"The decision to revoke the fourth estate's Tony voting privileges has spurred an outcry from disenfranchised journos and other legiters.
The Tony Award Management Committee announced via email Tuesday evening that members of the so-called First Night Press List -- the group of critics, reporters and editors invited to see Broadway shows on or before opening night -- would no longer be allowed to vote for the legit world's highest-profile kudos.
Journalists have been included in the voting pool since the 1963-64 season, the same year members of the League of New York Theaters and Producers -- the org that later became the Broadway League, now a co-presenter of the Tonys -- were invited to vote.
Move reduces the pool of Tony voters by about 100, or down more than 10%, to approximately 700.
As soon as the email went out, those affected voiced skepticism regarding the stated rationale behind the move, with some viewing the change as an effort by producers, presenters and promoters -- who make up the majority of the voting pool -- to tighten control of the Tony Awards, widely regarded as a top marketing showcase for Broadway fare.
Other critics took it as a slap in the face that further marginalizes their standing in the Gotham theater community. Irked members of the New York Drama Critics Circle soon launched into a debate regarding a variety of potential responses, including lodging a formal complaint to reopen negotiations, as well as prompting talk of expanding the NYDCC's annual awards to counter the exclusion from the Tonys.
The Tonys were the only kudos among the major entertainment industry laurels to have included press among voters. There's no significant critical presence among voting bodies for Grammys, Emmys or Oscars.
The severance letter, sent out by the Tony Awards' press agency, PMK/HBH, reasoned that the impartiality of journos might be compromised by their direct involvement in the selection of Tony winners. Announcement also noted that the press has plenty of opportunity to make critics' opinions known via the media outlets that run their theater coverage, as well as through the annual awards roundups in which various groups participate, such as the NYDCC Awards, Drama Desks and Outer Critics Circle Awards.
Decision also repped an effort to pare back an expanding first-night list, which has grown over the years to include a wide array of assignment editors, bloggers, TV bookers and others. Generous estimates peg the actual number of legitimate first-night press at 30-40, leaving 60 or so other media professionals who may or may not cover theater directly and in many cases don't see a large number of the eligible shows.
"It was not a desire to insult the press in any way but to address the fact that the criteria for inclusion on the first-night list was not coincident with any criteria for why one should or should not be a voter," said Howard Sherman, exec director of the American Theater Wing, co-presenter of the Tonys.
Rather than risk the controversy of disenfranchising only some of that press list, the management committee decided to revoke the vote for the entire group.
Some in the industry said they viewed the measure as throwing the baby out with the bathwater.""The decision to revoke the fourth estate's Tony voting privileges has spurred an... more
"Broadway tuner "Avenue Q" will shutter in the fall after a run of six years.
Comedy, in which a cast of humans and puppets play twentysomethings struggling to find their way in New York City, was one of the first of a new generation of small-scale offerings that carved out a stable foothold on a Rialto landscape more often associated with splashier fare.
Broadway production has grossed almost $120 million so far, and, according to reps for the show, returned $23.5 million to its investors.
The last several months of its Main Stem run have seen sales diminish, with weekly box office sometimes dipping below the $200,000 mark. Both the production's low running costs and its berth at one of Broadway's smaller venues, the John Golden Theater, helped extend its longevity.
The show became the epitome of an underdog legit success when the musical beat out big-budget competitor "Wicked" for the top tuner Tony in 2004.
Also picking up trophies for score (for composer-lyricists Robert Lopez and Jeff Marx) and book (for Jeff Whitty), "Avenue Q" was notable as well for a tongue-in-cheek, unusually aggressive awards campaign seemingly modeled after the high-profile pushes of Oscar contenders. (A year later, the administrators of the Tony Awards issued regulations limiting such campaigns.)
The show went on to stir up controversy just after the Tonys, when a seemingly imminent road incarnation was nixed in favor of a short-lived 2005 stint in Vegas. (A tour eventually went out, recently wrapping up two years on the road.)
In Gotham, the tuner became one of the more successful Broadway transfers of a show that originated at an Off Broadway nonprofit. "Avenue Q" preemed in a co-production by the Vineyard Theater and the New Group, playing at the Vineyard in Spring 2003. The show opened at the Golden that July.
Similarly quirky or edgy musicals from Gotham nonprofits -- including "Spring Awakening" and "The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee"-- have subsequently gone on to successful Rialto runs, although none have outlasted "Avenue Q."""Broadway tuner "Avenue Q" will shutter in the fall after a run of six years.... more
A very reliable end time prophesy made it onto the cover of 'The Sun,' and that means it made it into 'We've Got You Covered,' Conor Knighton's weekly roundup of what's in the glossies. He reads them so you don't have to. Also includes how to fix the world, Chace Crawford, the Rock, Robert Pattinson, Bret Michaels, crocheting, crappie on the move, the Summer Slaughter tour, Bruno nude, flirting, all things summer, and weaves!
We've Got You Covered is a recurring segment on Current TV's weekly television show, infoMania. In each episode of We've Got You Covered, Conor Knighton catches you up on everything you need to know about what's in this week's magazines. For more We've Got You Covered visit: http://current.com/topics/88829107_weve-got-you-covered/ and Current TV.
infoMania is a half-hour satirical news show that airs on Current TV. The show puts a comedic spin on the 24-hour chaos and information overload brought about by the constant bombardment of the media. Hosted by Conor Knighton and co-starring Brett Erlich, Sarah Haskins, Ben Hoffman, and Sergio Cilli, the show airs on Thursdays at 10 pm Eastern and Pacific Times and can be found online at http://current.com/infomania/ or on Current TV. And make sure to check out our facebook profile for special features at http://infomaniafacebook.com.A very reliable end time prophesy made it onto the cover of 'The Sun,' and that means... more
This week on infoMania The Real Housewives of New Jersey say goodbye in style, Heidi and Spencer just wont go away, home shopping networks are booming, Bryan explains why gays should abandon their quest for marriage rights, Sergio looks at the hottest music videos on YouTube, and as the world welcomes the new iPhone, Ben revisits his favorite iPhone apps.
infoMania is a half-hour satirical news show that airs on Current TV. The show puts a comedic spin on the 24-hour chaos and information overload brought about by the constant bombardment of the media. Hosted by Conor Knighton and co-starring Brett Erlich, Sarah Haskins, Ben Hoffman, and Sergio Cilli, the show airs on Thursdays at 10 pm Eastern and Pacific Times and can be found online at http://current.com/infomania/ or on Current TV. And make sure to check out our facebook profile for special features at http://infomaniafacebook.com.This week on infoMania The Real Housewives of New Jersey say goodbye in style, Heidi... more
Toolbox Bret Michaels has taken to MySpace (what, no Twitter?) to release his official statement on the Tony Awards incident that left him with a swift jab to the face. And when I say jab, I don’t mean a syringe of Botox.
The Poison frontman “missed his mark” during a performance at the award show on Sunday and suffered injuries from a stage prop that left him with a fractured nose and busted lip.
The statement is quite lengthy, but here’s the best part of his interpretation of the account:Toolbox Bret Michaels has taken to MySpace (what, no Twitter?) to release his official... more
This week on infoMania Brett Michaels gets floored at the Tony Awards. Sherri Shepherd talks anatomy on 'The View.' Heidi and Spencer get all, like, spiritual in the jungle. Spike TV uses science, history, and stupid-ness to determine the Deadliest Warrior of all time. Sarah Haskins wonders why best friends in commercials are always trying to sell each other stuff. Sergio
Cilli checks out the most popular music videos on iTunes. And Brett Erlich enjoys the great outdoors vicariously.
infoMania is a half-hour satirical news show that airs on Current TV. The show puts a comedic spin on the 24-hour chaos and information overload brought about by the constant bombardment of the media. Hosted by Conor Knighton and co-starring Brett Erlich, Sarah Haskins, Ben Hoffman, and Sergio Cilli, the show airs on Thursdays at 10 pm Eastern and Pacific Times and can be found online at http://current.com/infomania/ or on Current TV. And make sure to check out our facebook profile for special features at http://infomaniafacebook.com.This week on infoMania Brett Michaels gets floored at the Tony Awards. Sherri... more
Remember when we mentioned that Bret Michaels was almost decapitated the other night? The Poison rocker has posted these photos of his injured face on his website. Michaels says this is what he looks like after part of the set of the Tony Awards was seen falling on him on live television.Remember when we mentioned that Bret Michaels was almost decapitated the other night?... more
"The Broadway musical is suffering from four chronic problems that are growing increasingly pronounced:
• Commoditization. As a general rule, successful musicals have usually been adapted from pre-existing source material—but not slavishly. The goal was to make a new work, not a sure-fire onstage replica of a hit movie. Then came Disney, and all at once Broadway was awash in what I call commodity musicals, “new” shows that ape their familiar sources as closely as possible in order to piggyback on their commercial success.
• Gratuitous glitz. When a show disappears beneath its production values, you can bet that there wasn’t much to it in the first place. “Billy Elliot” is a case in point, stuffed full of tarted-up sucker-bait production numbers, the tawdriest of which was a dream ballet in which the title character dances “Swan Lake” with his grown-up self, flying through the mist-filled air at the end of a piano wire while the orchestra blasts out Tchaikovsky. That’s not imaginative—it’s just expensive.
• Undramatic scores. Pop tunesmiths and lyricists simply don’t know how to write plot-driven songs. Pop songs are free-standing art objects that tell self-contained stories, then fade out. Not so theatrical numbers, which are specifically designed to advance the plot line of a show and keep the action moving inexorably forward.
• Message mongering. Since when did it become obligatory for the makers of musicals to hector their audiences with tiresome little sermonettes whose sole purpose is to remind us that it’s nice to be nice? If I want to hear a speech, I’ll tune in C-Span.
Is the decline of the Broadway musical irreversible? By no means. Not only is the public demand for good shows stronger than ever, but the form itself continues to attract gifted young artists who long to see their names in lights. In recent seasons I’ve flung my critical hat in the air for “Avenue Q,” “The Drowsy Chaperone,” “The Light in the Piazza” and “The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee,” all of which had long runs on Broadway and are now being performed across the country. A genre that is still capable of inspiring such beautifully crafted, impressively fresh musicals as these can surely do better than “Shrek.”""The Broadway musical is suffering from four chronic problems that are growing... more
"Two-thirds of that hoary cliche about Broadway being hospitable only to spectacle, songs and stars was kicked out of Times Square this season, as a raft of high-quality, celebrity-laden revivals of serious plays eclipsed the season's mostly mediocre crop of new and revived musicals.
This season's profusion of what one might call boutique, high-end productions was partly a consequence of the economic times. Assuming a familiar name -- a Geoffrey Rush, a James Gandolfini, a Jane Fonda -- has been persuaded to sign up at reasonable cost, it's relatively cheap for Broadway producers to map out a modestly profitable way to do a limited run of a prestige title and snag a few ego-enhancing Tony nominations therewith. Heck, such good works can pay off. This month, Broadway producer Rocco Landesman was nominated to chair the National Endowment for the Arts. That would have been unthinkable back in the early 1990s, when all the serious plays were going off-Broadway.
The revivals this year were a strange crop. "Guys and Dolls" was mostly terrible -- overwrought, miscast, cold, awkward. Better than the critical consensus, "West Side Story" was beautifully sung and, in the high school dance from Act One, offered the single most thrilling dance number on Broadway all season. And I thought the controversial decision to include Spanish language in the show was a fine idea -- the show just needed the nerve to take it to its logical fruition. But it was torpedoed by the total lack of sexual chemistry between the two leads, which does not a truly great "West Side Story" allow.
"Hair" is the show likely to take the musical revival prize. And, indeed, it is a very lively and musically rich restaging of a beloved theatrical icon. But it is compromised by anachronisms. On the night I saw the show, I sat behind James Lipton ("Inside the Actors Studio") and watched hippie after hippie arrive at his seat, recognize him and fawn like a flower child with an uncanny sense of the power structure of the future. It summed up the show -- a zestful, well-crafted and occasionally moving revival, but one with a very clear sense of capitalist realities.
Is there a great new play this year? "33 Variations" was consistently interesting but never a fully visceral experience. "Impressionism" was a disaster. And I find it hard to see Horton Foote's very fine "Dividing the Estate," which I first saw in Cleveland years ago, as a new play anywhere outside of the island of Manhattan. But in Yasmina Reza's "God of Carnage," there is at last a very good play, a delicious deconstruction of American parenting, marriage and morality -- all in 90 minutes. All with a quartet of the juiciest performances under Matthew Warchus' red-hot direction. All with plenty of laughs.
In a different year, maybe someone would have turned it into a musical.""Two-thirds of that hoary cliche about Broadway being hospitable only to spectacle,... more
"The Tony awards this Sunday are hardly ample enough to do credit to the fine crop of plays the recent season produced. European classics, contemporary comedy, American masterworks, and new work by youngish writers were all represented in unimpeachable productions. This surprising robustness makes it all the more noticeable, and all the more sad, that something was seriously wrong with the musicals. But what was the disease giving so many of them the same livid complexion? Call it emphasitis: the enervating result of a synesthetic assault on the audience’s attention by talented people overdoing everything.
Some of the symptoms—such as painfully loud sound design—have been developing for years but broke through in a new way this season. At Rock of Ages, a show that imprisons you for two hours between a woofer and a tweeter, the cacophony for the first time seemed intentional: a way of obscuring the cheesy story and driving the sale of drinks. The producers would do well to sell earplugs too—but earplugs are no longer enough. The current revival of Guys and Dolls, building on the innovations in computer-graphic nausea inducement pioneered a few years back by The Woman in White, would benefit from eye-plugs. A good guideline is that your set design should never feature more dimensions than your cast.
What’s troubling this year is how pervasive the problem has become, creating a new baseline of “theatricality” that even top directors and performers seem powerless to resist. At its worst, that theatricality replaces subtlety, slyness, and variety of tone with the kind of constantly on-point, drilled-home messaging formerly reserved for ADHD teenagers. Indeed, the likeliest vectors of emphasitis are the blockbuster entertainments geared to those teenagers. Desperately trying to attain the condition (and thus the audience) of summer films, many musicals so overstep their welcome that the drama becomes one of managing the intrusion and getting out unharmed.
Mugging, which used to be a problem outside the theaters, has now become epidemic within. (West Side Story’s Jets put on “mean faces” to show they’re not just dancers and as a result look pretty much like Billy Elliot’s fanatically grimacing ballet girls.) The problem of overstatement in direction, choreography, design, sound, and performance is now so entrenched as to make moments of relative calm (such as Allison Janney’s underplaying in 9 to 5) seem like genius.""The Tony awards this Sunday are hardly ample enough to do credit to the fine crop of... more
"As Broadway prepares to celebrate itself next month, many theater people are increasingly concerned that writers, especially writers of nonmusical plays, are getting the bum's rush at the Tonys.
"Why doesn't the playwright accept the award by himself?" wonders composer and lyricist Maury Yeston, whose shows include "Nine" and "Grand Hotel."
"The bookwriter does, the lyricist does, the orchestrator does, even the person who runs the sound system does. One would think that the progenitor of an original piece of theater would be the person on whom the award would evolve."
Adds Susan Birkenhead, lyricist of the upcoming "Minsky's": "I can understand if one or two producers who broke their backs to raise money for the play go up with the playwright. But it's getting to be a mob scene."
Veteran producers say that many of their biggest investors now have it written into their contracts that if the play wins the Tony, they get to share the stage with the author.
"The chance to be on the Tonys for 10 seconds has become an enticement to invest," one producer says. "It's ridiculous, but that's what they want."
Another longtime producer says: "You should attend a producers' meeting sometime. We sit around deciding who's going to speak and in what order. But did we write the play? What we wrote was the check. Maybe there should be a Tony for Biggest Check. Then we can all go on stage."
The Dramatists Guild, which represents writers, has accepted the fact that, with plays costing at least $2 million, investors have to be wooed.
"If being onstage during a television show is what it takes to get them to produce plays, I'm fine with that," says Guild President Stephen Schwartz, the composer and lyricist of "Godspell," "Wicked," "Pippin" and more.
But he says the Guild is concerned that some of the writing awards are being handed out before the Tony telecast begins. Last year, for instance, neither the award for Best Book or Best Revival of a Play made the broadcast.
"That is a serious problem and really distorts what theater is," Schwartz says. "Film and television, even though they're supposed to be less of a writer's medium than theater, give more attention to writers in their annual telecasts."
The Guild is also pushing for the nominated plays to be acknowledged on the telecast. While the musicals can parade their big numbers, the plays are given barely a nod.""As Broadway prepares to celebrate itself next month, many theater people are... more
``Billy Elliot,'' the season's biggest musical hit, dominated the 2009 Tony Award nominations Tuesday, picking up 15, more than any other show.``Billy Elliot,'' the season's biggest musical hit, dominated the 2009 Tony Award... more
Watch Lea Salonga below perform "Bakit Labis Kitang Mahal" on Boy And Kris to be shown this coming Monday, May 19, 2008.Lea Salonga is celebrating her 30th year in Philippine Showbiz with a concert entitled Lea Salonga… My Life Onstage on May 23 and 24.Watch Lea Salonga below perform "Bakit Labis Kitang Mahal" on Boy And Kris to be shown... more
