I had some 12 straight hours of traveling yesterday: by car to the Hartford airport, by plane from there to Dallas/Fort Worth, by foot roaming around the Texas airport during a delay of the next plane, by plane again to L.A., where I’ve never been. The highway trip from the airport to the downtown hotel was my introduction to the storied vastness of the city. Feeling tiny and lost but mostly exhausted, I holed up in the hotel room rather than venturing out. My main excuse: Couldn’t miss the Tony telecast.
It’s still somewhat bewildering to me that in this age of Glee, Broadway still is forced to put all its eggs in one three-hour basket. Why there wouldn’t be demand for a more streamlined advertorial “We Love Broadway” type of special bewilders me. The hometown humblings and shout-outs and weepy breakdowns of the speeches have their own appeal, but abut messily with the dance spectacles. And there’s really no room for song-and-dance numbers built around the movie or TV stars the ceremony has on hand, but they’re compelled to do them too. “Overwhelming” would be the word, but in McLuhanist TV terms it’s not overwhelming at all, just crushingly, busily quaint.
Still, in all that kitchen sink pell-mell (the everything-but kind of kitchen sink, not the John Osborne kind) there were major elements missing. The most obvious one was the word “Fuck,” When you have given Samuel Jackson license to talk about a show properly titled The Motherfucker with the Hat and there’s not the hint of a bleep, it’s more notable than if he HAD said something censorable. Same with the South Park creators, who were eerily in synch with all the harmony and love and backpatting that is the common language on Broadway. They were on better than their best behavior; they seemed like whole other people with different cultural values. It reminded me of the similar spectacle of Pete Townshend accepting an award for The Who’s Tommy years ago. He seemed sapped of all satirical urges. Thank goodness for the down-to-earth, self-mocking star attitude of Bono and The Edge then. And for Brooke Shields—when Brooke Shields is your shock element, I guess you’ve really shocked.
I honestly didn’t think The Book of Mormon would do as well as it did. If you accept the common view that Tony voters vote for what helps their bottom-line in the long run, honoring shows which could rate a national tour if they only got a little more attention… well, Book of Mormon’s fortune was already made.
In any case, I’ve never minded that Broadway producers are crass opportunists. Somebody in the theater has to be. What you could take away from the overwhelmth of this year’s Tony’s is a sense of genuine and dogged innovation, whether you’re talking about grand-scale puppetry, coarse drama titles or even the dreaded yet technologically intimidating Spider-Man.
So that’s how I spent my first night in L.A. Today I begin hobnobbing with the small theater and regional theater types to whom that sort of diversity and progressivity and innovation is an everyday thing. I’m turning off the TV and happily heading to the trenches.