Miles's blog

The best thing about being near New York (aside from being close to Meg) is the opportunity to see Broadway shows.  Live theater at the highest level is exciting and thrilling.  I had never seen a show on Broadway until Meg and I went to Lion King in 2000, but since then, thanks to Meg’s residence in New York, I have been to many.  This year, of course, I have made it a point to see shows on a regular basis, and I have been rewarded by seeing many fine performances.  Sunday’s Tony awards demonstrated how fortunate I have been.

Seeing one of two shows a year allowed me to only see a small number of Tony-award-winning performances. I think prior to this year I had seen ten.  The best, I thought, was David Hyde Pierce in a fairly short-lived musical called Curtains.  He was funny and charming, and actually a pretty good singer.  Equally good was Sutton Foster, an incredibly charismatic performer who I loved in Anything Goes.  If you want to get an idea of how great she was, go to YouTube and search for her and this show.  You will find their Tony Awards presentation, which is great, but nowhere near as good as that number was in person.  I was blown away.  I would go back and see Anything Goes again, but Foster has run off to Hollywood to star in a show on the ABC Family network which goes to show that the money for tv must be really good.  (Also starring in this show, Bunheads, is Kelly Bishop, a Tony winner in her own right for A Chorus Line, in my mind the greatest Broadway musical of them all.)

Sunday night raised my total of Tony-winning performances I have seen to 15.  Two of them came from a single show, Nice Work if You Can Get It.  Both the Featured Actor and Actress in a Musical awards performed in this production.  (Featured Actor means not the star, what the Oscars call a Supporting Actor.)  I did not like the show that much.  It stars Matthew Broderick who not only can’t sing and can’t dance, but he is aging not-too-gracefully.  The songs are all classic Gershwin tunes, but they, by and large, are not staged very creatively.  The book of the show is boring and pretty stupid.  However, the two Tony winnders, Michael McGrath and Judy Kaye are talented veterans.  I doubt I will long remember these performances, but certainly they were excellent. 

Judith Light won a Tony for her work in Other Desert Cities, a drawn-out play, which tested my patience waiting for the surprising climax (which I had trouble enjoying because some morons cell phone went off).  Light, yes the boss from Who’s the Boss, was certainly dramatic, if perhaps a little too dramatic for my tastes, as the boozy aunt. 

I was much happier to see that two of my favorite actors in my favorite shows took home Tonys.  Based on a recommendation from my sister, I saw two great plays—One Man, Two Guvnors, and Venus in Fur.  While neither won for best play, the two lead performers won for very different kinds of roles.

One Man, Two Guvnors is an import from England.  The plot is difficult to describe, but basically it is a slapstick comedy with mistaken identities, hidden secrets, and the kind of coincidences you only find in fiction.  The star is James Corden, who is about the funniest performer I have ever seen.  The play is hilarious, based in part on Corden’s improvisation with members of the audience.  At one point he brings two audience members onstage, and uses them to help him move a heavy trunk.  I saw one of the men at intermission and he said he had no idea that was going to happen.  Later, when Corden’s character is starving and calls out for a sandwich, someone in the audience waved a Subway bag over his head and offered that h had one.  This was not part of the show, but Corden treated it with such wit and class that everyone in the audience was laughing hysterically.  So was he.  I definitely want to see this one again.  Corden beat out, get this, James Earl Jones, Frank Langella, Phillip Seymour Hoffman, and John Lithgow.  I think even he was surprised.

The other Tony winner I was happy to see win was Nina Arianda for Venus in Fur.  This is an exceptionally clever play about an actress auditioning for a part with the writer/director.  For an hour and a half it is just the two of them onstage, I was enraptured.  Arianda, along with Hugh Dancy who was not nominated (after all he was up against Jones, Langella, Hoffman, and Lithgow) are required to jump back and forth between their characters and those in the underlying play, set in 1870 Vienna.  Arianda spends much of the play dressed in a bustier and boots, and although she is pretty, it is not her looks which commands attention.  As the show unfolds each of them flirts, teases, controls, and breaks down.  I saw it twice and loved it both times. 

I am going to try to see some more shows before I leave.  I need to add more Tony winners to my collection.