Bring In ‘Da Tonys

Nathan Lane couldn’t help firing off zingers at the recent Tony annual nominees celebration at Sardi’s--offering a preview of what he is likely to do as the host of the 50th-anniversary Tony Awards, to be telecast on CBS tonight from the Majestic Theatre.

“Look, there’s Julie Andrews,” he told a reporter. “And she’s got a gun!”

Indeed, the absent Andrews had gone gunning for the Tony nominating committee shortly after this year’s nominees were announced on May 3. At the end of a matinee performance of “Victor/Victoria,” the star walked to the lip of the stage and announced that she could not accept her nomination for best performance by a leading actress in a musical because the nominating committee had chosen “to egregiously overlook” every one of her collaboratorsin the $8-million production. To add insult to injury, they had nominated instead two short-lived new musicals, “Chronicle of a Death Foretold” and “Swinging on a Star.”

The media went crazy--”Mary Poppins Hoppin’ Mad” headlined the New York Post--and soon everybody, to paraphrase Jimmy Durante, was gettin’ inta ‘da act. One of the producers of “Big”--the $10-million musical that won five nominations but not one in the best musical category--accused the committee of having “a myopic and elitist agenda.” David Merrick, a producer of “State Fair,” initiated a lawsuit against the Tonys because, although the Rodgers & Hammerstein score was nominated, voters had been instructed to consider only four of the songs because of some arcane rules. He lost the suit last week.

This year’s Tony furor, however, was symptomatic of some of Broadway’s deeper fault lines. In fact, the Tony uproar stemmed from a somewhat novel situation for the nominating committee. Unlike last season, when by default “Sunset Boulevard” walked away with most of the musical awards, this year the committee was not stretching to fill categories as it has so many times in the past. This season has been the most successful in recent history--both in terms of box-office dollars and critical reception.

Nonetheless, there appears to be anxiety over the fact that after the last gushing Tony acceptance speech, Broadway will still be mired in the intractable problems that have long plagued it: rising production costs and ticket prices, scarce investors and a demographic that tends to make Broadway the province of an aging economic elite.

“The fracas going on isn’t really about the nominations but about the enormous changes going on in the New York theater,” Andre Bishop, artistic director of the Vivian Beaumont Theatre at Lincoln Center, said in an recent interview. “It has to do with generational change--the old Broadway turning into the new Broadway, about how we in theater are going to reflect the cultural changes around us at the end of the 20th century. Some people welcome change, some people are frightened of it, and some people don’t even know it’s happening.”

Bishop added that what the Tony nominations primarily revealed this year was a phenomenon that had been developing over the past two decades: “the emergence of the nonprofit theater as an enormous force.” Indeed, every one of the eight nominees for best musical or drama came out of the nonprofit arena, along with four of the eight shows nominated in the revival categories. Sam Shepard’s “Buried Child” began as a production of Chicago’s prestigious Steppenwolf Company, Terrence McNally’s “Master Class” played the Kennedy Center and the Mark Taper Forum and August Wilson’s “Seven Guitars” had listed among its producers some of the biggest of the nonprofit players: Los Angeles’ Center Theatre Group/Ahmanson Theatre, Chicago’s Goodman Theatre, San Francisco’s American Conservatory Theater and the Manhattan Theatre Club.

Similarly, the two most acclaimed musical hits of the season, “Rent” and “Bring In ‘Da Noise, Bring In ‘Da Funk,” were developed, respectively, at the New York Theatre Workshop and the Public Theater, while the Tony nominating committee seemed to be dissing “Big” and “Victor/Victoria” for the crass crime of commercialism. In short, this year’s motto could well become, in the words of Gerald Schoenfeld, president of the Shubert Organization: “There’s no profit like nonprofit.”

“I said that tongue-in-cheek,” said Schoenfeld, who is the head of an organization with a long history of producing partnerships with nonprofit theaters on Broadway. “But I have never liked the terms, ‘commercial theater’ as opposed to ‘nonprofit,’ because it implies that they’re interested in doing art and we are not.” Noting that he prefers the terms “taxpaying” and “non-taxpaying” theater, Schoenfeld added, “I think what the Tonys tell us is that there are going to be more and more interrelationships between the two and, as a result, more and more material will be developed in a manner that fits the economic realities of today.”

A couple of decades ago, the nonprofits were not really players on Broadway. They were considered earnest stepchildren of the theater, created largely to present American or European classics or to provide a forum for new works considered too risky for the higher stakes of Broadway. Occasionally, one or two would make their way there, until the mid-’70s when things really started to heat up. Center Theatre Group brought “Zoot Suit” and the Tony-winning “Children of a Lesser God” to New York and Craig Anderson’s Hudson Guild developed Hugh Leonard’s “Da,” which won the best drama Tony in 1978. But it was three years earlier, in 1975, that producer Joseph Papp dramatically changed the dynamics of the game when his nonprofit Public Theater joined forces with veteran Broadway talents to create the blockbuster “A Chorus Line.” The repercussions on both Broadway and the nonprofit world are still being felt.

One Broadway producer, who wished to remain anonymous, said, “Some of the animosity you saw from the nomination controversy goes to that nagging perception, fair or not, that the nonprofits are rich and healthy while we, the profit boys, go begging. The problem is that the commercial theater, because of the enormous costs, is not commercially viable.”

Adding a different spin is Bishop, whose nonprofit Lincoln Center Theatre took a lion’s share of the nominations for generating the much-praised revival of Edward Albee’s “A Delicate Balance” and the less welcomed “Racing Demon” by David Hare, as well as the musical “Chronicle of a Death Foretold,” adapted by Graciela Daniele from the Gabriel Garcia Marquez novel.

“The key is that Broadway has been unable to develop a system in which to produce new work,” he said. “We nonprofits know how to develop them, but we can’t produce them on a big scale. On top of which severe government cutbacks have made it very, very tough to just survive. That has led to these alliances that have worked well enough in the past but which are going through growing pains as we continually look to find new ways to nurture artists and [the commercial theaters] look for ways to minimize their risks.”

Take, for example, the alliance between the nonprofits and veteran Broadway producer Robert Whitehead, who is celebrating his 50th year in theater with one of his greatest successes, “Master Class,” a drama about Maria Callas starring his wife, Zoe Caldwell. In the old days, Whitehead said, he would’ve had a traditional out-of-town tryout for the play at any oneof a string of theaters in Boston, Philadelphia, or Washington in much the same manner he had developed his productions of “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie” or “A Man for All Seasons.”

Instead, after a reading of the play in Montana, of all places, Whitehead became associated with the Philadelphia Stage Company, which asked to include it as part of their subscription season. For a mere $10,000 of “augmentation money”--as opposed to the hundreds of thousands it would’ve cost to mount the production in a traditional tryout house--Whitehead was able to get a five-week break-in run for the production. Furthermore, Gordon Davidson saw the play in Philadelphia and invited Whitehead to bring it to the Mark Taper Forum before bringing it to Broadway.

“We discovered the real center of the play in Los Angeles,” said Whitehead. “It gave Zoe the time to get herself more deeply and richly into Maria and it’s a luxury of time that Broadway in and of itself can no longer provide.”

Yet even Whitehead sees drawbacks to this kind of collaboration. “If you book in a company that has been cast by me, are you denying in some way your more serious objectives as a nonprofit theater? A theater can’t adhere to an ironclad morality forever, but there is an argument to be made whether nonprofits, in order to be more financially viable, are making compromises that are interfering with their creative mandates.”

Like many other artistic directors, the Taper and Ahmanson producer Gordon Davidson has had potshots taken at him in this regard from critics--among them Robert Brustein, drama critic for the New Republic, who is also artistic director for American Repertory Theatre. But Davidson labeled such criticism “hogwash.”

“The implication is that one is being corrupted and that the commercial and nonprofit worlds cannot coexist in relation to their respective aesthetic,” he said. “First of all, no one can predict what will be a hit and they’d be foolish to try. And secondly, Broadway isn’t the way we used to know it. There are no killings to be made. When I started to do plays that moved eastward, it was less about feeding Broadway than about giving a play a continuing life and another place that a play lives is New York.”

While Davidson noted that artistic directors must continually ask themselves the hard questions--”Is this play I’m thinking of doing a rape of the facilities or a true process collaboration”--he sees nothing wrong with wishing for a windfall or annuity such as the one “A Chorus Line” was able to provide the Public Theater for years.

The beneficiary of “A Chorus Line”--the Public--has had its most successful season since George C. Wolfe’s accession in 1993, moving not only its Central Park production of “The Tempest” starring Patrick Stewart to Broadway, but also “Noise/Funk,” the innovative Savion Glover show that explosively retells African American history through the use of tap and rap. The experimental show, which is doing surprisingly well on Broadway, was developed from its inception at the Public. Yet, its artistic director says that it’s “a very dangerous process” to allow a hit factory mentality.

“ ‘Noise/Funk’ came from nothingness and blossomed into somethingness,” Wolfe said. “If you program something for success, it’s bound to fail. What is really significant about this season that got lost in the ‘Julie Andrews moment’ is that we’ve gotten away from the era of British spectacle and reclaimed the American musical theater art form. It’s about the human heart vs. machinery.”

Wolfe himself came under fire in a recent Variety article in which an unnamed source was quoted as saying, “George really ought to be an independent producer, working on Broadway.”

There was also some muttering at the time he was named head of the Public that he had been chosen to replace JoAnne Akalaitis because her tastes were thought too esoteric to entice mainstream acceptance. Wolfe, who’d directed “Jelly’s Last Jam” and had been named to helm “Angels in America,” was perceived as having sharper commercial instincts.

Bristling at the criticism, Wolfe said in a recent interview: “I’m suspect because I’ve had success in the commercial arena, but my passion is to do shows that are important and challenging and that includes ‘Jelly’ and ‘Angels.’ Besides, what makes the institutional theater so exhilarating, and exhausting, is that we have a whole bunch of agendas--how to reach out to the community, develop new audiences, keep replenishing the supply of talent as it gets snapped up by Hollywood, how to fight this horrifying war on culture that’s going on in this country--as opposed to just the one commercial agenda.”

James C. Nicola, artistic director of the New York Theatre Workshop, underwent a baptism by fire in that commercial arena when he helped to develop at his 150-seat theater a new musical called “Rent.” It had a relatively obscure composer by the name of Jonathan Larson and offered a young cast of unknowns. The musical, now playing at the Nederlander, turned out to be a phenomenon and is the odds-on favorite to win the Tony, which would be added to its Pulitzer and other prizes.

But success has come at a price for the tiny theater. “There was a destructive effect,” said Nicola. “We even had to drop a production this year because our tiny staff simply wasn’t prepared to deal with a whole lot of stuff we’d never dealt with before, even down to finding a ticket for Warren Beatty to the matinee. It was a complete distraction from what we do.”

The artistic director cautions that while he sees the value of being a “research and development” arena for the commercial theater, the real danger to nonprofit theaters is that the world at large will ignore the value of the work that is being done which is not directly related to theatrical commerce. “Do people really see the value of all the plays that have failed here?” Nicola asked. “Do they realize that all those failures have a part in the success of ‘Rent’?”

“Whether you’re producing on Broadway or some 99-seat house, you have to just do things that you believe in, and let destiny, fate, whatever, take it from there,” Nicola said.

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The 1996 Tony Awards will air at 9 p.m. on CBS. The Tonys--and other things theatrical--are also available in cyberspace: See Page 64.