HIGH: Toby Marlow’s outfit LOW: Ariana DeBose’s hosting style WHOA: Myles Frost winning for his role as Michael Jackson in 'MJ'
Michael R. Jackson, winner. Photo: Charles Sykes/AP/Shutterstock With a couple of warm nods to COVID safety professionals and a scant few masks visible in the audience, the 75th annual Tony awards were anxious to communicate that Broadway has exited the pandemic and survived. Please come spend your money on our work.
LOW: Bunching together the costume-design awards for play and musical. Grump. This goes for all of the design awards, which were given out with no break between play and musical, to save time. As always, the slurring of these awards, given second-class status, is infuriating to people who love and care about stagecraft.
LOW: The awkwardness of the Paramount+-to-CBS transition. It’s not quite as rough as last year, but hosting the first hour of the awards ceremony solely on a streaming platform, apparently ending 7 minutes early, and then directing the audience — Paramount+ premium only please — to switch to a different tab within the service … the seams showed, much more than they should have.
EVEN HIGHER: Patti LuPone got deep into her prepared acceptance speech and then casually flipped to page two. If she’d had a third page, we would’ve kept listening and we would’ve been happy to do it. Nobody dared play her offstage. HIGH: Billy Crystal leading the room in a round of Yiddish jazz scatting. Sure, it started with a sweaty round of consonants. But as Crystal accelerated through calling out some specific audience members , the number took off. When you can include a reaction shot of Jayne Houdyshell saying “vey!” in a theater-wide back and forth of “oy!” “vey!” you know you’ve scored.
HIGH, WITH NO SIGN THAT THEY WOULD LOWER IT: That too-tall microphone in front of the petite producer Carol Shorenstein Hays. As she accepted the Best Revival of a Musical Tony, it lined up more or less with the top of her head. It doesn’t seem too much to ask, surely, that she have photos from the evening that don’t have a shadow on her face.
HIGH: Michael R. Jackson won Best Book of a Musical for A Strange Loop. Wearing a fantastic magenta robe, Jackson accepted the award to a resounding standing ovation from the theater. His breathless, thrilling speech included a tart note to the audience to sit down, since their standing ovation is cutting into his thank-you time.
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