‘Carousel’ Wins Tony Award for Best Revival

“Carousel” and “An Inspector Calls,” two productions from Britain’s Royal National Theater, were chosen Sunday as best musical and play revivals at a 1994 Tony Awards that honored a Broadway season dominated by old shows.

Jeffrey Wright won for best featured actor in a play for his performance in the second part of Tony Kushner’s epic play about AIDS, “Angels in America: Perestroika.”

Yet the big battle was between “Beauty and the Beast” and “Passion,” two very different love stories that competed for the top musical prizes.

“Beauty and the Beast,” a lavish stage version of the Walt Disney animated movie, was the season’s most popular new show. Filled with eye-popping special effects, the fairy-tale romance brought the world’s best-known film company--and its expert marketing--to Broadway.

“Passion” is the work of the coolly cerebral Stephen Sondheim, Broadway’s most celebrated composer, and author-director James Lapine. It tells an adult story of obsessive love, the desire by a plain, unhappy woman for a handsome military officer.

Not even in the running were the other two Best Musical nominees: “A Grand Night for Singing,” a revue of Rodgers and Hammerstein songs, and “Cyrano,” a Dutch musical about the long-nosed swordsman. Both shows already have closed.

The competition between “Passion” and “Beauty and the Beast” for Best Musical overshadowed the other awards, even the contest for Best Play, where “Perestroika,” the second half of Tony Kushner’s epic AIDS drama “Angels in America” was the favorite. “Millennium Approaches,” the play’s first part, took the prize last year.

Competing against Kushner’s play were “Broken Glass,” Arthur Miller’s look at an unraveling marriage; “Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992,” Anna Deavere Smith’s examination of the California riots, and the already-closed “Kentucky Cycle,” Robert Schenkkan’s seven-hour marathon about 200 years of greed and treachery in the Bluegrass State.

Gary Smith, producer of the Tony Awards telecast, proclaimed the theme of the show as “Past, Present and Future,” but it was the past that prevailed over the last 12 months. Seventeen old shows--10 plays and seven musicals--opened on Broadway during the season that ended May 31, compared with 20 new shows and special attractions.

It didn’t hurt the box office. Buoyed by such crowd-pleasers as “Carousel,” “Abe Lincoln in Illinois,” “Damn Yankees,” “Medea,” “Grease” and “She Loves Me,” Broadway attracted more than 8.1 million theatergoers during the season, the highest attendance level in five years. Grosses climbed to $356 million, up from $327 million the previous year.

Jessica Tandy, Broadway’s original Blanche DuBois in “A Streetcar Named Desire,” and Hume Cronyn, Tandy’s actor husband, were the first recipients of a special Tony Award for lifetime achievement.

The award for regional theater, based on a recommendation of the American Theater Critics Assn., was given to the McCarter Theater of Princeton, N.J.

The Tony Awards are presented by the League of American Theaters and Producers and the American Theater Wing, which founded the prizes in 1947.

The winners were chosen by 687 theater professionals and journalists who voted by secret ballot.