Highlights of the 2022 Tony Awards Nominations

Critic’s Pocket book

If the roster of Tony Award nominees introduced on Monday seems to be even odder and extra random than standard, properly, it’s been an odd and random season. For that matter, it wasn’t even actually a season. The surfeit of nods — many classes that normally characteristic 5 nominations this 12 months characteristic six or seven — pales compared to the scope of eligible productions, the primary of which (“Woman From the North Nation”) opened in March 2020, simply earlier than the pandemic blew an 18-month gap in Broadway. If my math is right, that was 100 years in the past.

The pandemic that distorted the season additionally distorted the awards course of. Of the 34 productions the 29 nominators had been allowed to think about, 15 opened in April — six within the final week of that month alone. It couldn’t have been straightforward. I do know that for critics it was a maddening sport of Whac-a-Mole, attempting to hit every present because it popped up earlier than all of the sudden vanishing, riddled with shutdowns and star absences. Ultimately, I missed two: “Mr. Saturday Night time,” which acquired 5 nominations, and “The Little Prince,” which was ineligible and by all accounts unintelligible.

The nominators presumably missed none, and of these 34 eligible productions, they honored a whopping 29. No musical, not even the dreadful “Diana, the Musical” was skunked, even when some awfully good performs, together with “Cross Over” and “Is This a Room,” discovered themselves forgotten. Was that as a result of they had been among the many first to step up within the wishfully post-Covid Broadway reopening that started in August? Having opened maybe too early they positively closed too shortly.

However these reveals are additionally extra leading edge than business awards usually know the right way to deal with, utilizing downtown theatrical codecs to current troublesome dramatic materials. (“Cross Over” is a surrealist have a look at violence in opposition to younger Black males; “Is This a Room,” a spoken transcript of an interrogation about authorities secrecy.) The nominations recommend a willingness to simply accept solely a kind of challenges — simply as, on the different finish of the spectrum, they appeared able to welcome performs which can be hackneyed in kind or content material however not each. The revival of Neil Simon’s “Plaza Suite,” starring Matthew Broderick and Sarah Jessica Parker, acquired one nomination, for Jane Greenwood’s costume design.

Nonetheless, poring over my private Tonys spreadsheet, which I preserve in a particular air-locked secure with my unique forged vinyl recordings and Playbills printed on papyrus, I’m impressed with the nominators’ dedication to unfold the wealth.

There are many acquainted names, after all, together with the earlier Tony winners Mary-Louise Parker, LaChanze, Hugh Jackman, Sutton Foster, Phylicia Rashad and Patti LuPone — the final two superlative in supporting quite than main roles.

However there are many breakthrough names as properly. The competition for finest efficiency by a number one actor in a musical is more likely to pit Broadway newbies Myles Frost (the star of “MJ”) in opposition to Jaquel Spivey (the star of “A Unusual Loop”) — by no means thoughts Jackman or Billy Crystal in the identical class. The primary-time nominees Sharon D Clarke (“Caroline, or Change”) and Joaquina Kalukango (“Paradise Sq.”) are likewise the pair to beat for finest efficiency by a number one actress in a musical — by no means thoughts Foster.

That these 4 main contenders are Black underscores that the Tonys, just like the season itself, are making some progress of their push towards higher range. By my rely, greater than a 3rd of the 136 complete nominations honored reveals and folks you won’t previously have seen a lot of on the Nice White Means — which I feel we are able to lastly cease calling by that title.

Not that you just “see” all of that range even now. We’re additionally benefiting from range backstage, together with lots of the administrators and designers and choreographers behind “For Coloured Women Who Have Thought-about Suicide/When the Rainbow Is Enuf,” “Paradise Sq.” and “The Pores and skin of Our Tooth.” Inclusion is inadequate if it’s merely public going through.

Loads of that new-to-Broadway expertise arrived not individually however en masse, because of Black authors, administrators and producers who made numerous hiring a precedence. One result’s that this was a season of ensembles, together with the six “ideas” featured in “A Unusual Loop,” the seven summary nouns portrayed by the forged of “Ideas of a Coloured Man” and the seven colours of “For Coloured Women.”

In a few of these reveals, in addition to in “Six,” “The Minutes,” “Clyde’s,” “Skeleton Crew” and “POTUS,” there are not any main roles in any respect; the group is the star. When that’s the case, it will possibly appear perverse to single out only one performer from a fastidiously balanced firm, although the nominators did simply that with their nods to Kenita R. Miller in “For Coloured Women,” Rachel Dratch and Julie White in “POTUS,” and John-Andrew Morrison and L Morgan Lee in “A Unusual Loop.”

These performers deserved their nominations, however so did a lot of their castmates; for that cause, as critics and others have argued repeatedly, the Tonys ought to create a pair of Finest Ensemble classes, for musicals and performs, to be awarded when it is sensible to take action. This 12 months particularly it could have made sense.

Not that sense is a factor the Tony nominations normally make. I’m not a believer in snubs, besides that point I used to be one way or the other not invited to my very own birthday celebration, however the randomness that’s inherent in a course of involving so few nominators protecting a lot territory does depart me with combined emotions in regards to the endeavor.

I’m after all thrilled to see a lot fantastic work, a lot of it really new, observed within the nominations. However even for a crusty critic, excellence doesn’t appear to be the one vital metric proper now. Pollyannish as it could sound, I feel every part that managed to open throughout this hectic, usually terrifying season, and everybody who went onstage in entrance of an viewers of shining if mask-covered faces, deserves, if not a nod, a bow.

Even, I suppose, “Diana.”