Tony Nominations & An American Idol on Broadway!

The Tony Awards, celebrating the best of Broadway's 2006-2007 season will air live on June 10th on CBS.

Spring Awakening and Coram Boy are among the most nominated musicals and plays. See the full list.

Also, the NYTimes has put up a ballot for it's users to select who they'd pick for winners. If they had a say. Which we don't.







In other NYTimes theatre news, the paper has reviewed American Idol winner Fantasia's turn in The Color Purple on Broadway. I loved the show (saw it twice) when it first opened with LaChanze. The Times makes a case that 'Tasia, who once showed very few acting abilities in playing herself in a made for Lifetime movie, is apparently doing just fine playing someone else.

My favorite part of the piece is when he spends an entire paragraph trying to find the write words to call Fantasia...well, ugly:

Much is made of Celie’s unattractiveness. She is essentially sold off by her father to a brutish husband as if she were a workhorse with a lame leg. LaChanze, though a skilled singer and actress, couldn’t disguise her natural beauty and poise. Fantasia possesses her own beauty, but it is more idiosyncratic, and as Celie she moves with the uneven amble of a woman trained at a young age to debilitating drudgery and a carelessness about her looks.

Theater: Coram Boy

It was announced on Friday that Coram Boy, the new Broadway production (and huge hit in London) will be closing is ticket sales do not pick up tremendously very soon. I was lucky enough to attend the opening night at the beginning of May and while I didn't have the same gut reaction that I had when I saw, say, Spring Awakening, I felt like it was a production unlike any I'd ever seen. It is cinematic, a huge cast of 40 actors and singers tell the amazing adventures of young boys over 15 years in the mid-1800's. Yes, it is a "period place" but don't let your disinterest in things historical turn you away.

The production is not perfect, but there are some performances that are not to missed. The young boys in the show are all played, quite convincingly, by adult women. It's not often that a play like this offers the kind of spectacle that one would usually find in a miracle.

Some of the actors are a little off the mark, but upon my second viewing, yeah I went back last weekend, I could see the production getting deeper, the connections of the actors to each other and with their characters is really sinking in and my friend, Tinashe, who is making her Broadway debut in the Chorus that sings from shadows in the loft above the stage, says the show is getting more solid every night. I recommend it.

Yes,there are people who leave the show saying they hate it. The critics were mixed with an emphasis on dislike. But, often, I think art does this, sometimes we look at theater too much at face value instead of the messages that it is trying to tell us.

I'd be interested to hear what other non-critics people who have seen the production have to say.

Discounts for Coram Boy and other Broadway and Off-Broadway shows are available with a free registration at Playbill.com. The show is currently set to close on May 27.