“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.

 

The Paris Olympics: Parlez-Vous Cinéma?

The French have always been very good at blowing their own horns. The spectacular opening ceremony they staged for last Friday’s opening of the Paris Olympics wonderfully showcased many things at which the French nation excels, like building the Eiffel Tower, producing daring fashion ensembles, taking on romance in all its permutations, and offending the bourgeoisie. (I was fascinated to find that day-after Internet chatter accused the festivities of insulting Christianity via an impudent hint of the Last Supper in a moment featuring drag queens.) Yes, that Seine-centric opening ceremony was long (aren’t they all?) and sometimes weird, but it had an exuberance that, to my mind, lifted it high above the ordinary. And the French, bless ‘em, were confident enough in their own cultural riches to offer prime performance slots to two women who weren’t French at all. That’s why Lady Gaga did a number complete with feathered fans, chorus boys, and diminishing clothing. And Celine Dion, coming off of a truly horrible neurological disease, used her Canadian brand of French to put a stirring musical cap on the whole evening.

 The opening ceremonies, of course, were designed for the TV audience, not for those drenched multitudes who stood in the rain watching bits of diverse entertainment (a piano solo! The capering of a masked torchbearer over the rooftops of Paris!) while soggy athletes sailed down the Seine on barges. But as a movie person, I couldn’t help thinking about France’s many contributions to the wonderful world of cinema. These were not much highlighted in a ceremony that seemed to delight in pretty much EVERYHING French. The  sole movie nod I remember involved a goofy film clip featuring the Minions, those little yellow critters who (as it turns out) were created and directed—and even largely voiced--by an actual Frenchman, Pierre Coffin. Who knew?

 But there was no in-passing acknowledgment of such landmark French directors as Jean Renoir, François Truffaut, Louis Malle, and even (despite lots of attention to pioneering French women) Agnès Varda. The French Nouvelle Vague (or New Wave) that had such a huge impact on Young Hollywood in the Sixties went unnoticed. Even more surprising, I heard absolutely no mention of the role played by French inventors in the development of the motion picture as an artistic medium. A trip to L.A.’s Academy Museum nicely reminds visitors where movies came from. (No, not the stork!) The wonderfully named Auguste and Louis Lumière were French inventors of photographic equipment, and the short films they produced between about 1895 and 1905 (documenting such commonplace events as workers leaving a factory) were among the first motion pictures ever made. Georges Méliès, another early filmmaker born in the late 19^th century, was not much interested in the Lumière brand of cinéma-verité realism. Méliès, who was a magician of some repute, became entranced with the trickery made possible by the motion picture medium. He helped create the longstanding vocabulary of special effects cinematography, pioneering such techniques as  multiple exposures, time-lapse photography, , dissolves, and hand-tinted color. Those of us who remember the Apollo 11 moon-landing in 1969 surely recall seeing the frequent clips from Méliès’ Le Voyage Dans La Lune (based on Frenchman Jules Vernes’ 1865 novel, From the Earth to the Moon), complete with astronauts, friendly moon maidens, and a landing that hits the Man in the Moon (splat!) in the eye.

 Of course the Olympics are a festival of sports. To honor its cinema heritage, France has the annual Cannes Film Festival in spring. But there’s no question that out of this current Olympiad will come a movie.

 An update: Mea culpa! A reporter writing in the L.A. Times mentions that the opening ceremony contained a subtle (and by me unseen) reference to Méliès and other French film pioneers. Where? I really can’t say.