I’m getting to this a little late this year. With my new, more relaxed approach to my blog, I didn’t do a full write-up of the ceremony itself, but I knew I still wanted to talk about the performances! Here are my favorites.
Gutenberg!: The Musical!
This isn’t a traditional performance, in that it’s not a song (or even a scene!) from the show, and there’s no clip of this bit up on YouTube. But Andrew Rannells and Josh Gad still perform a delightful little sketch in character. In it, they explain why Gutenberg! The Musical! is up for Best Revival rather than Best Musical, despite having never been on Broadway before. There are PowerPoints and labeled hats involved, and both of them are just effortlessly charming and funny. Didn’t even do a number, and they still killed it!
Illinoise
My favorite performance of the night. My brother, who’s not a Broadway guy but a huge Sufjan Stevens fan, put the show on my radar, and I went into the Tonys morbidly curious about what this was going to be like. In a word, it was gorgeous. While three musicians (with wasp wings!) sang “The Predatory Wasp of the Palisades is Out to Get Us!”, two pairs of dancers put their entire bodies and souls into telling the story of the song through movement. The whole thing gave me goosebumps.
Merrily We Roll Along
I’ve been a Merrily We Roll Along fan for years, and everything I’ve seen/heard about this revival seems terrific (not to mention the multiple Tonys it won that night!) “Old Friends” is an obvious choice for the performance, but with the cast’s chemistry, it’s easy to see why! Fun, charming performances from Jonathan Groff, Lindsey Mendez, and Daniel Radcliffe, and I like that we got the ensemble singing one of the transitions at the start as well.
Suffs
This was my favorite of the original songs we heard at the Tonys. The performance itself was pretty straightforward: “Keep Marching,” obviously the show’s closing number, was a rousing anthem sung directly to the audience on a relatively bare stage. But I liked the lovely melody and the emotive lyrics, and it was neat to realize that Shaina Taub, the Tony-winning composer/lyricist and book writer, stars in the show as well.
Water for Elephants
Look, I’m a simple woman. You show me lots of acrobatic moves during a musical number, I’m going to be impressed. They performed “Anywhere Another Train” and “The Road Don’t Make You Young,” and they took full advantage of the circus setting to put on quite the show. I loved all the flips and tosses, and I especially loved the ensemble members who danced on the central tentpole.
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