2 May 2023 Tony nominations day

[KathyB]

Tony nominations came out today, and Into the Woods and Sweeney Todd are up against each other in the best revival of a musical category. And a bunch of other categories as well.

Bernadette is barking at something outside, and running around the living room. I should probably go see what it is.

[scenicdesign71]

"The management committee of the Tony Awards, which is the group charged with overseeing the broadcast, has scheduled an emergency meeting on Monday [May 15] at which it will discuss how to proceed."

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/12/theater/writers-strike-tony-awards.html

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/lifestyle/lifestyle-news/tony-awards-will-not-be-televised-writers-strike-1235486990/

Tony nominations came out today, and Into the Woods and Sweeney Todd are up against each other in the best revival of a musical category. And a bunch of other categories as well.

After dithering through all of last fall, I never did manage to see Into The Woods before it closed in January, somewhat to my regret.  My guess is that Sweeney is doing fine for the time being: though its running expenses are high, it's playing to sold-out houses and, with substantial starpower, critical acclaim and word-of-mouth, could probably hold out for a delayed Tony ceremony if necessary.  Personally, my disappointment runs deep enough that I don't much care if it wins or loses, runs or closes -- in fact, if Kail's unfortunate mess manages to outlast the 1979 original's sixteen-month run, I'll be quietly outraged on Hal Prince's behalf.

Sweeney is the only one of this year's Best Revival-nominated productions that I've seen, but I'm basically rooting against it.  I have seen five other productions of ITW (plus the movie) and one of Camelot (plus the movie), not that that bears any relevance whatsoever to the award-worthiness of their respective B'way incarnations this past season.  But Parade would actually be my subjective, wholly irrational favorite (given that I've never even seen it anywhere, ever, and know the show only by its reputation and the OBCR, which I admire rather than adore) to take home the Tony.

[KathyB]

Sweeney is the only one of this year's Best Revival-nomined productions that I've seen, but I'm basically rooting against it.  I have seen five other productions of ITW (plus the movie) and one of Camelot (plus the movie), not that that bears any relevance whatsoever to the award-worthiness of their respective B'way incarnations this past season.  But Parade would actually be my subjective, wholly irrational favorite (given that I've never even seen it anywhere, ever, and know the show only by its reputation and its score -- which I admire, rather than adore) to take home the Tony.

I have seen the original touring production of Parade, and came away from it loving it even more than I already loved the score. It's one of my favorite non-Sondheim musicals. I know it gets quite a few regional productions, but I don't ever remember seeing one around here. Not that that has anything to do with the award chances of any of the nominees, but I'd go for Parade to win as well.

I can't even remember how many productions of Into the Woods I've seen--my best guess is five, including the one I saw this past September. (I've seen three of Sweeney Todd.)

[scenicdesign71]

H'wood Reporter:  Writers Guild Says It Will Not Picket 2023 Tony Awards


Maybe improv will be the official theme of the evening?

[scenicdesign71]

Sweeney is the only one of this year's Best Revival-nominated productions that I've seen, but I'm basically rooting against it.  I have seen five other productions of ITW (plus the movie) and one of Camelot (plus the movie), not that that bears any relevance whatsoever to the award-worthiness of their respective B'way incarnations this past season.  But Parade would actually be my subjective, wholly irrational favorite (given that I've never even seen it anywhere, ever, and know the show only by its reputation and the OBCR, which I admire rather than adore) to take home the Tony.

I have seen the original touring production of Parade, and came away from it loving it even more than I already loved the score. It's one of my favorite non-Sondheim musicals. I know it gets quite a few regional productions, but I don't ever remember seeing one around here. Not that that has anything to do with the award chances of any of the nominees, but I'd go for Parade to win as well.

Just a few weeks ago I discovered that one of the things that had always (to my longtime embarrassment) given me difficulty with JRB's score for Parade is actually one of what I'd now call its chief strengths.  It has to do with what Brown himself described thus (with reference to the influence of Charles Ives) in a 1999 interview:

When I looked at the period of Parade, Ives seemed right, though he was from the wrong milieu. Ives is Massachusetts, and Parade is Georgia. I knew I had to adapt his music to make it more Southern, but the stylistic impulse was right, his impulse of all this music happening at the same time: marching bands, rags, and waltzes playing against more sinister, symphonic sounds. I thought that, at heart, the texture of the show should be collisions, many things jumping on top of each other and never really ending. Keys abruptly change ...There's all this overlapping. There's all this cacophony...

...Most of which seemed clear enough when I first heard the OBCR many years ago -- maybe not the Ives influence as such, but the general strategy of musical "collision" and "overlapping" polytones and polyrhythms.  Surprisingly little of Brown's score seems untouched by this sense of constant and complicated harmonic and rhythmic "mis"alignment -- it feels like a structural principle, not just a flavor -- with the result that it's taken a quarter of a century for my ear to adjust.

The turning point came recently when I began to hear all this complexity not as generic "cacophony" but as a very specific evocation of (duh) a parade -- not only in the relevant (prologue and flashback) scenes, but also bleeding into the show's overall sonic tapestry.  (I haven't yet found anyone discussing this aspect of the score in detail -- presumably not because it hasn't been discussed by now, but because I haven't yet looked all that hard).

It's not exactly obscure: note the letters of the show's title, each turned in 3D space to march in lockstep across James McMullan's original LCT poster design.  The album cover nudges the idea even further, juxtaposing the letters more directly against the actual parading figures to create an unmistakable visual rhythm.

And it's not that I hadn't previously clocked the general idea of parade-as-metaphor, both narratively and musically.  (Roughly: parade = mob mentality = cacophony = the clash and collision and tribalist violence of which history is essentially constituted, no less terrifying when compressed into ostensibly extralegal outbursts of vigilante bigotry than it is when unleashed as official warfare on a national or global scale).

But that lofty vagueness -- mine, not Brown's -- never satisfied me; I could only understand the concept in overly-broad and facile terms.  The true ingenuity of what JRB was doing with this score somehow didn't fully sink in until about a month ago when I began to notice just how subtly, specifically, and inexorably his dissonances and restless time-signatures and "things jumping on top of each other and never really ending" conjure not just the abstract image of a parade but the actual spatial acoustics of one, with multiple independent strains of music, speech and percussion moving past the listener in successive but widely-overlapping and reverberant waves of sound.  It's unlike any other use of parade or marching-band imagery that I can think of in a musical (we're in an entirely different realm from Dolly or ACW or The Music Man, or even Assassins).   And it's that sensory immediacy and detail -- the immersive feeling of three-dimensional space and movement, on a massive surround-sound scale -- that, for me, finally breathes aural life into the metaphor, conjuring the goose-bump sensation of an agoraphobically vast outdoor urban vista scarily overpopulated by a claustrophobically dense and tectonically-shifting crowd.

Whether or not that image tracks historically with Atlanta's actual 1913 Confederate Memorial Day Parade (which almost can't have been as surreally immense and engulfing as it feels here), it establishes a dramatically dangerous, vividly tactile and specific atmosphere -- and JRB builds this sound-picture with much more skill and subtlety than I had previously managed to wrap my head around.  Where a less ambitious composer might have settled for mere "epic sweep" -- generic post-Romantic churn and tumult, spiced with the dark irony of patriotic celebration -- Brown goes further, saturating the entire score with an unsettling energy of not-quite-suppressed hysteria and irresistible forward movement (again: this "parade" dynamic feels threaded-through from beginning to end, not limited to the literal parade scenes in the story).  And that -- his intricate and uncompromising execution, even more than the ideas themselves -- somehow finally unlocks the whole thing for me on a visceral level.

The show's original director, Hal Prince, once insisted that "you can't hear a musical if you can't see it."  But in this case, it's almost the opposite: I could never quite "see" this particular show (or envision it, to my own satisfaction -- irrespective of having never literally seen a production, which, depending on the production, might not necessarily have helped much anyway) until I figured out how to hear it.  Should I ever be lucky enough to design it somewhere, I feel like I could at least begin to approach the material from a more engaged and less bewildered frame of mind.

So yeah, I'm on my way to adoring Parade, it's just taken me twenty-odd years.  I regret having missed Prince's original Broadway production, but I would very much like to see the current revival at some point before its limited run ends in August.

____________________
*While looking not-all-that-hard for specific references to the "parade-like" sound of Parade after finally beginning to appreciate its complexity, I came across JRB's quote in the Dramatist about Ives, above, in someone's 2005 thesis -- most of which I haven't yet read, but it looks like it might be interesting.

[scenicdesign71]

I'm slowly becoming just a hair less-behind in seeing the nominated shows, although, as in most previous years -- even on the off-chance that I make it to any more by June 11 (or after, for that matter) -- I won't have caught all or even most of them.

So far, I've seen:

• Kimberly Akimbo (Off-Broadway only, though I certainly wouldn't mind seeing it again uptown)
• Some Like It Hot (twice, both times at the invitation of friends who had extra tickets)
• Between Riverside and Crazy (livestreamed from the Helen Hayes in its final weeks there)
• Sweeney Todd (twice, though in retrospect I wish I'd spent that money to see Parade instead)
• Camelot (this past weekend, with yet another friend who had a spare ticket)

(I also saw A Strange Loop last December -- but, in Tony terms, that was catch-up from the 2021-22 season).

At some point, if I can scrape together the funds, I'd still like to see:

• Parade (definitely top of the list, musical-wise)
• Leopoldstadt (ditto, play-wise)
• A Doll's House, though it's unlikely, being a hot (and pricey) ticket, and ending its strictly-limited run soon.
• The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window

And I really regret not having seen, before they closed:

• The Piano Lesson
• Death of a Salesman
• Topdog/Underdog
• Ohio State Murders

There's a modest smattering of others (Fat Ham; New York, New York; perhaps & Juliet; maybe one or two more I'm forgetting) that I'd be happy enough to see if a ticket dropped into my lap, but am unlikely to otherwise.  Some Like It Hot and Camelot were both on that list until those tickets did drop into my lap, so never say never.  And while, in those two cases, my relative indifference about seeing them was ultimately borne out by the shows themselves -- smoothly professional, earnestly well-intended, painless but bland rethinks of their respective sources -- they still left me grateful for the chance to see theatre (and discuss it over dinner afterward) with friends.