Tony nominations snubs and surprises: Denzel Washington is missing for “Othello” and more

The stars abounded. Attendance has rebounded. The artists raised the roof, as is the price of tickets. It was a great season for Broadway, finally achieving a credible post -lodge reconstruction – but like what? Think of the nominations of the Tony Award as tea leaves, referring to where the commercial theater is located and predicting where it is. And also, with 29 of the 42 eligible productions receiving heads, offering many opportunities to celebrate deplored surprises and omissions (or vice versa).

A boys’ club, but women govern.

To look at the pieces of this season, you would think Broadway was still a boys’ club. Men dominated dramatic leading roles; Many non-musicals had no leading actress. This left only nine women eligible for the five standard appointments, unless you count each of the 26 characters played by Sarah Snook separately in “The image of Dorian Gray”. (She caught a single head sign.) But on the musical side of the big book, women have completely reigned, with so many star performance that some of the biggest names in Broadway were inevitably going to be snubbed. After Sondheim’s review, “Old Friends”, Bernadette Peters and Lea Salonga in the support category – who have not made them nominated anyway – who have always left Adrienne Warren (“the last five years”), Sutton Foster (“Once Upon a Matress”) and Idina Menzel (“Redwood”) in the cold. Especially Menzel, who, during this eco-musical, sang a dozen songs while climbing a 200-foot tree and dancing upside down in the air. As she proved in “Wicked”, it’s not easy to be green.

“Othello” takes him in the back.

“My heart is transformed into a stone. I hit him, and it hurts my hand. ” It is the conversation of Othello de Shakespeare, but it could well be the team of actors and creative of the Broadway revival, who did not receive a single appointment from Tony. In particular, Denzel Washington and Jake Gyllenhaal were excluded in the category of the main actor in a room, which has even made room for an unusual six nominated. “Romeo + Juliet” The other Shakespeare production of the season which attracted mixed criticism, made the best renewal of a room cring. Again, the producers “Othello” did not take the blow; A few minutes after the announcement of the appointments, they published a press release indicating that the program, which won more than $ 3 million per week during its limited race, had recovered its costs.

George Clooney is lucky.

“Good night and good luck”, the other blockbuster at the spring box office, has always been an uncertain proposal for the best new play, since it is closely like the script for the 2005 film on which it is based. However, Tony’s nominators paid tribute to his co-scriptwriter / star / man of conscience George Clooney with a head sign as best main actor in a room for his serious and massive representation of the 1950s surveillance journalist, Edward R. Murrow. The timing of the show has borne fruit – not to mention the star’s desire to dye her black oil for her debut on Broadway.

Everything is in the family to a “goal”.

Last year, “appropriate” by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins was nominated for eight Tony Awards. “Purpose”, his play on an eminent black political family is not entirely the best, but five of his six nominations were in the actor categories, an unusually high number for a set focused on the sets in which the pyrotechnic of the dining room is distributed so widespread. (Unfortunately, there was no place at the Tonys table for Alana Arenas, who gave a glamorous and explosive turn as a daughter-in-law, Morgan.) “English” by Sanaz Tossi and Kimberly Belflower “John Proctor is the villain”, two other overall propulsion dramas, each of the actor’s appointments.