Tony Awards: Schmigadoon and Death of a Salesman

There is always a moment near the end of any Tony ceremony when you see what the industry actually thought of the season, rather than what its marketing tried to sell. This year that moment arrived when the Radio City Music Hall stage announced that the best musical was Schmigadoon, a title that a year ago lived as a television parody rather than a contender for the highest theatrical honour in the English speaking world. The room reacted the way a room does when it knows it voted with its heart instead of by the expected arithmetic.

Schmigadoon began life as a serialised send up of the classic Broadway musical, only to return, through a stage adaptation, to the very form it had been mocking. That doubleness is exactly why it took the top prize: the show celebrates and satirises the genre at once, and Broadway audiences love being allowed to laugh at their own tradition without feeling they have betrayed it. The night’s biggest winner, however, was not a musical at all, but a revival of one of the toughest American dramas of the twentieth century.

Why did Death of a Salesman win the night?

The revival of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman took six awards, more than any other production, including best play revival and best direction. That a 1949 work should once again dominate a ceremony says less about nostalgia than about the fact that Willy Loman and his illusion of success still touch a nerve in the American viewer. When a play about a man who spent his whole life selling himself returns to the stage during a period of economic uncertainty, the industry reads it as contemporary rather than museum piece.

In the leading acting categories the night belonged to John Lithgow, who won best leading actor in a play for Giant and, at eighty, became the oldest winner in that category. Lithgow has for decades been an actor the public knows from film and television, so this Tony works as confirmation that his stage career, which stayed less visible, was operating at the same level all along. Best new play went to Liberation, while Ragtime was named best musical revival, giving the season a balance between fresh writing and a canonical return.

What this ceremony says about Broadway’s moment

This year’s ceremony also carried two shifts that go beyond the titles. Costume designer Quinn Jean became the first openly transgender person to win a Tony, the kind of institutional recognition that theatre tends to reach before film does. The ceremony was also hosted, for the first time, by the pop star Pink, a choice that suggests Broadway is looking for a way to reach an audience that may not yet have walked into the room but does follow whoever is standing on the stage.

What lingers after this year’s Tonys is the sense that the industry voted against predictability. A parody was named best musical, a seventy seven year old drama the night’s biggest winner, and an eighty year old its best actor. If theatre still knows how to reward what is alive rather than merely what is expensive, then this ceremony was good news. So which would you rather watch, a clever parody of the form or its classic original?