TONY Nominations: The Movie

It's a very cinematic year for the Tony Awards with lots of plays and musicals with previous film incarnations in the running... If you've never seen a Broadway show but have seen the following movies Glengarry Glenn Ross, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Monty Python and the Quest for the Holy Grail, Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, Sweet Charity, The Birdcageor La Cage Aux Folles, Little Women, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang than you've got half the categories covered. This is obviously not a good thing for the health of the theater BUT it will probably make the Awards show a lot more fun to play along at home with...


PLAY Doubt (7 noms) by John Patrick Shanley (known to filmgoers for his Oscarwinning screenplay for Moonstruck) and Glengarry Glen Ross (6 noms), the very well received revival of David Mamet's play, seem to be leading the play nominations. Rossbecame a 1992 film featuring Al Pacino and Jack Lemmon and is now, 13 years later, back on the Great White Way. The mixed-to-poorly received revivals of Tenessee Williams masterpieces A Streetcar Named Desire starring Natasha Richardson and the improbably cast John C Reilly and The Glass Menagerie with Jessica Lange were mostly ignored as was Denzel Washington's star turn in Julius Caesar--so the name recognition factor only went so far this year...


MUSICAL Spamalot!, the latest box office behemoth to hit Broadway seems to be sucking up a gargantuan portion of the nominations (14) in the musical category. Dirty Rotten Scoundrels and The Light in the Piazza also did well. Not faring well at all was Little Women, one of the earliest entries which nabbed only a nod for cutesy Sutton Foster.

...now that the nominations are announced, watch for the closing notices to go up for the shows that didn't do well or were completely shut out. Goodbye Brooklyn the Musical and good riddance!