Top Five Performances: 2025 Tony Awards

This post is coming to you later than I expected. Recently, my not-exactly-dormant-but-more-backburner obsession with Our Flag Means Death walked in, smacked me across the face, and said, “The Gentleman Pirate, I presume?” As such, I don’t have a lot of interest in engaging with stuff other than Our Flag Means Death right now, and I wrote this very gradually, in bite-sized chunks. So while I’m rewatching the show, I probably won’t be posting much beyond previously-written stuff that I already had locked and loaded, mostly Other Doctors Lives and Y tu Luna también. I know I’ll be getting back to Doctor Who and other stuff eventually—not to mention more Our Flag Means Death-related posts—but for now, I’m taking a breather and letting the hyperfixation guide me.

But even though my all-consuming interest is currently in a short-lived pirate romcom that was unjustly canceled a year-and-a-half ago, it was quite an interesting Tonys this year. We got a good, eclectic mix of shows, and it took some doing to pick out a Top Five from the many performances on display.

 

Floyd Collins

I’ve always liked this show, and I hadn’t realized there was a revival of it starring Jeremy Jordan! After the ensemble opened with “Ballad of Floyd Collins,” Jordan came on to perform “The Call.” I love how the lighting, combined with Jordan’s movements and the echo effects, effectively created the impression that he actually was moving through a cave. And no surprise, Jordan sounded terrific.

Hamilton

Look, tell me it’s “cringe” if you want. I know the politics are incredibly 2015. I still love it, and this 10-year reunion performance made me vibrate with excitement. I loooooove that it was a montage that gave almost every character a moment in the spotlight (if I recall correctly, Anthony Ramos is the only major cast member who wasn’t featured.) I mean, “Non-Stop”? “My Shot”? “The Schuyler Sisters”? “Guns and Ships”? “The Battle of Yorktown”? “The Room Where It Happens”? “History Has Its Eyes on You”? I wasn’t even thinking about the fact that Jonathan Groff would be there too, coming in with a bit of “You’ll Be Back.” Just hit after hit after hit. Not one person missed, everyone looked cool in their black formal wear (with bonus red jacket for Groff!), and each new segue brought me fresh waves of excitement!

 

Maybe Happy Ending

I loved this sweet, charming performance of “Chasing Fireflies / Never Fly Away.” Darren Criss and Helen J. Shen were both adorable as a pair of helper robots searching for fireflies, which they considered “little forest robots.” And having a firefly on the end of the conductor’s baton was just a beautiful touch!

 

Operation Mincemeat

I didn’t know anything about Operation Mincemeat, but this performance definitely got me interested in the show. Their number, “Born to Lead,” savaged the Eton-type MI5 upper brass with sly, clever lyrics. Unlike the RAF or naval soldiers, these men don’t know much about flying or sailing, but that doesn’t stop them from being in charge—their repeated refrain is, “For some were born to follow, / But we were born to lead.” Another line I loved is, “For fortune favors bravery, / And a fortune’s what I’ve got!” Great performance!

 

Pirates!

My prevailing thought while watching this performance was, “I bet this show is so much fun.” The cast performed two numbers, “Sail the Ocean Blue” and “Washboards,” and they were charming, entertaining, and energetic. I don’t know much about The Pirates of Penzance, and I don’t know what series of events leads the whole cast to dance while playing washboards together, but it was a delight. Just fun!

Y tu Luna también: 3Below: Season 1, Episode 3 – “Mind Over Matter” (2018)

This show is just fun. I genuinely love it, and not just in “this is good for something geared towards younger viewers” way. It may not be perfect, but it has a ton of humor and heart, and it slips some sly commentary in with its larger messages.

Aja and Krel are having trouble fitting in at school, since they’re still very new to the whole “acting human” thing. This concerns Varvatos, who thinks that suspicious behavior on their part may attract the hunters sent after them by Morando, the general who seized the Akiridion throne during the coup. When the kids see Eli, one of their classmates, snooping outside their home/ship, Krel decides to build a device to get inside Eli’s head and figure out how much he knows.

There’s so much here that cracks me up. I love the Akiridions’ confusion about human customs and norms, like when Krel slops food into his mouth in the cafeteria while Aja washes her hands with orange juice—at which point they wonder why everyone is staring at them. When they realize Eli might onto them, Varvatos’s mind immediately goes to torture, urging the kids to, “Drink his blood from the keg of glory!” And when Aja finds Krel grooving out to music as he works on his mindreading device, she earnestly asks, “Are you having a very small party?” The comic moments rarely feel like they’re trying too hard or relying on lazy tropes. Instead, the one-liners and sight gags are delightfully off-beat, and the whole cast gives it their all.

I also really like the balance the show strikes with the portrayal of Aja and Krel. The way they react to situations is often different and yet in-sync, like they appreciate each other’s individual strengths even if they don’t always understand them, and though they bicker and tease each other, you can feel the love behind it. And I like how nuanced their response is to their new surroundings. They’re sometimes fascinated, sometimes confused, sometimes disheartened, sometimes proactive, sometime frustrated, which keeps the story flowing and dynamic.

Our character of the week is Eli Pepperjack, voiced by Cole Sand. A holdover from Trollhunters, Eli is an excitable nerd with a perpetually cracking voice, and the new kids set off his spidey senses. He’s familiar with Arcadia Oaks’ more fantastical elements, as he gradually came to learn about trolls and other “creeps” on Trollhunters, but the prospect of aliens is a new one for him.

Nice story for Krel in this episode. His tech prowess can be a handy way to move a plot along, but here, we see how it’s also reflective of how Krel thinks and operates. Tasked with finding out what Eli knows, he doesn’t go the Varvatos-approved torture route, but he also doesn’t just try to talk to Eli, either. His mind immediately goes to gadgets, a technology-based solution to his problem. And once he’s made his device, I like seeing how he uses it, not just for telepathic reconnaissance, but also for connecting briefly with some of his classmates. I love how he bounces energetically from student to student, responding to their inner thoughts in a sincere but still awkward way. For instance, when he hears a student think My parents will kill me over a bad test score, Krel exclaims, “Then study hard! Do not die, my friend.”

Diego Luna is so good in this role. I’ve really enjoyed his other animated work, especially Zatz in Maya and the Three, but I think Krel might be his best voice acting performance. I love his matter-of-fact, slightly irritated delivery on, “We’re not torturing the Eli. He needs his thumbs.” (To which Varvatos of course cries, “I need his thumbs!”) And when Aja takes his mindreading device for a spin, his resulting freakout is pitch perfect. “No, you’re gonna break it!” he pleads, in what might be the most authentic whine I’ve heard from an adult actor playing a teen. It is 100% nerdy little brother getting upset with his sister for messing with his complicated toys, and I love it.

Other Doctor Lives: Broadchurch: Series 2, Episode 3 (2015)

*Written in 2018*

Decent interpersonal stuff, fairly good Sandbrook bits, and frustrating trial scenes. It’s bumming me out that the trial seems to be shaping up to be the consistent weak link of the season so far. However, while I’ve yet to see anything here that equals the best of series 1, there are still pieces that work for me.

Hardy’s gamble from the last episode leaves him unsure of where things stand with Claire and the Sandbrook case, and he needs Ellie’s help to try and salvage it. In the trial, Ellie takes the stand and is treated to much the same style of ludicrous cross-examination as Beth and Hardy got. And speaking of Beth, she faces a tremendously trying situation with one of the last people she wants to do so with.

Sharon, man. The judge is picking up what she’s laying down, and she seems to be successfully undermining the prosecution’s case, but I don’t see how. So much of what she says when questioning witnesses feels so baseless and shocking for the sake of it. I just don’t get why this tactic is working for her so well. And I understand the point the show is trying to make about the broken legal system, which is fueling Hardy’s drive to be so off-the-books in his pursuit of justice for Sandbrook, but with Sharon as the main representation of that, it’s doing it so sloppily. There’s still compelling material to be had in these scenes, since the main cast members are doing such a bang-up job while their characters are being hammered on the witness stand, but the actual construction of the scenes is just hamfisted.

In other news, we get a few more personal hints about Jocelyn and Sharon’s lives/inevitable secrets, and the Sandbrook stuff is pretty good. I particularly like how much Hardy recognizes he can’t do this without Ellie’s help; even if the way he goes about asking for it leaves plenty to be desired, it’s still an acknowledgment of her skills, and it’s a reasonable way to give Ellie something strong to occupy her time.

Between the trial and the Sandbrook investigation, this season is in some ways broader than the one that preceded it, but it doesn’t really feel that way to me. With most of the plot split between those two storylines (with smaller bits of other threads) and most of the screentime devoted to Hardy, Ellie, the Latimers, and the newer characters, I get less of a sense of Broadchurch the town and the people within in. This episode feels particularly light on supporting characters like Maggie, Paul, and Becca, and it does make the show feel narrower than it did in the first season, despite the tighter plot focus there on Danny’s murder.

It’s an all-right episode for Beth. She deals with something monumental here, something that’s even more of a head trip due to her lingering grief over Danny, and as I said, she deals with it under pretty much her least-wanted circumstances. She takes a lot of anger out on someone, and while it’s at least somewhat misplaced, it’s also devastatingly understandable.

*Written in 2025*

As I said in my original review, it’s good to see Hardy acknowledging how much he needs Ellie to conduct his unofficial investigation. It takes him a while to get there, though. At the start of the episode, they’ve hit a major fumble, and his first instinct is to deal with his frustration and panic by lashing out at Ellie. “What is the point of you, Miller?!?” he shouts. That’s a line that I actually associate with Doctor Who—I remember Amy saying it to Eleven after one of Rory’s “deaths,” and I feel like there’s a moment very similar to that somewhere between Clara and Twelve. And while it’s not Who, I believe there’s something like that in Sherlock as John, John questioning the ”point” of Sherlock if he’s unable to save someone. In those contexts, it’s always struck me as a very unfair, bleak accusation, as if people are only worth what they can do for you. Certainly not Hardy’s best moment.

In addition to seeing Ellie on the stand, Hardy spends more time in the witness box here as well. It’s not quite as dire for him this time around—Sharon saves all her wildest claims and questions for Ellie at the end of the episode, but she continues to pick away at the evidence in the case. One moment I do like from this scene, however, comes when she’s trying to establish that the killer might not have been the one who sent incriminating emails from their computer. As she gets Hardy to say that everyone else in the home might’ve had access to it, he mutters, “Well, I doubt the baby used it.” Hee! We haven’t gotten as much fun Cranky Hardy so far this season, so that line made me happy.

Y tu Luna también: 3Below: Season 2, Episode 2 – “Terra Incognita: Part 2” (2018)

*Premise spoilers.*

The second half of the two-part premiere comes in fast and funny, an endearing fish-out-of-water tale after the more straightforward sci-fi action of the first episode. A few of the jokes might get hammered a little too hard right out of the gate, but on the whole, this is a terrific episode that encapsulates all there is to love about 3Below.

Having fled the coup on Akiridion-5, Aja, Krel, and Varvatos just crashed their Mother Ship on the “dung heap” of planet Earth, specifically Arcadia Oaks. The ship, Mother, gets to work disguising both herself and her Akiridion charges so the locals won’t get suspicious. However, the ship is badly damaged, which forces the trio out into the world in search of critical replacement parts. Their kooky curiosity about Earth attracts some unwanted attention, and soon, the royals find themselves having to blend in at school.

There’s a lot to like here. We get some entertaining recurring jokes, like how Mother bases her Earth knowledge on radio transmissions that have reached deep space, so all of her info is decades out of date. To disguise the Akiridions, Mother transduces their native energy-based forms into human bodies that “people on the mud planet tend to ignore”: a girl, a Latino, and a senior citizen. This means that mighty warrior Varvatos is now in the body of a little old man with a walker, which thwarts some of his feats of strength and makes his rants about glorious death feel comically incongruous.

The montage of the kids and Varvatos exploring Arcadia is a hoot. Aja makes grass angels on a public lawn and investigates a vinyl record by licking it, and Varvatos faces off against an army of girl scouts trying to help him cross the street for a merit badge. They’re at their wildest and funniest when they’re just wandering around on their own, but once Aja and Krel get sent to school and Varvatos is left to his own devices, they’re put in more direct contact with humans—naturally, this just leads to even more fun.

But for all the jokes and silliness, this isn’t a frivolous episode. The king and queen were badly hurt during the coup, and they’ve been reduced down to their “life cores,” which Mother is barely able to keep in stasis, let alone regenerate, in her own damaged state. Aja and Krel are resilient, curious kids who are proactive in their own lives and fascinated by the new planet on which they find themselves, but they’re also scared teens who’ve just fled their home and are trying to figure things out in a strange place without their parents’ help. There are moments, especially near the end of the episode, where things get real. In these scenes, the emotions are as honest as the earlier comedy is ridiculous.

Our character of the week is Señor Uhl, Arcadia Oaks’ Spanish teacher and interim principal. Voiced by Fred Tatasciore, he’s one of many Trollhunters characters who carries over into 3Below in various capacities, and in my opinion, he really comes into his own in this series. On Trollhunters, a good chunk of his screentime is devoted to the gag of the Spanish teacher being Austrian, but here, he gets a lot more development and shading. He’s initially positioned as an obstacle for Aja and Krel, asking them questions they can’t answer and demanding they follow rules they’ve never heard of, but when it really counts, he demonstrates that, as odd and inexplicable as these kids are, he takes their education and care seriously.

Diego Luna is so much fun as Krel, people. Within five minutes of his debut on Trollhunters, I already loved him, but he’s simply a delight here. One of the tidbits offered about Krel on Trollhunters is that he loves music, and that starts in this episode. I love his reaction to hearing Earth music for the first time, involuntarily dancing around the Mother Ship that’s disguised herself as a “retro” home complete with a record player. At school, he adorably raises both his hands to ask questions in math class, adding, “Back home, I have four of them!”

These moments of unbridled enthusiasm are all the more enjoyable because, a lot of the time, Krel is kind of standoffish and skeptical. He quickly gets aggravated in his quest to find a new daxial array for the ship, because every human he talks to assumes it’s a band name, and he confidently addresses Señor Uhl as “school bureaucrat.”

Luna has some fantastic deadpan line readings as Krel coolly replies in situations that he clearly doesn’t understand. A couple of my favorites, both during an encounter with a police officer:

·        The interaction starts over a misunderstanding about money, namely that Krel needs to pay for things he wants in shops. The officer asks, “Do you have money to pay for the record, kid?”, and Krel simply answers, “It would appear doubtful.”

·        Later, the officer says, “Why aren’t you kids in school? You know what a school is, right?” Not missing a beat, Krel replies, “Let’s assume not.”

It’s hard to explain. The lines, while amusing, aren’t inherently fantastic on their own, but the way Luna delivers them makes them awesome. Even though Krel basically just has Luna’s voice (with maybe a little less of his natural huskiness,) he feels distinct very quickly. It’s not Luna I’m hearing. It’s Krel. Really nice work.