…. while the 1996 revival of Shepard’s Buried Child in part prompted the rules to get clarified, only half a decade later, in 2002, Turgenev’s “Fortune’s Fool” was nominated by the Tonys for Best New Play because it was its first time on Broadway, despite having been written over 150 years earlier.
As ryhog said, the Tony committee is allowed to do pretty much whatever they want on a case-by-case basis in situations like this. And they’ve made far stranger decisions before, some in very recent years (a Best Score category made up of 4 plays with 10 or 12 minutes of incidental music, rather than doing away with the category altogether?) - far stranger choices than putting A Man of No Importance in the New Musical category. |
