A few frontrunners, but watch out for some surprises.
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It’s the Friday going into Tonys weekend, and the countdown to the big show is on! To gear up for all the NYC glitter and glamour, here are my picks in the play categories. While a few shows are at the head of the pack, I anticipate at least one or two unexpected moments when the envelopes are opened at Radio City Music Hall on Sunday night.
Best Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role: Elaine May, The Waverly Gallery
Elaine May is a stage and screen legend who, at 87, is just hitting her prime. It’s possible that, in a shocker, Heidi Schreck will be honored for the play she wrote and starred in, What the Constitution Means to Me, but it doesn’t seem like it’s going to even come close.
Best Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role: Adam Driver, Burn This
With Jeff Daniels of To Kill a Mockingbird and Bryan Cranston from Network expected to duke it out down to the final ballot, I’m going out on a limb and giving it to Adam Driver, whose combustable performance lights the flame that fuels Burn This. Plus, he’s an actor’s actor who keeps returning to his stage roots even as his Oscar-nominated movie career skyrockets. I would love it if he swoops in as the night’s big split-the-vote surprise.
Best Performance by an Actress in a Featured Role: Celia Keenan-Bolger, To Kill a Mockingbird
Anyone who’s seen her show says that Keenan-Bolger is hands-down the best part of the already beloved production for her endearing portrayal of young Scout. Add in the fact that this is her fourth nomination with no previous wins, and it seems like this is going to be one of the night’s sure things.
Best Performance by an Actor in a Featured Role: Bertie Carvel, Ink
There’s a lot of heat around Benjamin Walker from All My Sons and The Boys in the Band’s Robin De Jesus (with Burn This’s Brandon Uranowitz as the dark horse), but I’m betting on the Olivier Award-winning Carvel for embodying the beginning of controversial living mogul Rupert Murdoch’s rise to meteoric media power.
Best Director of a Play: Sam Mendes, The Ferryman
Any director who can shape an epic ensemble piece with nearly two dozen characters ranging in age from infant to elderly that enter, exit and linger in an unending carousel of action that all happens within a single-set deserves a Tony. Mendes is that guy.
Best Revival of a Play: Burn This
This hot-to-the-touch production of Lanford Wilson’s already searing script sets the tone for transporting you to an artists’ loft in 1987 Soho by playing the era’s greatest hits as you walk into the theater and transports you until the final curtain call. Pivoting on explosive star performances by Adam Driver and Keri Russell, with invaluable support from Brandon Uranowitz, the show doesn’t have a prayer of winning but it gets the Tony in my eyes.
Best Play: The Ferryman
This race certainly honors the best overall production, but make no mistake: more than anything, it comes down to the text. (See: nomination snub for show-of-the-season, To Kill a Mockingbird, rumored to have been due to its hews-too-close-to-the-novel writing.) And when it comes to weaving a complex tapestry that intertwines richly realized story with distinctive character portraits—or, in this case, 21 of them—Jez Butterworth’s page-turner of a tragicomedy set in Ireland during the Troubles in the 1980s nails it.