The presenters, short on prepared banter, were reduced to bare-bones introductions. award evenings, without a script we’re all basically flummoxed.” “With the possible exception of ballet and . . .
“Writers are the sharp end of the inverted pyramid,” he went on. But the drollest commentary-and the night’s cleverest speech-came from Tom Stoppard, accepting Best Play, for “ Leopoldstadt.” “I’m teeming with emotions, which chatbots wouldn’t begin to understand,” he deadpanned. Miriam Silverman, who won a featured-actress award, for “ The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window,” stated, “We are a staunchly pro-union household.” The playwright David Lindsay-Abaire, who won for writing the book of “ Kimberly Akimbo,” the musical version of his play, wore a solidarity pin and promised to be back on the picket line the next day. As you’d expect, there were winners who voiced solidarity in their speeches. The writing ban played out in less poetic ways during the evening.
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This year’s ceremony was held not at the Tonys’ frequent location, Radio City Music Hall, but at the United Palace, an opulent former movie house in Washington Heights, and the immersive dance number showed off its gilded cherubs and scalloped archways. What would happen next? Were we ready for the unbridled buoyancy of her viral rap at the BAFTAs, with the immortal line “ Angela Bassett did the thing,” but without the eloquence of those words-or any others? As it turns out, the dance number that followed beautifully conveyed the evening’s limitations and its promise, as DeBose, without singing, glided through the theatre hallways, leaping into a dancer’s arms and boogying through the aisles. The guild agreed not to picket the ceremony-on the condition that the telecast go scriptless.Īnd so DeBose opened the show in her dressing room, closing a binder of blank script pages.
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Then, as the Times reported, a group of playwrights intervened, arguing that solidarity with film and TV writers shouldn’t come at such a heavy cost to a fragile sister industry. The guild said no, and the Tonys were left with a number of bad options: go on untelevised (a blow to the nominated shows, which need their musical numbers on TV for exposure) or delay the awards until the strike ends (by which time some of the shows may have closed). Last month, the Tonys asked the guild for a waiver to broadcast on CBS, one of the companies being picketed. But the ceremony is typically written by members of the Writers Guild of America, which is on strike. Broadway is struggling to regain its pre-pandemic attendance, and the Tonys are its most important marketing pitch to audiences around the world. The telecast’s existence was the result of an eleventh-hour show-must-go-on miracle. “So, to anyone who may have thought that last year was a bit unhinged,” DeBose continued, “to them I say, ‘Darlings, buckle up!’ ” DeBose was hosting for the second time in a row, but the task that lay before her was novel: there were no pre-written zingers, no teleprompters. “We don’t have a script, you guys,” Ariana DeBose announced on Sunday night, still sweaty and panting from her wordless opening number at the seventy-sixth annual Tony Awards.
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