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[0:01] Mo Brady: You're listening to Tony Telecasts from The Ensemblist, the only podcast that shows you Broadway from the inside out. I'm Mo Brady. And I'm Aaron Albano.

[0:21] Mo Brady: Welcome listeners to our mini-series about the Tonys, looking into the drama behind the drama of a theater season in Broadway history. In each podcast episode, we watch a telecast of a previous Tony Awards, not only the performances, but the opening and speeches to see how it reflects the season as a whole. So let's dive in and talk about the 1999 Tony Awards. The 53rd Annual Tony Awards were held at the Gershwin Theater on June 6th, 1999. Unlike every other awards ceremony we've discussed in this mini-series, the show did not have a formal host. Heading into the ceremony, the closed Lincoln Center Theater production of Parade led the pack with nine nominations. Following closely behind was the eventual winner for Best Musical, Fosse, with eight.

Spoilers! Sorry for spoiling the two-decade old ceremony. Also in the running for Best Musical were It Ain't Nothin' But the Blues and The Civil War with four and two nominations, respectively. In the race for Best Revival of a musical were Your Good Man Charlie Brown and Little Me, with four nominations, and Annie Get Your Gun, with three nominations, followed by Peter Pan with a singular nomination for Best Revival. But aside from the telecast itself, what was happening at the time? Aaron, take us back to 1999. The 1998-1999 Broadway season found itself in a very tumultuous time in U.S. history. Smack dab in the middle of President Bill Clinton's second term in office, domestically the country was facing a multitude of newsworthy events.

Among them were the impeachment and acquittal of said president in the scandal involving Monica Lewinsky, the brutal murder of Matthew Shepard in Laramie, Wyoming, and the mass school shooting in Columbine, Colorado that would sadly become the first of a number of school shootings in the nation in what the Washington Post would eventually refer to as a uniquely American crisis in 2018. Abroad, the world was embroiled in the Kosovo War, which permeated the American zeitgeist as well. And all this with Y2K just around the corner. Remember Y2K?

[2:24] Aaron Albano: Yeah, I sure do. Gosh, we're old, Aaron.

[2:37] Mo Brady: All right, let's pour one out for the non-nominated musicals. Now, out of all of the seasons that we've discussed so far, this, I thought, was the most sporadic, random in terms of its nominations. Usually you see there are musicals that are being nominated for either Best Musical or Best Revival of a Musical, and those shows are also nominated for many, many other awards. And this year, it's very odd. There's fits and starts. There's shows that are only nominated for Best Revival and then not nominated for anything else. There's shows that are nominated for tons of awards, but not Best Musical. It's very all over the place. And one of those, obviously, is Swan Lake, which is the dance show that ran at the Neil Simon Theatre.

[3:19] Aaron Albano: It was the Matthew Bourne production.

[3:21] Mo Brady: The Matthew Bourne production.

[3:22] Aaron Albano: The all-male Swan Lake.

[3:23] Mo Brady: The all-male Swan Lake. Okay, I guess there are other ways to describe it than just Swan Lake. So it was closed at this time. It had run September through January, 124 performances, had five nominations, and won for both Best Direction of a Musical and Best Choreography, both to the same person, Matthew Bourne.

[3:42] Aaron Albano: Wow, really? I didn't know that. Especially since it's not even really a musical. It's a ballet.

[3:47] Mo Brady: Well, in his acceptance speech, Matthew Bourne says, I won Best Direction of a Musical, and this isn't even a musical.

[3:54] Aaron Albano: Which I was like, correct. And also, maybe you shouldn't have won it? I don't know. Have you seen this DVD? I have this DVD, by the way.

[4:01] Mo Brady: Yeah, it's a fantastic show. I also really liked Edward Scissorhands, and I love a lot of their work. Also, a musical that is nominated for many awards, but not Best Musical, is Footloose at the Richard Rodgers.

[4:14] Aaron Albano: Everybody cut, everybody cut.

[4:18] Mo Brady: Clap, clap. This ran for 709 performances, a very respectable run, and had four nominations this year. Best Book, Best Original Score, Best Choreography, and Best Actress for Dee Hody.

[4:32] Aaron Albano: Yes.

[4:32] Mo Brady: We had a couple of smaller shows that were running this season as well. Band of Berlin at the Helen Hayes. It was a seven-person musical that ran 17 performances. Marlena at the Court, which was a three-person musical that ran 25 performances, but got two nominations, one for Best Book of a Musical and one for Best Actress. There was also The Gershwins' Fascinating Rhythm at the Longacre. This was a 10-person musical review that included Michael Burress, Adrienne Lennox, Orfeh, Sara Ramirez, and Patrick Wilson.

[5:03] Aaron Albano: This is a stacked cast that I want to see.

[5:06] Mo Brady: However, it only ran for 17 performances in April and May, and it wasn't nominated for a thing.

[5:10] Aaron Albano: So maybe it wasn't that good. Maybe it's just wrong place, wrong time.

[5:14] Mo Brady: Well, and it's funny because also a Gershwin review usually does so well.

[5:19] Aaron Albano: Yeah, it doesn't seem like a bad idea, and yet...

[5:21] Mo Brady: And yet nothing for this one. All right. The last non-nominated musical of the 1998-1999 season was a revival of On the Town. It ran 69 performances, October through January.

[5:33] Aaron Albano: This is the one with Jesse Tyler Ferguson as one of the sailors.

[5:38] Mo Brady: Oh, that's this one?

[5:39] Aaron Albano: Yeah, I think this is a public theater production.

[5:42] Mo Brady: Oh, interesting. Well, it had one nomination though, Mary Testa, for Best Featured Actress in a Musical, for playing Hildy, the taxi driver. So six non-nominated musicals, but only two of them are actually not nominated for anything. That's a lot of non-nominated musicals for one season, and yet this was the season of the play?

[6:02] Aaron Albano: Yeah, I guess so. 14 musicals, and here we are in the season of the play. Let's talk about this telecast, Aaron. Host Choice, you picked the 1999 telecast.

[6:12] Mo Brady: Yes, I did. Why did you pick this year beforehand? And then I want to know if it met your expectations.

[6:21] Aaron Albano: So I chose 1999 because in our discussions of more recent telecasts, we've always talked about the host. We've talked about James Corden, we've talked about Neil Patrick Harris, we've talked about Rosie O'Donnell, we've talked about all of them and discussed their strengths and weaknesses. This one interested me because it is one of the few more modern telecasts that does not have a formal host.

[6:47] Mo Brady: Yes, the energy of these telecasts really seems to ride or die on the host itself.

[6:54] Aaron Albano: So what happens when there isn't a host?

[6:56] Mo Brady: Exactly. That sounded very exciting to me to just examine in my Host Choice. I also wanted to watch this because it has people performing in this telecast that we've both worked with as choreographers, and I thought it'd be fun to watch them in their performing prime. So we'll dive into how all three of those worked in this podcast episode.

[7:34] Mo Brady: Opening number, There's No Business Like Show Business, sung by Bernadette Peters and Tom Wopat.

[7:40] Aaron Albano: Yeah.

[7:41] Mo Brady: This is one of those Tony Awards that opens with a number from a show, right? We saw that with Something Rotten doing a musical at the opening of the telecast in 2015. Sometimes when there is a show in the running that is so theatrical...

[7:59] Aaron Albano: Or just has like a baked-in opening number that's just too good to pass up.

[8:04] Mo Brady: Right. However, what's sort of unique, at least I think in this version, is it's a very clean opening number. We get Tom Wopat coming out singing a verse. Bernadette Peters comes out singing a verse. And then they just call out all the hosts. They name them by name and, you know, they all come out in their pairs that they're going to announce awards for. And they then end with like just these 20 stars.

[8:34] Aaron Albano: A host parade, if you will.

[8:36] Mo Brady: A host parade. It was a host parade. They do a roll call and then they just like sing the last line of the song. And then they're done. And then we move on. In terms of like getting famous people into the ceremony, they've done an excellent job here.

[8:52] Aaron Albano: Sure.

[8:52] Mo Brady: What did you think of this opening number?

[8:54] Aaron Albano: It was fine. It was fine. I mean, was it an opening number? No. Were we done with it quickly? Yeah. It was efficient.

[9:03] Mo Brady: It was efficient. That is a great word for it.

[9:07] Aaron Albano: We opened it.

[9:08] Mo Brady: And then it was open.

[9:11] Aaron Albano: I mean, it did allow for some like wonderful moments. Of course, Elaine Stritch comes out late when she's supposed to be joining Kevin Kline. Like there was just like some like great personality moments of people coming out that I was like, that's ridiculous.

[9:26] Mo Brady: So speaking of the reason that I wanted to choose this one, how did you like the lack of formal host?

[9:32] Aaron Albano: Well, one thing to know is that this is a 90 minute ceremony.

[9:36] Mo Brady: Yes.

[9:36] Aaron Albano: Speaking of efficiency, this is very fast. So to give a little context for where we are in the history of the Tonys at this time. So this came from 1998, where Rosie was doing her second time hosting. And the year after, in the year 2000, she will return for her third time hosting. I don't know what's going on in the middle where she couldn't do it. And she gets specifically called out by Elaine Stritch.

[10:03] Mo Brady: Placed in the middle of Rosie's second and third times hosting, it was a very drastic shift from a host led Tonys.

[10:13] Aaron Albano: Interesting, because this is like right in the middle of the Rosie O'Donnell show.

[10:16] Mo Brady: Yeah.

[10:17] Aaron Albano: And its impact on both inside the theater industry, but also sharing the theater industry outside.

[10:23] Mo Brady: Yeah. To the masses, right? In January of 1999, a spokesperson confirmed that Rosie O'Donnell would not be the host of the Tony Awards in June of that year, saying she doesn't have the time.

[10:37] Aaron Albano: Interesting.

[10:37] Mo Brady: So even though she's not the host, she was the de facto host. And then when she couldn't be the host, they're like, nah, we just won't have it. We'll just don't, we just won't have a host.

[10:46] Aaron Albano: Yeah.

[10:47] Mo Brady: It's Rosie or nothing, baby.

[10:49] Aaron Albano: Interesting. Fine. I don't always really love the comedian led.

[10:56] Moe Brady: I think it really depends on the performer, but honestly didn't feel like I missed anything. I don't know. What did you think?

[11:05] Aaron Albano: I like that we were shorter, but I did feel like the ceremony lacked a certain focus to it. Like I was just kind of not let out to dry, maybe let out to dry because I didn't have like a constant that I knew we'd go back to all the time, huh? And I actually felt like it had more of a rhythm than some interesting. Because often the host is used to sort of spice it up, you know? Okay, but this was very much two celebrities come out, they present an award. Here's a number, two more celebrities come out, they present an award. Here's a look at... yeah, very methodical to me.

[11:41] Moe Brady: That's fair.

[11:41] Aaron Albano: So, but it almost also felt like all of these people were now auditioning for being the next host after Rosie doesn't want to come back again.

[11:48] Moe Brady: Well, none of them won.

[11:49] Aaron Albano: So yes, correct, but some of them were fantastic. Would you like to give any shoutouts?

[11:54] Moe Brady: Um, Carol Burnett and Julie Andrews, like forget about it. Hands down the best non-hosts hosts of the night.

[12:05] Aaron Albano: They did specials together, right?

[12:06] Moe Brady: Oh, yeah, their chemistry is tried and true and it shows and you a hundred percent want to see them like yes, you want them to be the hosts of the Tony Awards and you they must have been like math. Thanks for good that might be real that might be so real.

[12:18] Aaron Albano: I did love Christine Baranski and David Hyde Pierce, you know, two theater people who like understand comedy but also understand the industry and also understand the Tony Awards like it just felt like they felt perfect to me.

[12:38] Moe Brady: Yeah, they were great.

[12:41] Aaron Albano: It's like no business, I know.

[12:45] Moe Brady: How you were accusing half the night waiting till the morning papers. Can we take a moment for the amount of dance nominations there were in this telecast?

[12:56] Aaron Albano: We love dance in 1999.

[12:59] Moe Brady: We did. It was so great and it's so few and far between when this happens. So I loved seeing this many on screen. None of them won, but it was great that they were there. Who was it? It was Adam Cooper for Swan Lake, Desmond Richardson, Scott Weiss, and Valerie Pettiford for Fosse. I'm so happy that the nominating committee decided to call out these four dancers because this isn't a Chita Rivera, this isn't a Gwen Verdon where they're being featured for their prowess in all three parts of the craft. They are being honored strictly for dance, which is never honored at the Tonys.

[13:40] Aaron Albano: Yeah. Well it is in 2000-20. Yeah, Robin Herter sings very little in Moulin Rouge! The Musical on by her own. It's mostly acting and dance that the role of Nini has and she's been nominated with a Tony Award. So it, I mean, yes, but you like you said, it's very rare. I don't remember another time in the last few years where we saw a dance performance, you know? It was Debra Yates in Contact in 2000. We saw a lot of nominations in 2003 for Movin' Out and then another Twyla Tharp show, Karine Plunadit in Come Fly Away in 2010. But I feel like Karine's nomination is like something we still talk about today as being impressive that she was nominated for a dance show, even though it was 10 years ago because we didn't have any other examples.

[14:24] Moe Brady: Yeah, that's real. I mean, I remember when Scott Weiss won for Jerome Robbins' Broadway and I feel like that is, are you believe the only one in history that couldn't? That was in 1989? He won for Jerome Robbins' Broadway. There were two others nominated, Charlotte D'Ambroise and Robert LaFosse, and then before that was Ann Rankin and Wayne Salento for Fosse's Dancing in 1978. This is not a common occurrence. So we had a lot of them in this time, which is great. It's also the shows like those are dance shows and this season we had a lot of dance shows.

[14:59] Aaron Albano: Erin, how do we do the plays? It's time to talk about how we did the plays. This is your favorite part. How did we do the plays?

[15:06] Moe Brady: We did them poorly. That's okay, so Elaine Stritch and Kevin Kline introduced quote a special one-time only performance piece for us this evening, a collage of moments from five of the best plays on Broadway. It's a mosaic of emotions touching on fathers and their children, men in their dreams, birth, death, and the bizarre and unpredictable intermission in between, and it would be performed by actors in the cast of those five plays: Brian Dennehy, Kevin Spacey, Clark Peters, Brian F. O'Byrne, Scott Wolfe, Frank Wood, and Max Wright.

[15:44] Aaron Albano: It was a mess.

[15:45] Moe Brady: I am so good. So I have a lot of questions about this thing. Firstly, why do we only have the men? Like you got Judi Dench, you got Stockard Channing, you got Mary Louise Parker all nominated for all of these plays already. Be a, you only have the men. Be there's no unifying thing about the shows that are being presented. It's like both revivals and new shows, like in Shakespeare, yeah, Death of a Salesman, Shakespeare, but also Side Man. I don't understand what the decision-making was for this presentation.

[16:20] Aaron Albano: I mean, we should have known from the top when Kevin Kline massacres, you know, Byrne's name because the concept was they were doing lines from their own shows at each other, right?

[16:32] Moe Brady: Right, they were saying lines from their shows. They were saying them in the characters they play in those shows, uh-huh, and yet it was supposed to sort of like be an emotional evocative piece about fathers of their children, men in their dreams, birth, death, and the bizarre and unpredictable intermission in between. I mean, what is most remarkable to me is that we hear time and again that the plays are where it's at this season. Calista Flockhart says in the very first presentation, "It was without a doubt the season of the play." Without a doubt, without a doubt. And Kevin Kline in that introduction says, "The talk of Broadway this season has been the resurgence of drama." And so you could see like the conference table where they go, "Dramas big, right? Okay, so we got to do something special with the drama. Let's put Brian Dennehy and Kevin Spacey together on a stage, sure, right?" And then it just spins out of control into a mess.

[17:33] Aaron Albano: It's like, yo guys, this acting exercise that someone came up with did not work on TV.

[17:41] Moe Brady: It does feel like a late-night theater production from your college, literally. And I'm just like, y'all didn't sell any tickets with this presentation.

[17:48] Aaron Albano: Well, that's the problem. We say that time and again, like if the goal is to sell the shows, uh-huh, the plays never get sold unless you perform a moment from the plays. It doesn't work when you do the montage. It doesn't work when you put props on a pedestal and have Laura Linney and Brian Stokes Mitchell talk about the plays. Just show us the plays!

[18:10] Moe Brady: Show us the plays! Especially since it was such like a heavy revival season, like show us Death of a Salesman, show us Twelfth Night, show us The Iceman Cometh. Okay, fine, but like show us the plays instead of having them all talk at each other in some non-descript universe where these characters would collide. Like I cut, no forget it. I can't.

[18:45] Aaron Albano: The last thing I want to talk about in the first half of our Tony telecast recap is the first ten. So this was a year where they gave the first ten awards, mostly design awards, also choreography, the directors. They gave them on TV, but in a separate telecast that happened right before this telecast, so on PBS, right? Not on CBS?

[19:08] Moe Brady: Yes.

[19:08] Aaron Albano: So you would tune into PBS for the hour before to watch these ten awards, and then you would go to CBS to see them, the main broadcast. So I think that's also part of the reason why the CBS version was so short. It was 90 minutes without commercials because we got this hour-long PBS, like a full hour because there's no commercials. In my opinion, like I think you know what you grew up with, right, in terms of Tony Awards. These were the glory days. Like you really got like an hour to sort of dig into the Tony Awards, and this is before YouTube. Sure, there's all this fantastic b-roll of rehearsals of other performances that you get to see, you know? You basically get to see multiple numbers from the shows now instead of seeing just the number that is part of the CBS telecasts, which is so interesting because that would almost be a better ad for the show.

[20:01] Moe Brady: Yeah, there's fantastic interviews with Jason Robert Brown, with Hal Prince. You get to see rehearsal footage of Fosse. They go through kind of the process of "I Want to Be a Dancing Man." So you see them in a, you see them I think rehearsing on stage in rehearsal clothes, you know, with their hats, "I Want to Be a Dancing Man," right? And then they go like back and forth from like rehearsal to performance, and you can sort of see like how the design elements or how the lighting or how the costumes add to the storytelling. I think it was really well put together, this hour-long telecast. We don't need this now because there's so much video content shows available, but in this time where there weren't those things, like this was such an excellent way to sort of get to see more of the shows than just the three minutes we see in the telecast.

[20:58] Moe Brady: Thanks for joining us for our first half of our Tony telecasts. Join us for the second part of our Tony's telecast recap. Be sure to join us on Friday.

[21:08] Aaron Albano: The Ensemblist was produced today by me, Aaron Albano, and me, Moe Brady. Special thanks to Liza Sammy for the background research on this week's and every week's Tony season. Please rate and review The Ensemblist wherever you listen to podcasts on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or at BPN.FM, the home of Broadway Podcast Network. Our Patreon members have on-demand access to our archive, including full conversations with our guests and early access to episodes. You can support us for between $5 and $20 a month at patreon.com slash The Ensemblist. Thanks for listening. Until next time!