Tony Awards 2024: WSJ’s Critic on This Year’s Nominees
‘The Outsiders,’ ‘Water for Elephants’ and the Alicia Keys-inspired ‘Hell’s Kitchen’ are among the musical contenders, while ‘Stereophonic’ and plays starring Rachel McAdams and Jessica Lange are also vying for a top prize.
By WSJ Arts in Review Staff
April 30, 2024 11:01 am ET
Gift unlocked article
Listen
(5 min)
The nominees for the 77th Tony Awards, to be held on June 16, were announced on April 30. Here’s a roundup of the shows contending for Best Musical and Best Play as covered by Charles Isherwood, The Wall Street Journal’s theater critic.
Best Musical
PHOTO: JOAN MARCUS
“This girl is on fire,” sings the ensemble in a jubilant high point of “Hell’s Kitchen,” a new musical drawing on the catalog of the R&B singer-songwriter Alicia Keys. The song celebrates a turning point in the life of the heroine, a 17-year-old based on the younger Ms. Keys. But the lyrics might equally apply to Maleah Joi Moon, whose incandescent performance in the central role of Ali, as the Keys character is called, provides the show with a blazing heart—and a voice with its own thrilling firepower, virtually an equal of Ms. Keys’s own superlative instrument.
PHOTO: MATTHEW MURPHY
With a book by the prolific playwright Adam Rapp (“The Sound Inside”) and Justin Levine, and a plaintive folk-rock score by Jonathan Clay and Zach Chance (known as Jamestown Revival) and Mr. Levine, “The Outsiders” is nimble and well-crafted, with nary a nut or bolt unsecured in its allegiance—save for a few judicious emendations—to the original story. Under the fluent direction of Danya Taymor, the young cast is sensational, engulfing the theater with emotional heat and an authentic-feeling sense of passionate loyalty to one another, primarily among those playing the greasers who are the focus of the story.
PHOTO: JOAN MARCUS
“Sisters are doin’ it for themselves,” Annie Lennox and Aretha Franklin memorably sang back in the 1980s. The musical “Suffs,” about the struggle for women’s right to vote in the U.S., provides a fresh example. With book, music and lyrics by Shaina Taub, who also plays a principal role among the all-female cast, and Leigh Silverman directing, the show highlights the talents of women, following in the admittedly more momentous footsteps—much marching was involved!—of the characters.
PHOTO: MATTHEW MURPHY
Time was, when a dreamy kid felt oppressed, the allure of running away to join the circus would fire the imagination. An American myth, or sentimental lore, probably. But in the new musical “Water for Elephants,” ostensibly set in a seedy, second-rate circus, running off to join the crew would seem to be little more rebellious than joining an unusually boisterous Boy Scout troop.
Also nominated in this category: “Illinoise.”
Best Play
PHOTO: MATTHEW MURPHY
Although it takes place over the course of a long day that stretches into the night, “Jaja’s African Hair Braiding,” a new play by Jocelyn Bioh being presented on Broadway by Manhattan Theatre Club, feels a bit like a few episodes of a workplace sitcom stitched together. That may sound like faint praise, or perhaps quaint praise, given the increasing rarity of that traditional TV format, but some of the most reliably fine and popular sitcoms—“The Office” and “Cheers” spring to mind—have found rich veins of humor, seasoned with sentiment, in the daily rituals and minor trials of the workaday world.
PHOTO: MATTHEW MURPHY
The extraordinary becomes ordinary, and the ordinary becomes extraordinary, in Amy Herzog’s delicately beautiful play “Mary Jane,” now on Broadway in an exquisite Manhattan Theatre Club production starring Rachel McAdams, giving one of the most moving and strikingly unadorned performances of this season, or any.
PHOTO: JEREMY DANIEL
Prayer for the French Republic
In Joshua Harmon’s “Prayer for the French Republic,” a Jewish family in France faces the wrenching decision of whether to abandon their established and accomplished lives to leave the country—and possibly save themselves from persecution, or worse.
You might assume the play is set during World War II. But while Mr. Harmon’s inexpressibly moving drama does include scenes from the 1940s, the family in question is grappling with the question of exile, to Israel, in the 21st century.
PHOTO: JOAN MARCUS
Jessica Lange plays a hapless, helpless and hopelessly bad single mother in Paula Vogel’s bluntly titled “Mother Play,” a funny and affecting but slight and fragmentary drama depicting Ms. Lange’s Phyllis and her tortured relationship with her son and daughter across several decades.
PHOTO: CHELCIE PARRY
Fans of Fleetwood Mac will either constitute the greatest admirers or the loudest detractors of “Stereophonic,” a new play by David Adjmi that dissects the roiling interpersonal dramas of a band obviously based on the group.
Audiences indifferent to Fleetwood Mac’s fairly well-known history may merely be bored by the play, which stretches a little past three hours under the languid direction of Daniel Aukin and toggles between often banal scenes of relationship woes among the musicians and the recording of a handful of songs, written by Will Butler of the band Arcade Fire.
Abycats' Thoughts 