The Tony nominations announced on Tuesday have me in a pickle. I am, improbably, cheering for not one, but two musicals.
In the Heights amazingly received the most nominations of any of this year's contenders, 13 total. I wasn't as wowed by it as everyone else was, mostly because I like my entertainment a little darker.
But I know how rare it is for a Latino-made play about Latinos to make it on Broadway. It's only happened a handful of times before: Short Eyes (which won an Obie and was nominated for six Tonys), Zoot Suit, Freak (which lost the Tony to "Art" as best play in 1998).
In the Heights is bubbly, and carried by the lightness and bounce of Lin Manuel Miranda. The other actors are uniformly kinetic and sweet. And the songs are not what you'd hear in the Copa, but hey, this is musical theater. And I do appreciate the break this play represents from the rut of portraying Latinos as always already only being involved in drugs-prison-gangs. (Although the curmudgeon in me wonders if the appeal to whites isn't a hunger to see happy darkies.)
And then there's Passing Strange. I am still kicking myself for missing the original run at the Public Theater, but I was blown away when I saw it at the Belasco, which still felt as close to a cabaret as a biggish theater can. As I wrote about here, it hit a deep chord in me (and in a lot of my other artist/intellectual/bohemian friends) as an accurate portrayal of our journeys to the Real.
The two plays are head to head in every category inn which Passing Strange is nominated (it has a total of 7 nominations). I'm just hoping for some kind of Salomonic solution. I mean, their main competition is Xanadu and Cry-Baby (how in the hell did that wonderful pervert John Waters become a preferred Broadway musical source?).
[Lin Manuel pix via Moxie the Maven; Passing Strange pix via variety.com]
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