Tony Awards 2023: WSJ’s Theater Critic on This Year’s Nominees
May 2, 2023 11:58 am ET The nominees for the 76th Tony Awards, which will be held on June 11, were announced this morning. Here’s a roundup of the shows contending for Best Musical and Best Play, as covered by the Journal’s theater critic, Charles Isherwood. Best Musical Joan Marcus Kimberly Akimbo A family mired in dysfunction. A young woman facing a terminal diagnosis. Teenage angst. Teenage romance. An eccentric aunt. These familiar and potentially
The nominees for the 76th Tony Awards, which will be held on June 11, were announced this morning. Here’s a roundup of the shows contending for Best Musical and Best Play, as covered by the Journal’s theater critic, Charles Isherwood.
Best Musical
Kimberly Akimbo
A family mired in dysfunction. A young woman facing a terminal diagnosis. Teenage angst. Teenage romance. An eccentric aunt.
These familiar and potentially hackneyed elements combine, in a nigh-wondrous feat of theatrical legerdemain, to bring to Broadway the best musical of the year so far, by far: the breathtakingly lovely and often riotously funny “Kimberly Akimbo.”
Some Like It Hot
Racing to its farcical climax, the new musical “Some Like It Hot” works up a sizzling head of steam, as its principal characters dash around attempting to secure their romantic fates and dodge the gangsters who have invaded their sunny refuge in a seaside hotel. This dizzying passage is pure pleasure. Unhappily, by the time it arrives audiences may be too dazed to notice, since this adaptation of the classic movie, while buoyantly performed, is also exhaustingly labored.
Shucked
Watching “Shucked,” a frenetically silly new musical, could be described as being stuck in the middle of a vast cornfield, the stalks at elephant’s-eye height. Either you will want to grab an ear and happily start munching—believe me, this corn has been roasted—or thrash your way free.
The Broadway musical “New York, New York,” set in the heady days after the end of World War II, is an unabashedly rhapsodic love letter to the city. It embraces with a big bear hug—one that contemporary dwellers would probably recoil from, speaking literally—the image of New York as the fabled dream-chasing capital of the world, a notion immortalized in the title song.
Note: Also nominated in this category is “& Juliet.”
Best Play
Leopoldstadt
The theater season is just aborning, but it is virtually inconceivable that it will produce anything superior to
Fat Ham
On its own terms, the play is an unalloyed pleasure: clever in its allusions to and occasional modest borrowings from Shakespeare’s mighty drama, frank and funny in its depiction of a family in the throes of transition, and acted with infectious exuberance. That it does not achieve any great emotional depth or resonate in the mind after you leave the theater will not detract from the pure enjoyment the play delivers from start to finish.
Stephen Adly Guirgis’s bruising comedy-drama “Between Riverside and Crazy,” a 2015 Pulitzer Prize winner now having its Broadway debut at the Helen Hayes Theater, is an ensemble work. But even the richest ensembles—and the production boasts one of the best currently on a New York stage—usually orbit around a galvanizing central performance.
In this case the centrifugal force is generated by Stephen McKinley Henderson, portraying Walter Washington, a black former policeman who was shot six times by a fellow cop—a white rookie—eight years before. Walter has been festering with grievance ever since, holding out for a multimillion-dollar settlement from the city.
Note: Also nominated in this category are “Ain’t No Mo’” and “Cost of Living.”
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