Thoughts On The 59th Annual Tony Awards

By Mark Rabinowitz in Current Events on June 5, 2005 8:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Liev Schreiber picked up the first award of the evening, winning for Best Featured Actor in a Play for Glengarry Glen Ross, beating out two of his castmates, Gordon Clapp and Alan Alda, as well as David Harbour from Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf (which I believe was once called, simply, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf) and Michael Stuhlbarg from The Pillowman. Schreiber, winning in his first nominated role was very gracious in his acceptance speech, saying, in part: "I'm completely shocked. This is the community that I've always dreamed of being a part of." Interestingly enough, he forgot to thank David Mamet, the author of the play. D'oh!

Odd Censorship

Anyone have any idea why CBS thought that they needed to mute the lines "coming out my ass" and "hummers in my Hummer?" Were they that risque?

Line of the Evening, So Far:

On accepting his 9th Tony, this year for Best Direction of a Musical, Mike Nichols - "My love to those who have not won tonight and I just want to remind you of my motto: Cheer up! Life isn't everything."

Bad Direction:

At the end of the traditional tribute to members of the Broadway community who passed away this past season, the folks running the telecast zoomed in on Jesse L. Martin who was starting to sing and clipped off the face of Martin's Law & Order castmate Jerry Orbach.

Lame.

Uh Oh! Gotta Get To The News!

So the big award time comes. Monty Python's Spamalot wins (hooray! Saw it last night. It's great!) and the orchestra plays off the producer! The biggest award of the night and they don't even let Eric Idle speak. Feh!