Nominations include:

Best Musical – The Scottsboro Boys

Best Revival of a Musical – Anything Goes

Best Revival of a Musical – How to Succeed…

Best Scenic Design of a Musical – Derek McLane – Anything Goes

See the complete list of nominees at:

http://www.tonyawards.com/en_US/nominees/index.html

Check out our video below!

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Source: NY Times

By: CHARLES ISHERWOOD

An exotic beast is stalking Broadway. No, I’m not referring specifically to the man-eating title character played by Robin Williams in “Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo.” I’m talking about the play itself: Rajiv Joseph’s smart, savagely funny and visionary new work of American theater, whose presence on Broadway invites fanciful comparison to the titular beast. A Pulitzer Prize finalist last year, “Bengal Tiger” is like a majestic cat serenely striding through a litter of cute-as-can-be kittens ready for their YouTube close-ups.

“Bengal Tiger,” which opened Thursday night at the Richard Rodgers Theater, asks us to think and feel like adults, absorbing the dark absurdities in Mr. Joseph’s microcosmic vision of the chaos that reigned in Baghdad shortly after the invasion of Iraq. Its quiet urge to attend to the moral problems that beset our world — not to mention the existential mysteries man has pondered for centuries — stands in stark contrast to the more prevalent invitations blaring from Broadway marquees: to be serenaded by sweet nostalgia or to Facebook-friend our inner teenager.

The production, directed with gorgeous finesse by Moisés Kaufman (“I Am My Own Wife,” “33 Variations”), does make a standard concession to the celebrity-centric economy of today’s theater by headlining a box-office name. (The rest of the terrific cast comes from Mr. Kaufman’s Los Angeles production, which I saw last spring.) But Mr. Williams, the kinetic comic who has sometimes revealed a marshmallowy streak in movies, never indulges the audience’s hunger for displays of humorous invention or pinpricks of poignancy. He gives a performance of focused intelligence and integrity, embodying the animal who becomes the play’s questioning conscience with a savage bite that never loosens its grip.

And, oh yes, Mr. Williams is quite funny too. He is after all playing a tiger with a foul mouth and a disposition to match, who’s been locked up in the Baghdad zoo for years and is growling as loudly as his stomach when the play opens. (Mr. Williams doesn’t wear a Tigger costume, only a grizzled beard and unkempt hair suggest an animal.) I should emphasize that “Bengal Tiger” is not a civics lesson kind of play to be dutifully attended like a cultural homework assignment. Man and beast, and man turned beast, are depicted throughout with a fanciful humor that still allows for clear-eyed compassion.

The American invasion of 2003 has just taken place, and Baghdad is riven by conflict and confusion. Two soldiers guarding the tiger’s cage — the cocky Kev (Brad Fleischer) and the business-minded Tom (Glenn Davis) — are killing time by swapping stories of their wartime experience. The tiger does some trash-talking himself, gloating over the stupidity of the lions, who fled their habitat only to be mowed down by artillery.

The juvenile Kev, played to dopey perfection by Mr. Fleischer, alternately gripes and makes absurd boasts about the prowess he is yet to prove. He seems to think that warfare is just a cool video game, and the other guys are hogging the Xbox. Tom, imbued with forceful gravity by Mr. Davis, was present when the American troops reached the palace of Uday and Qusay Hussein, Saddam’s sons. His spoils from the looting that took place: a gold-plated toilet seat and a matching handgun that he’s stashed in his knapsack.

This gleaming weapon, sowing mayhem as it moves from hand to hand, is a potent symbol of both corrupting greed and the brutality it can engender. A vulgar talisman of the rapacious Hussein regime, it also becomes a trophy sought after — possibly even killed for — by an American soldier intent on getting what he can out of the war. (Draw your own conclusions about the larger American imperatives in Iraq.)

The golden gun’s first victim is the hapless tiger. As the awed and envious Kev marvels at this spectacular bit of bling, Tom makes the mistake of offering a snack to the beast in the cage, with results that leave him without a hand and the tiger with a gut full of lead. “I get so stupid when I get hungry,” the tiger groans in self-disgust.

And yet death proves oddly congenial to this grumpy beast, who spends his time in the afterlife haunting the soldier who caused his death while pondering the mysteries his ongoing consciousness presents.

“It’s alarming, this life after death,” he confides. “The fact is, tigers are atheists. All of us. Unabashed. Heaven and hell? Those are just metaphorical constructs that represent ‘hungry’ and ‘not hungry.’ Which is to say, why am I still kicking around?” Suddenly this creature of dumb instinct begins acquiring a moral sense and with it the burning desire to know how the afterlife can exist without God, and how God can ignore the unruly garden of corruption that his world has become.

Such questions are tendered by Mr. Williams’s gruff tiger in an offhand, conversational tone that considerably lightens their weightiness. (The exception perhaps is a late speech decrying God’s indifference in overly bald terms.) Similarly, Mr. Joseph’s play to its credit does not aspire to make overarching and obvious statements about the morality of warfare. It is more deeply concerned with the facts on the ground, namely how the baser instincts of human beings inevitably come to the fore in an atmosphere tense with the threat of violence.

Kev’s hair-trigger anxiety and psychological fragility exemplify one potentially disastrous outcome. The bitterness and deadened humanity that Tom exhibits when he returns to Iraq after acquiring an artificial hand is another. And the play’s most movingly drawn character, the soldiers’ translator, Musa (played with soulful intensity by Arian Moayed), becomes perhaps the most heart-rending victim of the viral contagion of violence that the play depicts.

He is haunted by the ghost of Uday Hussein (a vivid, hilariously malevolent Hrach Titizian), who had employed him as a gardener to tend the exotic zoo of topiary animals on the palace grounds. Musa’s journey from friendly helper fascinated by the arcana of American lingo (a very funny scene dissects the meanings of the word “bitch”) to disturbed opportunist represents the most painful illustration of how the appetite for destruction that man shares with predatory beasts is unloosed when the structures of civilization suddenly fall away.

The mosaic of escalating violence depicted in the play takes place against a background of almost breathtaking beauty, in the elegant sets designed by Derek McLane, among his most poetic and effective work. The equally fine lighting design of David Lander blends velvety shadows with rich colors evoking the ravaged beauty of a once-great city.

It is an atmosphere inhabited by the play’s end almost entirely by ghosts. The ricocheting violence unleashed by the legacy of the Hussein regime and the American invasion that sought to end it has claimed victims both malign and innocent.

And yet “Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo,” for all the killing and suffering it contains, is buoyed by the vitality of its imaginative scope. Violence is not after all the only human activity that can have far-reaching, unforeseen effects, shaping lives far into the future.Mr. Joseph’s richly conceived play reminds us that art can have a powerful afterlife too.

The new sundial on the Shakespeare Theatre will be unveiled Friday, Oct. 22, at 4 p.m., during a ceremony open to the public.

Town officials will welcome Timex Group USA Senior Vice President of Technology Lou Galie for the ceremony. Timex Group USA of Middlebury has agreed to pay for the construction and installation of a replica of the original timepiece.

The new sundial is being designed, manufactured and installed by Global Scenic Services of Bridgeport. Timex is consulting on the design and engineering for the timekeeping functionality.

A prototype of the design was recently tested by Councilman Matt Catalano (R-3rd) and David Griffith, communications manager for Timex Group USA.

Griffith said it is the only sundial he knows of that was created by Timex.

The original sundial, a gift from Timex at the theater’s opening in 1956, will be preserved and displayed at the Timex Museum in Waterbury, according to a press release from Mayor John A. Harkins.

The title is “The Grand Manner,” but the style of A. R. Gurney’s latest play, which opened Sunday night at the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater at Lincoln Center, is definitely on the cozy side. A homey needlepoint embroidery on Mr. Gurney’s encounter as a prep school student with the fabled American actress Katharine Cornell, this fantasy memoir allows the author’s younger, provincial self a seductive first glimpse of a world where being merely life-size isn’t enough.

This is a tantalizing premise for fans of comedies about vintage theater stars preening their overgrown egos and flamboyant neuroses. Two prime examples of that genre — Edna Ferber and George S. Kaufman’s “Royal Family” and Noël Coward’s “Present Laughter” — were seen on Broadway last season and were enjoyable despite a distinct scent of mothballs. The idea of a fresh contribution from a dramatist as perennially stage-struckas Mr. Gurney certainly gave reason to hope.

Though set in the green room of the Broadway theater where Cornell (Kate Burton) is portraying Shakespeare’s Cleopatra in 1948, “The Grand Manner” might as well take place in one of the snug Buffalo parlors, replete with well-worn Oriental rugs and heirloom furniture, where Gurney characters have been gathering for decades. Even wearing the Queen of the Nile regalia in which she makes her entrance here (Ann Hould-Ward did the rich-hued costumes), Ms. Burton’s Cornell brings to mind less a commanding diva than one of the gracious but regretful matrons who are a Gurney specialty.

This should come as no surprise. Even taking on big subjects — like the moral fallibility of George W. Bush(“Mrs. Farnsworth”) and war in the Middle East (“O Jerusalem”) — Mr. Gurney remains a committed miniaturist. His characters share a sense of being confined by the identities they were born into. And the settings of his plays are ultimately prisons of a sort, from which characters stare wistfully out onto a world of ungraspable possibilities.

“The Grand Manner,” directed with low-key, spark-free leisureliness by Mark Lamos, is true to wistful Gurney form. “It’s a terrible thing to be trapped in the wrong role,” Cornell says to the young Pete (an excellent Bobby Steggert), who has come to Manhattan from his New England boarding school just to see her in “Antony and Cleopatra.” She doesn’t just mean her part onstage.

Cornell has agreed to receive Pete because he, like her, comes from Buffalo. And at a moment in her life when her identities as a woman and an artist feel shaky, Buffalo is looking like a sanctuary to her, a place where she is known for who she really is.

No wonder the name of that town is anathema to her closest associates, Guthrie McClintic (Boyd Gaines), her husband and director, and Gertrude Macy (Brenda Wehle), her manager and lover, who cajole and spar with the great actress. Before the evening ends, each of these combustible figures will confide in, argue with and seek counsel from Pete, revealing personal secrets unknown to the world at large. Pete, in turn, discovers his true vocation and leaves the green room (designed with comfy luxury by John Arnone) as a playwright in the making.

Not terribly credible, I’ll admit. But then Mr. Gurney isn’t asking you to believe unconditionally in this extrapolation from a chapter in his life. Only the first few minutes of the play, which portray an amiable but very brief backstage meeting between Pete and Cornell, are based on Mr. Gurney’s real experiences. The rest of the show is a sentimental speculation on what might have happened had he stayed a little longer.

Even fantasies require internal consistency, though, at least when they’re arranged into art. Here, while Cornell would seem to be revealing herself to Pete as a woman of everyday doubts and insecurities, she is also meant to embody the siren call of the The-a-tuh, where even small, ordinary problems are treated with the outsize posture of third-act curtain scenes.

That disproportionate relationship between cause and effect among theater folk may be a cliché, but it’s one we’ve been set up to expect here and we look forward to its delivery. That we are denied it partly has to do with the casting of Ms. Burton, whose strength has always lain in her anchoring humanity. As Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler, on Broadway in 2001, she ingeniously turned an exotic sexual monster into the thwarted trophy wife next door.

She approaches Cornell in a similar vein, and you’re aware of Ms. Burton’s intelligence and empathy. But even when she’s reciting from Cleopatra’s death scene, there’s nothing grand about her. Cornell may be as much of an anachronism as the country-club patricians who figure in many of Mr. Gurney’s earlier plays, but she has to be glamorous. Ms. Burton makes her sensible, self-aware and kindly, with only a touch of fiery temperament, a nice woman but kind of a bore.

As her tantrum-prone husband, Mr. Gaines probably goes too far in the other direction, making McClintic the show’s default queen of the theater. Ms. Wehle looks uncannily likepictures of Ms. Macy, and she lends a stylish asperity to an underwritten part. But it’s hard to believe that this efficiently functional ménage à trois would be so quick to disclose itself to a young visitor. “The most exciting loves are the loves that we don’t talk about,” Cornell says, and the play itself would be more exciting had she abided by that creed of reticence.

Mr. Steggert’s performance feels unfailingly true. This open-faced actor, who appeared last season in the musicals “Ragtime” and “Yank!,” gives us more than the usual blushing artist-as-a-young-man archetype. Pete has the arrogance as well as the awkwardness of his youth, and Mr. Steggert finds exact emotional shades in both his character’s painful self-consciousness and fatuous confidence.

As written and played, Pete is rendered with cool precision and a warm acceptance of imperfection. This show’s most persuasive character turns out not to be the first lady of the American theater but the boy who would grow up to be A. R. Gurney.

THE GRAND MANNER

By A. R. Gurney; directed by Mark Lamos; sets by John Arnone; costumes by Ann Hould-Ward; lighting by Russell H. Champa; music and sound by John Gromada; stage manager, M. A. Howard; general manager, Adam Siegel; production manager, Jeff Hamlin. Presented by Lincoln Center Theater, under the direction of André Bishop and Bernard Gersten. At the Mitzi Newhouse Theater; telecharge.com. Through Aug. 1. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes.

BEST MUSICAL

American Idiot

Fela!

Memphis

Million Dollar Quartet

BEST PLAY

In the Next Room, or the vibrator play

Next Fall

Red

Time Stands Still

BEST REVIVAL OF A MUSICAL

Finian’s Rainbow

La Cage aux Folles

A Little Night Music

Ragtime

BEST REVIVAL OF A PLAY

Fences

Lend Me a Tenor

The Royal Family

A View From the Bridge

BEST BOOK OF A MUSICAL

Everyday Rapture, Dick Scanlan and Sherie Rene Scott

Fela!, Jim Lewis and Bill T. Jones

Memphis, Joe DiPietro

Million Dollar Quartet, Colin Escott and Floyd Mutrux

BEST ORIGINAL SCORE (MUSIC AND/OR LYRICS) WRITTEN FOR THE THEATER

The Addams Family, Music and Lyrics: Andrew Lippa

Enron, Music: Adam Cork, Lyrics: Lucy Prebble

Fences, Music: Branford Marsalis

Memphis, Music: David Bryan, Lyrics: Joe DiPietro and David Bryan

BEST PERFORMANCE BY A LEADING ACTOR IN A PLAY

Jude Law, Hamlet

Alfred Molina, Red

Liev Schreiber, A View From the Bridge

Christopher Walken, A Behanding in Spokane

Denzel Washington, Fences

BEST PERFORMANCE BY A LEADING ACTRESS IN A PLAY

Viola Davis, Fences

Valerie Harper, Looped

Linda Lavin, Collected Stories

Laura Linney, Time Stands Still

Jan Maxwell, The Royal Family

BEST PERFORMANCE BY A LEADING ACTOR IN A MUSICAL

Kelsey Grammer, La Cage aux Folles

Sean Hayes, Promises, Promises

Douglas Hodge, La Cage aux Folles

Chad Kimball, Memphis

Sahr Ngaujah, Fela!

BEST PERFORMANCE BY A LEADING ACTRESS IN A MUSICAL

Kate Baldwin, Finian’s Rainbow

Sherie Rene Scott, Everyday Rapture

Montego Glover, Memphis

Christiane Noll, Ragtime

Catherine Zeta-Jones, A Little Night Music

BEST PERFORMANCE BY A FEATURED ACTOR IN A PLAY

David Alan Grier, Race

Stephen McKinley Henderson, Fences

Jon Michael Hill, Superior Donuts

Stephen Kunken, Enron

Eddie Redmayne, Red

BEST PERFORMANCE BY A FEATURED ACTRESS IN A PLAY

Maria Dizzia, In the Next Room, or the vibrator play

Rosemary Harris, The Royal Family

Jessica Hecht, A View From the Bridge

Scarlett Johansson, A View From the Bridge

Jan Maxwell, Lend Me a Tenor

BEST PERFORMANCE BY A FEATURED ACTOR IN A MUSICAL

Kevin Chamberlin, The Addams Family

Robin De Jesus, La Cage aux Folles

Christopher Fitzgerald, Finian’s Rainbow

Levi Kreis, Million Dollar Quartet

Bobby Steggert, Ragtime

BEST PERFORMANCE BY A FEATURED ACTRESS IN A MUSICAL

Barbara Cook, Sondheim on Sondheim

Katie Finneran, Promises, Promises

Angela Lansbury, A Little Night Music

Karine Plantadit, Come Fly Away

Lilias White, Fela!

BEST DIRECTION OF A PLAY

Michael Grandage, Red

Sheryl Kaller, Next Fall

Kenny Leon, Fences

Gregory Mosher, A View From the Bridge

BEST DIRECTION OF A MUSICAL

Christopher Ashley, Memphis

Marcia Milgrom Dodge, Ragtime

Terry Johnson, La Cage aux Folles

Bill T. Jones, Fela!

BEST CHOREOGRAPHY

Rob Ashford, Promises, Promises

Bill T. Jones, Fela!

Lynne Page, La Cage aux Folles

Twyla Tharp, Come Fly Away

BEST ORCHESTRATIONS

Jason Carr, La Cage aux Folles

Aaron Johnson, Fela!

Jonathan Tunick, Promises, Promises

Daryl Waters & David Bryan, Memphis

BEST SCENIC DESIGN OF A PLAY

John Lee Beatty, The Royal Family

Alexander Dodge, Present Laughter

Santo Loquasto, Fences

Christopher Oram, Red

BEST SCENIC DESIGN OF A MUSICAL

Marina Draghici, Fela!

Christine Jones, American Idiot

Derek McLane, Ragtime

Tim Shortall, La Cage aux Folles

BEST COSTUME DESIGN OF A PLAY

Martin Pakledinaz, Lend Me a Tenor

Constanza Romero, Fences

David Zinn, In the Next Room, or the vibrator play

Catherine Zuber, The Royal Family

BEST COSTUME DESIGN OF A MUSICAL

Marina Draghici, Fela!

Santo Loquasto, Ragtime

Paul Tazewell, Memphis

Matthew Wright, La Cage aux Folles

BEST LIGHTING DESIGN OF A PLAY

Neil Austin, Hamlet

Neil Austin, Red

Mark Henderson, Enron

Brian MacDevitt, Fences

BEST LIGHTING DESIGN OF A MUSICAL

Kevin Adams, American Idiot

Donald Holder, Ragtime

Nick Richings, La Cage aux Folles

Robert Wierzel, Fela!

BEST SOUND DESIGN OF A PLAY

Acme Sound Partners, Fences

Adam Cork, Enron

Adam Cork, Red

Scott Lehrer, A View From the Bridge

BEST SOUND DESIGN OF A MUSICAL

Jonathan Deans, La Cage aux Folles

Robert Kaplowitz, Fela!

Dan Moses Schreier and Gareth Owen, A Little Night Music

Dan Moses Schreier, Sondheim on Sondheim

SPECIAL TONY AWARD FOR LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT IN THE THEATER

Alan Ayckbourn

Marian Seldes

REGIONAL THEATER TONY AWARD

Eugene O’Neill Theater Center

ISABELLE STEVENSON AWARD

David Hyde Pierce

TONY HONORS FOR EXCELLENCE IN THE THEATER

Alliance of Resident Theatres/New York

B.H. Barry

Tom Viola

“Memphis” received seven nominations including outstanding new Broadway musical, and Manhattan Theater Club’s revival of “Royal Family” also received seven, including outstanding revival of a play.

“The Scottsboro Boys,” which was presented Off-Broadway at the Vineyard Theater and is transferring to the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis this summer, received six, including outstanding new Off-Broadway musical. “The Addams Family” received five nominations, for set design, actor (Nathan Lane), actress (Bebe Neuwirth), featured actor (Kevin Chamberlin) and featured actress (Carolee Carmelo), as did “Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson,” including new Off-Broadway musical and director of a musical (Alex Timbers).

A complete list of nominees for the 2009-10 season appears below.

OUTSTANDING NEW BROADWAY PLAY
Next Fall
Red
Superior Donuts
Time Stands Still

OUTSTANDING NEW BROADWAY MUSICAL
American Idiot
Come Fly Away
Fela!
Memphis
Sondheim on Sondheim

OUTSTANDING NEW OFF-BROADWAY PLAY
Clybourne Park
The Orphans’ Home Cycle
The Pride
The Temperamentals

OUTSTANDING NEW OFF-BROADWAY MUSICAL
Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson
The Scottsboro Boys
Tin Pan Alley Rag
Yank!

OUTSTANDING NEW SCORE (Broadway or Off-Broadway)
Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson
Memphis
The Scottsboro Boys
Yank!

OUTSTANDING REVIVAL OF A PLAY (Broadway or Off-Broadway)
Fences
Lend Me a Tenor
The Royal Family
A View From the Bridge

OUTSTANDING REVIVAL OF A MUSICAL (Broadway or Off-Broadway)
La Cage aux Folles
Finian’s Rainbow
A Little Night Music
Promises, Promises

OUTSTANDING DIRECTOR OF A PLAY
Doug Hughes The Royal Family
Kenny Leon Fences
Stanley Tucci Lend Me a Tenor
Michael Wilson The Orphans’ Home Cycle

OUTSTANDING DIRECTOR OF A MUSICAL
Christopher Ashley Memphis
Terry Johnson La Cage aux Folles
Susan Stroman The Scottsboro Boys
Alex Timbers Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson

OUTSTANDING CHOREOGRAPHER
Rob Ashford Promises, Promises
Bill T. Jones Fela!
Susan Stroman The Scottsboro Boys
Sergio Trujillo Memphis

OUTSTANDING SET DESIGN (Play or Musical)
John Lee Beatty The Royal Family
Beowulf Boritt Sondheim on Sondheim
Phelim McDermott & Julian Crouch The Addams Family
Donyale Werle Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson

OUTSTANDING COSTUME DESIGN (Play or Musical)
Jane Greenwood Present Laughter
Martin Pakledinaz Lend Me a Tenor
Matthew Wright La Cage aux Folles
Catherine Zuber The Royal Family

OUTSTANDING LIGHTING DESIGN(Play or Musical)
Kevin Adams American Idiot
Kevin Adams The Scottsboro Boys
Ken Billington Sondheim on Sondheim
Justin Townsend Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson

OUTSTANDING ACTOR IN A PLAY
Bill Heck The Orphans’ Home Cycle
Jude Law Hamlet
Liev Schreiber A View From the Bridge
Christopher Walken A Behanding in Spokane
Denzel Washington Fences

OUTSTANDING ACTRESS IN A PLAY
Nina Arianda Venus in Fur
Laura Benanti In the Next Room, or the vibrator play
Viola Davis Fences
Laura Linney Time Stands Still
Jan Maxwell The Royal Family

OUTSTANDING ACTOR IN A MUSICAL
Brandon Victor Dixon The Scottsboro Boys
Sean Hayes Promises, Promises
Douglas Hodge La Cage aux Folles
Chad Kimball Memphis
Nathan Lane The Addams Family

OUTSTANDING ACTRESS IN A MUSICAL
Kate Baldwin Finian’s Rainbow
Barbara Cook Sondheim on Sondheim
Montego Glover Memphis
Bebe Neuwirth The Addams Family
Catherine Zeta-Jones A Little Night Music

OUTSTANDING FEATURED ACTOR IN A PLAY
James DeMarse The Orphans’ Home Cycle
Jon Michael Hill Superior Donuts
David Pittu Equivocation
Noah Robbins Brighton Beach Memoirs
Reg Rogers The Royal Family

OUTSTANDING FEATURED ACTRESS IN A PLAY
Hallie Foote The Orphans’ Home Cycle
Rosemary Harris The Royal Family
Marin Ireland A Lie of the Mind
Jan Maxwell Lend Me a Tenor
Alicia Silverstone Time Stands Still

OUTSTANDING FEATURED ACTOR IN A MUSICAL
Kevin Chamberlin The Addams Family
Christopher Fitzgerald Finian’s Rainbow
Levi Kreis Million Dollar Quartet
Dick Latessa Promises, Promises
Bobby Steggert Ragtime

OUTSTANDING FEATURED ACTRESS IN A MUSICAL
Carolee Carmello The Addams Family
Katie Finneran Promises, Promises
Angela Lansbury A Little Night Music
Cass Morgan Memphis
Terri White Finian’s Rainbow

OUTSTANDING SOLO PERFORMANCE
Jim Brochu Zero Hour
Carrie Fisher Wishful Drinking
Judith Ivey The Lady With All the Answers
Anna Deavere Smith Let Me Down Easy

JOHN GASSNER AWARD (Presented for an American play, preferably by a new playwright)
John Logan Red
Jon Marans The Temperamentals
Geoffrey Nauffts Next Fall
Bruce Norris Clybourne Park

See the article…

The short-lived Broadway revival ofRagtime and the recent Off-Broadway musical The Scottsboro Boys each received nine nominations apiece, the most of any productions of the season.

Tony winner Patti LuPone will host the May 23 awards ceremony at the LaGuardia Concert Hall at Lincoln Center. (The nominees will receive their Nomination Certificates at a cocktail reception May 6 in Manhattan.)

The Drama Desk is an organization of theatre critics, writers and editors that honors excellence in all areas of New York theatre: Broadway, Off-Broadway, Off-Off-Broadway and not-for-profit.

The following awards were voted by the nominating committee and will be presented by the Drama Desk at its awards ceremony:

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“THAT GIRL” flirts with “Mad Men” in the set design for the new Broadway revival of the 1968 musical “Promises, Promises,” a frisky tale about trysting in the ’60s that stars Sean Hayes and Kristin Chenoweth.

The sets — which range from an office building and a Chinese restaurant to a dive bar and a bachelor pad — are the work of Scott Pask, whose period-savvy creations strike a balance between kitsch and Le Corbusier. (Mr. Pask’s twin brother, Bruce, the director of men’s fashion for T: The New York Times Style Magazine, designed the jewel-toned and slimly silhouetted costumes.)

Scott Pask’s other recent work on Broadway has also reinterpreted the look and feel of decades past, from the 1940s (“Pal Joey”) to the 1980s (“9 to 5”). With “Promises, Promises,” as he did for the current revival of “Hair,” Mr. Pask re-evaluates the colors, shapes and interiors of the early 1960s with nods to Modernist furniture design, Abstract Expressionism, popular television shows and films, and International Style architecture.

Before the show opened, Mr. Pask, 43, spoke about some of those influences in an interactive feature.

NY Times

The same goes for the performances. Sean Hayes is Chuck Baxter, a low-level office zhlub who climbs the corporate ladder by letting the higher-ups—including the grandest of the grand fromages, Mr. Sheldrake (Tony Goldwyn)—borrow his modest bachelor pad for their extramarital assignations. Little does he know that the girl of his dreams, the in-house-cafeteria worker Fran Kubelik (Kristin Chenoweth), is Sheldrake’s latest conquest. Hayes brings the right amount of knock-kneed savoir faire to the role, and he pulls off a number of physical gags (including an encounter with a strangely obscene-looking molded fiberglass chair) with rubbery-limbed grace: It appears he’s been studying the genius of Donald O’Connor. He also makes a grand foil for Katie Finneran’s hootingly funny Marge MacDougall, the floozy poor Chuck picks up in a bar on Christmas Eve. (Her furry, outsized bolero, which she assures Chuck is made of genuine owl, is practically a character unto itself.)

Chenoweth wouldn’t seem to be the right choice to play Fran. A pint-size dynamo in tippy-tap stilettos and a flaxen-blond pageboy, she comes off as a triple-threat cross between Eartha Kitt, Angie Dickinson, and Dolly Parton, all of them dames to be reckoned with. She conveys pep and feistiness, not the vulnerability her character needs: When she launches into “I Say a Little Prayer” (one of two Bacharach-David songs that didn’t appear in the original show but were added to this production), she bites into the lyrics with too much gusto—it’s a buoyant, reflective number that needs to be approached with some delicacy.

But her ability and conviction must not be underestimated: By the show’s end, Chenoweth has willed us into believing in Miss Kubelik’s fragility, dammit, and the illusion is just enough. When she and Chuck settle down on his sofa for a game of gin rummy, and she utters the show’s double-edged closing line—”Now shut up and deal”—we’re willing to buy this hi-fi version of urban domestic bliss. That’s a promise fulfilled, not broken.

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