| re: 'She Loves Me' and 'to my amazement ...' | |
| Last Edit: AlanScott 06:13 am EDT 09/01/20 | |
| Posted by: AlanScott 06:11 am EDT 09/01/20 | |
| In reply to: re: 'She Loves Me' and 'to my amazement ...' - BroadwayTonyJ 06:30 pm EDT 08/31/20 | |
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| I wrote about this a while ago online (but not here) after I found out some things I hadn't known about that perhaps helped to explain it. At the end of that post elsewhere, I quoted the Mako-Orbach story that Mako told Wayman (and that Wayman quoted here). Anyway, I've adapted what I wrote previously to make it more directly applicable to what we're discussing here. In 1975, Rose protested being nominated for best supporting actor (it was called "supporting" that year) in a play for My Fat Friend, which was a year after Douglas Turner Ward had protested being nominated in featured or supporting (as it was called that year) for The River Niger. 1975 was the same year as Rita Moreno's famous protest on the Tonys show itself. All of this, of course, was several years after the William Daniels kerfuffle. Unlike the Daniels situation, the protests by Ward and Rose were received by the Tonys committee after the ballots with their names had gone out so the Tonys refused to eliminate them from the list of nominees. Ward was not billed above the title but both Rose and Moreno were. And then in 1976, Mako was billed below the title. Given that Mako got nominated in leading, if they simply wanted a fourth nominee to fill out the category, there was no reason they could not have nominated Charles Repole in leading for Very Good Eddie since he was unquestionably playing the leading role and he’d gotten generally very nice reviews. And Rivera and Verdon were said to have been pissed that Donna McKechnie was nominated with them in leading actress. Anyway, my surmise is that they put Rose in lead to avoid him protesting again, never thinking there was any way he would win. My perception is that Ian Richardson was widely expected to win. And then Rose won. He was fantastic in the role, but it really did make any sense for him to be in leading. Another possibility, perhaps less likely, is that the committee really wanted Sammy Williams to win, and they thought Rose might give him tough competition. Having said that, Williams would surely have won even if Rose had been in competition in that category. The thing that was odd about Rose even being nominated for MFL was that he’d played the role at City Center in 1968. We’ve talked many times here (although not recently) about whether City Center was generally considered Broadway, and it’s too complicated for me to get into it again. But a number of people had been nominated for City Center productions, and I would think that Rose would have been deemed eligible in 1969 (the production opened in June 1968) had the nominating committee wanted to nominate him. Truth is that his reviews were much better in 1976 (although they were nice enough in 1968). The experience of 1968 must have helped. Plus, City Center productions rehearsed only two weeks and then opened after one preview. In 1976, he not only had played the role before, he had a full rehearsal period and a tryout run before he opened on Broadway. I wonder if the Tony rule against nominating people who had earlier been eligible for the same role was not yet in place in 1976 because the question had so rarely come up. And I wonder if Rose’s win may have prompted the rule. Re the Mako-Orbach story: Orbach could have added, "We not only lost to a fucking revival, we lost to a goddamn supporting actor in that revival!" (I must admit that I think of Billy Flynn as a supporting role.) Btw, the 1970s was a period of great contentiousness in the Tonys. Some of the rules and practicies we still have today were put in place in the 1970s in response to controversies and protests over nominations. And some of those controversies received prominent press coverage. |
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| Previous: | re: 'She Loves Me' and 'to my amazement ...' - BroadwayTonyJ 06:30 pm EDT 08/31/20 |
| Next: | The backstage drama behind the Tonys - WaymanWong 03:19 pm EDT 09/01/20 |
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