Tony "Best Musical" Question

They all have to be on Broadway to be nominated.

Yup. To be nominated for a Tony, your show must be ON Broadway, not off. (Which is why there's been so much hullabaloo recently about Spelling Bee transferring to Broadway, for example, because now it's eligible for the Tonys)

No.

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Thanks for that trivia, Margo! That is very interesting!

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Taking the question in reverse, wasn't there controversy about "Asassins" being nominated for Rivival instead of original because it had never 'technically' played on Broadway?

Here's where it can get really obscure. Grease was Tony-eligible because it was produced under the Production contract which is the one that Broadway shows are produced under. (Some are done under a LORT contract now.) The theatre it opened in was the Eden (soon-to-be-Entermedia and now the Village East 7-plex movie theatres) at 2nd Avenue and East 12th Street. The capacity of the theatre was about 1100 then.

Tony-eligible is usually by theatre and/or contract. Hence the Beaumont which uses the LORT contract for the first 10 weeks of the run and if business warrants must switch to the Production contract, is still an eligible house. Back in 1972 the Eden/Entermedia was on the eligible list. By 1981 or so with Joseph... I'm not sure it was on the list any more.

I told you it was obscure.

NB-History Time: Before becoming the Eden in 1969 or so for the original run of Oh, Calcutta (non eligible, I believe), this same theatre was the Casino East for a long run of an old fashioned burlesque show starring a slightly-long-in-the-tooth, former strip queen named Ann Corio called This Was Burlesque and before that was the Phoenix, home of the famed and legendary Phoenix Rep Company where Once Upon a Mattress and The Golden Apple among many many others, originated. It was built as one of the Yiddish theatres that flourished on lower 2nd Avenue. Indeed if you go into what is called Theatre #1 which is pretty much all of the Mezzanine and the front of the orchestra of the original theatre, you will see the landmarked ceiling which has a huge Star of David inlaid into the dome.

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Why wouldn't THE FROGS be considered new, and 12 ANGRY MEN a revival?

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12 Angry Men falls under the Tony "Classics" rule where even though it's never played Broadway, it's been an established and oft-performed work for 50 years and shouldn't be considered new.

The Frogs however played once 30 years ago in the Yale swimming pool and at the time was more of a 45 minutes skit than a full-fledged show. And that 45 minutes version has rarely been perfomed anywhere since. With six news songs from Sondheim and a new-ish book from Nathan Lane, the now two act, two and a half hour show is for all intents and purposes a new work for Broadway.

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Sorry Munk I wasn't arguing, I was just citing that as a type of question that gets asked and debated at Tony time: These are both old shows, why is one of them "New" and one of them a "revival". Margo explained it perfectly-- It wasn't really an issue to me it was just the only Tony question I could think of at the moment.

I have to say that I am so glad I chose to read this thread. Thank you all for the great info. There are so many threads/so little time that I am glad I opened this one.

Was there not talk in 1994 that Timon of Athens could be nominated for Best Play because it can hardly be considered a "oft performed" classic and had never been produced on Broadway? Thus it could have been possible that Kushner could have been up against Shakespeare. And God knows that Angel in America is a better play than Timon.

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Thanks, Margo. But who do you think would have won in '94 if Shakespeare and Kushner had both been up?

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