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    ‘A Strange Loop’ Wins Best Musical as Tonys Celebrate Broadway’s Return

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    “A Strange Loop,” a scalding story about a gay, Black theater artist confronting self-doubt and societal disapproval, won the Tony Award for best new musical Sunday night, giving another huge accolade to a challenging contemporary production that had already won a Pulitzer Prize.The soul-baring show, nurtured by nonprofits and developed over many years, triumphed over two flashy pop musicals, “MJ,” a jukebox musical about the entertainer Michael Jackson, and “Six,” an irreverent reconsideration of Henry VIII’s ill-fated wives, in a six-way race.“A Strange Loop” garnered widespread praise from critics; on Sunday night, Michael R. Jackson, the writer who spent nearly two decades working on it, acknowledged how personal the project was as he collected his first Tony Award, for best book of a musical.“I wrote it at a time when I didn’t know what I was going to do with my life,” he said. “I didn’t know how I was going to move forward. I felt unseen. I felt unheard. I felt misunderstood, and I just wanted to create a little bit of a life raft for myself as a Black gay man.”The ceremony — the 75th Tony Awards presentation — provided an opportunity for Broadway to celebrate its return and its perseverance, hoping that a dash of razzle-dazzle, a dollop of contemporary creativity and a sprinkling of nostalgia will help lure theatergoers back to a pandemic-scarred industry now in full swing but still craving more customers.The season that just ended was a tough one: It started late (most theaters remained closed until September), and was repeatedly disrupted (coronavirus cases obliterated its old show-must-go-on ethos, prompting cancellations and performer absences). With tourism still down, it was also short on audience.Patti LuPone won the Tony Award for best featured actress in a musical for “Company.” It was her third Tony.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“Our industry has been through so much,” Marianne Elliott, who won a Tony Award for directing a gender-reversed revival of the Stephen Sondheim musical comedy “Company,” said in her acceptance speech. “It felt at times that live theater was endangered.”But in the glittering ceremony at Radio City Music Hall in Manhattan, a parade of performers celebrated all that went well: Theaters reopened, long-running shows returned, and an unusually diverse array of plays and musicals arrived to entertain, provoke and inspire theatergoers.The best play Tony went to “The Lehman Trilogy,” a sweeping saga about the rise and fall of the Lehman Brothers banking business. Using three shape-shifting actors, contained within a spinning glass box of a set, the play journeyed all the way from the Wall Street giant’s humble origins in 1844 to its ignominious collapse in 2008. The show, written by Stefano Massini and Ben Power, picked up not only the Tony for best play, but also for the play’s director, Sam Mendes; its set designer, Es Devlin; and the great British actor, Simon Russell Beale, who thanked audiences for showing up, despite pandemic protocols and public health concerns.“You trusted us,” he said. “You came with open arms. It wasn’t easy at that point to come to the theater because of all those regulations. But you welcomed us.”“The Lehman Trilogy” won out against four other contenders, “Clyde’s,” “Hangmen,” “The Minutes” and “Skeleton Crew.”“Take Me Out” emerged victorious in the best play revival category, a particularly strong field that included productions of “American Buffalo,” “How I Learned to Drive,” “Trouble in Mind” and “For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow Is Enuf.”Written by Richard Greenberg, “Take Me Out” first ran on Broadway in 2003 and won the best play Tony that year; this year’s revival, presented by the nonprofit Second Stage Theater, was directed by Scott Ellis. It is about what happens when a baseball player, portrayed in this production by Jesse Williams, comes out as gay; Jesse Tyler Ferguson picked up his first Tony for his portrayal of the player’s investment adviser, who is also gay.“Company,” a musical first staged in 1970 that wittily and sometimes bitterly examines married life, won the Tony for musical revival, besting a much-praised revival of “Caroline, or Change,” as well as a starry revival of “The Music Man” that, thanks to the appeal of leading man Hugh Jackman, has been the top-selling show on Broadway since it opened.The award for “Company” reflected not only admiration for the reimagined production but also respect for Sondheim, its composer and lyricist, who is revered as one of the most important figures in American musical theater, and who died in November. The “Hamilton” creator Lin-Manuel Miranda, who was mentored by Sondheim, introduced a tribute to him, saying, “I stand here on behalf of generations of artists he took the time to encourage.”The ceremony was hosted by Ariana DeBose.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe Tonys, hosted by Ariana DeBose and broadcast on CBS, honored not only shows, performers, writers and designers, but also the understudies who saved so many performances this season. And DeBose, who this year won an Academy Award as Anita in the Steven Spielberg remake of “West Side Story,” paid tribute to the season’s extraordinary diversity, saying, “I feel like the phrase Great White Way is becoming more of a nickname as opposed to a how-to guide.”She noted the season’s high volume of work by Black writers, which came about as producers and theater owners scrambled to respond to demands for more representation and opportunity for Black artists after the national unrest over racism during the summer of 2020. This year’s class of Tony nominees featured a large number of Black artists, reflecting the fact that work by Black writers led to more jobs for Black performers, designers, directors, and more.The season being honored — the first since the coronavirus pandemic forced theaters to close in March of 2020 — featured 56 productions, including 34 eligible for Tony Awards because they opened between Feb. 20, 2020 and May 4, 2022. (The others were returning productions, many of them long-running hits.)The Covid challenges were costly: 6.7 million people attended a Broadway show during the 2021-22 season, down from 14.8 million during the 2018-19 season, which was the last full season before the pandemic; total grosses were $845 million, down from $1.8 billion.The Tonys served as a chance for Broadway to try to entice television viewers to become Times Square visitors. But one challenge: Viewership for all televised awards shows has been steadily falling. The Tonys audience had a recent peak in 2016, at 8.7 million viewers, when “Hamilton” was a contender; in 2019, there were 5.4 million viewers, and last year, when the Tonys held a ceremony in September to coincide with the reopening of theaters, just 2.6 million tuned in.Michael R. Jackson won the Tony for best book of a musical for “A Strange Loop.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThis year’s winners featured some Broadway veterans, including Patti LuPone, picking up her third Tony Award for her ferocious turn as an alcohol-addled married friend of the chronically single protagonist in “Company”; and Phylicia Rashad, winning her second Tony for playing a factory worker in “Skeleton Crew.” Among the other performers who collected Tony Awards: Joaquina Kalukango, for her starring role as a 19th-century New York City tavern owner in “Paradise Square”; Matt Doyle, who played a groom with a zany case of wedding day jitters in “Company,” and Deirdre O’Connell, who won for her remarkable lip-synced performance as a kidnapping victim in the play “Dana H.”“I would love for this little prize to be a token for every person who is wondering, ‘Should I be trying to make something that could work on Broadway or that could win me a Tony Award, or should I be making the weird art that is haunting me, that frightens me, that I don’t know how to make, that I don’t know if anyone in the whole world will understand?’” O’Connell said. “Please let me, standing here, be a little sign to you from the universe to make the weird art.”“A Strange Loop” tells the story of a Broadway usher, named Usher, who is trying to write a musical about a Broadway usher trying to write a musical; his thoughts, many of them self-critical, are portrayed by six performers, who each appear in multiple guises. The musical began its life Off Broadway, with a 2019 production at Playwrights Horizons in association with Page 73 Productions. After winning the Pulitzer, it had another pre-Broadway production at Woolly Mammoth Theater Company in Washington, D.C. It had support throughout those nonprofit runs from the producer Barbara Whitman, who is now the lead producer of the commercial run on Broadway; she was also a lead producer of the Tony-winning “Fun Home.”The Broadway production, which opened in April, has seen an uptick at the box office since being nominated for 11 Tony Awards (it won two), but has room for growth: During the week that ended June 5, it filled 89 percent of the 912 seats at the Lyceum Theater, grossing $685,772, with an average ticket price of $105.“Six” and “MJ,” although unsuccessful in the six-way race for best new musical, are doing substantially better at the box office, and did notch some big victories at the awards ceremony.“Six” picked up the Tony Award for best score during the first minutes of the ceremony. Its music and lyrics were written by two young British artists, Toby Marlow and Lucy Moss, who came up with the idea while undergraduates at Cambridge University, and who were discovered by a commercial producer following a buzz-building first run at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. The musical’s costume designer, Gabriella Slade, also won a Tony for her Tudor-style-meets-contemporary-clubwear outfits.“MJ” also landed key prizes, including for the lead performance by Myles Frost, a 22-year-old in his first professional stage role, and for the crowd-pleasing choreography by Christopher Wheeldon, who also directed the musical.The other contenders, “Girl From the North Country,” featuring the songs of Bob Dylan; “Mr. Saturday Night,” starring Billy Crystal as a washed-up comedian; and “Paradise Square,” about race relations in Civil War-era New York, appeared to be less of a factor in the competition.Simon Russell Beale won the Tony Award for best actor for his work in “The Lehman Trilogy,” which won best play.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThat first hour of the awards ceremony, viewable only on the streaming channel Paramount+, was hosted by Darren Criss and Julianne Hough, both of whom are currently starring in Broadway plays — he in a revival of “American Buffalo,” and she in a new farce called “POTUS.” They began the evening with a Broadway-is-back tribute, written by Criss, extolling the virtues and challenges of theater (the song included a plea for no slapping, in a dig at the Oscars).A lifetime achievement award was given to Angela Lansbury, a beloved star of stage, film and television who was also a five-time host of the Tony Awards, more than any other person. Lansbury, who is 96, was not able to attend in person, or even to accept by video; instead the actor Len Cariou, who starred with Lansbury in the original production of “Sweeney Todd,” for which they both won Tony Awards, paid tribute to her and introduced a video of career highlights. Then the New York City Gay Men’s Chorus performed the title song from “Mame,” which was the show in which she won the first of her five competitive Tony Awards.The Tony Awards, named for actress Antoinette Perry, are presented by the Broadway League, a trade association that represents theater owners and producers, and the American Theater Wing, a theater advocacy organization. The awards have been presented since 1947; there was no ceremony in 2020, and last year’s September ceremony honored shows from the truncated prepandemic season.This year’s awards were spread among 11 shows, with none coming anywhere near the record 12 prizes picked up by “The Producers” in 2001. The biggest hauls went to “Company” and “The Lehman Trilogy,” each of which won five awards; “MJ” won four, and “A Strange Loop,” “Dana H.,” “Six” and “Take Me Out” each won two. Taking home one prize each were “Girl From the North Country,” “Paradise Square,” “Skeleton Crew” and “The Skin of Our Teeth.” More

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      Review: In ‘POTUS,’ White House Enablers Gone Wild

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      Seven female farceurs bring Selina Fillinger’s new Broadway comedy about the president’s protectors to life.Keep your eye on the bust of Alice Paul.You remember Paul, the suffragist who helped secure the vote for women in 1920 and then went on to write the still-unratified Equal Rights Amendment? If not, you could head downtown to the Public Theater to see “Suffs,” the musical about Paul and her colleagues.But uptown, Paul is a projectile. Or rather, in “POTUS,” the snappy and intermittently hilarious farce that opened on Wednesday at the Shubert, a plaster sculpture of her face is. It’s Paul who brings down the first act curtain of Selina Fillinger’s rough-and-tumble feminist comedy — and with it, in a way, the patriarchy itself.I’d be giving away too much to say exactly how a sculpture undoes Fillinger’s nameless and unseen president, who may remind you of someone who in real life recently held the position and still thinks he does. The play, in any case, is happy to be rid of him. Its lumbering subtitle — “Behind Every Great Dumbass Are Seven Women Trying to Keep Him Alive” — makes clear that “POTUS” is less interested in the incompetent man than in his hypercompetent enablers.“POTUS” is in fact an encyclopedia of enabling, a natural field guide to the various poses that women who subcontract their souls get into. The classic cases are Harriet, the president’s beleaguered chief of staff, and Jean, his constantly blindsided press secretary. What Jean (Suzy Nakamura) tells Harriet (Julie White) applies to them both: “You stand in for him every single day, you’ve done it for years. You clean up his messes, you make excuses, you do his job, and then you wake up and do it all over again.”Rachel Dratch, left, and White in Selina Fillinger’s rough-and-tumble feminist comedy, directed by Susan Stroman.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesOn the day “POTUS” is set, that means trying to keep the president on track as he faces a series of public engagements, including a nuclear nonproliferation conference, a political endorsement, a photo op with disabled veterans and a gala honoring a women’s leadership council with the apt acronym FML. By 9 a.m. he is already disastrously off course, having referred to the first lady, at his first appearance, with a word that should have been unspeakable and is at any rate unprintable here.Though there appears to be no love lost between the two, Margaret, the first lady, is no Melania Trump, except for the catlike smugness that’s the top note of Vanessa Williams’s sleek performance. Margaret is spectacularly accomplished: a graduate of Stanford and Harvard, a lawyer, an author, a gallerist and a taekwondo practitioner. She must nevertheless put up with and cover for her husband’s tawdry affairs, including one with a “woke powderpuff” named Dusty (Julianne Hough), who shows up at the White House vomiting “blue raz” slushies.How Dusty enables the president with her own spectacular accomplishments, which include both adventurous sex play and flax farming, I leave for Hough — who, like the play, is gleefully filthy — to reveal.In any case, Dusty introduces a new note to the proceedings, which until her arrival seem, in Susan Stroman’s prestissimo production, at least loosely tied to reality. You can imagine how a woman like Stephanie, the president’s secretary, who speaks five languages and has a photographic memory, might still be disdained as a loser in this environment, because she’s fainthearted and has no polish. The first lady calls her “a menopausal toddler” — a description that Rachel Dratch, with her repertoire of cringes and moues, fully inhabits.And Lilli Cooper, winning even when whining, makes it easy to imagine how a woman like Chris, a Time magazine journalist and a newly divorced mother, might be worried about her job despite her experience and expertise. There are always, Jean warns her, younger male colleagues who “can out-tweet you, out-text you, chug a Red Bull and work three days straight.” Whereas Chris, on hand to interview the first lady, spends most of the play multitasking just to keep afloat — coordinating with her babysitter, her ex, her editors and her subjects while either pumping breast milk or leaking it.Still, you would readily include her as one of the women about whom the play asks, in frustration and shock, “Why aren’t you president?”Dusty does not fit that bill, gifted though she may be. Nor does the seventh character, Bernadette (Lea DeLaria), the president’s exuberantly butch and frankly criminal sister. The only country you could imagine her as president of would be a despotic narcostate, the kind that DeLaria, having a ball in the role, suggests is not much different than ours.From left: Cooper, White, Dratch and Vanessa Williams on Beowulf Boritt’s turntable set.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesIf Dusty and Bernadette, as outside forces, are necessary for forwarding the farce, they gnaw at its underpinnings. The point of the satire, so perfectly sharp in the initial confrontations — with White and Nakamura making a terrific comedy team — begins to dull as the emphasis shifts from verbal to physical humor.That physical humor is not always expertly rendered. (Dratch does it wonderfully, but the fight choreography is unconvincing.) And the turntable set (by Beowulf Boritt) that efficiently rotates the early action from room to room, like a White House Lazy Susan, seems by the second act to be spinning of its own accord, signifying hysteria but not giving us much chance to absorb it. (The sitcom bright lighting is by Sonoyo Nishikawa.) As the women move from cleaning up men’s messes to making messes of their own, you may feel some of the air, or perhaps the milk, leaking out of the comedy.In a way, that’s a faithful expression of Fillinger’s belief, as she told Amanda Hess in The Times, that “if you take the man out of the room, patriarchy still exists and we still play by its rules.”But in extending that idea to comedy, Fillinger, like a politician, is trying to have it both ways. In this, her Broadway debut, the ways aren’t always working together. As a farce, “POTUS” still plays by old and almost definitionally male rules; farce is built on tropes of domination and violence. On the other hand, and more happily, “POTUS” lets us experience the double-bind of exceptional women unmediated by the men who depend on their complicity. “He’s the pyromaniac, but you gave him kindling,” Chris, the journalist, tells the others.Or as Harriet, the chief of staff, puts it in a line that Alice Paul might have appreciated: “He can’t last if you stop saving him.” Maybe that’s true of male-dominated farces as well.POTUS: Or, Behind Every Great Dumbass Are Seven Women Trying to Keep Him AliveThrough Aug. 14 at the Shubert Theater, Manhattan; potusbway.com. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes. More

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      Julianne Hough and Vanessa Williams to Star in Broadway Farce 'POTUS'

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      “POTUS,” by Selina Fillinger, will star Julianne Hough, Vanessa Williams, Rachel Dratch, Lea DeLaria, Lilli Cooper, Suzy Nakamura and Julie White.Julianne Hough, Vanessa Williams and Rachel Dratch are among the stars of “POTUS” on Broadway.Rodin Eckenroth/Getty Images, Caitlin Ochs/Reuters, Michael Loccisano/Getty Images Add one more curveball to this unusual Broadway spring: a political comedy by a 28-year-old writer whose previous New York production took place in a 62-seat basement theater.The new play has a mouthful of a title — “POTUS: Or, Behind Every Great Dumbass Are Seven Women Trying to Keep Him Alive” — and is a farce about a group of women doing damage control for a problematic president.Selina Fillinger, the playwright, is working with the Broadway veteran Susan Stroman, who will direct. The cast will include Julianne Hough, Vanessa Williams, Rachel Dratch, Lea DeLaria, Lilli Cooper, Suzy Nakamura and Julie White.Previews are scheduled to begin April 14 and the opening date is set for May 9, which will most likely make it part of the next Broadway season, not the current one, if the Tony Awards stick to an expected late April opening deadline for eligibility for this season’s awards. The “POTUS” run, at the Shubert Theater, is limited, and scheduled to end Aug. 14.Fillinger, an Oregon native who has been working in Los Angeles as a writer on “The Morning Show,” said she started “POTUS” six years ago. (POTUS is an acronym for president of the United States.)“For years we’ve had this endless cycle of headlines about powerful men abusing their power, and each time I was fascinated by the women orbiting the men and enabling them,” she said in an interview. “The more I started to think about these women, the farce started to write itself.”And is the show about a particular president, such as, say, the last one?“It is an amalgamation of many men in power,” she said. “I set it in the White House because that’s the highest office in the land, but you could set it in any company and any institution and many homes.”Fillinger’s previous work, “Something Clean,” was staged by Roundabout Underground in 2019 and was praised by the New York Times critic Ben Brantley as “a beautifully observed, richly compassionate new drama.”Fillinger said there is some thematic overlap between “POTUS” and “Something Clean,” which was about a mother grappling with her son’s conviction for sexual assault. Her first play, “Faceless,” was about an American jihadist.“I think I am interested in complicity,” she said. “POTUS” and “Something Clean,” she noted, “are both centered on somebody who is never seen onstage, and that is because I am interested in who we give airtime to, and who we don’t give airtime to, and flipping the switch on that.”Stroman, who over the last 30 years has won five Tony Awards for choreography and direction, including both categories for “The Producers,” is best known for musicals. This will be her first time helming a play on Broadway; Off Broadway she directed a Colman Domingo drama, “Dot,” in 2016.In an interview, Stroman said an agent sent her the “POTUS” script, and she was immediately interested. “It’s very funny, and it has an important message within the comedy. At some point there’s a reckoning about what it’s like to keep these people in power who are not worthy.”The play’s lead producers are four companies: Seaview, led by Greg Nobile; 51 Entertainment, founded by Lynette Howell Taylor; Glass Half Full Productions, managed by Gareth Lake; and Level Forward, co-founded by Abigail Disney. The production is permitted to raise up to $6.75 million, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, but a spokeswoman said the play’s actual capitalization would be $5.9 million. More