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[0:00] Aaron Albano: You're listening to Tony Telecasts from The Ensemblist, the only podcast that shows you Broadway from the inside out. I'm Aaron Albano and I'm Mo Brady.

[0:27] Mo Brady: Welcome listeners to a new miniseries, bringing you all the drama behind the drama of a theater season in Broadway history.

[0:36] Mo Brady: In each podcast episode, we will watch a telecast of a previous Tony Awards and then delve into the theater season. What we saw, what we didn't, what was weird, what we loved, and who knows what else. So let's dive in and talk about the 1991 Tony Awards. But first, Mo, tell us about the telecast.

[0:54] Mo Brady: Happy to, Aaron. The 45th Annual Tony Awards were held on June 2, 1991. They were broadcast on CBS from the Minskoff Theater, current home of The Lion King, and hosted by Julie Andrews and Jeremy Irons. The telecast featured performances from the four nominated musicals, Miss Saigon, Once on this Island, The Secret Garden, and The Will Rogers Follies. It also included a special salute to The Year of the Musical Actor, featuring performances by Robert Morse, Topol, Anne Reinking, Michael Crawford, and more.

[1:26] Mo Brady: Leading up to the awards ceremony, Miss Saigon and The Will Rogers Follies were tied for the most nominations of the season, with 11 each. But it was The Will Rogers Follies that walked away with six wins: musical, score, choreography, direction, costume, and lighting. Miss Saigon and The Secret Garden both received three wins, with Saigon for performances by Jonathan Pryce, Lea Salonga, and Hinton Battle, and The Secret Garden for its book, scenic design, and performance by Daisy Egan, while the fourth nominee for Best Musical, Once on this Island, walked away empty-handed.

[2:00] Aaron Albano: But aside from the telecast itself, what was happening at the time, Aaron?

[2:04] Mo Brady: The world was a lot during the early 90s, Mo. George H.W. Sr. was in the middle of his presidential term, the Cold War was coming to a close, the AIDS crisis was rampaging through the U.S. and the world, and was still only at the beginnings of finding treatments, and judging from the recipient's speeches, the Gulf War was very heavily on the mind of the population at the time. In spite of that, however, the Broadway community this year brought us a very lucrative season full of shows that have stayed pretty well in the theatrical zeitgeist.

[2:31] Mo Brady: What was nice about our Tonys theme this year is that, in the montage, Broadway Take a Bow, we were able to see the entire existing Broadway season as of the broadcast. Those shows were Cats at the Winter Garden, City of Angels at the Virginia, Fiddler on the Roof at the Gershwin, Grand Hotel at the Martin Beck, Gypsy at the Marquis, I Hate Hamlet at the Kerr, Jackie Mason at the Neil Simon, Les Mis at the Imperial, Lost in Yonkers at the Richard Rodgers.

[3:02] Mo Brady: Sure!

[3:03] Mo Brady: Miss Saigon at the Broadway, Once on this Island at the Booth, Our Country's Good at the Niederlander, Penn and Teller at the O'Neill, Prelude to a Kiss at the Hayes, Six Degrees of Separation at the Vivian Beaumont, Phantom at the Majestic, The Secret Garden at the St. James, and The Will Rogers Follies at the Palace.

[3:21] Aaron Albano: Do you want me to take over?

[3:21] Aaron Albano: Whew! Tons of shows. The nominated shows that closed before the Tonys were OK, Peter Pan, Shadowlands, Shogun, Speed of Darkness, Those Were the Days, and Buddy. Give or take a few, that gives us a pretty comprehensive picture of what the Broadway landscape looked like in the 1990-1991 season.

[3:42] Mo Brady: His words go floating everywhere. His family hopes to make his set work.

[3:51] Aaron Albano: All right, let's talk about what we saw.

[3:54] Mo Brady: OK, first off, this was a great telecast.

[3:56] Aaron Albano: This was wild.

[3:59] Mo Brady: It was the wildest thing. Did you watch this live?

[4:02] Aaron Albano: No, no, I definitely have, I've never seen this before, like, in its entirety.

[4:06] Mo Brady: Fierce. Well, great. Then I'm glad we did. First off, there were three things I wanted to mention. One is the AIDS ribbons. So this is 1991, and we see host Jeremy Irons wearing an AIDS ribbon, also Tyne Daly, Kevin Spacey, Joel Grey, Daisy Egan. And it's interesting because this is in the 12 months before Broadway Cares Equity Fights AIDS was formed.

[4:32] Aaron Albano: Wow, OK, I was wondering that.

[4:34] Mo Brady: So Broadway Cares was founded in 1988, and Equity Fights AIDS was founded in 1987, but this is in the moment before they joined. They joined together in May of 1992. So this is really at the moment where the community is about to take a big step forward. And those AIDS ribbons, while we see them and we know exactly what they are when we watch the telecast, those were new to an audience, and they would have been like, why are all those people wearing red ribbons?

[5:03] Aaron Albano: Wow, OK.

[5:05] Mo Brady: They would have Googled it, but there's no Google.

[5:07] Aaron Albano: Oh, yeah, totally.

[5:08] Mo Brady: The second thing I wanted to bring up was Tommy Tune.

[5:12] Aaron Albano: OK, go ahead. I want to talk about this too. Keep going.

[5:15] Mo Brady: So Tommy Tune is the director and choreographer of The Will Rogers Follies, two awards he wins during the ceremony. However, he is not at the ceremony because less than a month after the show opened, he's playing Albert in a national tour of Bye Bye Birdie. And so significant portions of the telecast are live streamed, whatever they called it back then, live streamed from a theater in Seattle. So we see his win for choreography where he doesn't go on mic, but they stay on him for an uncomfortably long amount of time.

[5:53] Aaron Albano: Waving from the wings.

[5:54] Mo Brady: Waving from the wings. His win for direction in which they, quote unquote, stop the show in Seattle. Sure, I'll believe that. And then a performance of Tommy Tune and his co-star Anne Reinking as Rosie Alvarez. There's a whole thing I want to talk about. There's another conversation right there. But OK, keep going.

[6:19] Aaron Albano: It's just it's so weird.

[6:22] Mo Brady: It's the wildest. But here's my favorite thing about it, because I feel like this hearkens to a different time. Because you have this man who was, as of the end of this telecast, a Tony Award winning director and a Tony Award winning choreographer on tour as an actor. Like he's just on tour playing Albert. And it just so happens to win two Tonys, two creative team Tonys, while he's still an actor playing a role. I'm like, that would never happen now. Like the second you, quote unquote, transition into choreography or, quote unquote, transition into directing, you don't act anymore. Or at least it's very few and far between when you do. And so the fact that he won while doing another show, not even in New York, on tour in Seattle. Talk about the best ensemblist moment I have ever seen.

[7:22] Aaron Albano: I will throw a little shout out to Joe Mantello, right? Because Joe Mantello is a Tony Award winning director, and he.

[7:28] Mo Brady: Absolutely. But again, it's very few and far between. And it's very like.

[7:31] Aaron Albano: It's not on tour in a revival of Bye Bye Birdie.

[7:36] Mo Brady: Tommy Tune is on tour and he just won two Tonys.

[7:38] Aaron Albano: OK, then I want to ask you what you thought about what I'm going to call the moonlight moment.

[7:43] Mo Brady: Oh, my gosh. Yes.

[7:45] Aaron Albano: And I'm calling it because it's very reminiscent of the moment at the Oscars where La La Land is announced as the award winner and then taken back for Moonlight because.

[7:58] Mo Brady: Except it's worse. Keep going. Keep going.

[8:00] Aaron Albano: So announcing the best director award, Anthony Quinn and Joan Collins accidentally read the name of the best play off the card.

[8:12] Mo Brady: Yeah.

[8:12] Aaron Albano: So when they're announcing who the best director would be, they say Lost in Yonkers.

[8:18] Mo Brady: Well, he says Lost in Yonkers.

[8:20] Aaron Albano: Right. Sure, sure, sure.

[8:21] Mo Brady: Shocked, as is the rest of the audience.

[8:24] Aaron Albano: Right. The audience audibly gasps.

[8:27] Mo Brady: I did, too. And I'm sitting in my house.

[8:29] Aaron Albano: If you want to see a highly uncomfortable moment, watch this section because hearing the audience gasp, looking at Joan Collins' face, it is a fascinating, fascinating moment of live television.

[8:42] Mo Brady: It's so good.

[8:43] Aaron Albano: And I'm honestly surprised it's like not part of our shared knowledge about the awards.

[8:49] Mo Brady: It's not like Broadway legend at all.

[8:52] Aaron Albano: What did you think was most interesting about what we saw?

[8:54] Mo Brady: What we okay. In our year of the musical actor, which, A, isn't every year the year of the musical actor.

[9:01] Aaron Albano: But it's exactly what I wrote down in my notes.

[9:04] Mo Brady: What do you mean?

[9:05] Aaron Albano: Fine. If we need to stretch for a theme, there are many award shows where we've seen and many ceremonies that have stretched for a theme. Fine.

[9:14] Mo Brady: But these performances lured me.

[9:17] Aaron Albano: And there were certain ones where I was like, OK, fine. Sometimes the Tonys is a commercial. Sometimes it's not.

[9:22] Mo Brady: So the four non-nominated performances were Robert Morse for I Believe in You, Julie Andrews doing like a medley of her career, Tommy Tune and Anne Reinking singing Rosie, Michael Crawford singing Music of the Night, all of which were fine. It filled up the night with more music. It was cool.

[9:44] Aaron Albano: But the reasoning for all of them was suspect to me.

[9:47] Mo Brady: I mean, like Tommy Tune and Anne Reinking. They already had the cameras there. I don't know. It sort of justified.

[9:52] Aaron Albano: Yeah, it was definitely like, let's watch these two veterans of our business do a performance on tour. It really reminded me of the what year was it? 2012, where they showed Hairspray from the cruise line.

[10:08] Mo Brady: From Norwegian cruise line.

[10:10] Aaron Albano: It made me chuckle.

[10:11] Mo Brady: Made me chuckle a little bit. Here are my two real questions about the other two numbers. Robert Morse, I Believe in You, which I thought was fine. I had no idea why we were here. Like there was no production of How to Succeed. Robert Morse wasn't doing anything. So I was like, why is this here? And why are we doing this number?

[10:36] Aaron Albano: To celebrate the year of the musical actor.

[10:38] Mo Brady: It doesn't explain it to you.

[10:40] Aaron Albano: I don't know.

[10:40] Mo Brady: I don't know what else to say.

[10:40] Aaron Albano: Great.

[10:40] Mo Brady: But my biggest favorite moment of the non-nominated performances, Julie Andrews singing My Fair Lady music when Audrey Hepburn is in the building. She, we literally just saw her like an hour ago. And then Julie Andrews sings not one, but two songs from My Fair Lady. And I'm just like, yo, this low key shade to Audrey Hepburn. Because Audrey Hepburn is here. And Julie is just going for broke with these two Eliza songs. And I was dead.

[11:16] Aaron Albano: She's like, I'll take that legacy back. Thank you.

[11:20] Mo Brady: It's so good. It was so great. I loved it. It was my favorite. Let's talk about what we didn't see.

[11:39] Aaron Albano: Okay.

[11:39] Mo Brady: The one thing that I definitely did not see was Peter Pan's performance on the telecast. Because we saw Topol performing for Fiddler.

[11:45] Aaron Albano: For a second, I thought it was part of the year of the musical actor.

[11:51] Mo Brady: Wait, it wasn't?

[11:52] Aaron Albano: No, they're nominated.

[11:55] Mo Brady: Maybe it was like hitting both.

[11:57] Aaron Albano: But Fiddler on the Roof was nominated for Best Revival. You would assume, given that they are one of the nominees, that Peter Pan would also have a performance on the Tonys. So I was like, where is it? And then I looked up and I saw that it was closed already. But I was like, okay, there have been revivals that have closed by the Tonys.

[12:19] Mo Brady: The one that pops up in my head is the Deaf West production of Big River. That show was nominated for Best Revival, but it was closed by the broadcast. They still played a full video about that show. Remember that whole thing where they were raising money for the Deaf West revival of Spring Awakening to perform on the Tonys?

[12:42] Aaron Albano: I remember Bring It On performing on the Tonys after it closed. I remember Christmas Story performing on the Tonys after it closed.

[12:50] Mo Brady: So there is precedent. It is weird that we don't get to see a number of Peter Pan in B-roll, because we see a lot of other B-roll.

[12:59] Aaron Albano: Right, we'll get there.

[12:59] Mo Brady: But especially because Kathy's nominated.

[13:02] Aaron Albano: That's what struck me very starkly. If Fiddler gets a performance, why doesn't Peter Pan get a performance?

[13:07] Mo Brady: There was a lot of odd-seeming performance politics that were being played in this telecast, but we'll get there soon.

[13:17] Aaron Albano: So what I think was interesting that we didn't see was the entire controversy around Jonathan Pryce's casting as the engineer in Miss Saigon. His applause at the Tony Awards telecast was undeniably the biggest for any performer winning.

[13:33] Mo Brady: Absolutely.

[13:33] Aaron Albano: And yet he had the biggest controversy of the season. So big, in fact, that producer Cameron Mackintosh had announced back in August of 1990 that the show would not be coming to Broadway if Jonathan Pryce wouldn't be in it.

[13:51] Mo Brady: So there's this huge conflict going on between Actors' Equity and British Equity. Usually, there's like a one-for-one trade between Actors' Equity and British Equity, right? They'll say, hey, you guys send someone over and we'll let you send someone over. But American Equity was really causing...

[14:07] The Ensemblist & Broadway Podcast Network: Welcome to The Ensemblist, where we celebrate the performances and careers of ensemble performers on Broadway.

[14:37] The Ensemblist & Broadway Podcast Network: Today, we're diving into the 45th Annual Tony Awards, which took place on June 2, 1991, at the Minskoff Theatre.

[14:57] The Ensemblist & Broadway Podcast Network: The ceremony was hosted by the legendary Julie Andrews and Jeremy Irons, and it featured performances from the four nominated musicals.

[15:17] The Ensemblist & Broadway Podcast Network: Those musicals were Miss Saigon, Once on This Island, The Secret Garden, and The Will Rogers Follies.

[15:37] The Ensemblist & Broadway Podcast Network: Leading up to the awards, Miss Saigon and The Will Rogers Follies were tied for the most nominations of the season, each with 11.

[15:57] The Ensemblist & Broadway Podcast Network: However, it was The Will Rogers Follies that took home six wins, including Best Musical, Best Score, Best Choreography, Best Direction, Best Costume Design, and Best Lighting Design.

[16:17] The Ensemblist & Broadway Podcast Network: Miss Saigon and The Secret Garden both received three wins, with Jonathan Pryce and Lea Salonga winning for Miss Saigon, and Daisy Eagan winning for The Secret Garden.

[16:37] The Ensemblist & Broadway Podcast Network: Unfortunately, Once on This Island walked away empty-handed.

[16:57] The Ensemblist & Broadway Podcast Network: The telecast also included a special salute to "The Year of the Musical Actor," featuring performances by Robert Morse, Topol, Ann Reinking, Michael Crawford, and more.

[17:17] The Ensemblist & Broadway Podcast Network: It was a night filled with celebration and recognition of the incredible talent in the Broadway community.

[17:37] The Ensemblist & Broadway Podcast Network: As we reflect on this iconic ceremony, let's take a closer look at the nominated musicals and their impact on the Broadway landscape.

[17:57] The Ensemblist & Broadway Podcast Network: First up, Miss Saigon, which tells the story of a young Vietnamese woman and an American soldier during the Vietnam War.

[18:17] The Ensemblist & Broadway Podcast Network: The musical features a powerful score by Claude-Michel Schönberg and Alain Boublil, and it became a cultural phenomenon.

[18:37] The Ensemblist & Broadway Podcast Network: Next, we have Once on This Island, a beautiful tale of love and sacrifice set in the Caribbean.

[18:57] The Ensemblist & Broadway Podcast Network: With music by Stephen Flaherty and lyrics by Lynn Ahrens, it showcases the vibrant culture and spirit of the island.

[19:17] The Ensemblist & Broadway Podcast Network: The Secret Garden, based on the beloved novel, brought a magical story to life with music by Lucy Simon and lyrics by Marsha Norman.

[19:37] The Ensemblist & Broadway Podcast Network: Finally, The Will Rogers Follies, a musical tribute to the life of the American humorist and performer, featured a lively score by Cy Coleman and lyrics by Betty Comden and Adolph Green.

[19:57] The Ensemblist & Broadway Podcast Network: Each of these shows contributed to the rich tapestry of Broadway and left a lasting legacy.

[20:17] The Ensemblist & Broadway Podcast Network: As we continue our discussion, let's explore some of the standout performances from the night.

[20:37] The Ensemblist & Broadway Podcast Network: The performances showcased the incredible talent of the ensemble members, who often go unrecognized but are essential to the success of these productions.

[20:57] The Ensemblist & Broadway Podcast Network: From the powerful vocals to the intricate choreography, these performers brought the stories to life in a way that resonated with audiences.

[21:17] The Ensemblist & Broadway Podcast Network: It's important to highlight the contributions of ensemble performers, as they are the backbone of any musical.

[21:37] The Ensemblist & Broadway Podcast Network: Their hard work and dedication often go unnoticed, but they play a crucial role in creating the magic of Broadway.

[21:57] The Ensemblist & Broadway Podcast Network: As we celebrate the 45th Annual Tony Awards, let's remember to appreciate the ensemble performers who make these productions shine.

[22:17] The Ensemblist & Broadway Podcast Network: Now, let's take a moment to reflect on the significance of the awards themselves.

[22:37] The Ensemblist & Broadway Podcast Network: The Tony Awards not only honor the best in Broadway, but they also serve as a platform to showcase the diversity and talent within the theater community.

[22:57] The Ensemblist & Broadway Podcast Network: They highlight the importance of storytelling through music and performance, bringing together artists from all walks of life.

[23:17] The Ensemblist & Broadway Podcast Network: As we look back on the 1991 Tony Awards, we can see how far the industry has come and the progress that continues to be made.

[23:37] The Ensemblist & Broadway Podcast Network: It's a reminder of the power of theater to inspire, uplift, and bring people together.

[23:57] The Ensemblist & Broadway Podcast Network: Thank you for joining us as we celebrate the performances and careers of ensemble performers in this special episode.

[24:17] The Ensemblist & Broadway Podcast Network: We hope you enjoyed our look back at the 45th Annual Tony Awards and the incredible musicals that were nominated.

[24:37] The Ensemblist & Broadway Podcast Network: Stay tuned for more episodes where we continue to shine a light on the unsung heroes of Broadway.

[24:57] The Ensemblist & Broadway Podcast Network: Until next time, keep celebrating the magic of theater!

[25:17] The Ensemblist & Broadway Podcast Network: Goodbye for now!

[25:37] The Ensemblist & Broadway Podcast Network: Thanks for listening!

[25:57] The Ensemblist & Broadway Podcast Network: We appreciate your support!

[26:17] The Ensemblist & Broadway Podcast Network: See you next time!

[26:39] The Ensemblist & Broadway Podcast Network: Take care!

[26:59] The Ensemblist & Broadway Podcast Network: Bye!

[27:09] The Ensemblist & Broadway Podcast Network: Have a great day!

[27:19] The Ensemblist & Broadway Podcast Network: Until next time!

[27:39] The Ensemblist & Broadway Podcast Network: Keep shining!

[28:05] The Ensemblist & Broadway Podcast Network: Bye for now!