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2021 Tony Awards: Predicting the Likely Winners, from Slave Play to Moulin Rouge!

The 2021 Tony Awards, honoring the Broadway season that was cut short by the Covid pandemic, are all about memory.

Tony Awards 2021
Photo: Matthew Murphy

The 2021 Tony Awards, honoring the Broadway season that was cut short by the Covid pandemic, are all about memory. Shows and performers aren’t competing over what and who made the bigger impact in the moment, but which scenes and stars stuck in the craw over the intervening years. When the Tonys air on September 26, the season’s earliest eligible show, Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune (nominated for best revival of a play and for Audra McDonald’s leading performance), will have closed over two years ago.

Will Tony voters have held on to the lighting cues that captivated them or the directorial choices that piqued their interest more than a year ago? Or, more so than in any other year, will the 74th Tony Awards measure theater’s power to linger, to dazzle not just in the initial firework of liveness, but in the flickering embers of long retrospection?

Nor have the last 18 months left these memories alone. Frankie and Johnny’s esteemed playwright, Terrence McNally, died of Covid in the earliest weeks of the pandemic. Actors like Karen Olivo, a nominee for Moulin Rouge, have stepped away from New York theater, largely in response to the industry’s reactions to revelations about producer Scott Rudin. And Jeremy O. Harris’s Slave Play, which seemed like such an outlier on Broadway in 2019 in its raw honesty about interracial relationships and the insidiousness of white supremacy, has gained an iconic, almost mainstream status in the wake of a year of national conversations about race, privilege, and art. Harris even appears as himself in the latest Gossip Girl reboot, writing a fictional play which has since been commissioned for a full production by the Public Theater.

Slave Play also helped to catalyze, through its example of success, the sea change that’s transformed the Broadway stage for the currently reborn season. Even if every play had opened as scheduled in the 2019-2020 season, Harris would have been the only black playwright eligible for a new work. This year, there are five—plus two revivals—by black authors. And though theater-makers are anxious that this new landscape may not be lasting, the vision of Broadway that’s honored at these Tonys may well be a memory itself, soon a distant one, of a community that took too few risks and elevated too few voices on the largest stages.

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Best Play

Grand Horizons – Bess Wohl
The Inheritance – Matthew Lopez
Sea Wall/A Life – Simon Stephens and Nick Payne
Slave Play – Jeremy O. Harris
The Sound Inside – Adam Rapp

In fall 2019, The Sound Inside seemed like the most polished and instantly impactful of the bunch, a lovely, moving meditation on the loneliness of both authorship and mortality. But while the immediate visceral potency of that theatergoing experience has faded, I haven’t been able to stop thinking about Slave Play. The nettles of Jeremy O. Harris’s writing and Robert O’Hara’s specific production still sting. The play feels even more monumental through the filter of memory than it did two years ago. If most voters feel the same, expect a great night for Slave Play, including play, director, and probably most of the design awards.

Best Musical

Jagged Little Pill
Moulin Rouge! The Musical
Tina: The Tina Turner Musical

Moulin Rouge, deservedly, will sweep the design awards—plus best musical, director, and book—over its limited competition in each of those categories: Tina: The Tina Musical and Jagged Little Pill (which skims through the Alanis Morissette catalog). None of these shows make significant dramatic contributions to the jukebox genre, but Moulin Rouge, in its playful, self-aware rollercoaster ride through 70 recent pop songs and a whole lot of decadent choreography, knows exactly what kind of silly fun it’s aiming for and it sticks the landing. As the memes would say, Moulin Rouge understood the assignment.

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Best Revival of a Play

Betrayal
Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune
A Soldier’s Play

Jamie Lloyd’s Betrayal may have offered the most reinvention among the three revivals up for consideration, but its abstractions led to a lugubriousness that left three strong performers unmoored. If voters don’t give Betrayal free points for its edgier staging, expect Kenny Leon’s sturdier, largely gripping production of A Soldier’s Play to nab this one.

Best Performance by a Leading Actor in a Musical

Aaron Tveit – Moulin Rouge! The Musical

Technically, Aaron Tveit could still lose this one-man race if more than 40 percent of voters abstain from the category. That won’t happen. But spare a thought not only for The Lightning Thief’s Chris McCarell, whose snub, as the only other eligible contender, seemed especially cruel, but also for Isaac Powell, who might well have taken home the award if West Side Story had opened early enough for voters to attend before the shutdown. (West Side Story, a messy production with Powell as the principal bright spot, won’t be returning to Broadway.)

Best Performance by a Leading Actress in a Musical

Karen Olivo – Moulin Rouge! The Musical
Elizabeth Stanley – Jagged Little Pill
Adrienne Warren – Tina: The Tina Turner Musical

This one’s easy: Adrienne Warren will take home the trophy for the sheer vocal firepower of her Tina Turner. As biographical jukebox impressions go—Stephanie J. Block’s Cher, LaChanze’s Donna Summer, Ana Villafañe’s Gloria Estefan, and that’s just the past few Broadway seasons—Warren did unusually sharp work in crafting a character simply through the nuanced evolution of Turner’s delivery of her songs: Her final “Proud Mary” is a reclamation of a woman’s voice that, despite the odds, has kept on burning.

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Best Performance by a Featured Actor in a Musical

Danny Burstein – Moulin Rouge! The Musical
Derek Klena – Jagged Little Pill
Sean Allan Krill – Jagged Little Pill
Sahr Ngaujah – Moulin Rouge! The Musical
Daniel J. Watts – Tina: The Tina Turner Musical

Expect Danny Burstein to finally get the win for his seventh nomination. Burstein, who plays the Moulin Rouge’s charismatic, conniving owner, may not be giving the most deserving performance of his career (his turn as My Fair Lady’s Alfred P. Doolittle in 2019 was pretty loverly), but it’s certainly time for him to collect at last. The theater community will be glad to be able to pay tribute to this versatile veteran, especially after the past 18 months he’s endured: Burstein was hospitalized with severe Covid last year and lost his wife, the extraordinary Broadway soprano Rebecca Luker, to ALS in December.

Best Performance by a Featured Actress in a Musical

Kathryn Gallagher – Jagged Little Pill
Celia Rose Gooding – Jagged Little Pill
Robyn Hurder – Moulin Rouge! The Musical
Lauren Patten – Jagged Little Pill
Myra Lucretia Taylor – Tina: The Tina Turner Musical

In recent months, there’s been an upswing in criticism for Jagged Little Pill’s treatment of Jo, a supporting character who was portrayed as non-binary in the pre-Broadway tryout but was rewritten as cisgender for Broadway. The show’s producers recently announced that they’ve hired a diverse team of dramaturgs to retool the book—and Jo in particular—before the show reopens. None of that will matter here (for one thing, voting ended in March) and Lauren Patten, who played Jo in both iterations, will still be triumphant: Her ferocious rendition of “You Oughta Know” was one of the show’s few saving graces. (Its other most appealing asset is Tom Kitt’s rousing orchestrations, which will likely garner this show a second Tony.)

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Best Performance by a Leading Actor in a Play

Ian Barford – Linda Vista
Andrew Burnap – The Inheritance
Jake Gyllenhaal – Sea Wall/A Life
Tom Hiddleston – Betrayal
Tom Sturridge – Sea Wall/A Life
Blair Underwood – A Soldier’s Play

A bit of a toss-up, with a couple of starry contenders from the Marvel Cinematic Universe to boot, this category may be led by Andrew Burnap, who received lots of media attention at the time for his performance as the boisterously self-aggrandizing writer Toby Darling, a whirligig at the center of much of The Inheritance’s six-plus-hour running time. But the tenacious resolve of Blair Underwood’s Captain Richard Davenport memorably anchored A Soldier’s Play. If voters want to show some extra love to The Inheritance, they’ll honor Burnap here, but Underwood should—and may still—earn this recognition.

Best Performance by a Leading Actress in a Play

Joaquina Kalukango – Slave Play
Laura Linney – My Name Is Lucy Barton
Audra McDonald – Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune
Mary-Louise Parker – The Sound Inside

Joaquina Kalukango, who delivered Slave Play’s red-hot final monologue, an astonishing epiphany of anguish, anger, and sudden clarity, would have been a shoo-in for featured actress, as her character doesn’t really emerge as the play’s central figure until those final, paralyzing minutes. Instead, she’ll be going up against Mary-Louise Parker here. Parker’s unreliable narrator made The Sound Inside mesmerizing from start to finish. Of these two stellar performances, Parker, in the far more prominent role, will likely pull this one out.

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Best Performance by a Featured Actor in a Play

Ato Blankson-Wood – Slave Play
James Cusati-Moyer – Slave Play
David Alan Grier – A Soldier’s Play
John Benjamin Hickey – The Inheritance
Paul Hilton – The Inheritance

Another loaded category that pits pairs of actors from Slave Play and The Inheritance against one another, and that constellation may benefit David Alan Grier, cruel and desperate in the largely compelling revival of A Soldier’s Play. I’d still give the edge to Ato Blankson-Wood, who made Slave Play’s Gary complex and daring, especially in the early, startling scenes of antebellum-era foreplay that planted the seeds for deeper character development later on.

Best Performance by a Featured Actress in a Play

Jane Alexander – Grand Horizons
Chalia La Tour – Slave Play
Annie McNamara – Slave Play
Lois Smith – The Inheritance
Cora Vander Broek – Linda Vista

Though Jane Alexander was lovely and biting in Bess Wohl’s under-celebrated Grand Horizons, the real race here will come down to the women of Slave Play and Lois Smith, the nonagenarian who delivered a powerful monologue in the final scenes of The Inheritance. Chalia La Tour (my personal pick) and Annie McNamara both made themselves the butt of some of Jeremy O. Harris’s most delicious satire—La Tour as the psychobabbling sex therapist and McNamara as the über-woke white progressive utterly blind to her own self-centering—but Slave Play fans may split the vote and give the subtler Smith the prize.

Dan Rubins

Dan Rubins is a writer, composer, and arts nonprofit leader. He’s also written about theater for CurtainUp, Theatre Is Easy, A Younger Theatre, and the journal Shakespeare. Check out his podcast The Present Stage.

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