The Tony Awards: Stretching, Bending and Even Changing

If Sunday’s annual Tony Awards came with a stretchy-toy mascot--and really, what awards show couldn’t use one?--that mascot would be good old Gumby.

For those who haven’t seen it lately, Gumby’s head resembles the state of New York, proud home to New York City and, in turn, the industry and somewhat distressed state of mind known as Broadway.

Faced with musicals that some consider less than “real,” the Tony administration has added a catch-all category for hard-to-categorize productions. It won’t come into play until next year. But it represents the stretching, bending, reconfiguring--however slowly--of a Tony administration frankly baffled by what’s out there. Baffled, and trying to make the best of lean times.

These are, after all, times in which director-choreographer Susan Stroman’s “Contact,” a popular 85-minute “dance play” with no live music or vocalizing, leads the pack in the category of best musical. The Broadway musicians’ union, Local 802, protested the nomination. So did various other Broadway music men, Tony-winning orchestrator Jonathan Tunick among them. The protesters view “Contact” as a step, however prettily choreographed, in the wrong direction.

These are times when “Dirty Blonde,” Claudia Shear’s modest, minor, sleekly staged ode to Mae West and those who love her, can garner multiple nominations, including a nod for best play. At least Shear’s play, an off-Broadway transfer, can be called “new.” Increasingly, the best play Tony category acts as a magnet for work that has been around any number of blocks.

Last season, a 1938 Tennessee Williams prison drama (“Not About Nightingales”) received a nomination for best play. This season, nothing quite so ancient. Still, the 1999-2000 best play nominees include a 1960 Noel Coward comedy (“Waiting in the Wings,” which recently closed) and Sam Shepard’s “True West,” a 20-year-old work revived plenty off-Broadway and everywhere else, but new to the Main Stem.

In 1996, Shepard’s “Buried Child” got a best play nomination--nearly 20 years after it premiered. At this rate, everything Shepard ever wrote will eventually get a classy Broadway revival and snag the requisite nominations.

To some, these are niggly fine points in an otherwise cheery annual report.

Broadway shows grossed a record $603 million in 1999-2000, 2.6% higher than last season. (Average Broadway ticket price: $53.) According to the League of American Theatres and Producers, the total number of Tony-eligible Broadway shows was down by two--37 shows across the season, compared to last season’s 39.

On the road, not so good. Salable Broadway exports have never been harder to come by, which is why mediocrities dribbling red ink still go out on tour. Touring show revenues totaled $571 million (representing 29 productions), compared to last season’s $707 million (34 shows).

Let’s not kid ourselves. The Broadway numbers sound good. But the number of new shows is just plain dangerous.

Broadway will likely never again see a season like the 1927-28 season, when 264 shows jostled for attention. But unless Broadway sees to it that more viable new work comes to fruition, we’ll continue to see Tony Award nominees qualifying, to put it politely, as a stretch.

It’s a stretch, in many eyes, to toss multiple nominations onto an unpretentious swing revue, such as “Swing!,” which like “Contact” is part of the upcoming Ahmanson Theatre season. (“James Joyce’s The Dead,” a new but already closed Tony-nominated musical, has taken some hits for its reported play-with-Irish-parlor-songs structure. It arrives at the Ahmanson in July.)

Tony-nominated revues are nothing new, of course. Last year’s best musical Tony winner--the greatest-hits revue “Fosse,” returning to Los Angeles this month for a Shubert Theatre engagement--was merely that, a greatest-hits revue, slickly assembled.

Enjoyable? Absolutely. “Fosse” is in the same vein, if not the same league, as “Jerome Robbins’ Broadway,” another best musical Tony winner dating back to an especially weak season. But it’s possible to soak up the historical pleasures of “Jerome Robbins’ Broadway” or “Fosse” while wondering if a best musical Tony Award shouldn’t be reserved for something, you know, new.

I’m in a minority. Excesses and weaknesses notwithstanding, I fell hard for “The Wild Party,” with a score by Michael John LaChiusa and a book co-written by LaChiusa and director George C. Wolfe. The show, which got mixed reviews and is gasping at the box office, may lose its way near party’s end, but a lot of it is just plain thrilling, a triumph of design and atmosphere and hot-cha Jazz Age menace. (Dumbest omission from this year’s Tony nominees: Bruce Coughlin for his “Wild Party” orchestrations.)

Unless there’s a pretty wild upset, more likely to come from “Swing!” or “The Dead” than from “The Wild Party,” “Contact” will end up with the Tony. So, I suspect, will “Copenhagen,” the London import by Michael Frayn, up against “Dirty Blonde,” Arthur Miller’s “The Ride Down Mount Morgan” and “True West” for best play.

In “Copenhagen’s” case, the win would be richly deserved. Like “Dirty Blonde,” it’s a three-character piece. Michael Frayn’s memory play, directed by Michael Blakemore, uses as its core the 1941 meeting in Denmark of two old friends--reckless, brilliant German physicist Werner Heisenberg and his Danish mentor, Niels Bohr.

Between the world wars Bohr and Heisenberg collaborated on work regarding quantum mechanics and “the uncertainly principle.” Now, in 1941, World War II has taken their theoretical work and threatened to put it into practice. The old friends, if friendly rivals, now are classified as enemies. Why did Heisenberg visit Copenhagen? Frayn gathers together the ghosts of Heisenberg (Michael Cumpsty), Bohr (Philip Bosco) and Bohr’s watchful wife, Margrethe (Blair Brown), to burrow into the heart of the matter.

“Copenhagen” isn’t particularly fresh or novel in terms of form, or its use of characters scanning their pasts for answers. But it’s an absorbing work, beautifully staged and acted. Why Bosco or Cumpsty didn’t get a Tony nomination, and why Bob Stillman of “Dirty Blonde” did, is a genuine puzzler.

For my money, or at least my comps, it’d be on the crazy side if the solid “Music Man” revival won over the far superior “Kiss Me, Kate” revival. Blakemore is nominated for his direction of “Kate,” as well as his staging of the non-musical “Copenhagen.” In addition to direction and choreography nominations for “Contact,” Stroman’s up for direction and choreography of “The Music Man.” If Stroman keeps this up, the Tonys will officially be renamed the Stromys--and only shows Stroman directs, choreographs, admires or invests in will be eligible for consideration.

In 1994, responding to the glut of theatrical reruns, the Tony administration committee broke out separate categories for musical and play revivals. (This year’s likely straight-play revival Tony winner: “A Moon for the Misbegotten” or, from London, a revival--already!--of “The Real Thing.”) In the same spirit, next season brings an additional category for “Special Theatrical Event.”

It’ll be a way to handle shows of a “nontraditional aesthetic,” in the words of Jed Bernstein, executive director of the League of American Theatres and Producers. Like the Barry Humphries romp “Dame Edna.” Or Jackie Mason’s semi-annual stand-up routines. Or whatzits like “Squonk” or . . . “Contact”?

Truly, I doubt the Broadway establishment would tolerate a mere “Special Theatrical Event” Tony when it comes to an audience-friendly, tour-friendly potential moneymaker, such as “Contact.” There’s only so much bending old-guard Broadway’s going to do.

At least this early in the century.

* Hosted by Rosie O’Donnell, Broadway’s most ardent groupie, the 54th Tony Awards will be delayed broadcast at 9 p.m. Sunday on CBS, from Radio City Music Hall. “The First Ten Awards: Tonys 2000” begins at 8 p.m. on PBS.