“No People Like Show People”: The 2026 Tony Awards

Like most people with Hollywood ties, I love theatre. Since I’ve been old enough to sit through a full-length play, I’ve always adored that moment with the stage curtain opens and the magic begins, right before my eyes. That’s why I’ve always had mixed emotions about the televised Antoinette Perry Awards, which for 79 years have been saluting the best that Broadway has to offer. It fascinates me that this elaborate broadcast, traditionally staged at the legendary Radio City Music Hall, takes pains to invite hosts and presenters whose credentials are more screen than stage. This year’s host, the pop singer Pink, was hardly an exception. She candidly admitted that she herself has never trod the Broadway boards, although one of her songs does show up in the jukebox musical & Juliet. Pink’s hosting skills during the Tonys were certainly acceptable—she modeled elaborate costumes and performed a fancy high-wire stunt emulating the famous Mary Martin version of Peter Pan—but she brought to the evening nothing truly special.  

 It wasn’t just presenters (like Billy Crystal and Paul Rudd) who seemed to need Hollywood cred to be noticed. TV cameras consistently picked out such audience members as Annette Bening for close-ups. But of greatest concern is the fact that the majority of the nominees for Best New Musical were derived from screen hits. Musicals used to be the lifeblood of Broadway theatre, drawing in visitors eager to tap their toes to original showtunes. These days, though, most musicals make it to Broadway because they have had a previous incarnation as a cinematic hit. That’s the case with the much-nominated The Lost Boys, the present-day vampire story that ended up with four Tonys, notably for a spectacular set design. The winner in this year’s Best New Musical category turned out to be Schmigadoon!, a wacky parody of traditional musicals that owes much of its plotting to (of course) Lerner & Loewe’s  Brigadoon, in which two modern travelers stumble upon a village that time forgot. (From what I could see of the featured number on the Tony broadcast, Schmigadoon! can also claim Meredith Willson’s beloved The Music Man as an important musical inspiration.) Claiming her statuette, one of Schmigmadoon’s Broadway producers explicitly thanked Apple TV+, which had introduced the parody-musical as a wacky series back in 2021. It played on Apple TV+ for two years, accruing many fans. But a potential third season was cancelled, allowing the show’s creators to head for Broadway and the evening’s most hyped award.

 In the Best New Musical category, a third candidate was Titanique, not a stage version of James Cameron’s megahit film, Titanic, but rather an outrageous spoof of it, in which the familiar songs of Celine Dion are featured and Dion herself becomes a participant in the action. In the course of a peripatetic history, Titanique first surfaced in Los Angeles, then crossed the country for a successful Off-Broadway run before sailing on to the West End and finally Broadway. But it sank, alas, at the Tonys. The fourth and final Best New Musical contender was a modest original—thank goodness!—with the intriguing title Two Strangers (Carry a Cake Across New York).  It features a mere two actors and (for a change) brand-new music by a British writing team.

 I should also mention that the current Broadway season is big on outrageously kinky role-playing: see the revival of The Rocky Horror Show (best known for its midnight-movie version) and a drag-friendly updating of Cats subtitled The Jellicle Ball. To me, all this makes the folksy Schmigadoon! sound better and better.

 

Shooting Off My Mouth About “Young Guns”

Recently I’ve been catching up on classic films about young men in trouble. Perhaps I’ve been inspired by the spectacular new TV production of Lord of the Flies. In any case, I’ve now seen  Stand by Me (1985), River’s Edge (1986), and The Lost Boys (1987), the last of which has just become a Broadway musical hit.  Each of these flicks features young and mostly white males who are still children—or barely out of childhood—cut off from the adults in their lives and learning to cope with their world on the most violent terms.

  In 1988 along came Young Guns, which is often rather sneeringly referred to as a Brat Pack western. The designation of course refers mostly to a cluster of young actors (among them Molly Ringwald, Rob Lowe, and Demi Moore) who starred in the teen angst movies written and directed by John Hughes in this era. The young actors reportedly hated the “brat pack” designation, which came out of David Blum’s 1985 story in New York magazine in the wake of Hughes’ St. Elmo’s Fire. Emilio Estevez, who had figured prominently in the Blum piece, is the central figure in Young Guns, playing an embellished version of the Old West’s William Bonney, aka Billy the Kid.

 To be honest, this is not a story that can easily be tracked. But it apparently takes off from actual historic events: a young Englishman named John Tunstall came to Santa Fe in 1876 to get into the cattle business. His success as a rancher and store-owner put him at odds with local interests, and he was eventually murdered. In the film Tunstall (played by the always interesting Terence Stamp) is an older man, serving as a father figure to a number of wayward teenagers who work for him and are tutored by him in reading and social graces. After his sudden death, they dub themselves The Regulators, and are briefly deputized to take down his killers. But corrupt forces in the vicinity soon have them on the run.

 Estevez’s film role as Billy the Kid is the most interesting: he’s smart, brash, and always itching for a fight. Also memorable is Kiefer Sutherland, who—though scary indeed in Stand by Me and The Lost Boys—here plays a character with a sentimental side. (As “Doc,” he’s a gunslinger who’s also a would-be poet. Eventually he rescues a pretty Chinese concubine who’s being kept in thrall by the evil Jack Palance. Yes, it’s that kind of movie.) Smaller roles are filled by Estevez’s real-life brother Charlie Sheen, by Lou Diamond Phillips (as the all-purpose Native American in the gang), by Dermot Mulroney as the slob of the group, and by Casey Siemaszko as a love-sick gang member who makes some unfortunate choices. Some veteran actors, including Brian Keith, Terry O’Quinn, and Patrick Wayne (yes, he’s John’s son), also have key roles in the proceedings.

 As action movies go, this one has much to recommend it. There are a lot of horses, a lot of bad guys, and a lot of blood to be shed in picturesque outdoor surroundings. The climactic siege of a house to which Billy and the gang have been lured contains some dramatic moments, though it doesn’t fully match up with the actual historical episode. I was rather taken, in fact, by the filming of this episode: the up-close and slo-mo camera work here serves, I’m convinced, to glamorize violence, and to make us eager for more. Which is why there was a lucrative 1990 sequel, and talk of other sequels to come.  

 

 

Skirting the River’s Edge

At first I had River’s Edge confused with The Lost Boys, which came out a year later, in 1987. Both are set in California towns with a great deal of wild scenic beauty. (River’s Edge was shot in the Sacramento area, while The Lost Boys famously takes place in Santa Cruz, renamed Santa Carla for filming purposes.) Both involve packs of wild young men (and a few young women) who decisively turn their backs on conventional middle-class morality.  Both showcase fractured family units, and give juicy oldster roles to Hollywood veterans (Dennis Hopper, Barnard Hughes) while also featuring attractive young newcomers (Crispin Glover, Keanu Reeves, Jason Patric, Kiefer Sutherland). Both contain material that can surely be considered disturbing. Both were shot on low budgets, but made a fair amount of money at the box office.

 One big difference, though: The Lost Boys (now a musical hit on Broadway) is about vampires. The film’s supernatural element, along with some particularly eccentric characters—like the vampire-hunting Frog brothers—ensure that audiences will chuckle as well as shiver.  In River’s Edge, though, there’s no such release from the film’s built-up tension. It opens with an androgynous looking pre-teen flinging a doll into a river. (It turns out he’s figured out a great way to torment his little sister.) From there we move to another spot at the river’s edge, where a young man stands shell-shocked over the naked corpse of the co-ed he’s just strangled to death, because (as he later explained) she was talking shit.  

Though the film’s main characters are mostly male, their treatment of girls and women is central to the story. Some, like the hyperkinetic Layne (Glover) seem to have no use at all for the female of the species. Layne is overtly excited by the killing, and takes it as his mission to protect the killer. The physically and mentally wounded druggie played by Hopper cherishes a life-sized sex doll who eerily resembles the dead girl. Reeves’ character, Matt, is the only central male figure who makes a choice to do the right thing, though this leads to him being harassed—and accused of participating in the crime—by a particularly nasty local cop.

 Authority figures in River’s Edge don’t come off much better than the young. There’s that malicious cop, first of all, who is clearly a bully and a sadist. A youngish high school social studies teacher thinks he’s reaching his young charges by romanticizing the political activism of the Sixties, but he doesn’t have a clue as to what they’re thinking.  Most of the film’s young men don’t seem to have intact families, or any families at all. Matt’s mother, Madeleine, is an attractive nurse who does show some concern about the welfare of her brood, but she’s also shacking up with an idler who clearly thinks the kids are a nuisance. Madeleine, like the other parents we see, can merely helplessly shrug her shoulders when her youngsters stay out till all hours, or fail to come home at all.

 Reeves’ Matt, as the one young man with something of a conscience, is rewarded by the opportunity to hook up with the prettiest of the gang’s gal pals, played by Ione Skye. (This was her first film, and—as the daughter of the singer Donovan—she was still using her surname, Leitch, in her billing. It would be two years before she became everyone’s dream girl in Say Anything.) But even the nicest of the young people in this film are not so very nice. If you like your films dark, this one’s for you!

 

Climbing The 39 Steps

 The great Alfred Hitchcock directed his first film in 1922. He started in the silent era, and most of his early efforts have been lost. By 1935, when he premiered The 39 Steps, he was no novice, but it would take several more years before he transferred his macabre vision of life from English to Hollywood soundstages.

 I first knew The 39 Steps as a remarkably silly stage production that showed up on Broadway circa 2008 after a successful British run. The hard-working cast of four played all the roles in this espionage thriller, and elaborate scenic effects (like a working railway train) were hilariously worked into the production. But Hitchcock’s original film (loosely based on a 1915 novel) takes itself a bit more seriously. This despite the fact that the mordant Hitchcock wit is very much in evidence.

 One key fact about The 39 Steps is how much it became a template for later Hitchcock masterworks like North by Northwest. It deals with matters of life and death, but for most of the film the tone is relatively light. Except, of course, when a mysterious lady to whom Richard Hannay gives shelter in his London flat ends up dead as a door-nail the next morning, with a knife sticking out of her back. Hannay, played by the dapper Robert Donat, is very much a precursor for Cary Grant and the other actors who’ve played Hitchcock’s “wrong man” roles. Everyone thinks he’s a murderer, which is why he has to flee from London to the Scottish highlands. But in fact he finds himself more and more embroiled in a scheme that’s never entirely clear, though it seems to involve the sending of super-modern aircraft plans to an enemy nation. (The threat of impending war in Europe understandably hangs over the film.) It’s been said that this aircraft can be considered an early Hitchcock McGuffin—this being a Hitchcock-named thingumajig that everyone chases after, thus providing the engine for a film’s plot.  

 Donat, as Richard Hannay, manages to keep things light, even while being chased by everyone under the sun. Eventually there’s a woman—Madeleine Carroll as perhaps the first Hitchcock blonde—who first rebuffs our hero and then, of course, succumbs to his charm, in the course of a priceless scene in which the two (handcuffed together by thugs claiming to be police officers) have to pose as runaway lovers at a Scottish country inn. There are also some wonderful train scenes (Hitchcock clearly adored trains), in which Hannay tries not to attract attention while the  two businessmen in his compartment discuss at length the latest styles in women’s undergarments.

 But it’s not all fun and games. There are additional threats of violence, of course, and also an extraordinarily poignant scene in which Hannay seeks shelter at a farmhouse in the Scottish countryside. His host for the evening is a cranky old coot who will put him up, for a fee, but certainly doesn’t trust him. When Hannay enters the rustic home, he sees an attractive young woman, who turns out to be not the coot’s daughter but his wife. Peggy Ashcroft, in this small but significant role, clearly longs for Hannay and the big-city world he represents. In the wee hours, as his adversaries close in on him, she helps him to escape, giving him her husband’s warm coat . . .  which leads to a clever plot-twist. But the result for her is her husband’s wrath, and a vicious slap we hear though we don’t see it. (Not everything in Hitchcock is a joke.)

 

 

Paradise Lost: “Lord of the Flies”

The British seem to have a special talent for creating TV miniseries. I was awed (as were most Emmy voters) by last year’s Adolescence. So when I heard that Jack Thorne, who had created that show along with Stephen Graham, was behind a new BBC adaptation of William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, I had to watch.

 Like most in my age group, I read Golding’s 1954 magnum opus when I too was an adolescent. This story of young British boys stranded on a tropical island introduced all of us to the darker side of human nature. Lord of the Flies can be viewed as a canny parable of the fall of civilization. At first the pre-adolescent English boys, survivors of a plane crash that has wiped out their teachers and guardians, seem to have found themselves in a paradise: lush foliage, lots of fruit and fresh water, no obvious danger. But a crisis is brewing: while some of the boys, led by the sturdy and rational Ralph, are ready to accept a sensible form of self-government, others look to the mercurial Jack for leadership. And Jack, drunk on his own power, obliges by dividing the castaways into friends and enemies. Brutality ensues. (If any of this sounds like the current American political scene, I suspect that’s not an accident.)

 There have been films made of Golding’s novel, but I’ve never seen them. I’m also told that Yellowjackets, the recent Showtime miniseries, about a stranded girls’ soccer team, was directly influenced by Golding’s timeless work. What I can say is that the new BBC series, available now on Netflix, is well worth watching. Like Adolescence, it’s presented in four parts, with each episode focusing on one of the central boys. The first features the hapless Piggy who has accepted his lot in life as the butt of everyone’s jokes. Piggy, as his nickname implies, is short, pudgy, and slightly dazed-looking (he wears thick glasses that play an important role in the story). But despite the unfortunate nickname, Piggy is by no means stupid. He’s the most analytic of the boys, and one of the most generous, taking it as his obligation to look after the “littl’uns” who can’t fend for themselves. In subsequent episodes we focus on the increasingly maniacal Jack and on poor, addled Simon, who begins as Jack’s protector but then finds himself increasingly isolated. The final episode is dedicated to Ralph, a natural leader forced into an awkward and even dangerous position. Who eventually gets off the island? That’s not for me to say.

 This Lord of the Flies was filmed on location in Malaysia, and the beauty of the surroundings plays an important role in the drama. One of its most arresting elements—the fact that trees and other foliage sometimes take on eerie shades of red—turns out to be explained by practical considerations. Because of rules designed to protect child performers, there could be no filming after dark. So cameras were sometimes outfitted with infrared filters for day-for-night shooting. The result was a phantasmagoric color palette well suited to such a nightmarish tale, in which reality and fantasy become inevitably fused.

 A behind-the-scenes video suggests that the children in this cast—most of them new to professional filmmaking—came through their on-camera ordeal with their values intact. (Phew!) But it’s striking that the one cast member with a Wikipedia entry is Lox  Pratt, who will follow up his creepy performance as Jack by playing Draco Malfoy, boy bully, in the upcoming Harry Potter TV series. Clearly it pays to be evil. 

 

Biography at the Movies

I’ll soon be taking a bite of the Big Apple. The occasion is the annual conference of Biographers International Organization, a group that came into being to serve the needs of both active biographers and those interested in the field of biography. Since 2010 there have been (in addition to regular newsletters and Zoom events) annual BIO conferences, mostly in New York City but sometimes in outposts like Boston, DC, Richmond, and even Los Angeles. Some attendees merely want advice on telling family stories; others are experienced writers and even recipients of major awards. My BIO pal Amanda Vaill just won this year’s Pulitzer for Pride and Pleasure: The Schuyler Sisters in an Age of Revolution.

 I don’t know if there’s any hope of Angelica and Elizabeth Schuyler showing up at the movies anytime soon. (The fact that they’re both major figures in Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton might surely get producer-types interested.) But I do know there’s a long tradition of concocting films about famous historical figures. Decades ago, it was considered acceptable to wrestle the biographical facts about a celebrity —whether a composer, a scientist, or a politician—to conform to Hollywood’s idea of an inspiring life story. Now I’d like to think we’re trying harder to be true to actual reality. But in any case, actors love portraying great figures of the past. If you look at lists of Oscar-winning performances, you’ll note there’s a lot of Academy love for stars able to get under the skin of the real people who helped create our world. See, in this century alone, Gary Oldman as Winston Churchill (Darkest Hour), Eddie Redmayne as Stephen Hawking (The Theory of Everything), Daniel Day-Lewis as Abraham Lincoln (Lincoln), Philip Seymour Hoffman as Truman Capote (Capote), and Jamie Foxx as Ray Charles (Ray).

 This enthusiasm for biographical films has paid major dividends for members of BIO. And several  I know personally have been thrilled by the care with which the motion picture industry has transmitted their work to the screen. BIO stalwart Kai Bird is probably still basking in the glow of Oppenheimer, the 2023 Oscar winner based on his and Martin J. Sherwin’s deeply researched American Prometheus. Jack El-Hai was pleased with last year’s Nuremberg, which developed out of his gripping historical study, The Nazi and the Psychiatrist. When a BIO honoree, Candace Millard, published a 2011 historical work called Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine and the Murder of a President, I  doubt she thought Hollywood would come calling. But someone at Netflix got involved, resulting in last year’s fascinating four-part miniseries, Death by Lightning, in which we follow the tragic trajectory of a nineteenth-century U.S. president, James A. Garfield, and his soon-to-be assassin, Charles J. Guiteau. This four-part series is too new to have come up for Emmy consideration, but many other awards-giving bodies have recognized the show’s excellence, with particular attention paid to lead actors Michael Shannon (as the appealingly idealistic Garfield) and Matthew Macfadyen (as the maddening and probably mad Guiteau).

 There is one honor that Death by Lightning has already won. Each spring, since 1988, the scholars behind the USC Scripter Awards have chosen the year’s best film adaptation of a work in print. Uniquely, at an awards ceremony held not long before Oscar night, both the screenwriter and the author of the original published work gain recognition  In 2016, USC added an award for episodic television series, and so Millard was in the winner’s circle when the TV Scripter went to her as well as to screenwriter Mike Makowsky. Bravo to them both.   

 

The joys and the sadness of youth: “Stand by Me”

These days I suspect Stand By Me is best known as a song, one of those ageless ballads with which almost everyone can connect. It’s a paean to loyalty and friendship, which of course makes it perfect for campfire singalongs. It was recorded in 1961 by Ben E. King, who co-wrote it along with the invaluable popsters Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller. When I hear “Stand by Me,” it puts me in a mellow mood, remembering back to memories—both happy and sad—of my own past.

 Today it also revives in me bittersweet memories of the late director Rob Reiner, for whom this was an early film project, just after This is Spinal Tap (1984) and just before The Princess Bride (1987). Based on a novella by horrormeister Stephen King, Stand by Me recounts the story of four young small-town pals who set out on a trek to see a dead body. (Their town, Castle Rock, would become the name of Reiner's own production company.

 The four leads were played by talented young actors just coming into their own. In the story, they are pals largely because all of them suffer from various forms of trauma. Sensitive Gordie (Wil Wheaton) is mourning the loss of his older brother, his parents’ favorite, in an accident. Chris (River Phoenix) is used to having his natural intelligence and leadership qualities overlooked because he comes from a family of scofflaws and ne’er-do-wells. Teddy (Corey Feldman) is the oddball son of an Army vet with serious mental issues. Vern (Jerry O’Connell) is a good kid, but the doofus of the group. Most of the film details their overnight trek to locate the body of a missing classmate who apparently was hit by a train. They figure that if they announce to the world where the body can be found, they will be accepted as heroes.

 What they aren’t counting on is the gang of roving teens, led by the always scary Kiefer Sutherland, who have their own dibs on the body. Sutherland and his cronies are just one of the jeopardies the four pals need to face down. There are leeches in the local stream, and very real danger from an oncoming locomotive. The four are also grappling with impending maturity and their own challenging pasts. What happens to them in the long run is established by the film’s narrator (Richard Dreyfuss) who opens and closes Stand by Me. Once one of the four, he’s now an established writer retelling his own story.  

 One of the things that makes Stand by Me fascinating to today’s viewers is the real-life fate of those involved. Kiefer Stuherland, of course, has had a rich acting career that rivals the success once enjoyed by his late father, Donald. Richard Dreyfuss has starred in blockbusters (yes, Jaws!) and won an Oscar for The Goodbye Girl. John Cusack, who plays Gordie’s older brother in some brief flashbacks, became beloved for his romantic turn in Say Anything.

 For the film’s four main boys, career success has been a sometime thing. Jerry O’Connell has had a long career but few standout roles. Wil Wheaton now mostly limits himself to voiceover work. The irrepressible Corey Feldman still performs, at 54, but has struggled with drug and alcohol abuse. River Phoenix, a 1988 Oscar nominee for Running on Empty, died of a drug overdose in 1993, at age 23. 

 And of course Rob Reiner himself died on December 14, 2025 when he and wife Michele were allegedly stabbed to death by their son Nick. Life can sometimes be very, very sad.