‘Dear Evan Hansen’ grabs six Tonys
NEW YORK: Dear Evan Hansen claimed the top prize, best musical, at the 71st Tony Awards on Sunday, on a nailbiter of a night that saw it scoop up five other awards, including one for its star, Ben Platt.
The musical, birthed in the summer of 2015 at Arena Stage, garnered trophies for its book writer Steven Levenson and composer-lyricists Benj Pasek and Justin Paul, who earlier this year earned an Oscar for their music in La La Land.
It tells the story of an introverted teenager who, desperate to be accepted, perpetuates a lie about a friendship with a classmate, who has taken his own life, a falsehood that earns him internet fame, but ends in disaster.
The show, which also won for Alex Lacamoire’s orchestrations and for Rachel Bay Jones’s featured performance as Evan’s struggling mom, won in the category that also included Come From Away, Natasha, Pierre and the Great Comet of 1812 and Groundhog Day.
Another tight race saw the Tony for best play go to Oslo JT Rogers’s fact-based, three-hour drama of the back-channel efforts of two married Norwegian diplomats to bring Israelis and Palestinians to the negotiating table.
Oslo won in a particularly strong field of new plays on Broadway that included Lucas Hnath’s A Doll’s House Part 2, Lynn Nottage’s Sweat and Paula Vogel’s Indecent.
Indecent’s director Rebecca Taichman won best director. No single show had been expected to dominate the three-hour ceremony hosted by Kevin Spacey the way the Broadway juggernaut Hamilton did last year, when it won 11 awards.
Spacey, a smooth raconteur and skilled impressionist, opened the show dressed in Evan Hansen’s now wellknown blue striped polo shirt and wearing a cast on his arm, a la Evan, emblazoned in this case with the hashtag “host.”
He assayed characters from each of the nominated musicals and finished up in the number, in versatile style, tap dancing in a tuxedo. Awards were handed out in 24 categories, divided between musicals and plays, new and old. The Tonys for best revival went to the widely-lauded Hello, Dolly! and August Wilson’s play Jitney, the only drama in his 10-play cycle of black life in the 20th century not to have been staged before on Broadway.
Producer Scott Rudin said bringing Dolly! back was an attempt “to remind people of what musicals were like in the ‘60s, the golden age.”
The star of Dolly!, Bette Midler, was named best actress in a musical in a contest that notably also included Patti LuPone and Christine Ebersole of the musical War Paint. Laurie Metcalf, who plays an older version of Ibsen’s Nora Helmer in A Doll’s House, Part 2, won best actress in a play, and Kevin Kline took home the Tony for best actor in a play for his portrayal of a self-infatuated British actor in the revival of Noel Coward’s Present Laughter.
In other supporting categories, Cynthia Nixon of The Little Foxes won as featured actress in a play, and Gavin Creel of Hello, Dolly! and Michael Aronov of Oslo were voted best featured actor in a musical and play.