For the past seven years, I have been a full-time drama student and an early career theatre professional. After a life full of amateur theatrics, directing and acting in plays and musicals with my best friends, always feeling like the stakes were approximately 10,000x higher than they actually were, it was a very sudden shift to find my hobby and truest love suddenly be what I did and thought about all day every day.
There were times when this would get me down and I would question why I was going into this insane industry anyway. What was the point of being in a field where things were rapidly reaching theme park levels of commercialization and where the barriers to participation were so high that who knew if I would ever surmount them? Theatre school was hard, and being a grown-up in the theatre industry has been even harder. Now, in a time when theatres are shuttered round the globe and I miss this art form I've dedicated my life too with my entire being, it is easy to think of all the bad things about this life, mainly the total instability. It's times likes this, when I'm feeling sad or unsure about this life I've chosen, when I turn to the 2013 Tony Awards Opening Number. Before we watch it together, I want to paint you a picture of who I was when I first saw this on TV almost seven years ago. I was a 17-year-old with less than a week of high school left, preparing for my upcoming first semester studying drama at Carnegie Mellon. I was sitting on the couch in the house I grew up in, where I'd watched many prior Tony Awards, and I was surrounded by my best friends. So, it was in that headspace that I saw this miraculous performance on that fateful Sunday evening in June.
Before we do a deep dive, I'm gonna let you sit with whatever you're feeling right now. Just let yourself feel it for a few deep breaths.
Ready? Let's jump in. 0:01-0:44 Let's start with the opening sequence, a sweet nod to Once, the musical that had won the Tony the prior year. I had yet to see Once, but I had seen The Swell Season, the music duo who wrote the music for the musical and the film it's based on, perform at the Hollywood Bowl three years prior with my friends, some of whom were with me on that couch. We saw them on accident- we bought the tickets because She & Him was their opener. It was a very pleasant surprise. A year after the Tonys, I saw Once by myself on the West End. It was the first musical I saw alone and I loved every second of it. 0:45 That Shia LaBeouf joke! Bet you forgot all about that Broadway controversy! Earlier in 2013, Shia was meant to make his Broadway debut in Lyle Kessler's Orphans, but left the show citing creative differences from his costar, Alec Baldwin. The New York Times maintains that he actually was fired. 1:10 One of the other things that made the 2013 Tony Awards so damn special was called out in the lyric, "And we're back where we began it all/Radio City Music Hall." This seems like an apt celebratory lyric for the first Tony Awards ceremony held at Radio City since 2010, as during 2011 and 2012 Cirque du Soleil was in residence there. HOWEVER this lyric is misleading because we did not, in fact, begin it all at Radio City Music Hall. The first Tony Awards ceremony was held in 1947 at the Grand Ballroom at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel. The Tonys were held at hotel ballrooms for the next few decades, and in 1967 the awards moved to The Shubert Theatre. It wasn't until 1997, at the 50th Annual Tony Awards, that the show moved to Radio City. So while I applaud Lin-Manuel Miranda for the dramatically resonant lyric, it is not historically accurate. 1:53 A giant Tony Award emerges from the background. Neil winks at the camera and runs offstage for what can only be a quick change. Things are starting to get crazy. 2:22 After a quick jokes about how toned the men of Kinky Boots are, the camera pans to Billy Porter, not yet a household name and notably not dressed to the nines, à la 2020 Billy. This was an exciting moment for me as an audience member because it was the first shot of a CMU alum nominated that evening. He and seven other CMU alumni would go on to win that night, for acting, lighting design, producing, and costume design. Here's a picture of me meeting Billy Porter a little over three months later. Yes, he is very awesome in person. 2:39 Here we have the hilarious nod to the haphazard nature of putting on a Tony Awards ceremony, "I just learned this dance like half an hour ago." While that statement is a stretch of the truth, it isn't entirely inaccurate. The production number featured approximately 200 people (sadly cannot find a source with an exact count), and each group would rehearse their bit of the number separately, accommodating for the fact that most of them were definitely still doing 8 shows a week. The only run through with all of the performers present was the morning of the telecast. 2:53 Neil runs and jumps through a hoop mirroring Matthew James Thomas' acrobatic entrance as the titular prince in the 2013 revival of Pippin, written by another CMU alum Stephen Schwartz WHILE HE WAS A STUDENT AT CMU. Granted, the show changed a lot on the road from CMU to Broadway, but it was still a point of pride for me. That night alumna Patina Miller would win Best Actress in a Musical for her turn as Leading Player, and the production would win Best Revival of a Musical. I have not met Patina Miller, but I saw the show that December, and can affirm the show was worthy of all the accolades. 3:07 The cast of Bring it On: The Musical floods the stage. Bet you forgot about Lin-Manuel Miranda's Broadway flop, didn't you? It's okay, he's gonna win an Emmy for this opening number in a few months. Oh yeah... and Hamilton will take over the world in three years. 3:16 MIKE TYSON HAD A ONE MAN SHOW. WHAT. EVEN. 3:38 The four little girls playing Matilda RUN OUT OF THE GIANT TONY AWARD, previously unopened. Incredible. That show is amazing. I saw it in March the next year and in my opinion it should have won the Tony over Kinky Boots. But I digress. Moving on! 3:44 The "jaded former Billys" enter, calling back to the 2009 Tony Awards when the three young men who shared the titular role in Billy Elliot shared the award for Best Leading Actor in a Musical. I saw both Billy Elliot and Next to Normal, one of it's Tony Awards competitors on a high school drama club trip, and I maintain that Next to Normal should have won. Hey, I can be utterly obsessed with the Tony Awards and disagree with the voters. Once again, moving on! 4:00 Lilla Crawford, the star of the season's revival of Annie, starts off the choreography in the wrong direction. The magic of live theatre! 4:24 The lyric, "though being famous doesn't mean that you will get a good review, so Alec, write Ben Brantley if you want, that's entertaining too!" Oh boy, so much to unpack here. So, as discussed earlier, Alec Baldwin was in the Broadway show Orphans this season. Ben Brantley, the chief theater critique for The New York Times and, whether you like it or not, the most important critical voice in theater, called Baldwin's performance, "a mutating cartoon" with "only hints of the requisite menace." It was, all in all, not a glowing review. But wait, there's more! Alec Baldwin RESPONDED in HuffPost where he literally says, "Ben Brantley [...] is not a good writer" and calls him an "odd, shriveled, bitter Dickensian clerk." It's pretty incredible, and you can read the whole thing here. 4:32 That leads into a very quick tonal shift, referencing the much nominated Pippin with the lyric "we've got magic to do," and then an ACTUAL magic trick by ACTUAL magician, Neil Patrick Harris. Insane. 5:03 Neil is now "walking down the aisle with some Newsies in tow." Remember Newsies, Disney's completely accidental smash hit of the 2012 Broadway season. Here's the story behind that: Disney Theatricals has a whole line of educational materials for licensing their "Jr." productions to elementary schools, youth theatre companies, etc. The educators who put on these shows are asked to fill out a feedback form, and one of the questions is which other Disney properties they'd like to be made available in this format. They noticed that Newsies, the 1992 cult favorite movie musical starring Christian Bale, was requested very often, despite the film's lack of critical success. SO, the team at Disney decided to adapt it to a musical for the New Jersey regional theatre Paper Mill Playhouse so that they could have a quick turnaround for amateur licensing. HOWEVER, the cute dancing boys of the musical led the show to become an absolute hit with the teens, preceding what would become a decade of teens ruling the Broadway canon, leading Disney to swing Newsies over to Broadway for what was supposed to be a limited engagement run. That turned into an open-ended run, a handful of Tony nominations, a few wins, and Newsies becoming the fastest musical to recoup on it's investments in the history of Broadway. Once again, insane. 5:13 Some guy who I don't recognize gives the first standing ovation of the night. A little premature, but I get it. 5:20 "Can I have my Tom Hooper Les Mis close up please?" This is obviously a reference to the previous holiday season release of Tom Hooper's film adaptation of Les Misérables, famous for the previously unheard of live singing on camera and for dividing the theatre community. For the record, 17-year-old me loved it, and saw it in theatres three times. 5:58 "Just for the hell of it Tom Hanks!" I just wanted to say how much I love Tom Hanks, and how much everyone loves Tom Hanks. I hope he's doing okay. If you want to fall deeper in love with Tom Hanks and distract yourself from your current troubles and for some reason have lived under a rock for the past few months, please read Taffy Brodesser-Akner's beautiful profile of him in the Times. 6:06-6:18 If you don't cry at this bit about all the kids watching at home and how everyone up on that stage was that kid at some point... I don't even know. Just like... look yourself in the mirror and think about it for a second. I'll wait. 6:36 Debra Messing's face in this shot is the best moment of the entire video. I think it summarizes how all of us truly feel about this performance. I wish I was the kind of person that new how to make GIFs because this reaction is the perfect GIF. 6:37 SPIDERMAN. I don't even know where to begin. For those of you who are out of the loop or who have suppressed the memory, Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark was the absolute train wreck that helped define the 2010 Broadway season. Tons of cast and creative team members dropped out, many many cast members got injured, and when it finally opened the show was panned by critics and lost shit tons of money. It would have had to have run on Broadway for at least 5 years to make back the reported $75 million dollars it cost to put up. 6:40 I love this part when they bring out a bunch of cast members from some of the longest running shows on Broadway- The Lion King, Mamma Mia, Jersey Boys, and Chicago. While the awards at the Tonys celebrate the newest productions, its so cool that they included these casts because these long running shows make up the backbone of Broadway. People come from all around the world to see the aforementioned productions and the likes of Phantom of the Opera, Wicked, The Book of Mormon, and Hamilton. They're often people's gateway drugs to the the addiction that is musical theatre. We love them too! 6:45 "Kathie Lee's a Broadway lyricist so anything can happen!" For less than a month, from November-December 2012, Kathie Lee Gifford, best known for her tenure alongside Hoda Kotb on The Today Show, starred in Scandalous: The Life and Trials of Aimee Semple McPherson. She actually wrote the music AND lyrics. Come on Lin. More inaccuracies. Gifford was nominated for a Tony for her performance... not her song writing ability. 7:02 Neil makes like King Kong (which would not come to Broadway for another five years, but was getting ready to open in Australia at the time) and climbs that giant Tony Award, leading the full cast of the number through to a big finish, and a rousing round of applause and roughly minute and a half long standing ovation. We get reaction shots from the great Harvey Weinstein, sweet baby Anthony Ramos, new to Broadway Cyndi Lauper, a sparkling Annaleigh Ashford, an absolutely shook Patina Miller, an under-reacting Jesse Eisenberg, a spectacled Bernadette Peters, and Megan Hilty, before NPH comes in with a button, "And that's our budget, good night!" He then welcomes Audra McDonald and Zachary Quinto to the stage to kick off the actual awards show. Wow. Just wow. I don't know how to close out this blog post, because if it isn't clear to you now how much this opening number means to me, and how much Broadway and the theatre community means to me, then I don't know what to tell ya. I love the theatre community so much, and this number is just an incredibly elaborate love letter to that community. And, if you're still not bored, please watch this video of director Glenn Weiss calling the cues for the closing sequence. You're welcome. That's all for today folks. Should I do a similar deconstruction of the closing number next? Let me know! Epilogue
Now that you've made it all the way to the bottom, I leave you with some bonus content. The night before The Tony Awards, I directed an illegal concert version of Les Mis because my math teacher wanted me too (long story) at my high school that we marketed as Broadway Night and I lied on the phone to MTI about our intentions. It was a lot, but the whole point of it was to bring faculty, alumni, and current high school students together to honor the head of our performing arts department, who was retiring that year. After the Tonys, I posted the following incredibly self-aggrandizing tweet.
(I'm completely aware there is a typo. It was 2013 and twitter didn't [and still doesn't] have an edit tweet button, so leave me alone.) K now I'm actually done. Bye!
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Stephanie KaneI like reading plays, drinking lots of coffee, and holding other people's Tony Awards. Archives
August 2018
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