"Mean Girls" and "Spongebob" lead the 72nd Annual Tony Nominations!

by Nathaniel R

Katharine McPhee lost the imaginary Tony Award at the end of the much-missed TV series "Smash" but she's starring in "Waitress" on Broadway now and was given the honor of announcing the Tony nominations this morning with Tony winner Leslie Odom Jr of "Hamilton," Murder on the Orient Express, and "nationwide in on your side... 🎵" TV commercial jingle fame. She and Leslie were super charming during the announcement with McPhee getting the giggles at her own perpetual stumbling over the pronunciation of "Spongebob". It soon turned into a running gag where both announcers were pronouncing it "Spahngebob Squahrpants"

"Spongebob Squarepants" and "Mean Girls" led the nominations for musicals with 12 each while "Angels in America" was the most nominated play, with 11 nominations. A full list of nominations with trivia and commentary is after the jump...

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"Carousel" and "Spongebob" lead the Drama Desk Nominations

by Nathaniel R

Jessie Mueller and Joshua Henry in Rodges & Hammerstein's revived "CAROUSEL" which led the nominations

As discussed in a previous recent post, most theatrical awards don't have as direct a correlation to the Tony Awards as film awards do to the Oscars. At the Drama Desk Awards, which have been around almost as long as the Tonys, Off Broadway is also considered so their nominations naturally differ quite a lot. Expected Tony frontrunner The Band's Visit received zero nominations due to its previous Off Broadway run (i.e. eligible last season instead with the Drama Desk)

The nominations are after the jump...

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Stage Door: The Complex Web of Theater Awards

by Nathaniel R

Andrew Garfield in "Angels in America"

Oscar fanatics have it easy. Each year roughly 300 movies are eligible for the Oscar race and those same titles (with very few exceptions) are also eligible for all the other movie awards on this continent. They're even (with a few more exceptions) the same slate of movies that are eligible ACROSS the ocean at the other major English language film awards (the BAFTAs). Not so with theater!

Theater awards, a nichier beast altogether, are ultra territorial and when there is crossover it can feel accidental or play out like an echo rather than a harmonic convergence. The Olivier Awards, for example, just honored Lin Manuel Miranda's blockbuster "Hamilton"  which the Tony Awards honored two years prior but the only real crossover for this year's Tony Awards is likely to be Angels in America which just transferred here with most of its London cast intact...

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Come to "Show Business: The Road to Broadway" this Sunday!

by Nathaniel R

Hello all. A week or so ago I moderated a screening of Mean Girls (2004) for Show-Score's new Stage and Screen series with two members of the new stage musical's team (The Broadway version of Tina Fey's classic officially opens this Sunday).

I'm doing another Q&A so come! This Sunday at 1:00 PM I'll be speaking with director/producer Dori Berinstein about her documentary Show Business: The Road to Broadway (2007) which follows four musicals during the seminal 2003/2004 Broadway season: the blockbuster Wicked, the little scrappy show that could (and did) Avenue Q, Tony Kushner and Jeanine Tesori's brilliant Caroline or Change, and the troubled Boy George musical Taboo.  I saw all the big shows that year (a rare occurrence) and loved all four of the musicals this doc follows so that season remains special to my heart.

The movie has awesome rehearsal and backstage footage and all sorts of brilliant taking heads like Tony Kushner, Carol Channing, Alan Cumming and many more.

Idina and Kristin rehearsing Wicked in 2003.

When: Sunday, April 8 at 1:00 PM
Where: Peter Norton Symphony Space's Leonard Nimoy Thalia (2537 Broadway at 95th).

If you'd like to attend as my guest, please e-mail me and I'll arrange it. Would love to have some TFE readers there! Come support my stage fright AND see a fun movie that isn't streaming anywhere.

Stage Door: Broadway's Beach Vacations

by Dancin' Dan

It may be April, but New York City is once again covered in a blanket of snow in a winter that won't stop. But thankfully, Broadway is providing not one, but two beach vacations you can take for (slightly) less than a plane ticket to somewhere warm. Escape to Margaritaville and Spongebob Squarepants could not be more different on the surface (although both feature a volcanic explosion as an important plot point), but they do provide some pretty wonderful escapism for anyone longing for warmer climes...

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