Tony Award Category Thoughts

[cvleonard]

Posted: 2/14/23 at 11:09am

Okay, so I clearly broke all the unwritten community rules about long posts. 

Here's my two step suggestion about a possible way to solve the Tony Award category concerns:

(1) Change each of the eight current categories so that they are recognized by the gender of the character and not the actor. For example: “Best Performance by a Leading Actress in a Musical” would become “Best Leading Performance as a Female Character in a Musical.” This would allow a nonbinary performer to cleanly fit into consideration for a role they have chosen to play that does have a specific gender identity, without causing their inclusion in that group to be at all tied to their own preferred identification.

(2) Create a ninth performance category called: "Best Performance as a Nonbinary or Nontraditional Character." This category would not be subject to differentiation between musicals and plays, or between "leading" and "featured," so as to ensure the best chance that enough competition in the category would exist to prevent a nomination, let alone a win, from feeling like it was somehow not truly earned or otherwise exists on the spectrum of "tokenism."

If you are intrigued by those two ideas, feel free to read the longer post I wrote below.  

 

**********

Broadway performer Justin David Sullivan’s recent decision to withdraw from consideration for this year’s Tony Awards sparked a challenging conversation that has been increasingly imminent for a while now, and has gained steam much more quickly during the accelerated pace with which our entertainment culture has been willing to take on the issue of gender identity and flexibility over the last several years.

 

Sullivan (a nonbinary actor who uses she, he, and they pronouns) would potentially have been in the running for their portrayal of the nonbinary character May in the musical & Juliet, which is currently running at the Stephen Sondheim Theatre. Because the Tonys, like most major performing awards in the entertainment industry, categorize their nominees by gender, there is not a natural place for the growing number of nonbinary actors, like Sullivan, to comfortably fit in.

 

Leaving aside the forehead-slapping frustration that the Tony folks didn’t foresee this very situation happening years ago, thereby missing out on the chance to show leadership before an actor like Sullivan ended up in this awkward and unnecessary position, there is still an opportunity for the LGBTQ-friendly theatre community to lead the way on this conversation.

 

Many have suggested that the Tony Awards should eliminate gender from the acting categories. There are currently eight acting awards that are routinely given out, four for musicals and four for plays. These follow the style of “Best Performance by a Leading Actress in a Musical” and “Best Performance by a Featured Actor in a Play.” Most of the suggestions surrounding this idea would simply condense these eight awards down to four, pitting actors of all genders against each other in their respective categories.

 

While a noble thought, this seems to be a bad idea for three reasons:

 

1. You cut in half the number of performers ultimately getting individual recognition for their work, which could have a negative impact on their careers. Any decision, no matter how well intentioned, that has a negative impact on performers shouldn’t even be up for discussion.

 

2. Much of the financial success of a Broadway show is often determined by the results of the Tony Awards, and being able to claim that you have one (or more) of those eight performances who won can be the difference between your show staying open and your show closing. You could, of course, take the cynical view that making sure producers can continue to line their pockets with ticket sale revenue isn’t a high priority, but what should be a high priority is making sure that shows do well enough so that their cast and crew are able to stay employed. Recognition from the Tonys in any category — but especially in the acting categories — heavily influences this.

 

3. Cutting the acting categories from eight to four dramatically increases the chance that all four categories will be swept by one “group” in a particular season. For an art form that, despite making positive strides over the last twenty years or so, still tends to have straight-presenting white men at the apex of the industry power structure, this is a scenario that is not difficult to imagine. Being gender-blind in giving out acting awards sounds great until you reach the end of the ceremony and realize that all four of those awards have gone to men or, even worse, all white men. It’s bound to happen.

 

As a side note, some have suggested that you could solve this by doubling the number of nominees and give out two awards in each category instead of one. That would result in the same number of actors being recognized each year, but I fear that you would only create an awkward new problem of inevitable gossip and side conversations about who was number one and who was number two. That feels rather icky, and still doesn’t guarantee adequate representation.

 

So what is to be done?

 

Recognizing that our overall understanding of gender and how we understand and talk about it is a dynamic discussion that will continue to evolve as time passes, and that we should be expecting that whatever change gets made today may need to be changed yet again in the near future as our relationship with gender evolves,  I think there are two steps — the first one simple and the second one slightly more nuanced and tricky — that could be taken.

 

First, instead of categorizing the awards by the gender of the actor, categorize the awards by the gender of the character. For example, “Best Performance by a Leading Actress in a Musical” would become “Best Leading Performance as a Female Character in a Musical.” This would put the onus and responsibility of the identification on the material of the show itself, with perhaps the writer (if they are still alive) making that determination, or the creative team (if the writer has left the gender of the character vague, or the script is old enough — i.e. Shakespeare — where more freedom exists in taking artistic license with changes) making the decision depending on how they chose to intentionally have the character portrayed. This would help nonbinary actors, who presumably intend to be considered for roles of any gender during their careers, to feel secure that their inclusion in a particular category is not a question about how they identify, but instead is tied to how the character they are playing identifies.

 

For example, in an alternate universe in which they originated the roll (rather than appeared as the latest in a long line of replacement actors), a nonbinary performer like Jinkx Monsoon, who is currently playing the female character Mama Morton in Chicago on Broadway, could have been up for the “Best Featured Performance as a Female Character in a Musical” category. Monsoon’s categorization, for award recognition purposes, wouldn’t be tied to their personal identification, but rather to their character’s.

 

That would solve some of the difficulties, but it wouldn’t solve them all. Sullivan, whose performance in & Juliet has rightfully attracted a significant amount of positive attention, could end up portraying a character that does identify strictly as either male or female in their next project (making potential award categorization more easily categorized under this idea), but their current situation of being a nonbinary actor playing a nonbinary character still wouldn’t be solved.

 

Many have made the suggestion to simply expand the categories and add four more acting awards specifically for nonbinary performers (or, in the case of consistency with my suggestion, create four more awards for nonbinary characters). But this is tricky as well, and the best example of why can be seen by looking at Aaron Tveit’s win as “Best Performance by a Leading Actor in a Musical” for his work in Moulin Rouge at the 2020 Tony Awards.

 

You may remember that the 2019-2020 Broadway season was the one cut short by the COVID-19 pandemic, which meant that fewer shows than normal were up for consideration. In fact, only four musicals ended up being considered for awards, two of which (Tina and Jagged Little Pill) didn’t have a clear leading man, and the fourth musical, The Lightning Thief, was not a show whose performances were widely considered worthy of Tony consideration.

 

Tveit ended up being the only actor nominated in his category. While it is technically true that he was not guaranteed to actually win the award — a certain percentage of voters still had to say he deserved it — it’s difficult to imagine a circumstance where he would have been denied the victory. Can you imagine the spectacle of public awkwardness that would have resulted (live on national television) in his category being called, he being identified as the only nominee, and then the presenters opening the envelope and declaring that there was no winner? That would have been awful for everybody — especially Tveit — and would have been a public relations nightmare for the Tony Awards and the greater Broadway community in general.

 

Let’s be clear, Tveit is exceptionally talented, and was almost certainly on track to be a Tony winner at some point, so I’m not at all suggesting there is anything illegitimate about him being recognized for his work in Moulin Rouge. It’s doubtful that there is a large contingent of folks out there who are grumbling under their breath that he didn’t deserve it. But it doesn’t erase the reality that his win does sort of come with an asterisk attached to it, and, right or wrong, it’s hard to not see it as a slightly less significant accomplishment than it may otherwise have been had he faced competition from other actors. I’m sure Tveit, himself, is itching to win a second time, so that he can jokingly begin his acceptance speech with, “For some reason I was a little more nervous today than the last time I was nominated.”

 

Therein lies the challenge with creating four new awards specifically recognizing nonbinary characters (or actors, under the current labeling format). While pinpointing the exact number of people in the United States that identify as nonbinary is next to impossible, some recent studies have suggested that there are just over a million people who identify as such. In a country of over three hundred million people, that’s an extremely small percentage — less than one percent.

 

Even given the theatre community’s relatively progressive efforts (especially recently) to tell more stories about a wide range of identities, lifestyles, and experiences, it shouldn’t be taboo to acknowledge that we still aren’t likely to see a season with more than a handful of significant nonbinary characters — let alone enough to legitimately fill nominee spots on the Tony ballots across four different categories. Some performances, some characters, and some shows just simply aren’t worthy of that level of recognition. It’s okay to say that. This isn’t the third grade science fair where everybody gets a blue ribbon just for participating. Getting a Tony nomination, let along winning the award, needs to mean something.

 

With Tveit’s experience in a “traditional” category as a good example, I would imagine that a performer like Sullivan would not like to feel as though they won a potential award — let alone got nominated — as a nonbinary actor by default. After all, would anybody else in the current season be Sullivan’s competition? J. Harrison Ghee, also a nonbinary actor, is currently playing Jerry/Daphne in Some Like It Hot. If you follow the current method and had the award centered around the actor’s identification, perhaps Sullivan and Ghee would both be up in a theoretical “Best Performance by a Leading Nonbinary Performer in a Musical” category.

 

That’s fine, I suppose. But there’s still just two of them. And despite the fact that they are both wonderful in their respective shows and (in this case) likely would be deserving of a nomination in such a category even if the field of candidates was larger, there’s no guarantee that would have been the case. It’s also entirely possible that one (or both) of their performances could have not been very good. Would they still be nominated anyway, simply because the category needs to be filled up?

 

Adding to the complication is the nuance of their characters’ respective journeys of self-identification. In a scenario where the award is “Best Leading Performance as a Nonbinary Character in a Musical,” Sullivan’s “May” seems to definitely fit the definition, as there is really no question from the very beginning that May is nonbinary. Ghee, on the other hand, is playing a character who, at the outset, seems to be definitely a man, but who, by the end of the show, has embraced the unexpected connection they felt to being a woman. I can see some making the argument that Sullivan’s character is the “true” nonbinary one, and that Ghee’s character might be nonbinary, but the show doesn’t seem to end at a point where Ghee’s character has fully left the self-discovery stage. Consequently, some could argue that the character still fits more neatly into the “male” category, as they haven’t explicitly declared themselves to be otherwise in a final way yet. Either way, I don’t think our somewhat reactionary theatre community is quite ready to deal with that level of nuance.

 

This is where it gets tricky. How do you create a safe space for actors like Sullivan and Ghee to potentially be recognized for their work, while at the same time making sure that there is enough competition for that recognition so that being nominated — let alone winning — can feel valid and not like some sort of awkward, overly progressive tokenism?

 

What you could do, following the template above of identifying the award by the character's gender and not the performer's, is create a ninth category called simply “Best Performance as a Nonbinary Character,” making no differentiation between “lead” and “featured” nor between musicals and plays. For now, at least, it could be a single award recognizing a single performance, regardless of the size of the role or the type of show. 

 

I’m not certain, however, that condensing it that far would even create enough competition. It depends, of course, on the season, but when considering the mathematical representation of nonbinary individuals as a part of our real-world population, it’s still a small enough number — and with the number of shows in a typical Broadway season (Thirty? Forty?) being limited to begin with —  that we could be a long way from seeing, if we ever do, enough nonbinary characters to legitimately fill out one — let alone four — categories.

 

After all, not every role warrants Tony consideration. Wouldn’t the greatest sign of nonbinary characters becoming a “norm” be the inclusion of characters in the world of a show who happen to be obviously nonbinary, but are almost completely nondescript otherwise? What if one of the“Barricade Boys” in Les Miserables had been nonbinary, but wasn’t otherwise elevated from what is a mostly interchangeable group of characters? Does that actor, despite not necessarily standing out as being more worthy of recognition from their peers in the show, get a Tony nod simply because a nominee list needs to be filled out and they or their character happens to be nonbinary? 

 

This is where it gets a little tricky. I’m not entirely satisfied or comfortable with what I’m about to suggest next, but I think it is at least a conversation starter, and I welcome suggestions on how to take this idea and make it stronger.

 

I was thinking about whether or not there are other performances that struggle to neatly fit into an existing Tony category that may benefit from a ninth award being created that they could potentially be included in. Specifically, for example, I think about one of my favorite individual performances from this entire past Broadway season — that of Kennedy Kanagawa’s portrayal of “Milky White” in the recently-closed, but enormously successful, revival of Into the Woods. Kanagawa managed to give such an unexpectedly touching and creative performance that, in a star-studded cast doing a beautiful show, he was the one I couldn’t stop thinking about when it was over. But since the role was almost pure puppetry, and the character of Milky White didn’t sing at all, fitting Kanagawa into consideration in the most appropriate current category of “Best Performance by a Featured Actor in a Musical” wasn’t really logical. But, other than that, there currently is no other place to really consider a performance like his.

 

I also started thinking about what other standout “nontraditional” performances have either gotten overlooked completely, or awkwardly pigeonholed into categories that aren’t quite right. In 1998, the Tonys made history by nominating Alice Ripley and Emily Skinner together for their roles as the conjoined twins Daisy and Violet Hilton in the musical Side Show (they ultimately lost to Natasha Richardson’s performance in Cabaret). Would the uniqueness of their joint performance been better suited for a separate category? Or what about the team of puppeteers and voice actors who brought King Kong to life in the 2018-2019 season? Despite the show’s material being subpar, the physical creation of Kong was an enormously (pun intended) amazing spectacle, even winning its designer Sonny Tilders a Special Tony Award in 2019. But could the team that actually brought Kong to life be considered as a “group” nontraditional performance?

 

The overall problem that needs to be solved is how to properly recognize performances that don’t fit neatly into current — or “traditional” — categories in a way that feels both genuine AND legitimate (from a competitive standpoint). So taking all of what I’ve said into consideration, I would create that ninth performance category, and call it “Best Performance as a Nonbinary or Nontraditional Character.” The key, of course, is wording it very carefully, because one needs to be sensitive to the appearance of seeming to group a nonbinary human character with, you know, a cow puppet. The grammar nerd in me believes that if you called the category “Best Performance as a Nonbinary/Nontraditional Character” (note the backslash instead of the word “or&rdquo, you would be inappropriately suggesting that the nonbinary character and the cow puppet are the same type of “nontraditional” character, which is clearly not a good way to present it. But by using the word “or” in the category label, I think you allow for a greater intention of distinction to be interpreted, provided folks are reading and understanding that label with intention. 

 

In a way, it’s a little bit like the Golden Globe tradition of having a category for “Drama” and a category for “Musical or Comedy.” The Globes apparently (and rightfully) recognized, at some point, that there weren’t going to be enough musicals each year to warrant their own category without running the risk of a particular film and group of actors winning almost by default due to lack of competition (regardless of their actual merit), so they lumped them in with comedies (presumably, at least in part, because of an arguably defensible bias that comedies on their own may also not produce enough performances that are actually award worthy either). It’s not perfect, but it works. 

 

What I’ve suggested is not a perfect solution, but since I don’t think that a perfect solution exists, I do think it’s at least a reasonable solution for now. But to consider the conversation done would be a mistake. I think that as our own language and relationship with how we think about and discuss gender continues to evolve over time, this will all need to be evaluated — perhaps annually — to see if there are better or more currently appropriate ways to group and label categories to achieve the goal of recognizing worthy performances in the most appropriate way.

Updated On: 2/14/23 at 11:09 AM

[Huss417]

Posted: 2/14/23 at 11:11am

This is too much reading for me. Sorry.

[Call_me_jorge]

Posted: 2/14/23 at 11:21am

What was the answer?

[Jordan Catalano]

Posted: 2/14/23 at 11:27am

Is there an audible version of this post?

[Mr. Wormwood]

Posted: 2/14/23 at 12:14pm

There's a lot of discussion on this topic already on this thread: https://forum.broadwayworld.com/readmessage.php?thread=1154876

To be fair, that entire thread is probably not as long as this first post... what's that meme?

I ain't reading all that
I'm happy for u tho
Or sorry that happened

[chrishuyen]

Posted: 2/14/23 at 12:32pm

Not sure if this post was meant to summarize the posts that were made in the thread that Mr. Wormwood linked, but much of this discussion has already happened on that thread, including just about all of the points you made.

[Phillyguy]

Posted: 2/14/23 at 12:39pm

This is way to long to read. I’m not sure you can blame Tony for not taking a stance earlier because there is no good solution. You are pitting an important social issue of the last century (gender equality) against the social issue of the day (gender inclusivity). No matter how design the program, you will upset some people. 
 

Adding to that, there’s a financial layer to this. Changes to the awards can have a major impact on the commercial success of the shows. There probably is some inertia to fix something that isn’t broken. 

[TotallyEffed]

Posted: 2/14/23 at 12:41pm

i ain’t reading all that

i’m happy for u tho

or sorry that happened

[Jarethan]

Posted: 2/14/23 at 1:07pm

I stopped reading after the first paragraph.  I don’t remember the other thread, but simple answer IMO: give two awards in every category.  So lead performance in a musical might be won by 2 women or any other combo.  In such a scenario, for example, Streisand and Channing could have both won and Bert Lahr, who won for a 10 week flop, would have been happy to be nominated.