I’m going to say it straight out. I’ll even beg. Dear CBS, please let us theater folk have our one night a year.

The Tony Awards, honoring the best of the Broadway season, happened Sunday, June 13, and a lot of genuine Broadway glitterati were MIA. Where, for example, was Patti LuPone and Tony Kushner, Marin Mazzie and Donna Murphy, Audra McDonald, Taye Diggs, Cherry Jones, Brian Stokes Mitchell, J. Robert Spencer, Mandy Patinkin, Stephen Sondheim and dozens of other real theater people who should have been onstage at Radio City Music Hall?

“Probably in the balcony,” Atlanta actor Clifton Guterman offered in response to one of my Facebook rants.

Ironically, the Tonys have won Emmys (plural) for being the best awards show on TV. They will,  however, never top the Oscars, the Emmys or the Grammys in terms of popular appeal. And they shouldn’t have to.

CBS refuses to acknowledge this fact and, year after year, trots out Hollywood types and other “celebs” to deliver the medallions. This will, they reason, cause hundreds, nay millions, of non-theater viewers to tune in. It doesn’t work. Never has. Never will. Tony viewership leveled off at 7 million this year, down from 2009 but up from 2008. It will never approach the 36 million that Oscar attracts.

Let me say this clearly: IT DOESN’T MATTER!

Viewers who don’t plan to watch the Tonys will not do so just to see Green Day bask in strobe lights or Denzel or Will Smith stumble through lines on the Teleprompter.  Those of us who watch because it is theater will wonder, infuriated and frustrated, why bona fide Broadway royalty isn’t there. The result: a watered-down telecast that pleases no one.

“This is the way to make theater temporarily flashier but far less relevant,” John Ellison Conlee, a Tony nominee for The Full Monty a few years back, offered in a Facebook riposte.

And Guterman? “Rough show this year. Very rough.”

It doesn’t have to be this way. CBS wants the prestige of the Tonys but not the responsibility of doing them justice. Already a third of the winners are named off-air — the CBS brain trust doesn’t want to bore viewers with unimportant honors like best director. And the telecast is held to a strict three-hour limit. Never mind that the Academy Awards can stretch into hour four or five or, God forbid, a sports event be taken off the air when it dribbles into prime time.

It wasn’t always so.

I was a little Wisconsin kid — on my belly as close to the TV as possible, head in hands, elbows cushioned by shag carpeting — living  for that Sunday night in June when the lights of Broadway shone just for me. I remember Ethel Merman, Mary Martin, Robert Preston, Arthur Miller, Jerome Robbins, Edward Albee, and Rodgers and Hammerstein. I want that magic back, and I don’t think I’m alone.

Put the Tonys on TV an hour earlier so we can cheer all the winners. Let the show run as long as it needs to, brightened by the star power of those who actually sing, dance, direct or emote eight times a week in the middle of Manhattan. Turn down the volume and let the stage bewitch us as it so naturally does. Tell Hollywood to stay home. And ask Patti LuPone and Stephen Sondheim to step up front and center where they belong. Give us our Tonys back, please.

After all, it’s only one night.

One Comment on “Paula Abdul? Raquel Welch? On the Tony Awards? Puh-leeze.”

  1. Raquel Welch is a Broadway Veteran, having starred in Woman of the Year & Victor Victoria. Certain Hollywood Stars have made the successful transition to Broadway and earned their status in the Theater – she’s one of those Entertainers who deserves to be at the Tony’s as an accomplished alumni!

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