more likely than dramas to spawn road companies and significant additional revenue. Even fabled flops like “Big” have the potential to eventually turn a profit on the road, especially with the cachet of having played Broadway (even without Tonys). That’s partially why so many musicals opened in a cluster at the end of the season. This year, in the final week of Tony eligibility, four expensive and mediocre new musicals opened within six days of each other. This was a disheartening week in the history of Broadway.

Three of the four shows that opened that week got their nominations for best musical. All three had their premieres on Broadway, which, like some kind of mad puppy mill, continues to turn out product with an eye on the bottom line and little sense of nurturance. Not restricted to Broadway shows, the New York Drama Critics awards overlooked all of these extravaganzas and awarded best musical to “Violet,” the eccentric, local-color story of a disfigured country girl who falls in love on a Greyhound bus. Premiered at Playwrights Horizons, “Violet” was a talented piece that needed work, but at least it was in a place--the nonprofit theater--where it could get what it needed.

Of course, “Jekyll & Hyde,” the worst musical of this year’s fatal four, had a very long development process. This vacuous adaptation of the Robert Louis Stevenson tale was first staged at Houston’s Alley Theatre in 1990 and toured extensively thereafter (it stopped at the Orange Country Performing Arts Center in 1995). But the only real development that occurred in those seven years was audience development. When it finally reached Broadway two days before the Tony nomination cutoff, “Jekyll & Hyde” had a new director but was no better than it had been on the road.

In a way, “Jekyll & Hyde” is the victim of the publicity it courted. There were not one but two recordings of the pernicious score, featuring a song much beloved by Olympic athletes and lounge singers called “This Is the Moment,” a song destined for immortality in Las Vegas. This song helped produce an audience for the musical thriller, which did strong business in many of the cities it toured.

By the time the show arrived in New York, there was already a name for its cult of devoted fans: Jeckies. No Jeckies made it on the nominating committee, thankfully, and “Jekyll & Hyde” got neither a best musical nor a best score nomination.

Those shows that did featured at least some saving graces. At least John Kander and Fred Ebb wrote some solid, old-fashioned show songs for “Steel Pier,” and at least Susan Stroman’s choreography athon dancing inventively. At least “The Life” showcases talented singers, most impressively Lillias White. At least “Titanic” features some hauntingly elegant music by Maury Yeston, beautifully orchestrated by Jonathan Tunick.

Whatever the life vests these shows threw out to audiences, it was clear that not one of them could hold a candle to the 22-year-old Kander & Ebb musical that had opened in November and which remained unquestionably the musical sensation of the season. “Chicago” offers an unashamed celebration of style over content--a tonic compared to the clunky stories told by the new musicals this season. Starring Bebe Neuwirth, who displays the feline confidence of a star who has found a perfect role, “Chicago” follows the adventures of two 1920s showgirls who find celebrity through crime. Ironically, the original, 1975 production of “Chicago” was overshadowed by “A Chorus Line,” a much warmer show, which opened on Broadway only one month later. Context is everything.

If the years have helped to show “Chicago” in its glory, the four dramas nominated for best play this year underwent other trials. All four had previous productions, in this case a testament to the development process. The two American plays--Alfred Uhry’s “The Last Night of Ballyhoo” and Horton Foote’s “The Young Man From Atlanta”--had premiered regionally and off-off Broadway, respectively, and to some acclaim. For his story of an older couple trying valiantly to avoid dealing with their son’s suicide, Foote won a Pulitzer Prize in 1996.

The Pulitzer may not mean much to box office, but it helps get a play to Broadway. Uhry won one in 1988 for his first play, “Driving Miss Daisy.” This undoubtedly helped the mounting of his second play, “Ballyhoo,” the beautifully told story of a Southern family and the divisions between American Jews of German and Russian extraction on the eve of World War II.

The other two contenders for best play come from London. A transatlantic crossing also helps to sift out the dead wood, since only the plays and performances that garner the most acclaim overseas find backers here. Both David Hare’s “Skylight” and Pam Gems’ “Stanley” won their share of Olivier Awards. Retaining most of their original casts, these plays gave us the opportunity to see some of Britain’s finest actors making Broadway debuts--most notably the steely eyed Michael Gambon as a businessman trying to win back a wayward mistress in “Skylight” and the wide-eyed Antony Sher as the naive and childishly selfish painter Stanley Spencer in “Stanley.”

But even better than Gambon and Sher, who were both nominated for best actor, this season offered two performances that would be worthy of the Tony Award even if the world were a perfect place and every show nominated were worthy.

Playing John Barrymore in decline, Christopher Plummer is a great actor playing a great actor in a great theater (the Music Box). The accumulated richness of theatrical history onstage is truly breathtaking. Indeed, if poets are said to write to other poets across time, “Barrymore” is about actors honoring each other.

“There’s nothing as dead as a dead actor,” bemoans Plummer’s Barrymore, with a delicious twist of irony that rescues his disappointment from being sour. Plummer reincarnates Barrymore’s ephemeral greatness at a moment in life when any actor no doubt worries about the longevity of his own art. The place where the actor ends and the character begins is pleasantly blurred. “One of my greatest regrets will be that I couldn’t sit in the theater and watch me perform,” says this Barrymore, as written by William Luce, and indeed it should be one of Plummer’s own regrets as well.

In perhaps the most acclaimed performance of the year, the British actress Janet McTeer inhabits the skin of Nora Helmer so deeply that it is almost uncomfortable to watch her. Henrik Ibsen’s “A Doll’s House” is fully illuminated by this brave and unforgettable performance. As the Norwegian housewife whose husband thinks of her as an adored pet, McTeer’s Nora participates happily in her own serfdom until she receives a flash of in-sight about who she actually is. The play and the character are rendered in absolute clarity here.

And so, the Tonys this year will no doubt honor inspired and inspiring work, at least in some categories. The two-hour telecast, which had steadily grown more bizarrely truncated over the years, will at last get a little breathing room, thanks to PBS chipping in with an additional hour for the presentation of 10 of the less high-profile awards prior to the two-hour CBS show, bringing the total show to three hours. The program is finally ejecting what Tony Kushner dubbed the “scary orchestra”--the loud music that rudely and like clockwork cut off the theater’s most admired personages when they dared to go on for a second too long. Instead of celebrating theater, the truncated Tonys sent a message across America of theater’s shrinking importance in our national cultural value system.

The Tony’s possible savior is, of all people, a comedian and talk-show host whose only Broadway role was playing Rizzo in the terrible musical “Grease.” But Rosie O’Donnell is an avid theater fan, as she’s proven in her spirited daytime talk show. She’s taken the reins of the new, hopefully improved Tonys with a firm hand. In order to try and broaden the appeal of the show, she asked that it be moved to Radio City Music Hall, erstwhile home to the higher-rated Grammy telecast.

While we all want the theater to appear to be as culturally important as it in fact is, do we really want the Tonys to be more like the Grammys? Rosie could be a white knight, riding in to save the shrinking Tonys. Or she could be like Roseanne, currently playing the wicked witch in a souped-up stage production of “The Wizard of Oz,” designed to draw in her television fans but repelling people who know anything about theater. Tune in to see if Radio City will be a kind of Emerald City for the New York theater. Mary Poppins will be there.

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* “Broadway ‘97: Launching the Tonys” airs tonight at 8 on PBS. “The American Theatre Wing’s 51st Annual Antoinette Perry ‘Tony’ Awards” airs at 9 p.m. on CBS.