Monday, June 8, 2009

A couple of random thoughts on the Tonys

* The opening was AMAZING! How many people were onstage at the end? I'm guessing about 200? Brilliant to put songs together, too. Who knew that "Tonight" from West Side Story and "Luck be a Lady" from Guys and Dolls would fit together? And yay for including shows not nominated for best musical/revival. I was happy to see Stephanie J. Block up there. (SHE SHOULD HAVE BEEN NOMINATED, DARN IT!)

* Best part of the opening? The Bret Michaels clothesline. I am such a bad person. I rewound it and watched it 4 or 5 times. Karma will come back to bite me, I'm sure, and a set piece will fall on me sometime within the next year. *ducks*

* Okay, seriously....someone needs to be fired. There were technical mishaps throughout the entire show. Unforgivable ones. They are like the unforgivable curses in Harry Potter. The fact that I could hear the West Side Story girls before their entrance...bad form. The mic problem with Tituss Burgess is forgivable...that kind of thing happens and is unavoidable. But the rest of the stuff? Badly done, Tony Awards techies. Badly done. (And if you think I'm being a little harsh, ask Shauna what SHE thought about it. LOL!) I'd better watch it, or there are going to be microphones blowing up while attached to me. Karma, karma, KARMA!!!!!

* One thing that I really liked this year was that there were more musical numbers than awards (on the televised portion, anyway.) It really kept the energy up! The spotlighting of touring shows was great, too! I especially liked the Jersey Boys ones. That's a lot of Frankie Valles on one stage, though. Wow!

* Cutest acceptance speech of the night: The 3 Billys! They didn't know what to say! How adorable was that?!

* Most frightening speech of the night: Why is Alice Ripley yelling? She's kind of scary. Just because your character is manic, doesn't mean you have to be in your speech! The quote from JFK was great, but calm yourself down, Als!

* My favorite speech: Geoffrey Rush! Making all the other shows into French existentialism was so funny!

* Note to the Billy Elliot people: If you want to get families to come to your show, you should have picked a different production number. That was scary!!!!!!!!!

* Most touching moment: The In Memorium. Starting out with Natasha Richardson, and then using the song "What I Did for Love" absolutely guaranteed that I would cry. Good choice!

Okay, so I didn't take notes and I didn't type this while I was watching. So now I'm out of stuff to say. All in all, the Tonys were great!