MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:
The Tony Awards, Broadway's highest honors, were handed out at Radio City Music Hall on Sunday evening in a ceremony hosted by the pop star Pink. Reporter Jeff Lunden says the voters were surprisingly even-handed, spreading the awards around - with one big exception.
JEFF LUNDEN: The Tony voters clearly love the revival of Arthur Miller's "Death Of A Salesman" starring Nathan Lane and Laurie Metcalf. Director Joe Mantello set the atmospheric production in a garage, and it picked up six awards, including best revival of a play. Winning for best director, he said...
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
JOE MANTELLO: We discovered a play that we thought we knew so well and could still surprise us, and that real thrill comes from risk.
LUNDEN: But the other storylines of the night were a bit more dramatic. It was unclear which of the two highly regarded musical revivals would take the top award. Early in the evening, it seemed that "Cats: The Jellicle Ball" would win. A radical reimagining of the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical, it's set in the drag ballroom scene.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSICAL, "CATS: THE JELLICLE BALL")
UNIDENTIFIED ENSEMBLE #1: (Singing) Jellicles do and jellicles can. Jellicles can and jellicles do.
LUNDEN: It picked up Tonys for best direction of a musical, choreography, and Qween Jean won for her costumes - the first openly trans woman to win a Tony.
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QWEEN JEAN: This experience has been monumental. We are here for the legacy of queer people, trans people. We are taking up space.
LUNDEN: But the epic revival of E. L. Doctorow's "Ragtime," which looks at Jewish immigrants, white upper-class suburbanites and the Black community in Harlem in the early 20th century, ultimately won over the voters.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSICAL, "RAGTIME")
UNIDENTIFIED ENSEMBLE #2: (Singing) And there was distant music skipping a beat, singing a dream. La, la, la, la.
LUNDEN: It was named best revival of a musical and picked up three additional awards, including best actor and actress. In a season where only six new musicals opened and all have had challenges at the box office, two of them went head-to-head as well. The technically impressive adaptation of the 1980s teenage vampire movie "The Lost Boys" picked up four awards. But "Schmigadoon!" the gentle parody of Golden Age musicals like "The Music Man" in Oklahoma, also took four awards, including the all-important best musical prize.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSICAL, "SCHMIGADOON!")
UNIDENTIFIED ENSEMBLE #3: (Singing) Schmigadoon, where the sun shines bright from July to June.
LUNDEN: Picking up the Tony, producer Lorne Michaels said...
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LORNE MICHAELS: Sometimes singing, dancing, a lot of jokes and a happy ending is really all you need.
LUNDEN: "Liberation" by Bess Wohl had a happy ending, too. The semi-autobiographical piece about her mother's generation and feminism in the 1970s was named best play. The Tony comes on the heels of winning a Pulitzer Prize and is the first for an American woman in 37 years. Other winners included actors John Lithgow, Laurie Metcalf and Lesley Manville. And what of the host, Pink, who's never been in a Broadway show? She began the evening dressed as Peter Pan and flying in the air, as she does in her stage shows. But she really showed off her theatrical chops, singing and dancing in a tribute to the long-running musical "Chicago."
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
PINK: (Singing) Come on, babe. Why don't we paint the town? And all that jazz.
LUNDEN: For NPR News, I'm Jeff Lunden in New York. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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