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      in Movies

      Laura Linney on the Singer Who Reminds Her of Beginnings

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      “The sound of his voice reminds me of the beginnings of things,” the actress said. “The first time you fell in love, the first time you went away.”“One of the great things about getting older is that if you’re lucky enough, you get to work with some of the same people over and over again,” the actress Laura Linney said. “It’s my favorite, favorite thing to do.”Ethan Hawke is one of those colleagues on repeat. Their relationship began with what she called a rather famously bad production of “The Seagull” in 1992.Linney was thrilled, then, when Hawke asked her to play Flannery O’Connor’s mother, Regina, in his new film “Wildcat.”“We’ve watched each other struggle and succeed and do well and be in pain,” Linney said. “There’s a trust that comes with time that you can’t generate.”The four-time Emmy winner and three-time Oscar nominee talked about the memories evoked by Elton John, her not-so-secret addiction and how she hopes to be remembered. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.1Juilliard StudentsI went to Juilliard. I’m on the board at Juilliard. Walking through the halls of Juilliard and seeing young artists at a level of concentration that you only have when you are in the midst of training, I find it incredibly life-affirming. It confirms everything I want and know to be true about why the arts are important.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Movies

      Ahmed Best, the Actor Behind Jar Jar Binks, Is Proud of His ‘Star Wars’ Legacy

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      Ahmed Best recalls the painful backlash to the “Phantom Menace” character that was considered a racial stereotype at the time, but is now embraced by fans.Ahmed Best is a futurist, an educator, a martial artist, a writer-director and the actor behind Jar Jar Binks, the most hated character in the “Star Wars” universe.Long-eared Jar Jar is a bipedal amphibianlike creature with an ungainly walk and a winning attitude. The groundbreaking, computer-generated goofball debuted in the first installment of George Lucas’s prequel trilogy, “Star Wars: Episode I — The Phantom Menace,” and instantly set off widespread criticism from both fans and the press.“It took almost a mortal toll on me. It was too much,” Best recently recalled. “It was the first time in my life where I couldn’t see the future. I didn’t see any hope. Here I was at 26 years old, living my dream, and my dream was over.”Now 50, Best is the picture of panache who could easily be mistaken for an off-duty rock star. He arrived at our interview riding a motorcycle and wearing a blue denim jacket, black jeans and stylish shades.Best has continued to play Jar Jar Binks in animated “Star Wars” shows and video games. “It’s big and it tends to overtake your life,” he said.Daniel Dorsa for The New York TimesIn the presence of Best’s self-assured demeanor, it’s even more shocking to learn that back in 1999 the vitriol fans flung at Jar Jar, and in turn at him, ravaged his mental health. But he revisited these memories a few weeks before the movie’s return to theaters on Friday to commemorate the 25th anniversary of its release.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Television

      The Voice of a Hundred Faces: Dee Bradley Baker’s ‘Star Wars’ Journey

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      With “The Bad Batch” ending this week on Disney+, the man who has voiced hundreds of “Star Wars” characters over the past two decades looks back on his run.For “Star Wars” fans who have seen only the theatrical blockbusters, clone troopers are peripheral figures, at most recalled as the title menace in “Attack of the Clones,” from 2002. But over the past two decades they have become essential to the franchise, the pillar of animated “Star Wars” series including “The Clone Wars,” “Star Wars Rebels” and most recently, “The Bad Batch.”And in that time one man has been essential to the clones: Dee Bradley Baker, who has voiced them all.Not all of the shows — all of the clones, hundreds of them since getting cast for “Star Wars: The Clone Wars,” which debuted in 2008 with a feature film and an animated series that lasted for seven seasons. Now Baker’s incredibly prolific gig, which also included plenty of non-clone roles, has finally come to an end: “The Bad Batch,” the “Clone Wars” sequel series, concludes its three-season run on Disney+ this week, and there are no plans for more clone shows.“It’s been wonderfully gratifying to go on this journey,” Baker said.Baker, 61, has been a voice actor for nearly 30 years, working on series like “Dexter’s Laboratory,” “American Dad,” “Codename: Kids Next Door” and “Space Jam.” Before “Star Wars,” he almost exclusively played funny parts: He voiced every animal in “Avatar: The Last Airbender,” Perry the Platypus in “Phineas & Ferb” and creatures in live-action projects like Sebastian the rat in “The Suicide Squad.”“I would get cast as more young, energetic and comedic because that’s how I thought of myself,” Baker said. The “Star Wars” shows “pulled so much more from me as an actor because it asked things of me I wouldn’t even think of.”“Nothing can be more fun than to play in the universe that captured your imagination as a kid,” Baker said.Jesse Grant/Getty ImagesMany of the dramatic and emotional stories early on in “The Clone Wars” involved the clone troopers. After all, it is easier to kill a replaceable clone, one of millions, than a Jedi who also shows up in the theatrical movies.Though the series was on Cartoon Network and aimed at kids, the war stories were intense and put the increasingly hard-bitten clones through one wringer after another. One story arc channels the novella “Heart of Darkness”: The troopers are led by a ruthless Jedi General in a jungle planet, until the general’s constant sacrifice of lives leads to insurgency. One episode was directed by Walter Murch, the Oscar-winning sound designer behind the Vietnam War epic “Apocalypse Now,” itself inspired by “Heart of Darkness.”“Voice acting is acting, you need the same skill and the same talent,” said Ashley Eckstein who played Ahsoka Tano. (This central “Clone Wars” character last year became the center of a live-action show, “Ahsoka,” starring Rosario Dawson.)“It can even be harder and more difficult to do voice acting,” Eckstein continued. “Dee and I had to do some deeply emotional and action-packed scenes, and we had to stand still behind a microphone. You can’t act it out or move around. You have to convey all of it just through your voice.”“The Clone Wars” was followed by “Star Wars Rebels,” which follows a small Rebel crew that eventually includes a group of surviving clones, and “The Bad Batch,” centered on a squad of “defective” clones with even more distinct personalities.Baker voiced a menagerie of creatures in “The Clone Wars.” He said his improv background prepared him for the odd sounds “Star Wars” shows require and for moving quickly between characters.Lucasfilm/Disney+One obstacle to making clone troopers compelling is the challenge of differentiating them. (They are, after all, clones.) There were small attempts from the beginning to make them distinct from a design standpoint. The creators gave them colorful armor and insignia to contrast them with the Empire’s more well-known stormtroopers, according to Dave Filoni, who was supervising director and an executive producer of “The Clone Wars” and is now the chief creative officer of Lucasfilm.“They were able to express their individuality, where stormtroopers are individuals taken into service and stripped of their personality and identity,” Filoni wrote in an email. Still, a look is little without the voice and personality that goes with it, and Baker’s performance was a big reason the characters became so central.The first test to see if Baker voicing all the clones would work came in “Rookies,” the fifth episode of “The Clone Wars.” The episode came from an idea by George Lucas, who wanted to do an episode of just clones, and follows a group of cadets who come together as a squad and stave off a droid invasion.As Henry Gilroy, the show’s head writer, recalled, “That recording session was actually a revelation, for we realized that we could write anything for the clones to do with story and character and Dee would execute to perfection.”The clones soon went from being one-off characters with little personality to proper members of the expanded cast, with their own emotional and dramatic arcs that carried on throughout the show’s seven seasons and into “The Bad Batch.” (The character Echo is the last surviving member of that rookie squad.)Baker comes up with one or two defining qualities for each clone to help differentiate them.Lucasfilm/Disney+All the clones are based, fittingly, on the same voice: the one Baker created to play Captain Rex, the second-in-command to Anakin Skywalker and his closest friend in “The Clone Wars,” after Obi-Wan Kenobi. Baker would settle on one or two defining qualities for each clone — rank, age, attitude, quirk — to guide his performances. He used to record one clone at a time, going through an entire script with one and then doing the same with the next and so on until an episode was done.But as “The Clone Wars” developed more complex arcs, he took a faster, more daunting approach. “I would start to play all of them and just jump back and forth,” Baker said. “I just read through the scenes straight through as if they’re characters playing out a scene, but it’s just me going from one voice to the other.”Michelle Ang, who stars in “The Bad Batch” as Omega, is amazed by this process. “He can not only perform the different personalities, but hold five different viewpoints of all the ‘Bad Batch’ characters and argue for each one,” she said. “It feels like there are four distinct people I’m working with.”Eckstein called Baker a mentor, comparing their relationship to that of Ahsoka, her young Padawan character, and Baker’s seasoned Captain Rex. “He taught me the ways of the Force, the ways of voice acting,” she said. When she too was asked to play multiple characters in the same episodes, “I learned from Dee, who is brilliant at doing that.”Baker, who started out in comedy, said improv helped train him to embrace the odd vocalizations “Star Wars” shows can require and to move fluidly between characters.“I am not so much prepared as I’m ready,” he said. “You want to be open and available to steer this and configure that in a way that the writers you’re working with want things to go. You can’t prepare for it. You get that in the immediate human connection of now, and that is inherently improvisational.”The end of “The Bad Batch” is the end of an era, even if other “Star Wars” roles eventually come Baker’s way, like the upcoming video game “Star Wars Outlaws.” Though characters like Ahsoka Tano live on in live-action, and Captain Rex made a cameo in “Ahsoka,” “The Bad Batch” characters were the last characters that Lucas, the “Star Wars” mastermind who is no longer involved with the franchise, had direct input on. The significance of this isn’t lost on Baker.“I’ve loved ‘Star Wars’ since I was a kid,” he said. “Nothing can be more fun than to play in the universe that captured your imagination as a kid.” More

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      in Theater

      Kelli O’Hara’s Ties to Opera, From ‘The Gilded Age’ to the Met Stage

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      O’Hara is an unusual kind of triple threat: a star of Broadway and television who is appearing at the Metropolitan Opera in a revival of “The Hours.”On the HBO costume drama “The Gilded Age,” Kelli O’Hara plays a New York grande dame forced to choose sides in an opera war: remain at the old guard’s Academy of Music, or defect to the Metropolitan Opera being built by the nouveau riche they had excluded.When her character, Aurora Fane, joins a throng of socialites surveying the nearly completed Met, the camera lingers on her face, upraised in awe.O’Hara herself is far more familiar with the Met, at least in its current incarnation. In addition to being a Tony-winning star of Broadway musicals and an Emmy nominee, she has been singing at the Met for nearly a decade, and is back now for a revival of “The Hours,” starring opposite Renée Fleming and Joyce DiDonato, opera legends both.Still, the Met’s grand auditorium, which holds 4,000 people, inspires the same wonder in O’Hara as it does in Aurora. Although Aurora never had to fill it. And O’Hara does.“Once I give over to it and believe in myself, I remember that this is the way my voice wants to sing,” she said.This was on a recent morning during a break from rehearsals. O’Hara, 48, had traded her costume corset for a black jumpsuit. One hand held a paper cup of coffee. (A socialite would never.) Later she would return to the basement space where she is rehearsing “The Hours,” Kevin Puts’s adaptation of Michael Cunningham’s time-skipping novel, itself inspired by Virginia Woolf’s “Mrs. Dalloway,” which opens May 5.On “The Gilded Age,” O’Hara, left, plays Aurora Fane, a wealthy socialite who is forced to choose sides in the opera war that created the Met. She is shown with Louisa Jacobson.Barbara Nitke/HBOOne of the Met’s archivists, John Tomasicchio, stopped in to show O’Hara a few items from the Met’s founding that would have been familiar to Aurora: a piece of its original stage, an etched glass lightbulb, brocade from a box seat. Tomasicchio displayed a newspaper illustration of the audience thronging the stage.“It was like a rock concert,” O’Hara marveled. “The passion people had.”Opera was not quite O’Hara’s first passion. She went to college intending to study musical theater, but was told that her voice wasn’t built for the pop and rock styles then in vogue. As she was graduating, she participated in the Met’s National Council Auditions and made it to the finals at the regional level. But she missed the camaraderie she had experienced in musical theater, so she packed her bags and headed for Broadway.Broadway welcomed her. She starred in acclaimed productions of classic musicals including “South Pacific” and “The King and I,” for which she won a Tony. Just this week she received her eighth Tony nomination for “Days of Wine and Roses.”While she did not regret leaving opera, she sometimes wondered how she might have fared on the Met’s stage. “There was always this thing in the back of my head that said: But my voice wants to sing that way,” she said.At the very end of 2014, she had her chance, in a new production of the operetta “The Merry Widow” directed by Susan Stroman, with whom she had previously worked on Broadway. She followed that debut with a production of Mozart’s “Così Fan Tutte” in 2018. To make this leap in midcareer was frightening, but O’Hara, who runs marathons and has gone sky-diving, doesn’t mind a certain amount of fright.“I had to put my backbone straight and have conversations with myself,” she said. “’You can do this. You’re fine. Just keep your nose to the ground and do your work.’”Even as she scaled the heights of Broadway, O’Hara recalled her opera training. “There was always this thing in the back of my head that said: But my voice wants to sing that way,” she said.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThat work paid off. When she sang in “Così,” her “lovely soprano voice and quite good Italian diction” were praised by Anthony Tommasini of The New York Times.While opera singers occasionally make the move to Broadway (Fleming and Paolo Szot are recent examples), careers rarely flow the other way. And a performer who can do all this and television, too? That’s rarer still.“The Hours,” O’Hara’s first contemporary opera, which premiered in 2022, is a further challenge. O’Hara co-stars as Laura Brown, a woman constrained by the suburban rhythms of post-World War II California. In some ways, Laura is a companion to Kirsten, the role O’Hara was nominated for in Adam Guettel’s “Days of Wine and Roses.” Kirsten is another woman confined by the expectations of midcentury American life. Both find freedom where they can.“I’m coming off of over two years now of playing sad women, held women, even Aurora, held back, constricted,” O’Hara said.For O’Hara, opera is not exactly freeing. It’s too demanding for that, too needful of perfection. But she believes that she’ll keep pursuing it — for the difficulty, for the terror, for the range of roles. (On TV, she said, she now plays grandmothers. Opera is rather more forgiving.)O’Hara knows that she could fail. Her voice could crack. She might flub a note. But Aurora is brave enough to join the new-money mavens at the Met’s opening. And O’Hara in her way is brave, too. Brave enough to send her bright, unamplified soprano out into thousands of ears each night.“I’m confident enough to want to try,” she said. More

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      in Music

      Vanessa Williams Releases ‘Legs’ Music Video Featuring Edgy Ensembles

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      Vanessa Williams’s many ensembles in a music video for her new song, “Legs (Keep Dancing),” evoke her knack for portraying a diva with style.It might not come as a surprise that Vanessa Williams, in the music video for her new single, “Legs (Keep Dancing),” can be seen showing off her legs.Some may remember her showing off a lot more in a 1984 issue of Penthouse, that, after being published, led Ms. Williams to become the first Miss America forced to give up her crown, a decision that the pageant’s leaders have since apologized for.Her legs in the “Legs” music video, unlike in the Penthouse photos, are for the most part clothed. Moschino shorts and fishnets, a spangly gold bodysuit and a pink feathered outfit are among the many items Ms. Williams, 61, wears while moving — mostly dancing — between locations that include a white-walled studio, a dimly lit limousine and a nightclub.For certain viewers, Ms. Williams’s colorful wardrobe in the video might evoke other aspects of her career as an actress and singer, say, her past role as fashion editor Wilhelmina Slater in the TV show “Ugly Betty,” or her upcoming role as Miranda Priestly, the Anna-Wintour-inspired fashion editor, in the musical adaptation of “The Devil Wears Prada,” arriving in London’s West End later this year.Ms. Williams, speaking on a phone call on Tuesday after flying from Japan to New York, said that certain attire worn in the “Legs” video had connections to some of her past roles. For instance: A silky chartreuse corset and matching cargo pants by Adrienne Landau, a label she has worn since her days on “Ugly Betty.”Another ensemble of sheer black top and zipper-covered red pants came from Trash and Vaudeville, the punk emporium in Manhattan’s East Village.An ensemble of sheer black top and red zipper-covered pants came from the store Trash and Vaudeville in New York.WMGA spangly gold bodysuit worn beneath a sparkly fringed belt brought to mind Ms. Williams’s reputation as a diva who embraces fashion.WMGMs. Williams, who developed her wardrobe for the video with the stylist Alison Hernon, said the clothes they chose were pieces she feels comfortable in and “that feel comfortable on my body.”She added that her outfits in the video for “Legs,” her first non-holiday-related single in 15 years, were meant to not only highlight the song’s titular anatomy, but also what she described as its underlying message: That her decades-long career is ongoing and ever-expanding.“I’m still here, still standing, still kicking,” Ms. Williams sings on the dance-pop single. “In fact, I’m the best I’ve ever been.”“I’ve got a lot of stuff going on,” Ms. Williams said on the phone. Her to-do list includes plans to release a full-length album on a newly announced record label. She is also a producer of a new musical about the trumpeter Louis Armstrong, which is coming to Broadway around the same she starts performances of “The Devil Wears Prada” in London.Ms. Williams has followed a career path blazed by Black performers like Diana Ross and Diahann Carroll, both of whom also served as inspiration for “Legs” and its music video, which opens with Ms. Williams dropping a cream-colored Michael Kors coat and a Worth & Worth hat — attire nodding to clothes Ms. Ross wore in the 1975 film “Mahogany,” Ms. Hernon said.A line in the song’s chorus, “They say the legs are the last to go,” echoes the title of Ms. Carroll’s memoir, “The Legs Are the Last to Go,” released in 2008. Its cover featured a leggy portrait of Ms. Carroll, who died in 2019.Ms. Williams, who starred in the film “The Courage to Love” alongside Ms. Carroll, said that the title and cover of her memoir reflect how, “with age, comes wisdom.”“She’s realizing and accepting her body shape and all that comes with it,” Ms. Williams said. “And that’s what I think is reflected in what I wanted to say with this phase of my life and also in the music.” More

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      in Theater

      Sarah Paulson on Her First Tony Nomination for ‘Appropriate’

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      After Sarah Paulson moved to New York City when she was a young girl, her mother took a job as a waitress at Sardi’s, a storied Broadway restaurant. It opened up a world that she would not have otherwise been exposed to, helping to nurture her ambitions of performing onstage.Paulson’s first acting job, at 19, was as a Broadway understudy, beginning a career that returned to the stage several more times but found its rhythm on television, with steady roles on Ryan Murphy’s “American Horror Story” and a career-defining turn as the prosecutor Marcia Clark in the limited series “The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story,” for which she won an Emmy.Despite complex roles as famous public figures and, once, a pair of conjoined twins, Paulson said her most challenging role has been in the Broadway drama “Appropriate,” for which she received a Tony nomination for best leading actress in a play on Tuesday.In “Appropriate,” a play by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, Paulson plays an older sister clinging to her memories of her father as she and her siblings clear out his home after his death, confronting the family’s dark secrets and their grievances against one another in the process. In the script, Paulson gets to play with cutting insults, weighty monologues and plenty of yelling.After learning of the news while still in bed, hours before taking the stage again, Paulson spoke about the endurance that it takes to be a stage actor and about her career coming full circle. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.Tell me how you’re feeling right now about your first Tony nomination.I feel very moved and certainly overwhelmed to be in a category with such extraordinary women, some of whom are my friends. More than anything there’s that little girl in me who moved to New York at 5 years old and whose mother got a job as a waitress at this theater hangout, to wake up and have a Tony nomination for the first time in my life, at 49, feels just wildly moving to me and something that I have dreamed about since I was a girl.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Theater

      Daniel Radcliffe on Breaking the Spell in ’Merrily We Roll Along’

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      Daniel Radcliffe caught the first batch of Tony nominations during the announcement at 8:30 a.m. He texted congratulations to his “Merrily We Roll Along” co-star Jonathan Groff, who was nominated for best actor in a musical.But then dad duty called before his own category, featured actor in a musical, was announced at 9:00.“I was in the middle of doing breakfast and trying to put my son down for his morning nap, so I got a text from a member of the cast letting me know I was nominated,” said the actor, 34, who stars as the lyricist and playwright Charley Kringas in the acclaimed revival of the 1981 Stephen Sondheim-George Furth musical, “Merrily We Roll Along.”Radcliffe’s Tony nomination — for his fifth Broadway role since his 2008 debut in “Equus” — is the first of his career. And it’s extra special, he said in a phone conversation from his New York apartment on Tuesday, because not only Groff, but his other “Merrily” co-star, Lindsay Mendez, was also nominated, for featured actress.“People in your line of work probably get bored of actors talking about how much they love each other, how much they enjoy working with each other,” said Radcliffe, who is best known for playing Harry Potter onscreen. “And we do say it a lot, but this group is really awesome — Lindsay, Jonathan, the whole cast. I feel so lucky.”These are edited excerpts from the conversation.You recently were the ring bearer at Lindsay’s wedding, for which Jonathan served as the officiant. How did that come about?We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Theater

      Leslie Odom Jr. on Tony Nomination for ‘Purlie Victorious’

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      The day of the Tony Award nominations is like college acceptance day a bit earlier in the spring, but on the scarcity model: Of the dozens of artists eligible in each category, only five or so are “admitted.” That means some great work gets left by the wayside — but also, because the number of nominators is small enough to be idiosyncratic, that plenty of outcomes defy all prediction. Here are our thoughts on this season’s inadvertent (and possibly advertent) snubs, delightful (or mystifying) surprises and other notable anomalies. Television stars are considered good box office but not always good Tony bait. This year’s crop, including Sarah Paulson, Jeremy Strong, Steve Carell and William Jackson Harper, complicates that wisdom. Paulson is a likely winner but the men are already canceling each other out. Though Carell, in his Broadway debut, and Harper both play characters competing for the love of a married woman in the Lincoln Center Theater revival of “Uncle Vanya,” only Harper, excellent in a role that is usually considered supporting, was nominated as best leading actor in a play. (The production, which featured many lovely performances, was otherwise shut out.) Note that Chekhov let neither man win.Deep cuts for ‘Stereophonic.’How the nominators handled the ensemble in David Adjmi’s recording-studio-set play was going to be one of the morning’s most interesting questions. The answer: Generously, as five members of the young cast were singled out for their supporting performances, including Tom Pecinka and Sarah Pidgeon as the fraying central couple, and Juliana Canfield and Will Brill as their bandmates. Without an instrument in hand, Eli Gelb got in, too, as the ’70s rock group’s frazzled sound engineer. Spreading all that love helped take the show to Number One with a Bullet — the most nominated play in Broadway history.Too many riches to go around.On the other hand, the superb ensemble casts of “Jaja’s African Hair Braiding” and “Illinoise” were skunked. That’s no accident: As more works these days distribute the storytelling burden equally among many members of a cast, odd nomination outcomes — feast or famine — can result.That’s why we often argue here for a new category that honors ensembles. And Actors’ Equity, the national union representing actors and stage managers, goes further, with its annual award for Broadway choruses. Of the 23 musicals that opened this season, 21 are eligible; the winner will be notified on June 15 — pointedly, one day before the Tonys.Women lead in directing.In the history of the awards, only 10 women, beginning in 1998, have won prizes for directing. This year that number seems likely to rise, with seven of the 10 possible directing slots filled by women. Anne Kauffman, Lila Neugebauer and Whitney White have been nominated for best direction of a play, and Maria Friedman, Leigh Silverman, Jessica Stone and Danya Taymor (the niece of Julie Taymor, the first woman to win for direction of a musical) are in contention for best direction of a musical.To love, honor and ignore.The Tony nominating committee said “I do” to two pairs of actors playing married characters: Brian d’Arcy James and Kelli O’Hara as lovers undone by alcoholism in “Days of Wine and Roses,” and Maryann Plunkett and Dorian Harewood as an older couple grappling with dementia in “The Notebook.” But the shows did not receive the same love. Neither was nominated for best musical, though “Days of Wine and Roses” did pick up a nomination for score and “The Notebook” for book. Guess you can’t always have your wedding cake, and eat it too. A warm Willkommen to ‘Cabaret.’Rebecca Frecknall’s crepuscular revival of Kander and Ebb’s “Cabaret” was celebrated when it opened on the West End in 2021, eventually winning seven Olivier awards. But its Broadway transfer received a more muted response. (“Too often a misguided attempt to resuscitate the show breaks its ribs,” The New York Times wrote.) So who cares? Not the Tony nominators, who recognized the show with a nomination for best revival of a musical and gave nods to the actors — Eddie Redmayne, Gayle Rankin, Bebe Neuwirth and Steven Skybell — in all four categories.No yellow brick road for ‘The Wiz.’The much-anticipated revival has been one of spring’s early hits, but Tony nominators followed the lead of critics, not audiences, who didn’t have much nice to say about the show’s look, script and performances. “The Wiz,” which earned seven Tony awards when it arrived on Broadway in 1975, didn’t get a single nod this time around.Shaina Taub gets out the vote (mostly).Like “Hamilton,” the musical “Suffs” looks at American history through a contemporary lens. Like “Hamilton,” the show started at the Public Theater before moving to Broadway. And like “Hamilton,” it was written and composed by its multitalented star, here 35-year-old Shaina Taub. When nominations were announced, though, Taub didn’t pull off a Lin-Manuel Trifecta. She received nods for her music and book, two of six nominations for “Suffs,” but not for starring as the suffragist Alice Paul. Nikki M. James, already a Tony winner for “The Book of Mormon,” got the show’s one acting nomination, as Ida B. Wells.Pop/rock storms another stage…Squint and you may think you’re at the Grammy Awards on Tonys night, as the best score nominees include Arcade Fire’s Will Butler (“Stereophonic”); David Byrne and Fatboy Slim (“Here Lies Love”); and Jamestown Revival (“The Outsiders”). Plus, of course, Sufjan Stevens, whose 2005 concept album is transcendently reorchestrated for dance in the best musical nominee “Illinoise,” and Alicia Keys, whose existing tunes power the most nominated musical of all, “Hell’s Kitchen.”Except when it doesn’t.Among those who might instead be watching from home: the not-nominated Barry Manilow (“Harmony”); Ingrid Michaelson (“The Notebook”); and Huey Lewis, whose songbook energizes “The Heart of Rock and Roll,” but didn’t rouse Tony nominators.Waving the flag for ‘Illinoise’ and more.Monday’s roster reflected a Broadway season that was notably American, even aside from “Illinoise,” a show actually named for a state. “Hell’s Kitchen,” nodding at the New York City neighborhood where Keys grew up, told a story we like to think of as local: Big dreams come true. “Suffs” took us behind the scenes of American history, as women fought for the vote. “Purlie Victorious” and “Appropriate” took contrasting approaches — one comic, one gothic — to the peculiar American institution of racism. But even aside from their content, the 17 productions nominated for the biggest prizes are overwhelmingly the work of American authors. (One of the touted London imports, Peter Morgan’s “Patriots,” didn’t even make the list for best play.) Is Broadway, which has too often resembled a British colony, finally achieving independence? More