The Tony Eligibility and Category Placement Thread (FINAL RULINGS) — Page 2

I wouldn't be surprised if they chose to give Carrie Fisher a special award for Wishful Drinking. That's what they used to do before the Special Event category - it's how Barbra Streisand and Judy Garland won their Tonys, for example.

Thanks for the link, Mike. Teh article (on WHITE CHRISTMAS) was an interesting read.


I extrapolated the scores from Stagegrade's listings. I am not sure where they draw the line between "A+" and "A" or between "A" and "A-". Reading their explanation makes it seem highly subjective on their part.

For example, how is it possible that a show with all postive and no negative reviews (FELA: 13 raves, 7 positives) is graded A- along with a show like EVERYDAY RAPTURE (10 raves, 4 positives, 1 mixed leaning positive, 1 mixed leaning negative, and 1 negative.) I would say that FELA got universal acclaim while RAPTURE had a few naysayers. Therefore FELA should have been scored "A" or even "A+" with Rapture "A-" or even "B+"

So I created a spreadsheet tallying the raves, positives, mixed, negatives and pans for each show and calculating the percentage positive. I used Stagegrade's data but "A" reviews were all classed as Raves, "B" reviews and "C+" as positives, "C" as mixed, "C-" and "D" as negative and "F" as pans. (Mixed reviews are tricky, but to include all of them as just mixed pulls the overall percentage figures down. SO, I decided to subdivide based on whethere leaning positive or negative.)

I have been keeping track all season - even as Stagegrade took over from Critic-o-meter.

I'm a collector of Broadway stats -now that Variety no longer does it's season-end tally of Hits and Flops I have to figure it out myself. I decided I wanted to keep track of the overall reviews (like Steven Suskind's very useful OPENING NIGHTS books do for 1943-1981) for future reference, and to settle arguments down the road when someone here claims such and such show opened to terrible reviews. I'll be able to see what the actual numbers were.

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Apparently, American Idiot never submitted their score, so it is not eligible. Fela's petition to be considered was turned down. The scores for Enron, The Royal Family and Fences were officially deemed eligble, although there is no reason to believe that other scores such as Red's would not also be eligible.

It is somewhat telling (and somewhat discouraging) that not only is the Score category weak, but the Best Book category is also weak. Memphis and Everyday Rapture are shoo-ins, because all of the other possibilities have been found to be problematic by at least some people. (The other new musicals this season are Addams Family, All About Me, American Idiot, Come Fly Away, Burn the Floor, Fela, Million Dollar Quartet, and Sondheim on Sondheim.) But two of the problematic ones are still going to get nominated.

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Updated On: 5/3/10 at 10:59 PM

Yero, thanks for the info. The Playbill article about the most recent administrative meeting specifically mentioned the score for The Royal Family as being eligible. (Someone somewhere posted that it wasn't eligible for some reason, which may be why they specifically mentioned it.)

I did not know that Fela turned their petition in too late. It is weird that they would even bother if they know that they missed the cutoff.

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