Postscripts to the Tonys : L.A.’s Hwang Savors His 1st Win for ‘M. Butterfly’

Midnight passed, and Monday began. David Henry Hwang, happy, weary, sitting with his wife and the actors from his play, grinned when asked when he thought the lavish Tony party would end.

“Sometimes these things end of their own accord,” said Hwang, part of the post-show bash at the New York Hilton and winner of his first Tony award for his first Broadway play, “M. Butterfly.”

The quiet, 30-year-old Los Angeles resident, who lives in the Los Feliz area, went almost unnoticed by the swarms of photographers working the party that followed Broadway’s 42nd annual Tony awards show.

But his drama, based on a true story about a male French diplomat’s 20-year affair with a Peking Opera diva who really is a man, won the season’s Tony for best play--plus two more, for John Dexter’s direction and for B. D. Wong’s supporting-actor role as the diva.

In his acceptance speech to the black-tie multitudes at the Minskoff Theater, site of Sunday night’s Tony show that CBS televised, Hwang wryly noted that the dramatic fuel for his play was a bit unusual:

“I like improbable plots. But I’m not sure I could have made that one up myself.”

As expected, “The Phantom of the Opera,” Andrew Lloyd Webber’s made-in-England ghoul-meets-gal megahit musical, won the lion’s share of Tonys--seven, including best musical, director (Harold Prince’s 16th Tony), and best-actor honors for Michael Crawford.

The show’s other winners: Maria Bjornson for the musical’s lavish sets and costumes, Andrew Bridges for lighting, and Judy Kaye for featured actress in her comic role as a discarded opera singer.

The Lincoln Center version of Cole Porter’s “Anything Goes” won best-revival honors, as well as Tonys for Michael Smuin’s choreography and Bill McCutcheon’s supporting role as an on-the-lam gangster posing as a priest.

In the drama category, L. Scott Caldwell won as featured actress for “Joe Turner’s Come and Gone.”

In awards announced last month, South Coast Repertory of Costa Mesa and the Brooklyn Academy of Music each received a special Tony for continued excellence by a regional theater.

“We have the best of all possible worlds,” South Coast co-director David Emmes quipped shortly before leaving for the ceremonies. “We know we won and we get to go to the show.”

“Phantom” composer Webber, whose singing wife, Sarah Brightman, wasn’t nominated for a Tony as the co-star of his latest work, also got to go the show. But as he entered the Minskoff, he told reporters, “I don’t expect to win at all.”

He was right in one respect. Stephen Sondheim, who hadn’t won a Tony since “Sweeney Todd” in 1979, won a best score award--his fifth Tony--for “Into the Woods,” a version of popular fairy tales.

Sondheim’s collaborator, James Lapine, won for best book of a musical, and Joanna Gleason, cast as the the baker’s wife in the show, won as best actress. Noting her role, she smiled and told the audience:

“I’ve really felt like Cinderella at the ball. Thank you for this slipper.”

Ron Silver, the nervous, hustling movie producer of David Mamet’s “Speed-the-Plow,” in which he co-stars with Joe Mantegna and Madonna, won best actor in the drama category, with Joan Allen getting best actress honors as the bereaved dancer in Lanford Wilson’s “Burn This.”

Madonna, the rock star who more than a few Broadway inmates thought a strange choice for Mamet’s play, attracted the most attention by photographers before and after her presentation of the special Tony to South Coast Repertory.

Clad in a black gown festooned with pink fabric roses, she drew a laugh from the audience when, having said her microphone was placed too low, added: “I’m being punished for not coming to rehearsal today.”

The evening’s most emotional moment came when “Phantom” star Crawford, who wears a white half-mask during most of his musical, came on the Minskoff Stage for his best-actor Tony. He seemed close to tears of joy.

“Oh, gosh,” gasped the British star, who began in “Phantom” nearly two years ago in London and had been expected to win Sunday night. “There are so many ups and downs in this business.

“But the time I’ve had here in New York--there’ve been so many wonderful things happen to me. I know that by the law of averages I must be due to be knocked down by a truck any day now.”

The Tony awards followed a season in which Broadway’s box office, fueled by such hits as “The Phantom of the Opera” and “Les Miserables,” took in a record $253 million, 21% more than in the 1986-87 season.

But “Phantom” director Prince, while basking in the glory of his 16th Tony in 34 years, has often said that Broadway still has problems, despite big hits such as the new musical he directed here and in London.

He sounded the warning again Sunday during one of the post-show press conferences in which most winners participated at Sardi’s, the famed restaurant and theater gathering spot across the street from the Minskoff.

“I don’t think anybody’s turned the whole thing around yet,” said Prince, whose first Tony was for “The Pajama Game.”

“I’ve read all this stuff about how healthy the season is, and I’m pleased . . . but how can it be absolutely healthy when there are 32 openings in a season? When I was a kid, there used to be five a week.

“And all that stuff about encouraging new writers and so on: How many of them get the encouragement? How many composers and lyricists get the chance to be seen?

“No, you can’t blind yourself--because the box-office take is so humongous--to misreading the situation. I really think we damn well better address it.”

Ironically, Broadway rookie Hwang’s “M. Butterfly” was the only one of four Tony-nominated plays to be produced specifically for Broadway, according to a spokesman for the show. Although it had a tryout run in Washington, it premiered March 20 on Broadway, not in regional theater or Off-Broadway.

Its author, who has had seven plays produced, including the acclaimed “F.O.B.,” got the idea for “Butterfly” from a newspaper article. He initially thought the idea might make a musical.

He approached producer Stuart Ostrow, who “was very encouraging,” Hwang recalled. “But when I wrote it, it turned out to be a play rather than a musical. I sent it to him as a courtesy, not expecting that he’d want to produce it.

“But fortunately, he did.”

Late this summer, Hwang expects to start work on another play--he hasn’t yet decided what it will be about--commissioned by South Coast Repertory.

He also is writing--and will direct--he said, a movie whose development is co-financed by public television’s “American Playhouse” production company, whose backers include KCET-TV.

That company’s first Broadway effort, Lee Blessing’s “A Walk in the Woods,” was one of three competing with Hwang’s drama for best play on Sunday.

Hwang, who hasn’t picked a title for the movie, described it as “basically another 20-year love story.” Save for the two-decade element, he added, this one isn’t at all like “M. Butterfly.”

“It’s about a man who falls in love with the daughter of another man he hounded to death,” he said.

Times staff writer Jan Herman in Orange County contributed to this article.