Any actor playing a showy central role in a revival of Christopher Hampton's 1985 play Les Liaisons Dangereuses is being set up for failure. Comparisons to previous interpreters of the Vicomte de Valmont—Alan Rickman on stage and John Malkovich (Dangerous Liaisons) and Colin Firth (Valmont) on film—are likely, if not unavoidable. But Ben Daniels, making his Broadway debut, seems to have enough confidence not to care about anyone else's performance, and the élan and depth to give a stirring one of his own.
"Daniels retains a smooth aristocratic bearing," David Sheward wrote in Back Stage's review. "He also exposes Valmont's struggle toward decency as he reluctantly falls in love with the woman whose reputation he has decided to ruin."
The sexually charged gamesmanship and verbal jousting between Valmont and the Marquise de Merteuil (Laura Linney) form the play's plot, but it's the Vicomte's fall, rise, and fall that give the story its soul, upon which Daniels makes a unique impression.
For this role, Daniels won a Theatre World Award and was nominated for an Outer Critics Circle Award for outstanding actor in a play. This is Daniels' first Tony nomination.
An aging jurist giving a 90-minute lecture on his life's work does not, on the surface, make for good drama. But when the jurist is Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall and the actor portraying him is Laurence Fishburne, it makes for an engaging, often moving play.
Marshall, who died in 1993, was the first African American to sit on the Supreme Court and one of the leading figures in the battle for civil rights. Before joining the court, he was a litigator for the NAACP who deftly and vigorously picked apart the doctrine of "separate but equal" through a series of legal victories—culminating in the Supreme Court's 1954 ruling Brown v. Board of Education.
Marshall's journey deserves a better format than the one chosen by Thurgood playwright George Stevens Jr.: a man recounting his story chronologically. Fishburne overcomes these dramatic limitations through a performance that stirs as much as it informs. Most in the audience already know the outcome of the Brown decision, which officially, if not wholly, ended "separate but equal" as judicial doctrine. But Fishburne makes the retelling riveting, summoning all the power and glory contained within it.
For this role, Fishburne won Drama Desk and Outer Critics Circle awards for outstanding solo performance. He won the 1992 Tony for best featured actor in a play for Two Trains Running.
It would seem a thankless role, being the milquetoast friend of a scheming playboy engaged to three stewardesses in post-pill, pre-AIDS Paris. But in Boeing-Boeing, a revival of Marc Camoletti's 1960s sex farce, the cipher is actually the hero—and Mark Rylance gives a commanding and convincing performance as Robert, a man clearly out of his depth.
Robert's verbal and physical fumbling make audiences both cringe and laugh as he tries to forestall the catastrophe of the three fiancées bumping into one another in the apartment of his friend Bernard (Bradley Whitford). "Rylance underplays Robert's astonished reactions to Bernard's amorous adventures," critic David Sheward wrote in Back Stage. "As complications ensue, he grows more desperate, until he reaches a fever pitch of epic comic proportions."
With all its manic, door-slamming energy, the story is at best an overly ambitious episode of Three's Company. But Rylance's understatement and patience allow him to find humor in unlikely places, such as a series of goodbyes with the maid, Berthe (Christine Baranski), an exchange that is nothing but a feeble attempt to get her out of the room. Robert's passive-aggressive maneuvering won't budge Berthe, but Rylance's soft-sell performance gives Boeing-Boeing a welcome lift.
For this role, Rylance won a Theatre World Award and a Drama Desk Award for outstanding actor in a play. This is his first Tony nomination.
In Tom Stoppard's sprawling, intellectual epic…wait a minute. Weren't we writing that bloated prepositional phrase this time last year, when the playwright's The Coast of Utopia went on to win seven Tony Awards, a record for a play? No matter: Actor Rufus Sewell infused Stoppard's latest heady masterwork with his soulful performance as Jan, an energetic Czech dissident living in England. After the Soviets crush the Prague Spring, Jan returns to his native land to try to save socialism, but his true love is a record collection that includes the Rolling Stones, the Velvet Underground, Pink Floyd, and the Czech band the Plastic People of the Universe.
Jan's journey involves time in jail and the dawning of glasnost and perestroika and ends with Czechoslovakia's post-Communist renewal in 1991. Stoppard's play fails to convincingly connect all the dots among communism, crushed ideals, rock 'n' roll, and rebirth, but Sewell's multifaceted performance brought a much-needed urgency to the story. His wasn't the screaming guitar solo that makes your hair stand on end, but rather the steady thrumming of the bass that gives the song its groove.
For this role, Sewell was nominated for a Drama Desk Award for outstanding actor in a play. This is his first Tony nomination.
Rupert Goold's reimagining of Macbeth in Soviet Russia is a bloody, horrific affair that started in Chichester, England, moved to the Brooklyn Academy of Music, and then transferred to Broadway's Lyceum Theatre. Goold limns the theme of treachery disguised as decency, and who better to help carry that out than Patrick Stewart? By subverting his usual hero's mien, the Royal Shakespeare Company alumnus delivers a performance that's surprising and powerful and, in the end, full of frailty.
"Patrick Stewart skillfully conveys the murderous thane's journey from loyal subject to treacherous tyrant," wrote David Sheward in Back Stage's review. "He shows the cracks in Macbeth's composure with small gestures and suppressed cries, then undergoes a transformation to superhuman killer when the witches convince him he's invulnerable."
In addition to its gory doings, Macbeth is a story of a mental breakdown, which Stewart handles with equal aplomb. Of his acting, Ben Brantley wrote in The New York Times, "His performance is the first I have seen to completely realize what Harold Bloom calls a 'tragedy of the imagination.' "
For this role, Stewart was nominated for an Outer Critics Circle Award for outstanding actor in a play. This is his first Tony nomination.
—Andrew Salomon
After her Tony-nominated Broadway debut last year in Eugene O'Neill's A Moon for the Misbegotten, Eve Best impressed critics by seamlessly slipping into the role of Ruth in Harold Pinter's The Homecoming. The British-born actor's portrayal of an enigmatic wife, mother, and prostitute was hailed by Back Stage critic Leonard Jacobs as not only a "terrific performance" but a "180-degree turn" from her Josie Hogan in Misbegotten.
In Pinter's absurdist family drama, Teddy (James Frain) returns to his North London home after nine years to see his embittered father, Max (Ian McShane); his uncle; and his brothers. Ruth stirs up an already volatile family pot when she arrives as Teddy's wife and the mother of his children, capturing the attention, animosity, and desire of the chauvinistic all-male family.
Best created an emotionally complex Ruth, who fully grasps the rules of sex games—including the fact that when men are around, less is more, even if you're the most intelligent one in the room. Through subtle transformations, Best's Ruth was at once a victim and the powerful nucleus of Pinter's perplexing family.
For this role, Best was nominated for an Outer Critics Circle Award for outstanding actress in a play. She was nominated for a Tony in 2007.
Deanna Dunagan knows how to make a stage—indeed, an entire world—revolve around her. Violet, the cantankerous, drug-addicted matriarch of the Weston family in Tracy Letts' August: Osage County, is an ideal role for a 60-plus female actor eager to dominate a cast of 13 and say things as a character that one just can't say in real life. In his review, Back Stage's David Sheward compared Violet to such monumental characters as Hedda Gabler, Madame Rose, and Blanche DuBois; Dunagan gets credit for lifting Violet into those ranks.
In the play, the entire Weston family comes to visit Violet's Oklahoma homestead after the disappearance of the family patriarch, only to find the gathering centered on Violet's mouth cancer, her all-consuming addiction, and most of all her prickly attacks on everyone in the room. As August progresses, Dunagan transforms Violet from a victim of pathologies to a monstrous creature with an unrelenting tongue. The dark comic role has charmed and disturbed critics, who are undoubtedly grateful that Violet is fictional and not a member of their own families.
For this role, Dunagan won a Theatre World Award and the Drama Desk and Outer Critics Circle awards for outstanding actress in a play. This is her first Tony nomination.
Critics who loved Kate Fleetwood in Macbeth often devoted only one sentence to her after offering a litany of praise for co-star Patrick Stewart and the production's timeless, morguelike set design. Up against a Star Trek veteran and a bloody Shakespeare classic and with no prior Broadway experience, Fleetwood still managed to wow Tony nominators with her original, emotive portrayal of Lady Macbeth, who enables the thane to murder his way to power only to be racked with guilt and paranoia later.
For director Rupert Goold (who is Fleetwood's husband), the story's political assassinations inspired a Stalinist angle, along with three mysterious, syringe-wielding nurses reminiscent of the masked surgeons in the dystopian film Brazil. With severe, makeup-enhanced cheekbones and noir hair, Fleetwood looks the part of a Stalinist version of anyone. But the British actor also brings a long Shakespearean résumé and creates a powerful, horror-film portrait of Lady Macbeth, transforming—in a refreshingly transparent style—from bloodthirsty vixen to guilt-ridden sleepwalker.
This is Fleetwood's first Tony nomination.
Critics had no trouble swallowing a softer side of S. Epatha Merkerson, best known for her role as Lt. Van Buren on Law & Order, in William Inge's Come Back, Little Sheba. She played Lola Delaney, a chatty, somewhat ditsy housewife who lives a sheltered life with her recovering-alcoholic husband (Kevin Anderson). This revival of the 1950 play was in fact acclaimed more for Merkerson's performance than for the play, which was deemed somewhat"dated" by Back Stage critic David Sheward.
Merkerson's performance found new life in Lola, a woman who grew accustomed to playing the fool and relying on her looks when she was young and who now, deep in middle age, must fight old habits to confront adult issues, including her husband's deep-seated resentment of her. The New York Times commented at length about Merkerson's eyes, how they project a "clarity that scalds."
For this role, Merkerson was nominated for an Outer Critics Circle Award for outstanding actress in a play. She was nominated for a Tony in 1990.
With a Pulitzer Prize and seven Tony nominations, August: Osage County has received plenty of recognition since it moved to Broadway from Chicago's Steppenwolf Theatre Company. So has actor Amy Morton, a Steppenwolf ensemble member for 11 years who plays Barbara Fordham, the eldest daughter of the deeply dysfunctional Weston family. Morton made her Broadway debut in 2001 as the notoriously sinister Nurse Ratched in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, another Steppenwolf show to come to the Big Apple, but it's her steely, complex character in August that has made Tony nominators pay attention.
As played by Morton, Barbara matches her pathologically cruel mother, Violet (played by fellow Tony nominee Deanna Dunagan), in some ways yet maintains a deep self-awareness. Foul-mouthed and frustrated with life, Barbara demeans her husband, her pot-smoking daughter, and the entire family just as her mother would, only she does it with a self-loathing twist. On stage for almost all the play's three-and-a-half-hour running time, Morton embodies a kind of intermediary—between a family laden with mind-boggling tragedy and a voyeuristic audience in dire need of human connection.
For this role, Morton was nominated for a Drama Desk Award for outstanding actress in a play. This is her first Tony nomination.
—Halley Bondy
Daniel Evans brilliantly portrays the deeply layered title character in Sam Buntrock's elegant, minimalist revival of Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine's Pulitzer Prize–winning musical. In the play's two acts, the versatile and passionate Evans depicts two distinct but related Georges: Georges Seurat, the 19th-century French painter, and a modern-day conceptual artist who is not sure if he is Seurat's great- grandson. Yet common to both Georges is the idea of the man as artist, torn between his work and his personal relationships.
In playing both artists, "Evans' body seems to pulse with irresistible energy as he transmits his ideas either onto canvas or into electronic images," wrote Back Stage critic David Sheward. "He also physicalizes the war between his artistic and emotional needs." Evans infuses not only his songs but his entire performance with vigor, while conveying a deep exhaustion as both Georges try to please various patrons, critics, and themselves. Evans' performance has many beautiful and disturbing facets and conflicts, emotional and mental and all unforgettable.
For this role, Evans was nominated for Drama Desk and Outer Critics Circle awards for outstanding actor in a musical. This is his first Tony nomination.
In the Heights, a vibrant musical about the Latino denizens of Upper Manhattan, finds author Lin-Manuel Miranda making a remarkable Broadway debut as Usnavi, a cheerful bodega owner. Even among strongly delineated characters and story lines, Miranda is an impressive standout; his performance is fresh, alive, invigorating, fearless, funny, and irresistibly moving.
Even more impressive, the New York City–born actor (a founding member of the hip-hop theatre troupe Freestyle Love Supreme) also conceived the show and spent years writing its score—a spicy mix of freestyle rap, salsa, and Latin beats—so Miranda's energy thrums with genuine heart. In the Heights, which opened Off-Broadway early last year and transferred to Broadway this season, is a tremendous accomplishment that owes a great deal of its success to its daring star, who poured his soul and imagination into every bit of the show, including his remarkable character.
This is Miranda's first Tony nomination. He has also been nominated for a Tony for best original score.
An acclaimed singer-songwriter and solo artist (he formed his band the Negro Problem in the early 1990s), Stew is making his Broadway debut in Passing Strange, a quirky, clever, funny autobiographical show that he conceived and composed with Heidi Rodewald, who is Tony-nominated with him for best original score and best orchestrations.
With poignancy and an astonishing dramatic and musical range, Stew plays the gimlet-eyed narrator of a story that stars his younger self, played by Daniel Breaker (who is Tony-nominated for best featured actor in a musical). That means Stew must watch all the flaws and foibles of his past play out unrelentingly before him every night. As Back Stage critic Leonard Jacobs wrote, the audience "will no doubt identify with the show's central character, a wanderlust-driven black man…on a quest for his soul, for the core of self-identity." But Stew, wrote critic Charles Isherwood in The New York Times, "can also play a mean guitar, and when necessary he strides the stage like an evangelical preacher, or a preening rocker, to whip the audience into a froth."
His performance is at once measured and exuberant, calm and frenetic, arrogant and humble—a delicate balance, one absolutely true to life.
This is Stew's first Tony nomination. He won Drama Desk Awards for outstanding music (with Heidi Rodewald) and outstanding lyrics. He has also been nominated for Tonys for best original score, best orchestrations (with Rodewald), and best original book.
This category is awash in breakout talent, as Paulo Szot joins Broadway's ranks with a marvelous debut as the dashing Emile de Becque in South Pacific. An internationally renowned baritone, he is best known for his roles in Carmen and Le Nozze di Figaro with the New York City Opera, and he treats the audience to his beautiful voice in "Some Enchanted Evening" in the very first scene, setting up an electric performance that only grows in energy and excitement as the romance between Emile and Kelli O'Hara's Nellie Forbush deepens.
Szot clearly relishes the romance, the moods, and the potency of his character, bringing to the stage both the technical precision of a masterful singer and the emotional power of an absorbing actor.
For this role, Szot won a Theatre World Award and a Drama Desk Award for outstanding actor in a musical and was nominated for an Outer Critics Circle Award for outstanding actor in a musical. This is his first Tony nomination.
Last nominated for a Tony for playing Frank Butler (opposite Bernadette Peters) in an acclaimed revival of Annie Get Your Gun, Tom Wopat is once again hearing Broadway's cheers. Wopat, whose credits stretch back to 1978 and include seven seasons on TV's The Dukes of Hazzard, has created in A Catered Affair a character very different from those we've seen him play before. As Tom Hurley, the middle-aged cabdriver husband in the John Bucchino–Harvey Fierstein tuner, he plays a man who suffers through daily life in silence, putting up with his wife and somehow soldiering on despite losing his beloved son in the service.
As his neglected daughter's nuptials come to the fore, Wopat's Tom does a slow burn, hiding his anger until finally, in one explosive musical number, the character's long bottled-up feelings burst out. Back Stage critic Leonard Jacobs described Wopat's acting as "empathetic" but also noted that his character "lacks the words I love you," helping to explain his explosion. Wopat brings a sadness and depth to a portrait full of penetrating moments.
For this role, Wopat was nominated for a Drama Desk Award for outstanding featured actor in a musical. He was nominated for a Tony in 1999.
—Anna Bengel
After her performances as Penny Pingleton in 2002's Hairspray and Audrey in the 2004 revival of Little Shop of Horrors, Broadway insiders and audiences began to wonder when someone would write a show for Kerry Butler to star in. We can now thank Douglas Carter Beane not only for writing a leave-'em-in-stitches parody of the 1980 flop movie musical Xanadu, but for tailoring the twin role of the Greek muse Clio and Kira, Clio's earthbound doppelgänger, for this playful and insouciant musical-comedy artist. We can also thank Xanadu's crackerjack director, Christopher Ashley, and perhaps most of all the musical's casting director, Cindy Tolan.
Butler has any number of qualities that make her one of Broadway's most sought-after talents. She has the kind of comic timing that can't be taught or analyzed. She sings much like the goddess she plays in Xanadu and gives patrons of the Helen Hayes Theatre the bonus of being one fierce whipsaw on roller skates. And she makes such an attractive counterpart to her co-star Cheyenne Jackson that you'll be tempted to sing "Magic" or "Suddenly" right along with her.
This is Butler's first Tony nomination.
The National Hurricane Center gives those torrential storms their names, but the only name for the swirling cyclone now occurring eight times a week at the St. James Theatre is Patti—as in LuPone. Her portrayal of Madame Rose in Gypsy is likely to stand as the definitive one for a generation. And after Gypsy revivals in 1974 (starring Angela Lansbury), 1989 (starring Tyne Daly), and 2003 (starring Bernadette Peters), LuPone's work arguably summates all the Broadway Roses who have preceded her, including the original, Ethel Merman.
It's not that LuPone coos through such songs as "Some People," "Small World," and "You'll Never Get Away From Me" or plows through Gypsy's powerhouse numbers, "Everything's Coming Up Roses" and "Rose's Turn," like a bulldozer at a demolition derby. It's that she acts as well as she sings and is illustrating for Broadway once more that there's virtually nothing this Juilliard-trained stage creature cannot lovingly transform into her own.
For this role, LuPone won the Drama Desk, Outer Critics Circle, and Drama League awards for outstanding actress in a musical. She won the Tony for best actress in a musical in 1980 for Evita and was nominated for Tonys in 1976, 1988, and 2006.
For nearly 60 years, the title South Pacific failed to grace a Broadway marquee. And as memories lingered of Mary Martin's performance as Nellie Forbush in the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical, it seemed obvious that anyone who played Nellie in a future Broadway revival would have big shoes to fill.
Then along came Kelli O'Hara—already a Broadway star with her performances in Sweet Smell of Success, The Light in the Piazza, and The Pajama Game—to gamely tuck Nellie Forbush under her arm, give her a tender caress, an injection of spunk, and the depth charge of her glorious soprano, and help Lincoln Center Theater's extraordinary revival of South Pacific wash away almost all nostalgia for the indelible performances of yesteryear.
Besides possessing outer and inner beauty—and the most enviable voice to grace the musical theatre since Audra McDonald—O'Hara, like McDonald, brings an often breathtaking intelligence to her acting. Watch her sit, disturbingly motionless, as her take on "A Wonderful Guy" unfolds. It is just one example of O'Hara's meticulous, unforgettable work in a mesmerizing revival.
For this role, O'Hara was nominated for Drama Desk and Outer Critics Circle awards for outstanding actress in a musical. She was nominated for a Tony in 2005 and 2006.
When she burst onto the Broadway scene in 1989's Jerome Robbins' Broadway and as Miss Adelaide in the 1992 revival of Guys and Dolls, for which she won a Tony, Faith Prince was pegged, understandably, as an offbeat comic performer with a pixie face and clarion voice. The years since then have been good to Prince, with roles in plays (What's Wrong With This Picture?, Noises Off) as well as musicals (Little Me, Bells Are Ringing), plus concerts and opportunities in other media. But the theatre world has awaited a project to showcase all of Prince's gifts, from her ear for dialogue to her buoyant way with a character-driven lyric. In this sense, A Catered Affair is manna from musical heaven.
Combining subdued humor with a story centered on her character's role as mother, wife, and lost soul, Prince electrifies A Catered Affair and turns the score by John Bucchino and the delicate book by Harvey Fierstein into a very special product. An intimate chamber musical, the piece itself may not be to everyone's liking, but there's no way not to be moved by Prince's work. She is a theatrical treasure and must be celebrated for it.
For this role, Prince was nominated for Drama Desk and Outer Critics Circle awards for outstanding actress in a musical. She won the Tony for best actress in a musical in 1992 for Guys and Dolls. She was nominated for a Tony in 1989 and 2001.
Watching her powder her face in a mirror, George Seurat, the main character in Act 1 of Sunday in the Park With George, wonders what Dot, his paramour, sees. As he waxes rhapsodic over her pink lips, red cheeks, wide eyes, round face, and tiny pout, you notice Jenna Russell, who plays the role in Roundabout Theatre Company's beautiful revival of the award-winning 1984 tuner, and realize she has all those qualities.
Yet Russell is not just a pretty face. Much as Bernadette Peters, who created Dot, leveraged her character's contours through to Act 2, which occurs 100 years later, Russell gives a heartbreaking, insightful performance that brims with wisdom, humor, and emotional veracity. Indeed, Act 2 is rough going: Russell plays Marie, Seurat's illegitimate daughter, at age 98 having to watch her grandson—George, also an artist—struggle just as Seurat did in Act 1.
Russell's voice is both exquisite and a cauterizing conductor of raw feeling. It's also as versatile as that of fellow Tony nominee Daniel Evans, who plays both of the Georges. Not only does she deliver a double pleasure in this lovely Sunday; she's a model for what true onstage collaboration looks like.
For this role, Russell won a Theatre World Award and was nominated for Drama Desk and Outer Critics Circle awards for outstanding actress in a musical. This is her first Tony nomination.
—Leonard Jacobs
The charming con man is not a new type on stage, but Bobby Cannavale's Dennis added a new dimension of creepiness and sexuality in Theresa Rebeck's Mauritius. Evoking David Mamet's American Buffalo, Mauritius explores the machinations and gamesmanship among three foul-mouthed rogues (played by Cannavale, F. Murray Abraham, and Dylan Baker) determined to obtain a valuable stamp from two beleaguered, warring sisters (Alison Pill and Katie Finneran). Chief among the petty criminals is Dennis, a chameleonlike figure who seamlessly slips from role to role. Whether seducing one sister and then the other or negotiating with his partners, Cannavale was wholly convincing.
But just beneath his earnest persona, Cannavale lets it be known that Dennis is a con man—or maybe he's just playing a con man; either way, the character disarms us, at every moment calculating his gains and losses and planning his next move. In the end, the audience is still unsure whether Dennis is a sleazy cad or something a little more complex—a tribute to Cannavale's performance.
This is Cannavale's first Tony nomination.
Seeing an actor suppress murderous rage beneath an icy smile can quickly become tiresome, and it's a potential pitfall for any actor tackling the pimp Lenny in Harold Pinter's 40-year-old drama The Homecoming, a play that adds a whole new level to dysfunctional family relations.
But Raúl Esparza's Lenny was never a Johnny One-Note. While always sinister, he was also the needy infant: pouting, petulant, and demanding. An uneducated lower-class Brit, Lenny puts on airs, most significantly in his speech, with his vocal affectations becoming a subtle form of assault and mockery. Esparza's body language was also captivatingly thuggish: His chest puffed up, his shoulders thrown back, leading with his crotch, his walk was wonderfully coarse and vulgar. Although Esparza's Lenny was a repellent character beyond redemption, he was totally understandable.
For this role, Esparza won a Drama Desk Award as part of the show's ensemble and was nominated for an Outer Critics Circle Award for outstanding featured actor in a play. He was nominated for Tonys in 2004 and 2007.
Conleth Hill had his work cut out for him as the broad comic relief in Conor McPherson's The Seafarer, a play exploring themes of degradation and redemption. Set in Dublin on Christmas Eve, it tells the story of heavy-drinking buddies who've gathered to guzzle the night away when an unexpected guest intrudes: The devil has come to claim the soul of the host, Sharky (David Morse), with whom he had an earlier deal. But Sharky isn't the only lost soul. So are the others, including the bumbling Ivan Curry (Hill), who chooses to be with his pals on Christmas Eve rather than his nagging wife, a woman he can't stand. Nearsighted and drunk, he has lost his glasses and spends much of the play staggering about looking for them.
With facial expressions to spare, Hill is the classic physical comic, nowhere more vividly than during a high-stakes poker game with Satan. In an increasing alcoholic stupor, Hill's character held his cards pressed against his face in an effort to see them. It was inspired lunacy while at the same time hinting at the man's pitiful state.
For this role, Hill won a Drama Desk Award for outstanding featured actor in a play. He was nominated for a Tony in 2001.
In an extraordinary ensemble, Jim Norton was a standout as Richard, the utterly delighted (and delightful) aging drunk who needs little more than a refill to be well with the world. Always charming and witty, with the famous Irish gift of gab, he has a pleasure with life that's in no way marred by his total dependence on his younger brother Sharky (David Morse). Richard is blind and occasionally incontinent, but that's no big deal for a man without self-consciousness.
Still, he is keenly aware of what's going on around him, and in his own way he's quite the gamester. When it suits his purpose, Richard can also be irascible, whiny, or self-promoting as he hosts a group of fellow drunks on Christmas Eve. But there are darker layers here as well. Like the play's other losers, Richard is alone and lost. His sad eyes tell the real story. So does a rage unleashing a lifetime of resentment against his brother. What's stunning about that moment is that while there's no hint it's going to happen, when it does it's not unexpected. Norton's performance was one of the most memorable this season.
For this role, Norton was nominated for an Outer Critics Circle Award for outstanding featured actor in a play. This is his first Tony nomination.
Playing a character in a madcap farce is tricky for even the most seasoned actor. Just imagine the challenge of playing four. David Pittu pulled it off seamlessly and to hilarious effect this season in David Ives' adaptation of Mark Twain's 1898 play Is He Dead?. In this lighthearted concoction about a debt-ridden failed painter (played by Norbert Leo Butz) who fakes his death to boost the value of his work, Pittu played a foppish art collector, a detective disguised as a valet, the king of France, and an art critic.
In each of these clearly delineated portrayals, Pittu always managed to strike the right comic note—one suited to the spirit of the play without being excessively over the top. His performances also meshed perfectly with those of the other actors. But most impressive (unless you'd checked the program), there was no way to have known there weren't four actors on stage instead of just Pittu moving effortlessly from role to role.
For this role, Pittu was nominated for an Outer Critics Circle Award for outstanding featured actor in a play. He was nominated for a Tony in 2007.
—Simi Horwitz
Tom Stoppard has often been accused of writing plays that are academically brilliant but emotionally arid. His latest work, Rock 'n' Roll, covers numerous weighty subjects, including the rise and fall of communism in Czechoslovakia, Sapphic poetry, and the music of Pink Floyd. But it's also the protracted love story of Jan, a Czech intellectual, and Esme, a British flower child of the '60s who becomes disillusioned during the last century's final decades. Repeating her London performance in the dual role of the adult Esme and her mother, Eleanor, Sinead Cusack provided this challenging brain buster with its emotional core.
In her early scenes, she harrowingly portrayed Eleanor in her battle with cancer while dissecting Sappho's odes. For the play's second half, as Eleanor's daughter, she captured Esme's distracted attempts to pick up the pieces of her shattered idealism.
Cusack is a too infrequent visitor to our shores. She last appeared on Broadway in the Royal Shakespeare Company's repertory productions of Cyrano de Bergerac and Much Ado About Nothing in 1985 and was seen Off-Broadway in the Irish Repertory Theatre's staging of Our Lady of Sligo in 2000.
For this role, Cusack was nominated for a Drama Desk Award for outstanding featured actress in a play. She was nominated for a Tony in 1985.
As one of three stereotypical airline hostesses in love with the same duplicitous architect in the farcical Boeing-Boeing, Mary McCormack is required to play an amalgam of sexual and cultural clichés. Gretchen is a voracious, domineering German who would not be uncomfortable in leather brandishing a riding crop.
In keeping with Matthew Warchus' over-the-top direction of this 1960s bedroom romp, McCormack takes Gretchen's fevered intensity to a dizzying level. Upon her first entrance, she is so overcome with passion for Bernard, the triple-timing playboy, that she kisses the rug he has just walked on and nearly molests the maid Berthe. When she encounters Robert, Bernard's provincial friend, she turns a misunderstanding over the location of a town into a declaration of war. "You are lying!" she screams when he can't remember the same details she does. McCormack commits so totally to these absurd actions that they seem perfectly logical and organic to her character, drawing enormous laughs.
Of course, much of the comedy in farce depends on the performers' physical life, and McCormack endows Gretchen with a scary athletic vitality. Ben Brantley in The New York Times praised McCormack's "glorious Olympian strut and wide-legged, take-no-prisoners stance."
This is McCormack's first Tony nomination.
As earnest presidential speechwriter Clarice Bernstein in David Mamet's raucous political comedy November, Laurie Metcalf could have easily slipped into caricature. Like every other character in the cartoonish script, Bernstein is a clichéd figure—a tree-hugging liberal and a lesbian just back from China with an adopted baby. She blackmails her boss, President Smith, by promising to write a career-saving speech, but only if he'll marry Bernstein and her partner on TV.
The situation could have been played strictly for laughs, but Metcalf convinces us that the impending wedding is the most important event in her life. The way she girlishly flounces about in a frilly bridal gown is simultaneously comic and endearing. When she risks her life to save the president, her heartfelt declaration of her belief in democracy breaks through the comedy like a knife.
Metcalf first came to prominence with a stunning performance in Steppenwolf Theatre Company's revival of Balm in Gilead, winning a 1983 Obie as the romantic Darlene, lost in a world of prostitutes and drug addicts. She then gained wide recognition and three Emmys as sarcastic sister Jackie on the sitcom Roseanne. It's exciting to have her back on stage.
For this role, Metcalf won an Outer Critics Circle Award for outstanding featured actress in a play. This is her first Tony nomination.
As a teenager, Martha Plimpton came to fame through Calvin Klein jeans commercials and roles in The Goonies and the TV series Family Ties. She could have pursued a career as a model or in lowest-common-denominator film and TV fare. Instead she joined Chicago's Steppenwolf Theatre Company and appeared there and in many prestigious New York stage productions, winning an Obie for Hobson's Choice and a Drama Desk Award for last season's Tom Stoppard trilogy, The Coast of Utopia.
This year she's Tony-nominated for Manhattan Theatre Club's revival of Caryl Churchill's 1982 drama of class and sexual roles, Top Girls. Except for Elizabeth Marvel as Marlene, a hard-edged executive, each member of the seven-actor ensemble plays more than one role. Plimpton astonishes by doubling as Pope Joan, the possibly apocryphal ninth-century academic who rose to the papacy disguised as a man, and as Angie, Marlene's dull- witted, determined niece. Joan is a fantasy figure attending a luncheon for Marlene with other famous women from history and literature; she exudes erudition. As Angie, Plimpton bursts with energy and anger. Whether threatening to kill her mother or prancing about in a favorite dress, she wants to break free of her confining world as Joan did, but she doesn't know how.
Plimpton was nominated for a Tony in 2007.
There is plenty of screaming and outrageous behavior in August: Osage County, Tracy Letts' mammoth dysfunctional-family drama. But one of the most effective moments is provided by a silent Rondi Reed as the otherwise boisterous Aunt Mattie Fae. After she degrades her son Little Charles one time too many, her usually submissive husband, Charlie (played by Francis Guinan), tears into her for constantly upbraiding the misguided but well-meaning boy. Reed's expression conveys a lifetime of disappointment: You can see every regret and missed opportunity in her crumpled face and every resentment in her tightly set mouth. That expression becomes doubly devastating in the next scene, when Mattie Fae reveals to her niece Barbara a long-hidden secret about Little Charles' true parentage. All her anger makes sense as she pours out her heart.
In earlier moments, Reed endows Mattie Fae with a giddy, good-ol'-gal humor that can turn to withering derision in a moment. It's not surprising she's sisters with the corrosive Violet (played by the brilliant Deanna Dunagan).
A veteran of Chicago theatre, Reed has appeared previously on Broadway in The Grapes of Wrath and The Rise and Fall of Little Voice and Off-Broadway in Picasso at the Lapin Agile.
This is Reed's first Tony nomination.
—David Sheward
Between the Off-Broadway run of Passing Strange at the Public Theater and the show's Broadway transfer to the Belasco, Daniel Breaker, who plays the central figure of Youth, appeared in Lincoln Center Theater's production of Cymbeline as "a Gentleman." The contrast demonstrates the vicissitudes of a young actor's career as well as Breaker's versatility—from lead in a hit musical to tiny ensemble part in Shakespeare.
A Juilliard graduate, Breaker is best known for his classical roles. He starred in The Rivals, A Midsummer Night's Dream, The Tempest, and The Comedy of Errors at Washington, D.C.'s Shakespeare Theatre Company, receiving a nomination for a Helen Hayes Award. But it's his rocking performance as the insecure younger version of Stew, the co-creator and narrator of Passing Strange, that has brought Breaker his first Tony nomination. As the character journeys from confused adolescence in middle-class L.A. to experiments with art, sex, and identity in bohemian Europe, Breaker delivers screaming rock screeds, searching ballads, and a truthful portrait with equal conviction.
As Charles Isherwood wrote in The New York Times, "Brimming with the nervy energy of an ego itching to write its name on the world, Mr. Breaker scampers around the stage with antic enthusiasm, eyes glowing with righteous self-importance or popping with comic mortification."
For this role, Breaker won a Theatre World Award and an Obie Award as part of the show's ensemble. He was nominated for a Drama Desk Award for outstanding actor in a musical. This is his first Tony nomination.
Two years ago, Danny Burstein received a Tony nomination for his wildly exaggerated turn as the cartoonish Latin lover Adolfo in the spoof musical The Drowsy Chaperone. Now he's in the running for a much more shaded performance as the Navy wheeler-dealer Luther Billis in Lincoln Center Theater's hit revival of South Pacific.
Burstein goes beyond Billis' crude exterior to display his humanity and compassion. We first encounter him haggling with Bloody Mary over the price of grass skirts and boars' teeth. Then his soft center is exposed when Ensign Nellie Forbush jogs by and he reluctantly reveals in front of his fellow sex-starved sailors that he's done her laundry free of charge. Burstein's expression combining embarrassment and devotion shows that Billis has brotherly affection rather than lecherous cravings for Nellie. He has further opportunity to expose his feelings at a Thanksgiving show on the base. Dressed in drag for the "Honey Bun" number, this tough cookie allows himself to look silly and even enjoy himself so that Nellie's show will be a success.
A graduate of the Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts, Burstein has previously appeared on Broadway in A Class Act, Titanic, Company, and other shows and with Tony Randall's National Actors Theatre.
For this role, Burstein won an Outer Critics Circle Award and was nominated for a Drama Desk Award for outstanding featured actor in a musical. He was nominated for a Tony in 2006.
As Sonny, the cocky cousin of bodega owner Usnavi (played by Lin-Manuel Miranda), Robin De Jesús provides some of the funniest and most endearing moments in In the Heights. Sonny is a randy teenager, always ready to display his sprouting whiskers to any passing female. When Usnavi clumsily attempts to ask out his crush Olivia, Sonny boldly offers tips on impressing the ladies and even boogies with Olivia. In a later number, when Olivia tells Sonny how cute he is and kisses him, De Jesús' flustered reaction captures the overconfidence of an unsure boy whose bluff has been called. In Act 2, when all the neighborhood fixtures are fading away and Usnavi announces he's selling the bodega, Sonny mournfully cries, "It's the end of an era!" De Jesús skillfully strips away Sonny's bravado to reveal the lonesome kid scared of losing his home.
Fans of Todd Graff's film Camp will remember De Jesús as Michael, an aspiring performer who shows up for his prom in a sequined gown. Though they express themselves differently, Michael and Sonny, as played by De Jesús, possess the same determination to stand out in the crowd. The same might be said of the young actor, who has also appeared in Rent on Broadway and in Godspell at the Paper Mill Playhouse.
This is De Jesús' first Tony nomination.
When Christopher Fitzgerald learned he'd been offered the role of Igor in the stage version of Mel Brooks' raucous film comedy Young Frankenstein, he was inside a Cabbage Patch Kid costume for a Geico commercial. The good news caused him to caper, cavort, and create a memorable character from an inanimate toy.
In his current Broadway gig, Fitzgerald similarly takes unusual materials (Marty Feldman's original performance, itself a parody of mad-scientist sidekicks from innumerable horror films) and, like Dr. Frankenstein, fashions a unique living creature. He acknowledges Feldman's work, but never imitates it.
In "Together Again for the First Time," a duet with Roger Bart as the doctor, Fitzgerald uses bits of Jimmy Durante pizzazz and his own winking enthusiasm to charm the audience with a tribute to vaudeville and comedy teams. His physicality during the "Abby Normal" scene ("Whose brain?" "Abby's brain") doubles the guffaw quotient.
Fitzgerald has previously created comic roles in shows such as Wicked, The Cripple of Inishmaan, Amour, and Saturday Night, receiving Drama Desk nominations for the latter two. As his director, Susan Stroman, told The Associated Press, "He is extremely gifted. He has what you can't teach. He has the gift of comedy for the stage."
For this role, Fitzgerald was nominated for Drama Desk and Outer Critics Circle awards for outstanding featured actor in a musical. This is his first Tony nomination.
If you want a lesson in how to have a long career in the theatre, look at Boyd Gaines. He's successfully made the transition from boyishly attractive juvenile to mature character man, collecting three Tonys along the way. He may pick up his fourth for meeting the demanding task of supporting Patti LuPone in her potentially overwhelming performance in Gypsy. LuPone's Sherman tank of a Madame Rose could easily have overrun any actor playing Herbie, her lover and the agent representing her kids' vaudeville act. But as David Rooney in Variety observed, "Gaines is no spineless mouse as Herbie, but a profoundly decent man with a deep well of dignity." Gaines' Herbie stands up to Rose, and when he realizes she will never be the kind of woman he needs, his long-suppressed rage and frustration explode with the force of a cyclone.
But there's more to Gaines' performance than his climactic blowup. There's a funny, playful sexual connection between this Herbie and Rose, best illustrated in book writer–director Arthur Laurents' comic staging of "You'll Never Get Away From Me," in which LuPone and Gaines tease each other, awkwardly dance, then wind up in a tangle on the floor.
For this role, Gaines won a Drama Desk Award for outstanding featured actor in a musical and was nominated for an Outer Critics Circle Award for outstanding actor in a musical. He won the Tony for best featured actor in a play in 1989 for The Heidi Chronicles, for best leading actor in a musical in 1994 for She Loves Me, and for best featured actor in a musical in 2000 for Contact. He was nominated for a Tony in 2007.
—David Sheward
What a season de'Adre Aziza has had. First she made a brilliant Off-Broadway splash in Jordan Harrison's time- traveling Doris to Darlene: A Cautionary Valentine. Then she turned up in Stew's rock concert–cum–autobiographical musical Passing Strange in a panoply of seriously distinctive roles. As the character coyly nicknamed Youth takes the audience through the peaks and valleys of his life, he meets Edwina, a teenage girl; Marianna, a post-millennial free spirit and experimental filmmaker; and a writer singularly named Sudabey. Aziza appears in almost all the ensemble numbers, but even when she's not the dramatic focus of the scene, her compelling, statuesque, inherently theatrical physical presence draws your eyes to her.
Perhaps the most gratifying part of watching Aziza this season has been witnessing her display so much range, with so much ingenuity and caution-to-the-wind brio, in such a short period of time. It's obvious that Aziza is more than just an asset to Broadway; she also represents its potential.
For this role, Aziza won a Theatre World Award and an Obie Award as part of the show's ensemble. This is her first Tony nomination.
No one would deny that the character Louise in Gypsy has more depth and a greater dramatic arc than her sister June, who runs off at the end of Act 1, leaving Louise as the focus of her mother's vicarious dreams of stardom. But until Laura Benanti first played Louise last year in the City Center Encores! revival of Gypsy that's now running on Broadway, few considered the character dramatically colossal.
Indeed, while all the actors who have played Louise on Broadway have earned Tony nominations (Sandra Church, Zan Charisse, Crista Moore, and Tammy Blanchard), none was considered the favorite to win, until now. That's because Benanti unearthed a completely new way to portray Louise, the plain, seemingly untalented girl initially overlooked by her mother who evolves into the famous stripper Gypsy Rose Lee. Blessed with a gorgeous voice and stunning looks, Benanti knows how to burrow into dialogue and find its emotional center, then take that center and project it dazzlingly across the footlights.
For this role, Benanti won Drama Desk and Outer Critics Circle awards for outstanding featured actress in a musical. She was nominated for Tonys in 2000 and 2002.
How could anyone not love Andrea Martin in almost anything she does on stage? Yet Martin's performance as Frau Blucher, the slightly demented and ever foreboding housekeeper in Mel Brooks' musical version of his film Young Frankenstein, is rather a case unto itself. With rare comic ease, Martin hacks and claws her way through all the useless clutter and frippery of the reportedly $20 million production and delivers a daffy, mirth-making character who puts every bit of guff back into guffaw.
True, Martin gets to sing only one solo number, "He Vas My Boyfriend," and fond memories of Cloris Leachman's performance in the film linger. But Martin has that diminutive stature, rubbery face, and elastic, unstoppable voice, plus she does deadpan better than virtually anyone working in the theatre today. It's been 15 years since she won her only Tony; could this year bring an additional statue to her mantel?
For this role, Martin was nominated for a Drama Desk Award for outstanding featured actress in a musical. She won the 1993 Tony for best featured actress in a musical for My Favorite Year. She was nominated for Tonys in 1997 and 2002.
Nearly a quarter of a century has passed since Olga Merediz made her Broadway debut, in the short-lived transfer of the musical version of William Saroyan's The Human Comedy from Off-Broadway's Public Theater. But in those years, she has worked steadily on both stage and screen, slowly building her résumé as a well-regarded and highly castable actor of Latino descent.
In In the Heights, however, there is something about her magical, tear-inducing performance as Abuela Claudia, the surrogate grandmother to Lin-Manuel Miranda's funky Usnavi, that feels right at home for Merediz. Her character has worked through the years to build a life for herself in a new country, and when she hits it big in the lottery, the plot twist changes the show's direction for all the other characters.
As far as we know, Merediz hasn't hit the Lotto, but In the Heights is unquestionably a big win for the actor, who was born in Cuba and grew up in Puerto Rico. She paints such a complete and effortlessly moving picture of Abuela Claudia's world in her big song, "Paciencia y Fe (Patience and Faith)," that it's impossible not to give her a long, loving ovation when she's done. She not only gives a superb performance; she is a textbook case of good things coming to actors who toil resolutely, waiting for the big break they deserve.
This is Merediz's first Tony nomination.
It's one thing to be handpicked by director Bartlett Sher to play Bloody Mary in the first Broadway revival of South Pacific and to travel all the way from Hawaii, where Loretta Ables Sayre is a star, to play the role. But it's another thing to make your Broadway debut and be honored with a Tony nomination for playing one of the most humorous but deceptively tricky roles in the musical theatre canon.
All at once, the character of Bloody Mary is comic relief, a dramatic device, and the occasion for the legendary Rodgers and Hammerstein song "Bali Ha'i." But Sayre seems to have an instinct for the role, balancing the funnier aspects of Bloody Mary's antics with a flattened and often screechy wail ("you liiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiike?") and a simply exquisite voice that in just the first few notes of "Bali Ha'i" transports the audience to a mystical land somewhere deep in the South Pacific. And when Bloody Mary makes it clear that wedding her daughter, Liat, to the American Joseph Cable is about more than making a supreme love match, Sayre unveils the character's terrified interior and leaves you heartbroken for her and admiring Sayre's tremendous talent.
For this role, Sayre won a Theatre World Award. This is her first Tony nomination.
—Leonard Jacobs