Which shows will be Tony Award nominated next week?

by Patrick Ball

Daniel Craig and Ruth Negga in a modern "Macbeth"

It’s only been 8 months since last year’s long delayed Tony Awards, but it’s time to celebrate the best of The Great White Way once more. This year’s crop represents the first full season since 18 months back when Covid chaos  closed the industry that depends on gathering patrons en masse in close quarters. Though at times it was a bumpy road back to anything approaching normal for Broadway, come Tony season we actually have a pretty robust roster of new shows ready for their turn in the awards season sun.

Nominations will be announced by Tina: The Tina Turner Musical’s Tony Winning Adrienne Warren and Joshua Henry on Monday May 9th. The Tonys will be broadcast live June 12th on CBS and Paramount+ and will be hosted by our newly minted Oscar winner and former Tony nominee Ariana Debose. 

Unlike the Oscars, the Tonys are in a bit of a world unto themselves in the landscape of theater awards...

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Tony Awards 2021: Winners, Performances, and Takeaways

by Nathaniel R

The incredible Audra McDonald hosted the 74th annual Tony Awards last night

Did you watch the Tony Awards on Paramount Plus or the "Broadway's Back" concert on CBS last night? Two years and three months after the 73rd Tony Awards and 11 months after the nominations were announced the 74th "Annual" Tony Awards were finally held. Those awards were celebrating the very short very depressing theater season of 2019/2020 which ended with lots of sickness (Moulin Rouge the Musical in particular was hit very hard by COVID-19 in the spring of 2020) and lots of crushed dreams as several shows never opened and others were pushed back two years and some had to close well before they ran out of steam. Cut to September 2021 and the shows that did somehow survive the two years shutdown are reopening or will reopen by the end of the year.

Let's look at the winners, the hightlights, and what we can clean from all of this after the jump... 

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Review: Red Sparrow

by Eric Blume

The Russian Tourism Board won’t likely be sponsoring the film Red Sparrow, the new spy movie from Hunger Games director Francis Lawrence.  Other than featuring some very chic ushankas on a very attractive cast, this film makes Russians look very nasty, just like we’ve always imagined them to be for the movies.  Lawrence’s conception of the country illustrates his wonderfully corny, often thrilling, mysterious, and silly/serious approach into old-fashioned espionage that we don’t see much of nowadays.

Lawrence starts his film where he should:  firmly on the face of his leading lady, Jennifer Lawrence, sporting a bangs-heavy brown wig.  She’s a famous ballet dancer in Moscow, and the director steals a bit of the feverish tone of Black Swan in her early scenes.  The plot unravels in a series of crosses, double-crosses, and reverses that include her involvement with a US spy played by Joel Edgerton...

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Beauty vs Beast: Hear Her Roar Ragnarok

Jason from MNPP, championing the second weekend of big-time Thor receipts with some "Beauty vs Beast"  love for its ladies - among all the intergalactic biological diversity that Ragnarok director Taika Waititi brought to the Marvel franchise it shouldn't be discounted the prime roles he gave to several actresses, including the villain Hela (some Australian actress, never heard of her) and the drunk Asgardian runaway Valkyrie (Tessa Thomspon).

As with all the best villains Hela's got a solid claim to righteousness as the throne is hers and her father's a hypocrite... although I do wish Taika had gotten her more mixed into the bulk of the action. And Valkyrie is a fascinating, damaged, complicated character, imperfect in ways Female Heroes don't usually get to be. And even better the two of them have their own antagonistic history so I can easily ask you to choose sides...

PREVIOUSLY From Gods to Angels, last week we tackled the Mormon marriage at the heart of Tony Kushner's play turned HBO movie, and even though Patrick Wilson (and his butt) made a good showing it was Mary Louise Parker's Harper who stole 65% of your hearts. Said row-bin:

"The one thing above all others that I remember from watching this when it first aired was Mary Louise Parker screaming, "MR LIES? MR LIES!" with this gut wrenching need to escape. I still get goosebumps when I think about it. Team Harper, if nothing for that searing memory."

Beauty vs Beast: Marriage Among the Prophets

Jason from MNPP here -- the great Mike Nichols would have turned 86 today if he hadn't passed away back in 2014, and yet even with him gone for three years now I've spent a good chunk of the year thinking about him. Specifically I've been thinking a lot about his 2003 adaptation of Angels in America, thanks to the most recent London production with Andrew Garfield & Co grabbing headlines before moving here to the US in a few months. What are your thoughts on Mike Nichols' miniseries now? Have you re-watched it lately? (The whole thing is available to stream on Amazon if you haven't.)

Anyway there are a lot of antagonistic pairings in Angels that I could have used for this week's "Beauty vs Beast" but in every iteration of the show I have seen it's always the fractured marriage of Joe (Patrick Wilson in the film) and Harper (Mary Louise Parker) that I come back to, so that's where we'll land.

PREVIOUSLY Last week we floated down through the storm-drain on a raft of red balloons and took on Stephen King's most recent blockbuster adaptation of It - y'all weren't in the mood for clown-time though, choosing The Losers Club over Pennywise by just a couple of points. Said catbaskets:

"Tie between Beverley and Pennywise. You can keep all the boys. They bring little to the table compared to those drama gals with demons."