“The Book of Mormon,” the exuberantly foul-mouthed
hit show about comically mismatched missionaries in AIDS-ravaged Africa,
won the award for best musical, along with eight other awards, and Nick
Stafford’s “War Horse,” starring a life-size puppet of a noble steed,
won five awards capped by the best play trophy at Sunday’s Tony Awards
ceremony.
As was widely predicted, Sutton Foster won the
leading actress in a musical award for Cole Porter’s “Anything Goes,”
the best musical revival winner. Mark Rylance won the leading actor in a
play award for “Jerusalem.” Frances McDormand won the leading actress
in a play award for “Good People.” Norbert Leo Butz was named leading
actor in a musical, playing a dogged lawman tracking an elusive con
artist in “Catch Me If You Can.” It was the second Tony each for Rylance
and Butz.
The steamroller showing by “Book of Mormon,” whose
artistic team was led by “South Park” creators Trey Parker and Matt
Stone in their first Broadway foray, came as no surprise to anyone,
including presenter Chris Rock, who feigned shock as he announced the
winner.
“Book of Mormon” had topped the list of nominees with
14, despite — or perhaps because of — its aggressively, politically
incorrect tone, which continued during the ceremony at the Beacon
Theatre in New York. In accepting the award, Parker thanked “our
co-writer, Joseph Smith,” the founding father of the Mormon faith.
“Book of Mormon” fell short, however, of the record number of 12 Tonys won by “The Producers” a decade ago.
In contrast to Parker and Stone’s irreverent
entertainment, another of the evening’s most-honored shows, the best
play-winning revival of Larry Kramer’s 1985 “The Normal Heart,” treats
its serious subject as anything but a laughing matter. Kramer’s drama
raised an impassioned warning cry about the AIDS crisis when it was
first produced at the Public Theatre 26 years ago.
In accepting the award, Kramer gave a shout-out to
gay men and women. “I could not have written it had not so many
needlessly died,” he said of his drama, which also won acting awards for
Ellen Barkin (lead actress) and John Benjamin Hickey (featured actor).
First-time nominee Barkin, in her acceptance speech, teared up as she
thanked Kramer “for thinking you can make the world a better place.”
Of the principal cast for “Book of Mormon,” Nikki M.
James won for performance by an actress in a featured role in a musical.
The show also won trophies for best original score and for best book
(to Parker, Stone and Robert Lopez), direction (Parker and Casey
Nicholaw), orchestration (Larry Hochman and Stephen Oremus), scenic
design (Scott Pask), lighting design (Brian MacDevitt) and sound design
(Brian Ronan).
“War Horse,” which is based on a children’s novel set
during World War I, and is being adapted into a feature film by Steven
Spielberg, won awards for its directors, Marianne Elliott and Tom
Morris. It also won for best sound, scenic and lighting design.
McDormand, the star of the Coen brothers’ “Fargo” and
other films, scored with her portrayal of an embattled Boston single
mother in David Lindsay-Abaire’s “Good People.”
In one of the evening’s most competitive categories,
best actor Rylance won for his turn as a Falstaffian modern-day
anti-hero in Jez Butterworth’s “Jerusalem.” Fixing the audience with a
mischievous look, Rylance turned his acceptance speech into a slyly
absurdist, blank-verse ramble (courtesy of a Louis Jenkins poem) before
concluding with a simple thank you.
Echoing the honors bestowed on “The Normal Heart,”
the ceremony at the Beacon Theatre made a point several times of
emphasizing sexual tolerance. That started with a comic opening number
led by host Neil Patrick Harris on the theme that Broadway isn’t “just
for gays anymore,” it’s also “for fine upstanding Christians who know
all the songs from ‘Grease.’ “
John Larroquette won the award for actor in a
featured role in a musical for the revival of “How to Succeed in
Business Without Really Trying.” The actor, best known for his
television roles, thanked the musical’s star, “Harry Potter” actor
Daniel Radcliffe “without whom I would be sitting at home watching this
in my underwear.”
Predictably, there also were a number of guffaws at
the expense of the eternally postponed musical “Spider-Man: Turn Off the
Dark.” The $70 million musical, scheduled to open Tuesday, has endured
countless delays and earlier this year was halted for a creative
makeover that included replacing its original director, Tony-winner
Julie Taymor.
Cameras captured the show’s song-writing duo, Bono
and The Edge of the rock band U2, laughing during Harris’ 30-second
joke-a-thon about “Spider-Man.”
As has been customary in recent years, the ceremony
got an extra dose of celebrity cachet from a number of Hollywood stars,
TV personalities and super models who turned up as presenters and
performers: Brooke Shields (who got bleeped for an impromptu obscenity),
Hugh Jackman, Stephen Colbert, a breathlessly effusive Christie
Brinkley and a hirsute Robin Williams, who has been making his Broadway
debut in the drama “Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo.”
Theatrical royalty was on hand, in the venerable
personages of presenters Vanessa Redgrave and James Earl Jones, who
spoke of theaters as magic places and “shrines.” “The floorboards are
worn down by generations of players,” Jones intoned in his best Darth
Vader bass-baritone. “The curtains are imbued with secrets of days gone
by.”
South African playwright Athold Fugard (“Master
Harold … and the Boys”) won the lifetime achievement award, and Eve
Ensler, author of “The Vagina Monologues,” received the Isabelle
Stevenson Award, in recognition of her achievements in the areas of
social and humanitarian work.
The award for best regional theater went to the Lookingglass Theatre of Chicago.
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