The home run to the Tonys…..

If anyone has a “lock” on the award it is Patti - she’s currently giving her “Rose’s Turn” in Gypsy nightly at the St James, and the general consensus is that it is Patti’s Turn for the Tony. Jenna Russell, who is nominated in the same category for her performance in Sunday in the Park with George there, told me in New York last week, “Part of me would rather stay at home and watch it on telly”.

She’s probably going to have to spend the next day in bed from exhaustion, if not disappointment: she told me that on Sunday, she has to be at Radio City at eight in the morning (having given two performances the day before!) to do a full dress rehearsal in wigs and make-up for the extract from the show she is doing in the Tony telecast, then she has to do that day’s matinee, and then she’s got 45 minutes to get to the Red Carpet to make a grand entrance in her Tony frock (“I’ve got a dress - but I’ve been eating a few pies since I tried it on, so I’m a bit worried! I guess I will just have to hold my breath in….”). She’ll be able to watch only part of the show, before being taken off to get into costume to do her extract - “then I have to get back into my frock and back to my seat, in order to go ‘hurrah’ for Patti!” But she’s not going to be disappointed: “If you can call it losing out, I don’t have a problem with it at all to lose to one of my heroes!”

But talking of the Red Carpet - I hope that one of my heroes makes a re-appearance this year. The best coverage of last year’s awards, hands down (or tail up), was provided by Conan O’Brien’s Triumph the Insult Dog, meeting some of the guests (“a who’s who of who cares”, as he called them) and nominees. You can watch it here; as he says in his introduction, “Tonight a celebration of the Great White Way. No, we’re don’t mean Elton John’s butt cheeks - we’re talking about something even older and easier to get into”.

But however flippantly Triumph the Insult Dog treats them, the awards, of course, have a serious commercial and marketing imperative - ratings may be low for the show itself (“Is there anything you would like to say to the three people watching? Their names are Murray, Tom and a guy in a hospital bed who can’t reach the remote”, Triumph asks Judd Hirsch on the red carpet, and doesn’t wait for an answer before he adds, “I just been told that Murray dozed off”), but their value is for afterwards. When I spoke to another Brit nominee, Ben Daniels (who is up for Best Performance by a Leading Actor in a Play), last week, he said, “It’s really hard to be British and say everyone is way too excited and excitable about the whole thing, but then they have no Arts Council here, and they need them for their productions to survive. It’s all about business.”

The fact that Broadway and the Tony Awards are all about driving business into shows is proved annually by the fact that many of the shows clinging on in the hope of an award will close soon after the awards if they don’t get them. But who decides? According to the New York Times, “There are 796 Tony voters. A group that size would almost, but not quite, sell out a performance of Avenue Q at the Golden Theater, one of the smallest on Broadway. But that’s the crowd that decides who gets the hardware and who gets the awkward reaction shot, which show gets a lease on life and which show starts drafting the closing notice.”

But as Jeremy Gerard reported this week on Bloomberg news, those 796 voters don’t even get to see all the shows - and should, officially, not vote in the categories for which they have not seen all the competitors, but routinely do.

Gerard discovers that, despite the fact that Tony voters had four months to see Pinter’s The Homecoming, nominated for Best Revival of a Play and whose star Eve Best is nominated for Best Performance by a Leading Actress in a Play, under 400 of them actually went. “We were very disappointed. We made a really concerted effort to get all the voters in,” lead producer Jeffrey Richards is quoted as saying. As for Les Liaisons Dangereuses, also in contention in the revival category, Gerard quotes the show’s press agent Adrian Bryan-Brown as saying that only about half the voters have seen it.

As Gerard concludes, “Ensuring an honest vote wouldn’t be difficult to do. The press agents keep tabs on all the members of the press who show up; how hard would it be for the league and unions to do the same? A certified vote would make the Tonys more than just a popularity contest. Committing themselves to see all of the shows, regardless of their reviews, would force the voters to take Broadway as seriously as they’d like the rest of the country to do — especially the viewers on Sunday night. Apparently, 36 evenings is too much to ask for.”

For critics, of course, 36 evenings is just a fraction of the nights we spend in the theatre - but then it is our job to do so. You would have thought, though, that it is also the passion and interest of the other voters, too - since they’re all industry professionals of one sort or another. And it should also, of course, a privilege to have access to a pair of the best — and free — tickets to every show on Broadway, too. It’s amazing how quickly that can be taken for granted.

I try to never take it for granted, even though it is my job to go to the theatre. But it’s also the PR’s job to make sure we’re encouraged to go - as I keep saying here, the clashes in the press night diaries in London mean we can’t get to everything - and to make sure that our tickets are there when we do. There’s nothing guaranteed to annoy a critic more than turning up to a theatre to find the tickets that have been arranged are not there. Yet once again, it happened to both Charlie Spencer and myself last night, when we arrived at the Shaw Theatre to see Golda’s Balcony. It was originally announced to open last night, but for some reason - that became apparent last night - it was moved to Tuesday, when it clashed with Michael Frayn’s Afterlife at the National; so both Charlie and I spoke to the PR to go last night instead. But the theatre had no tickets waiting for us; and it turned out last night was a charity gala, who had bought out most of the house - thus necessitating the change of press night date.

The harried box office assistant tried to do the best she could - and issued us with tickets in row L, three rows from the back. It’s a small auditorium, but Tovah Feldshuh is a small actress - and I wasn’t convinced that she would be seen to her best advantage from the back. I asked to be moved, and seats were found instead in row F, albeit on the side. (At which point, the box office computer packed in and wouldn’t print them - so the new seat assignment had to be hand-written in.) I told Charlie that I had asked to be moved - and he was moved, too, to the row behind me.

In a particularly crowded week of openings, the show is lucky that it is being covered at all; but it’s the height of incompetence to fail to properly accommodate the press bookings that have been made.