In All Seriousness

The Tony Award for best musical is usually considered the climax of Broadway’s big night. But in tonight’s event, airing at 9 on CBS, the greatest interest will be in a category long considered on life support: drama.

Will Tony voters honor Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman” or Eugene O’Neill’s “The Iceman Cometh” as the best revival of the season? Will Brian Dennehy’s Willy Loman or Kevin Spacey’s Hickey take the top acting award? And will Warren Leight’s “Side Man” or Tennessee Williams’ rediscovered “Not About Nightingales” reassert American supremacy by winning for best play against the British and Irish interlopers Patrick Marber (“Closer”) and Martin McDonagh (“The Lonesome West”)?

In a lackluster year for musicals, the only real suspense in those categories will be whether “Parade,” about the lynching of a Jew in 1915 Atlanta, which closed months ago, will beat out “Fosse,” the glitzy revue of the work of the late director-choreographer Bob Fosse. “Fosse” was produced by Livent, and “Parade,” too, was co-produced by the Canadian company, but you can be sure that whoever gets up to accept the award isn’t likely to thank Garth Drabinsky, the producer whose vision gave birth to both shows. The former head of Livent is currently fighting extradition from Canada, having been indicted in Manhattan federal court in connection with illegal practices that are alleged to have sent the live-theater corporation into bankruptcy and onto the auction block. (SFX Entertainment last week announced a proposed deal to acquire much of Livent’s operations, although SFX will not take on Livent’s role of producing Broadway musicals.)

Despite the teetering finances, Livent managed to garner a total of 17 nominations for its musicals, a development not entirely out of place in a Broadway season in which conventional wisdom was set on its head more often than not. And nowhere was this more evident than in the world of “the straight play,” which has long played perennial stepsister to the more glamorous musical.

And we’re not talking comedy either, but raw, serious stuff. Even “The Lonesome West,” which offers some pretty good laughs in its story of an odd-couple sibling rivalry, ends with the two brothers facing off with gun and knife, respectively. To the surprise of nearly everyone, nonmusicals accounted for more than 17% of this season’s record-breaking attendance and helped fuel an all-time high of $588.5 million in Broadway ticket sales.

Audiences flocked to revivals of Miller’s “Death of a Salesman,” starring Dennehy as Willy Loman, and O’Neill’s “Iceman Cometh,” with Spacey as Hickey. (See commentary, Page 9.) A brief moment of near nudity by 27-year-old Nicole Kidman caused box-office records in David Hare’s “The Blue Room,” subsequently surpassed by a fully clothed 64-year-old Judi Dench, who bettered the numbers in Hare’s “Amy’s View.” Even Sophocles proved a potent draw with an acclaimed production of “Electra,” his 2,400-year-old relentlessly grim tragedy, starring Zoe Wanamaker and Claire Bloom. And though original American drama fared poorly (apart from Leight’s Tony-nominated “Side Man”), who would have thought that Williams would finally receive the critical acclaim that eluded him in his later years with a play he wrote at age 27, titled “Not About Nightingales”?

“It does put a lie to the concept that there is just a limited audience for nonmusicals,” said Todd Haimes, artistic director of both Livent and the non-for-profit Roundabout, the latter of which this year presented a revival of “The Lion in Winter,” starring Stockard Channing and Laurence Fishburne. “I don’t know if it’s a trend or not, but it does seem to say, ‘If you do good work, they will come.’ ”

“Everybody is talking about how we’ve discovered a new audience for straight plays,” said Emanuel Azenberg, one of the producers of “The Iceman Cometh.” “Maybe they’ve always been there. Maybe we’ve finally given them something that they want.”

What audiences seemed to want this season was muscular, accessible, “close-to-the-bone” theater, in the words of McDonagh, the Irish playwright of last season’s “The Beauty Queen of Leenane,” who this year is represented by “The Lonesome West,” one of the nominees for best play.

Of course, actors with box-office clout have always been important to the equation as well, and there is no question that the presence of Dench, Dennehy, Kidman and Spacey fueled the straight-play juggernaut this season. When stars become involved, however, limited engagements must almost always be part of the game plan. Of the above four, only Dennehy’s “Death of a Salesman” is an open-ended engagement. And that has given rise to a couple of relatively new developments on Broadway: smart producing that makes the numbers work within a 14- to 16-week playing period and aggressive marketing that is, increasingly, turning shows into “events.”

“With responsible management, we’ve discovered that you can make shows valid in a four-month period,” Azenberg said in a recent interview. “All our prices are too high, but plays, as opposed to musicals, have done something about it. We’ve learned that it’s doable on Broadway and doesn’t have to be relegated to a small theater without union obligations.”

Indeed, while $2 million in advance ticket sales once was considered extremely healthy for a straight drama on Broadway, this season has seen that figure more than double for “The Blue Room,” “Amy’s View,” “Death of a Salesman” and “The Iceman Cometh.” The last, with more than $8.1 million in total sales, holds the box-office record, and its entire 16-week run is sold out, despite a $100 top ticket price necessitated by the expense of a 19-member cast and more than four-hour running time.

“Everything has to be an event now; nobody leaves anything to chance because the stakes have become too high,” said Adrian Bryan-Brown of Boneau-Bryan-Brown, the publicity office for “Amy’s View,” “Iceman” and “Blue Room.”

“There is so much competition, not just from other shows, but from other forms of entertainment. But the success of ‘Iceman’ does tell us that people are willing to pay extraordinary prices for an ‘event,’ just as they might for a basketball game.”

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A good case in point is “Amy’s View.” Its limited engagement was almost entirely sold out by the time it opened last April. Hare’s play is about the complications that ensue when the daughter of a West End actress marries a television producer openly contemptuous about the theater. It had the pedigree of having been a hit in London and, more importantly, marked the return of Dench to Broadway for the first time in 40 years. Her recent Oscar win as Queen Elizabeth in “Shakespeare in Love” added even more momentum to the hot-ticket campaign directed by publicist John Barlow, who issued daily bulletins on “the mobs” outside the stage door of the Ethel Barrymore Theatre, adding the patina of a rock star to a modest dame of the British Empire. Dench became the toast of the Broadway season even before opening in “Amy’s View,” and the effect of the brouhaha was to neutralize the critics, who largely panned the play while heaping praise on her.

On the other hand, the favorable critical response was key to the surprising success of “Electra,” which had a limited engagement earlier this season and which had no marquee stars to speak of, the presence of Wanamaker and Bloom notwithstanding. Directed by David Leveaux in a contemporary style that drew parallels between ancient Greece and modern-day Bosnia, “Electra” also became an event, much to the surprise of its producers.

“If you talk about it rationally, it makes no sense: a Greek tragedy on Broadway in December?” said Eric Krebs, a prominent off-Broadway producer who is making his Broadway debut as part of the producing team for “Electra.” “The only rationale was that it was the most exciting theatrical piece that I’d seen in many seasons.”

Krebs said it would have been economically impossible to produce “Electra” on Broadway had it not been developed in the not-for-profit arena, first at the Donmar Warehouse in London and then at the McCarter Theatre in New Jersey. It was during the latter run that the production received an enthusiastic rave from New York Times critic Peter Marks. “Once again, for better or worse, the trigger couldn’t be pulled until we got that review,” said the producer.

Indeed, all the nominees for best play (“Side Man,” “Nightingales,” “Closer,” “Lonesome West”) and best revival (“Iceman,” “Death of Salesman,” “Electra,” “Twelfth Night”) were developed at institutional theaters. Broadway has become a repository of work that began elsewhere.

This also accounts to a large extent for what has been termed the “British invasion,” the preponderance of productions from London and Ireland on Broadway in the last decade or so. Of the above eight, only three were first nurtured at American theaters: “Side Man,” which had three previous productions, including one at the Roundabout; “Death of a Salesman,” developed at Chicago’s Goodman; and “Twelfth Night,” a Lincoln Center Theater production. (“Nightingales,” a co-production of the Royal National and Houston’s Alley Theatre, premiered in London.)

Part of the British invasion may stem from producers hoping to capitalize on American Anglophilia and the snobbish cachet of a London pedigree. But it’s also much easier and cheaper to import a proven product than to develop one from scratch. And most producers also point to a more sophisticated tryout system among the heavily subsidized theaters in London and a longer tradition of dramatic stagecraft than in the United States, said veteran producer Liz McCann.

“In Britain, you have artists--actors and writers both--who make a commitment to the theater and stick with it. On Broadway, an actor or actress has a success and they’re off to make movies, and then they come back once in a great while, like Kevin Kline or Meryl Streep. And the same thing with writers.”

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Indeed, Marber, the young British director-playwright of “Closer,” the corrosive view of marital infidelity and sexual obsession starring Natasha Richardson and Rupert Graves, was represented off-Broadway last season with his play “Dealer’s Choice”; both McDonagh and Conor McPherson, the 27-year-old Irish playwright of Broadway’s “The Weir,” have had three of their plays produced in New York within a year, and the prolific Hare has had no less than four productions on Broadway in the last 12 months. Further, Hare himself is currently appearing in “Via Dolorosa,” his one-man show about his trip to the Middle East, which has been the best-received of all his recent plays.

That Hare was totally snubbed by the Tony nominations--as he was last year for “The Judas Kiss”--has caused some insiders to talk about a “British backlash” among the theater community. It has led to predictions that the best play Tony will go to Leight’s “Side Man,” which is being loudly touted by its producers as “the only new American play by a living playwright this season.”

McDonagh claims that he didn’t feel a backlash, though the London-based playwright was quick to add, “I’m very Irish,” so to lump his and McPherson’s plays under the British label was tantamount to calling all American plays “Canadian.”

“I think the less warm response to ‘Lonesome West,’ compared to ‘Beauty Queen,’ has more to do with it being my so-called second play than anything else,” he said. “I would hope that we could all continue doing our stuff.”

Until now, of course, there has been little encouragement for American playwrights to continue doing their “stuff” on Broadway. The downside of this season’s overheated box office is that the heat is not on, for the most part, new American drama. “Not About Nightingales,” though a critical success, will lose most of its investment when it closes its limited run two weeks from now, and “Side Man” is banking on a Tony and the addition of television hunk Scott Wolf to the cast to lift its anemic ticket sales. Even the British and Irish plays are on the cusp. “The Lonesome West” has yet to find its audience, and the well-reviewed “Closer,” though it’s drawing well, isn’t the blockbuster that some had predicted.

“I think ‘Side Man’ and ‘Lonesome West’ would be doing a lot better at the box office if there were not so many other dramas around, but we’re very encouraged by the response,” said Susan Dietz, a Los Angeles-based producer who with her partner, Joan Stein, is backing “The Lonesome West.”

Both Dietz and Stein, the latter of whom is one of the producers of “Side Man,” contend that the viability of straight drama on Broadway this season should attract both more producers and artists. “Ultimately, the future is going to be determined by the artists themselves,” said Stein. “If you can get the actors and the playwrights, then everything will fall in line. A good play is a good play. This season proved that there is an audience for good, serious theater. Now we’ve got to provide it.”

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On the Web

* For complete coverage of the Tony Awards, a list of winners and a photo gallery, go to Calendar Live!: https://www.calendarlive.com/tonys