2017 TONY NOMINATIONS

[bostonman]

IMO, Spacey did fine. His impressions, while funny, weren't exactly socially current. I was surprised he chose Clinton and Carson. Odd.

 

One does what one can do.

 

Well, I tend to think that the majority of the time, he didn't play to his strengths. The impressions were off (and odd, as BN said). The opening number did a fun job of trying to showcase the nominated musicals, but he didn't really have the chops to pull it off, though he gave it a good college try, lol. (But do we tune into a nationally broadcast professional awards show to see "good college tries"? Have all the American Idol-style shows really brought us to that, lol?) When he was being himself, he was fine. And when he did the House Of Cards presidential appearance, he was fine. But the rest of the time, he just seemed, and looked, and sounded, out of his comfort zone.

 

And why that last song? Oh my god...I mean, you know you had the CBS producers, already rattled by Midler's one-woman show, lol, starting at their watches seeing the seconds tick by...with Patti Lupone singing in some undiscovered language, Spacey not really reprising his Darin from Beyond The Sea, and the song, well-intentioned but a bit too much of a sentimental slog to feel like a fitting end to the broadcast.

 

We can, on the other hand, thank the lord that Rachel Bloom didn't make yet another appearance. Her shrill adolescent fangirl routine was most likely the most classless and migraine-inducing thing about the broadcast, a broadcast which - I should say - did have a lot of great moments.

[+ WilliamM]

IMO, Spacey did fine. He definitely skewed the whole show older, which is likely why the ratings were down 31% from last year. His impressions, while funny, weren't exactly socially current. I was surprised he chose Clinton and Carson. Odd.

 

For me, the show was too long, and missed an opportunity to honor James Earl Jones in a more distinguished way.

 

I am also surprised he chose Clinton..

 

Finally, does "Hello, Dolly" appeal to a young audience? My guess: No, with a few exceptions.

[bostonman]

Finally, does "Hello, Dolly" appeal to a young audience? My guess: No, with a few exceptions.

 

One of my favorite real-life anecdotes - I was doing a teen summer musical theatre program some years back, and we had assigned songs to each of the kids to be one of their main songs for the session. We had assigned "Ribbons Down My Back" to one of the girls. When she came in to work on the song for a coaching, she sang through it, and she sounded ok but I didn't feel like she was making any real connection to the lyrics yet (not atypical with young singers, lol). So in an effort to help her discover more about the song, I started by asking her if she had ever seen the show/film before, or perhaps had read The Matchmaker in school - the play the show is based on. She hadn't. But her response was priceless - "I looked up the synopsis on Wikipedia, but it was so long I couldn't get through it."

 

By the time she performed the song at the end of the session, she knew what it was all about.