Plenty of drama but no controversy at the 2024 Tonys

Major awards ceremonies are unpredictable. The Oscars this year were well-behaved, but recent events have boasted everything from “The Slap” to the Curb Your Enthusiasm­-esque farce of Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway announcing that the wrong film had won Best Picture. Still, that’s nothing compared to the Grammys this year, in which Killer Mike won three awards and celebrated his victory by being led away from the ceremony in handcuffs. So the hope was, for this year’s Seventy-Seventh Tony Awards, that there would be drama, but rather less drama, if you catch my drift.

Certainly, there was event. When Jonathan Groff won Best Actor in a Musical for Merrily We Go Along, he promptly broke down in tears and told his co-stars Daniel Radcliffe and Lindsay Mendez that, “You are more than old friends; you are soulmates, and I’m looking forward to watching each other change for the rest of our lives.” As Oscar Wilde said of the death of Little Nell, you’d have to have a heart of stone not to laugh. But Radcliffe, who finally cast off his Harry Potter cloak to win Best Featured Actor in the same musical, was not to be outdone, declaring in his speech to his co-stars that, “I don’t really have to act in this show; I just have to look at you and feel everything I want to feel. I will never have it this good again.”

All this was good old-fashioned Broadway schmaltzy excess, lapped up by the audience. Yet there were greater surprises, too. Jay-Z and Alicia Keys brought something of the more anarchic spirit of the Grammys to the evening when they performed a duet on “Empire State of Mind,” to commemorate Keys’s musical Hell’s Kitchen. There was a split between Best Musical, which was awarded to The Outsiders ­— and allowed Angelina Jolie, one of the show’s many producers, to make a silent appearance on stage — and Best Play, which was a popular award for David Ajmi and Will Butler’s Stereophonic, although the naysayers and quibblers might define that as being just as much of a musical as The Outsiders, given that it contains over a dozen songs. Ah well.

If you have the likes of Jeremy Strong and Sarah Paulson nominated for Tonys, they are probably going to win, and so it proved; Strong for his overdue return to Broadway in the much-praised (although not by our critic) revival of Ibsen’s Enemy of the People, and Paulson won her first award for her performance in Appropriate. Otherwise, it was an evening that largely rewarded a few plays and musicals rather than spreading the love, and contained few real surprises. One of the big stories was how poorly received Cabaret was in New York compared to its acclaim in London, and the producers were no doubt disappointed to win a single award for Tom Scutt’s scenic design, rather than any of the many gongs that Merrily We Roll Along was garlanded with.

As a ceremony, it had the usual problems that most awards shows have; Ariana DeBose was an enthusiastic but lightweight host, and some of the musical numbers, divorced from context, looked downright bizarre. (Eddie Redmayne may not be rushing back to the Broadway stage after the lukewarm reception that his MC in Cabaret, which does nothing to obscure memories of Joel Grey, received.) And the stately guest appearance of Hillary Clinton, promoting the suffragette musical Suffs and schoolmarmishly reminding the audience to vote in the forthcoming elections, may have gone over well in the room but played badly to a less partisan audience at home, who do not regard Clinton’s loss in 2016 as the tragedy that she so clearly does.

But otherwise, it was an inoffensive, engaging enough ceremony that reminds us that the Great American Musical is still the preserve of Stephen Sondheim, that actors cry when emotional in public and that Strong and Paulson are one decent film role away apiece from becoming holders of the legendary EGOT quartet now; exciting and deserved accolades for a pair of America’s greatest actors. So plenty of drama but no controversy. The producers will, you feel, be relieved today.