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https://www.vulture.com/article/tony-awards-2024-welcome-to-the-phonys.html

own Sara Holdren and Jackson McHenry. These two critics have spent the past few months cramming their schedules with previews and spinning out reviews of all the big shows (and a clutch of small ones too). Now that they’ve seen it all, they’re ready to hand out some honors of their own — in categories the Tonys voters never dreamed of. Welcome to our awards show. Go ahead and call it the Phonys.

...

Best Performance As the Emcee From Cabaret

And it’s not from the actor who is currently playing the Emcee in Cabaret.

Sara: The best current performance as this kind of character is not the one by Eddie Redmayne, who’s in Cabaret at the Kit Kat Club on Broadway — it’s George Abud as Marinetti in Lempicka. He’s playing an artist who was the real-life father of futurism, historically shoehorned into the play. But that doesn’t matter, because he does what the Emcee in Cabaret is supposed to do: He guides us along as the world tumbles toward fascism. The opinions he expresses are explicitly ugly, but Abud does it with so much successful charm without giving away any of the menacing. Whereas Redmayne’s Emcee is just a mess, wiggling his fingers.

Jackson: He totally tips his hand. It’s odd to watch Cabaret and never feel like you’re being seduced by the Emcee. Redmayne’s Emcee is just going, “Welcome to Berlin, it’s evil,” and hopping around. There is meant to be a complicated dynamic with the Emcee where he’s both sort of queer and luring you into fascism. But this production seems to tell you, “All of this expression is going to lead to being a brown shirt.” It seems un-thought-through and un-nuanced. Abud is much more convincing.

I thought I remembered BalconyClub offering the same reports for The Devil Wears Prada so I checked the thread, and interestingly enough Bill Snibson didn't seem to have a problem with their attention to detail then, since s/he was commenting and responding to them throughout that thread.

https://forum.broadwayworld.com/readmessage.php?thread=1153172&page=11

Officially "gaze"...but obviously intending to be read/heard as "gays."



 

Helen Shaw in the New Yorker:

“Stereophonic” and “Cabaret” Turn Up the Volume on Broadway

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/05/06/stereophonic-theatre-review-cabaret

It's highly positive, and this was an interesting observation:

"The sound designer Ryan Rumery has a nearly impossible task, which he executes with ambition and finesse, but he’s trying for needlepoint accuracy in a Broadway house, which sometimes fights back. The way that music stays alive after being electronically organized into tape is one of the play’s core mysteries, but there are places in the Golden where the sound goes a little sour. Playwrights Horizons’s compact, wood-walled venue functioned as a well-balanced listening room, whereas the sprawling new venue is a gamble, seat by seat. That’s Broadway for you: everybody pays a toll to get there."

 

Another review by a woman, the ever insightful Helen Shaw for The New Yorker. She didn't like it either.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/05/06/stereophonic-theatre-review-cabaret

"Kander and Ebb’s musical about the guises of Fascism relies on a slow build from seeming liberation to revelation: an American named Cliff (Ato Blankson-Wood) bumbles his way through Weimar Berlin, intoxicated by the permissive night life and oblivious of the growing political horrors all around him. It was last on Broadway in 2015, with Alan Cumming playing the mischievous m.c.—a certain Puckish reserve is crucial to the role. The director of this revival, Rebecca Frecknall, approaches the material as if she’s exploring hidden meanings in a Jacobean text for people who have never heard a “thou” before. Hers is the subtext-as-atmosphere version of an auteur director’s treatment, offering at every moment the darkest, grungiest interpretation possible. From the outset, she has the cabaret dancers slither like demons in some medieval vision of Hell, which, paradoxically, renders the show both dull—oh, look, it’s the half-naked tubercular imps again—and a bit prudish. By shifting the early parts of the musical toward menace, Frecknall has made sexual licentiousness coincident with evil. Surely this is not her intention.

All is not ill: Gayle Rankin, whose voice is a big angry miracle, plays Sally Bowles, the cabaret’s down-at-the-heels star, and she scream-sings with such total conviction that she almost sells the show as her own personal nightmare. But Frecknall chooses Redmayne as her production’s centerpiece, and it’s been clear since he performed in “Red” on Broadway, in 2010, that he is most affecting when his impulses are reined in. When they aren’t, he can careen into absurdity, as he does here—inventing a German accent so pernicious (“Tomowwoar belongs toor me,” he sings) that you can’t always understand him, and an overly ornate physical vocabulary that’s one part silent-film Pierrot and one part Igor from “Young Frankenstein.” I have never felt so far from other audiences as I did knowing that this incarnation was beloved in London. Perhaps British viewers, familiar with stylization from Christmas pantomimes and music-hall tradition, enjoy a broader mode of performance than I do."

I haven't seen BTTF but this is hilarious.

LuckyDipster said: "kdogg36 said: "This is what is known as a "straw man.""

😕"

The goal of this thread was to have a positive thread among the usual negativity. Don't let the negative, wholly off-topic people get to you. 

For a positive thread, what was the nomination that made you the happiest?

Jessica Stone got in for Direction of a Musical!

Rebecca Frecknall did not!

Deadline: Tony Award Nomination Predictions 2024: The Shoo-Ins, The Wild Cards And Everything In-Between

Deadline: Tony Award Nomination Predictions 2024: The Shoo-Ins, The Wild Cards And Everything In-Between

CoffeeBreak said: "Agree. Some of these Variety and Time Out nominations are off. In past years, both have been pretty off."

Time Out isn't predicting, just expressing their own preferences.



 

MemorableUserName said: I noticed in TimeOut's (fake) "TONY" nominations they cited Esper in Featured Actor in a Play instead of Stoll. Now the Drama Desk nominations have done the same. Stoll still seems more likely for the Tony nod...or maybe not?

yyys said: "Esper is the better actor in that play so it makes sense.

The Distinctive Baritone said: "Corey Stoll is a great actor, but IMO he has one of the least interesting role inAppropriate.Esper has much more of an awards-bait kind of part I think.
 

I haven't seen Appropriate yet. I just found it interesting because most of the predictors have been saying Stoll and almost no one mentioned Esper. (kurtal was the only one in the predictions thread who did.) I also checked GoldDerby's predictions and none of the Editors or users have Esper predicted, while most have Stoll. One of the Experts has Esper; none of the others do. Will be interesting to see how it turns out.

I noticed in TimeOut's (fake) "TONY" nominations they cited Esper in Featured Actor in a Play instead of Stoll. Now the Drama Desk nominations have done the same. Stoll still seems more likely for the Tony nod...or maybe not?

Also noteworthy that they put Ubeda in Lead and Plunkett and Harewood in Featured, unlike the Tonys. These seem to make more sense IMO.

Just keeping everything together:

Gold Derby: https://www.goldderby.com/article/2024/2024-tony-nominations-predictions-shows/

What's On Stage: https://www.whatsonstage.com/news/tony-awards-2024-nomination-predictions_1595485/

Holdren in Vulture is positive:

Staff Meal Deserves Five Stars on Yelp

https://www.vulture.com/article/theater-review-abe-koogler-staff-meal.html

Elisabeth Vincentelli for Washington Post:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/theater/2024/04/25/rachel-mcadams-mary-jane-steve-carell-uncle-vanya-eddie-redmayne-cabaret/

"Jessica Lange also has to maneuver her way through a wordless stretch, albeit a longer, more complex one, in Paula Vogel’s new “Mother Play,” from Second Stage Theater. During an evening alone in her apartment, her character, Phyllis, listens to music, microwaves a TV dinner and eats part of it, fixes herself some drinks, looks at her watch, occasionally smiles while lost in thought — all of this feeling as if it happened in real time. This may sound tedious on paper, but Lange, who couldn’t snuff out her movie star aura if she tried, moves through the scene like a glamorous, dreamily remote siren beached in suburbia.

Vogel’s semi-autobiographical piece is generous toward all three of its characters, but it is named “Mother Play” for a reason: Phyllis, inspired by the playwright’s own mom, is a devouring presence who looms over her children, portrayed by Celia Keenan-Bolger and Jim Parsons (alternatively funny and poignant in one of his best stage turns to date). She is 37 when we first meet her, in 1964, and Tina Landau’s production wobbles at the start because Lange is not entirely convincing in those early scenes (suspension of disbelief is a powerful tool, but it has its limits). She gains in both power and vulnerability as Phyllis gets older, as years and life pass her by. After three revivals of classics (she won a Tony for “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” in 2016), it’s also a delight to see Lange in a contemporary piece."