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[0:00] 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 miniseries 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 the speeches to see how it reflects that season in Broadway history. So let's dive in and talk about the 2007 Tony Awards.

[0:42] Mo Brady: The 61st annual Tony Awards were presented at Radio City Music Hall on June 10th, 2007. Just like when we looked back at the 1999 ceremony, the 2007 Tonys had no host, but instead a score of celebrity duos as presenters. Heading into the ceremony, two musicals were virtually tied for the most nominations, Spring Awakening with 11, and Grey Gardens with 10. Also, with a respectable set of 7 or 8 nominations were Curtains, Legally Blonde, and Mary Poppins. Nominated for Best Revival were productions of Company, 110 in the Shade, The Apple Tree, and A Chorus Line. But aside from the telecast itself, what was happening way back in 2007, Aaron?

[1:26] Aaron Albano: Well Mo, aside from me being in the city and you being in Seattle, having not moved here yet, the 2006-2007 Broadway season found itself amidst many cultural highs and lows. Right in the middle of President George W. Bush's second presidential term and his international war on terror, the season witnessed the inauguration of the nation's first female Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi. On a more sober note, 2007 also saw the school shooting at Virginia Tech, which remains the deadliest school shooting in the history of the United States. Culturally, the season also saw the inauguration of the very first version of Apple's iPhone, propelling the world solidly into the age of the smartphone, allowing all the actors in New York to be able to check their rehearsal schedules and text their stage managers when they're calling out right from the comfort of their cell phone. Just think, in only six years they'll be able to hear the dulcet tones of Morgan Brady and Nika Graf Lanzarone from those same phones every week. Upstage, downstage, it's all the rage.

[2:31] Mo Brady: That's Dick, he works for me.

[2:34] Aaron Albano: It's a Hiroshima of the small. He's listened to every record in this store.

[2:41] Mo Brady: Ever since we've been...

[2:43] Aaron Albano: All right, let's pour one out for the non-nominated musicals, which Marvin Hamlisch basically did for us in a b-roll package in this 2007 Tony Awards. The year in musicals!

[2:54] Mo Brady: Man, we loved a b-roll package this year.

[2:57] Aaron Albano: Mm-hmm. All right, so the non-nominated musicals are Martin Short, Fame Becomes Me.

[3:04] Mo Brady: He's back!

[3:05] Aaron Albano: He's back. The Times They Are a-Changin'. This is Twyla Tharp's follow-up to Movin' Out. It had a seven-person ensemble, including Lisa Guida, Neil Haskell, and Ron Todorowsky, but only 28 performances at the Brooks Atkinson.

[3:20] Mo Brady: Dr. Seuss's How the Grinch Stole Christmas. This was 107 performances at the Hilton, which is now The Lyric. This would be the first year, because it also was revived just one year later.

[3:31] Aaron Albano: Oh, okay.

[3:31] Aaron Albano: The ensemble of this production included in the children's cast, Bryn Williams, Kevin Solak, and Jess Leprado, former Newsy.

[3:39] Mo Brady: Oh, wow! What iconic children that show had!

[3:43] Aaron Albano: I know. High Fidelity. If you thought that The Times They Are a-Changin' was a low number of performances with 28 at the Brooks Atkinson, High Fidelity will meet you and beat you, because it was only 13 performances at the Imperial Theater.

[3:58] Mo Brady: Oh, my gosh. Did you see High Fidelity?

[4:01] Aaron Albano: Before I moved to the city.

[4:02] Mo Brady: Oh, yeah, that's right. I saw it out of town in Boston, because I was in Spelling Bee at the time, and we got comps to go see High Fidelity with Will Chase and Jen Colella.

[4:11] Aaron Albano: Yes. As opposed to these smaller musicals, we had The Pirate Queen, which performed 85 performances at the Hilton, now The Lyric. And this was a big musical, Stephanie J. Block was The Pirate Queen, but it had an onstage ensemble of 29, including Nick Adams, Jared Bortz, Brooke Elliott, Michael James Scott, and Daniel Torres.

[4:34] Mo Brady: Love Music, with 60 performances at Studio 54. This had no ensemble, an onstage company of 10. And then the travesty of the century, Legally Blonde not being nominated for Best Musical.

[4:48] Aaron Albano: How dare!

[4:49] Mo Brady: How dare! Now, this is an incredible 595 performances at the Palace, had an onstage ensemble of 18. And just like people who still work today, it's like the Jerry Mitchell crew.

[5:01] Aaron Albano: Oh, yeah.

[5:02] Mo Brady: Paul Kanin, Galen Gilliland, Becky Gulsvig, Manny Herrera, Natalie Joy Johnson, Andy Karl, lots of fan favorites. And of course, while this musical lives on in popularity, in part because of its MTV filming, it was not included in this year's Tony Awards, because it was not nominated for Best Musical.

[5:19] Aaron Albano: Yeah.

[5:20] Mo Brady: One revival that was not nominated, we had five revivals this season, and four were nominated for Best Musical, and the one that was not was Les Miserables. This was the first of the two revivals that Broadway has seen. It played 463 performances at the Broadhurst, had an ensemble that included Becca Ayers, Justin Bohan, Nikki Renee Daniels, Nihal Yossi, and Jeff Creedy.

[5:44] Aaron Albano: That's wild.

[5:45] Mo Brady: Well, how long ago had it closed? Not that long ago.

[5:48] Aaron Albano: I did do a little bit of research. It is officially considered a revival and not a return engagement if it's been over three years, and this was over three years since the original production had closed.

[5:58] Mo Brady: But just barely, I assume.

[5:59] Aaron Albano: And yet, we don't see any nominations for it.

[6:01] Mo Brady: Well, because it was also, even though it was a revival, it was basically a remounting, like everything stayed the same.

[6:07] Aaron Albano: Yeah, they just didn't like it.

[6:09] Mo Brady: It was less over-animosity from that British invasion. They were like, we already gave you awards. Get out of here.

[6:14] Aaron Albano: Get out of here.

[6:16] Mo Brady: All right, so Aaron, you chose this Tony Award telecast 2007. Why did you want to revisit 2007?

[6:32] Aaron Albano: I did. So for kind of two main reasons. One, I've been on this host kick lately. Since our conversations about hosts and non-hosts and how successful hosts are in various years, I wanted to still explore that subject. We just saw in 1999 that this no formal host format didn't really work in 99. So I wanted to sort of check in 2007 whether it did. I think amidst this host study, for lack of a better term, I'm developing kind of a theory about what works and what doesn't and why and whatever. Because I feel like we've seen a bunch of no formal host telecasts like back in the day, in the times when this was more of a celebration. And those have worked great. We've now seen 1999 where it didn't. And the format was more commercial the way we've seen it in more recent years.

I wanted to see if it still held with this year, which, spoiler alert, I kind of feel like it still didn't work. And so I'm wondering if with this new format, and tell me if you agree, with the commercialization of the Tonys, we need a host.

[7:47] Aaron Albano: We sort of need a host to sort of unify the whole thing, because the unification of the celebration has no place in today's Tony Awards.

[7:58] Mo Brady: Right. There's not a unifying idea. Like, let's look at the Imperial Theater or let's look at composers. It's just a series of commercials.

[8:08] Aaron Albano: And so in the absence of that unifying presence, we need a host to sort of corral it together.

[8:14] Mo Brady: We need a host. We need a host.

[8:17] Aaron Albano: Which is sad, right? Like, I feel like we shouldn't because... I think the hosts do two things nowadays. One is they combine all of these disparate elements of presentations from shows, award announcements. And then like, let's talk about the American Theater Wing. Let's do an immemorium. Let's do the Carnegie Mellon teacher thing.

[8:38] Mo Brady: Yeah.

[8:38] Aaron Albano: They provide that, like, connective tissue. But they also provide humor.

[8:42] Mo Brady: Yeah.

[8:42] Aaron Albano: That's what they do now. I mean, sometimes we see a lot of humor in the presenters. We'll talk about, like, which presenters we see humor in this year a little later. But yeah, those are the two things. I think they're connective tissue and they're funny. So that's why I wanted to watch this again as a study, not as a competition, Mr. Moe Brady.

[9:01] Mo Brady: Was it worth watching?

[9:02] Aaron Albano: Sure. And then secondly, because I remember this season, but I barely remember this season. I was doing Spelling Bee at the time. So I was sort of in my own world there and I was in a different place in my life. So I also wanted to sort of revisit this season because I remember having very specific biases about this season. And I wanted to see if they still held up or if that was just me being 23-year-old idiot Aaron.

[9:28] Mo Brady: I mean, you bring up an interesting point, which is when you're working on Broadway, you often don't have a clear perspective of the season as a whole. Yes, you've drank the Kool-Aid of your own show and the value of it in the landscape. But also, like, you've perhaps not seen a lot or anything if you're working, depending on your show schedule versus other shows. So you don't really have a sense of, like, how it's all landing for audiences, especially, like, industry audiences who end up deciding award ceremonies like the Tonys. And you get into that, like, oh, these are the shows that people are seeing instead of my show. Because I was in a not even a sophomore show, like a junior or senior show, just being like, all right, who's taking all of our audiences? Why are we not selling as well? And that definitely carried over to the other show that heavily featured characters that are in their youth. We'll get there.

[10:22] Aaron Albano: Don't get ahead of yourself, Aaron Albano.

[10:25] Mo Brady: As a veteran of A Chorus Line, this revival of A Chorus Line on Broadway.

[10:40] Aaron Albano: Yes.

[10:41] Mo Brady: How long after the Tonys?

[10:43] Aaron Albano: Actually, I did two months before the Tonys. I was a vacation swing in this year from January to March. So I was there with this company. I just didn't stick around.

[10:55] Mo Brady: Aaron Albano books, baby.

[10:57] Aaron Albano: All right, so take us through this opening performance. It's one of those that uses a number from a nominated show as the opening of the Tony Awards. Now, we've seen this plenty of times, but how did it work this year?

[11:10] Aaron Albano: Okay, so the telecast opens with Marvin Hamlisch on the roof of Radio City Music Hall at a grand piano playing the opening of A Chorus Line. And while he's playing, he yells out the iconic 5, 6, 7, 8. We then pan out to the entire cast of the revival outside of Radio City Music Hall on the corner of 49th and 6th. It's very clearly a pre-record, but very thrilling in itself. Very well edited. You get to see everybody in the cast. And then that sort of edits into the opening credits, which also still have a Chorus Line theme where everybody has headshots of the presenters that night, clearly not being carried by the presenters themselves, with the exception of a few. The people, they sort of like look behind their headshots and like, it's really me, Bernadette Peters.

It's me! It intercuts throughout into the opening number, to which Mara Davey and Jeff Schechter get to sing their solo lines from the opening. And then we cut to the live performance inside Radio City Music Hall, where the entire cast of A Chorus Line, including onstage covers and swings, the entire company in their golds performing one onstage to kind of close out the opening number.

[12:30] Mo Brady: All right, what'd you think of it, Aaron? Did it work? Was it a good opening for the Tony Awards?

[12:35] Mo Brady: For me, as an alumni of A Chorus Line and someone who just knows A Chorus Line very intimately, I thought it was great. The opening is very thrilling. One is a very great sort of finale to an opening. It has that bang to it. It has that glitz and glamour that you want for the let's bring it home moment. If you don't have sort of the baggage that A Chorus Line comes with in your head, it was just a number. I don't know. What do you think? I liked it. I liked it. I think it was interesting in terms of like atypical. I can think of two ceremonies that kind of used New York as part of the opening number. One was that 42nd Street where they were on the subway. I love that one. That one's so good.

Yes. And this is another one where we see we're seeing a performance sort of integrated into the city and I liked it. I like I like that opening. I think it's fun to see all these crane shots because you get to see that number kind of in a new way that we never see it before. You know, just the spacing and the way that the angle is different. You're getting to see that iconic opening choreography in a way that you don't get to see it when you're sitting in a house. Yeah, the headshot bit did last too long. I feel like this was a decade somewhere. There was like a 10 year period where the opening of the ceremony was just so focused on how many celebs can we try to get you to stick around for?

Like what combination of television and theater stars will make you sit and watch this telecast? Is it Ally McBeal and Judd Hirsch? Totally. This just felt so long and maybe because I was so focused on who was really behind the headshot and like those aren't Audra McDonald's hands. Like that sort of idea. I give it an A for effort in terms of finding a coherent through line. But this sort of adherence to this chorus line theme didn't really feel it really led anywhere outside of, oh, this was surrounded by the chorus line performance. What I think is interesting about these opening number as nominee performances is that you can sort of forget about them when you're starting to think about like the nominated performances of the evening.

This happened to me with the tap dance kid. The tap dance kid was used as the opening number in 1984. And then when I was starting to think about all of the musicals, I couldn't remember what the other one was because that performance had happened so long ago in the telecast. So I do think it's hard because you don't want to over showcase a show, but maybe actually giving a show two performances if you're going to use them as the opening would be more equitable in terms of audience's brain space. I'm not sure. Maybe I just have a low attention span.

[15:31] Aaron Albano: So just bringing it back, we had a show with no formal hosts. How do you feel like it went, Mo? The problem with no host, but a score, I love the word score, but a score of presenters is that it becomes an audience favorite contest. You see who's good at it and you see who's not good at it. The first presenter is four-time Tony Award winner Angela Lansbury. She's also a former host of this award ceremony. The audience loves her. So it's like she's not the host, but she's basically the host? Yeah, she's essentially the host. I'm like, you're going to do the first award and the last award and say, I'm not the host, but I've hosted before. I'm like, you're the host. Now, in general, this was a Tony Awards without jokes from the presenters.

Yes, it was a very serious telecast. One exception, notable exception, David Hyde Pierce and Bebe Neuwirth. God bless. Classic. They're like the perfect level of celebrity to be a presenter at the Tony Awards, right? Like you recognize them, but you're like, that's a theater person who is on TV, not like that is a TV person who did a play at Williamstown once. How do we do the plays this season? We had two B-roll montages this year, one for the look back at the year in plays, and then we had one with the year in musicals, and both included not just the nominated productions, but all the productions that year. And then later on in the show, Marsha Gay Harden and Judge Hirsch describe the four nominees for best play, and then we get another B-roll package just for the four plays.

It's the opposite of Hannah Montana. It's the worst of both worlds. It's just like we spent so much time on plays, and yet there's not a satisfying bite to be had of any of them. I think the challenge with showcasing plays in the Tony Awards is getting sort of a nourishing bite of the show. Some of them showcase great, M. Butterfly, the fantastic scene with John Lithgow and B.D. Wong. You have to be able to like dig in and spend some time with a show. And so what's annoying about this telecast is they devoted a lot of time, and yet nothing was satisfying. Literally nothing. I mean, it's one of those things like, I did not hate the two B-roll packages of the year in plays and the year in musicals, because I do like the fact that we honored the non-nominated productions in some way on the Tony telecast. Because if this is a celebration of our industry that year, it's worth yelling out the ones that you're not super featuring this year.

[18:10] Mo Brady: In memoriam. This year, the in memoriam was Tommy Toon giving a speech about Betty Comden, who he worked with on the Will Rogers Follies, and then he sings an abridged version of the song Look Around from that show. At the same time, we get a slideshow projection of pictures of people we've lost that year. How'd this land for you? I didn't like it. I didn't like it at all. Listeners, you've heard me. I usually love these. A, they started the slideshow while Tommy Toon was giving his intro, and then he sang like some of the song, like a 16 bar cut of the song. And I was like, this feels very rushed and very truncated, almost disrespectfully so. We need more time to honor these people who have passed.

And it felt like it was a rush job and they just wanted to get through it so they can move on. How about you? Having watched this many Tony Awards, I feel like I know how to do an in memoriam. Yeah. Which is some decently famous respected vocalist comes out and sings a theater song or a theater adjacent song while we watch a slideshow. Just sing You'll Never Walk Alone. Just do me. Give me a slideshow. I even dug the year when they brought out all of the nominated casts again to sing You'll Never Walk Alone. So classy. That was the classiest. It was beautiful. And it was like show choir. I loved it. Well, show choir. It was like concert choir. Yeah, it was this this section of the show needs appropriate reverence for the people we've lost.

And this did not feel that way. Look Around is a great is an appropriate and beautiful song for this moment. But to sing like your eight bar cut, and like rush through them where I can't even process who's on the slideshow. I'm like, this sucks, man. Like, these people deserve better, frankly.

[20:31] Aaron Albano: Other strange things about this telecast. What stood out to you, Aaron? One of the craziest things in this telecast was the fact that apparently the orchestra was on a schedule because there were so many playoffs. Like I think I wrote them down. I counted them seven speeches this year were played off 7.5, including Jay Johnson, who was finishing right as they started to play him off. But Billy Crudup, John Gallagher, Jr. Jay Johnson, Michael Mayer, Julie White, David Hyde Pierce, Christine Ebersole, and the producers of Spring Awakening all got that like musical cane to get off the stage. And I was just like, I guess we're on a time crunch this year. It's hard to know. Like, I'm sure they've been told like maybe there's like a countdown clock up there.

Maybe? Yeah. Can they just limit who gets to go on stage at these things? I don't know. This is probably why they got rid of the best theatrical event. Maybe. What about you? Anything else particularly stick out to you? It was just odd. There were like lots of little things. The little bit of Broadway and Everyone campaign. So this is like when we'd come back from commercials, Heidi Klum, or Judge Doody, or Alex Rodriguez would like share a small Broadway memory. It's like, okay, sure, I can like see the importance of showing that there's a little bit of Broadway in Everyone. But it's like that on top of all of these audience reactions. There were so many shots of collaborators of winners in the audience.

Yeah, right. Like so if someone from Spring Awakening was on stage, then they would immediately jump to a mop-haired Jonathan Groff, like holding his hands over his mouth, watching. Like it was just sort of like, gratuitous. I don't know. It didn't land for me. I was like, let's just watch the person who won the award give the speech. What did work was the one performance from a non-nominated musical, which was Fantasia Barrino singing I'm Here from the Color Purple. There's a reason for it. They're here to celebrate the regional Tony Award for the Alliance Theatre, which is where Color Purple started. Like they do like a decent job of like making an excuse for this performance. Yeah, but it's definitely like, buy some tickets to Color Purple, guys.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah, this was an incredible performance. It's wonderful. Of I'm Here. Like, yes, she's so good. Like, it's very different. I feel like there's like, you know, you can listen to LaChanze do it on the cast album. And then there's Fantasia Barrino singing I'm Here. There's that Jennifer Hudson doing the Kennedy Center Honors for Oprah Winfrey, where like the choir comes in in the background. Yeah. And then there's Cynthia Erivo doing I'm Here. Like there's three internet I'm Here's. Yeah. And they are all good for their own reasons. Because the song is fantastic in itself. The song is wonderful.

[23:17] Mo Brady: Gong, gong, gong. I believe that. Yeah. Like it just like it's such it's, yeah, it's an iconic song. But what Fantasia Barrino does so incredibly in this performance, and I didn't see her in the show. So I don't know if this translated for two and a half hours. But she's so raw. Yes. I mean, that's that's Fantasia, though. Like that's why she won American Idol. Like this material seems to land with her. And it's like you're not watching a performance from a musical. You're watching like a literal person figuring out their self worth through music. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I heard she was fantastic. I didn't see it either. But the buzz around Fantasia in that show was like, oh, that's that's the show, man. That's that's Celie.

[24:13] Mo Brady: Thanks for joining us for our first half of discussion of the 2007 Tony telecast. Join us again on Friday when we will discuss the performances by the nominated shows and give our unsanctioned Yelp review. It should be sanctioned, to be honest. The Ensemblist was produced today by me, Aaron Albano, and me, Mo Brady. Special thanks to Wasif Sami for the background research on this 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 like this one. You can support us for between $5 and $20 a month at patreon.com slash the Ensemblist. Thanks for listening. Until next time.