{"id":3453,"date":"2009-06-08T07:17:00","date_gmt":"2009-06-08T14:17:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cahighways.org\/wordpress\/?p=3453"},"modified":"2009-06-08T07:17:00","modified_gmt":"2009-06-08T14:17:00","slug":"monday-morning-tony-backing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cahighways.org\/wordpress\/?p=3453","title":{"rendered":"Monday Morning Tony-backing"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>A few quick observations on last night\u2019s Tony awards, while the tea cools:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>What was with Neal Patrick Harris\u2019 shiny suit. Did he have it tailored in Duloc?\n<li>Award shows are not only to award the best, but to market Broadway. To that end, I was confused by the choices of numbers from <i>Shrek<\/i>, <i>Guys and Dolls<\/i>, and <i>West Side Story<\/i>. Although <i>Shrek<\/i>\u2019s number showed Christopher Sieber\u2019s remarkable on-the-knees dancing, it did nothing to show off the principles. Similarly, <i>Guys and Dolls<\/i> showed off Nicely-Nicely\u2019s number, not the numbers for the leads: Sky, Nathan, or Sarah Brown. As for <i>West Side Story<\/i>, although the number showed off the dance skills of the cast, it did nothing to show off the revised bilingual lyrics. On the other hand, the numbers from <i>Billy Eliot<\/i>, <i>Hair<\/i>, and <i>Next to Normal<\/i> made me want to see those shows.\n<li>It was nice to see the touring companies perform, although the number from <i>Mamma Mia<\/i> struck me as low-energy. As I noted in the last bullet, these numbers should sell these shows: they should make me want to see the touring productions. The <i>Mamma Mia<\/i> number didn\u2019t.\n<li>Beating the marketing horse to death: it would have been nice if they had also included production numbers for some of the other musicals currently running to help publicize Broadway as a whole.\n<li>It was interesting to watch Gregory Jbara drag his wife up to the stage. You can tell she was a little shell shocked, plus her dress was not really meant for running up to the stage.\n<li>I was disappointed that 9-to-5 didn\u2019t win anything, although their competition (in the form of \u201cBilly Elliot\u201d and \u201cNext to Normal\u201d) was very strong.\n<li>The opening number was excellent, and I found the closing song amazing. Other than that, NPH did acceptably. Not outstanding.\n<li>Some of the folks haven\u2019t aged well: Stockard Channing, Liza, Carrie Fisher. On the other hand, Susan Sarandon and Jane Fonda were stunning.\n<li>The sound engineer for the production had trouble. There were lots of problematic microphones &#8212; much more than usual.\n<li>Some of the acceptances were truly great: the three Billys, Geoffrey Rush, Alice Ripley, Angela Lansbury, and Karen Olivo come to mind. Others were&#8230;wtf&#8230; especially Liza\u2019s, where I expected her to go off on some odd tangent.\n<li>Frank Langella\u2019s introduction was priceless, where he castigated the ATW for not nominating him.\n<li>The snippets from the play nominees were too short &#8212; they didn\u2019t give a good sense of the plays. Again: this should be Marketing 101: put in a sufficient scene to sell seeing the play. If you\u2019re not going to do that, why bother?\n<li>Lastly: It was great to hear about \u201cWorking in the Theatre\u201d. But bring back \u201cDownstage Center\u201d. It\u2019s been gone since November, when Sirius and XM merged.<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A few quick observations on last night\u2019s Tony awards, while the tea cools: What was with Neal Patrick Harris\u2019 shiny suit. Did he have it tailored in Duloc? Award shows are not only to award the best, but to market Broadway. To that end, I was confused by the choices of numbers from Shrek, Guys <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"https:\/\/cahighways.org\/wordpress\/?p=3453\">Read More &#8230;<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28,1],"tags":[301],"class_list":["post-3453","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-theatre","category-lj-xfer","tag-theatre-2009"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cahighways.org\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3453","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cahighways.org\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cahighways.org\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cahighways.org\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cahighways.org\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3453"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/cahighways.org\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3453\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cahighways.org\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3453"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cahighways.org\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3453"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cahighways.org\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3453"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}