It’s all Tony Awards, all the time on From the Ledge this week. Not only because it’s going to be the coronation night of Chicago theater (specifically Steppenwolf and the Chicago Shakespeare Theater), or that I am one of the five people in my age bracket who has watched the show on CBS religiously for the past eight years, but it’s also been really difficult to catch up on blog content when you’ve been locked into a conference room on Madison Avenue for the past several days. There have been lots of new articles coming out about the stellar August: Osage County folks in these days leading up to the Tonys. Friend of From the Ledge, Storefront Rebellion posted a link to this roundtable discussion with many of the cast from Backstage.com. Amy Morton, Rondi Reed, and Francis Guinan, particularly, continue to be refreshingly direct. The New York Sun also put out an article on August director, Anna Shapiro. It’s interesting that when (not if) she wins this Sunday, she will be only the fifth female director to win in the Tony’s 61 years of existence, and of that five, nearly half will be from Chicago, Lookingglass Theater’s co-founder Mary Zimmermann (who won for the luminous Metamorphoses, which I really enjoyed) and herself. Wow. In non-August Tony news, various chatrooms and the New York Post’s much-vilified Michael Reidel, are predicting an upset in the Best Actor in a Play category. The early favorite was Patrick Stewart, Captain Picard himself, who got rave reviews in a revisionist staging of Macbeth, but it seems like Mark Rylance, former Artistic Director of the Globe Theatre and one of the leading Shakespearian actors in the world, will provide the upset win this Sunday, in ironically, the revival of a light-weight 1960s farce, Boeing-Boeing. I have always wanted to see Rylance live on stage, and thought of going to see him at the Guthrie in Peer Gynt earlier this year, unfortunately the thought of three hours of an Ibsen play in the middle of subzero Minneapolis temperatures was enough to dissuade me. I saw Rylance in Patrice Chereau’s abominable film Intimacy several years ago at the Chicago International Film Festival, which created a lot of controversy at that time for the graphic sex scenes. Uhmm, maybe I will see Boeing-Boeing the next time I’m in New York later this month. Finally, here’s a really enjoyable read on the Tonys from a “lifelong theater geek” published on Salon.com.
Tags: August: Osage County, Tony Awards
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