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Alison Stewart: This is All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. The 2023 Tony Nominations were announced this morning. A total of 38 shows are in the running this year. It was a packed season of both Broadway debut and revivals and the best play category nominees included works from newcomers like Jordan Cooper's Ain't No Mo' to legends like Tom Stoppard, Leopoldstadt. In the musical category, there's the show with the most Knots 13, Some Like It Hot as well as & Juliet, and the surprise hit Shucked, both with nine nominations. There was a lot of love for Beloved Works Given New Life, such as a piano lesson, Top Dog Underdog, and Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street. TimeOut USA's Theater and Dance Editor Adam Feldman joins us to discuss. He's a Theater Credit TimeOut, New York. Adam, thanks for being with us.

Adam Feldman: Glad to be here.

Alison Stewart: What was unique about the 2022/23 season?

Adam Feldman: Well, I don't know that there's anything unique about it exactly but it's the first season that we've had back really since the pandemic shutdown. There was a season last year but it wasn't entirely complete. This is a sign of Broadway in a way, getting back to normal with all of the pluses and minuses that entails. Those of us who love theater are going to debate whether or not every candidate that was nominated this year was the most deserving and whether some people were unjustly left out. For the most part, it represents a really strong season.

Alison Stewart: What shows or what themes seem to work this season that you think really had to do with the timing of it being the first full season post-pandemic? What audiences and what critics were interested in?

Adam Feldman: Well, one thing that I think that we saw a lot of this year is producers playing it kind of safe. I don't mean that the productions themselves were boring. It's just that we saw a lot of time-tested material this year. We had a lot of very strong musical revivals and play revivals. Shows that we know for a fact have audiences and are of good quality. Even among the shows that were new, a lot of them came with the perimeter of prior critical and awards recognition. This year, for example, of the three new plays that are nominated for Best Play, three of them have already won the Pulitzer Prize in past years. Some of them had a pipeline to Broadway that was a little bit interrupted by the COVID shutdown.

There were a lot of shows this year that were banking on audiences being able to trust that they would see something really reliable. For the most part, I think a lot of them came through. We have very packed seasons this year in the best revival of a musical category, for example. In some years past, there have been only two eligible candidates. This year there were six of which only four could be nominated and they include some awfully good productions. I was really excited about the revival of Parade this year. That's a less well-known show from the late '90s that has currently a wonderful revival on Broadway with Ben Plat and Micaela Diamond playing the lead roles. There's a wonderful revival of Sweeny Todd with Josh Groban and Annaleigh Ashford.

Then the new musicals also mostly tend to play it a little on the safe side. Some Like It Hot got a lot of nominations this year, got the most nominations of any show with 13 nominations. That is, of course, based on the widely beloved classic comedy from the late '50s. & Juliet and New York New York are the two musicals that got the next most nominations again. Both of them drawing unfamiliar material. Juliet is taken from the pop catalog of Max Martin, the super producer, and writer for major pop stars like Britney Spears.

New York New York is an ostensibly new musical that is actually cobbled together from songs by the great Broadway songwriting team of John Kander and Fred Ebb who wrote Cabaret and Chicago. All of these are reliable entities. The exception to this are the other two big musicals that are nominated this year, Shucked and Kimberly Akimbo. Both of those are quite new. For me, they are my favorite of the category, even though they have slightly fewer nominations than the others.

Alison Stewart: They're both really fresh. Kimberly Akimbo, I said to someone who wanted to know where to go, and I said, "Well, it's not like anything you've seen before."

Adam Feldman: Well, I love Kimberly Akimbo. It's such a sweet show. It has a strange concept. It's based in this magical realism idea of this girl, a teenage girl who's turning 16 and she has this disease that causes her to age at a super fast rate. She's played by Victoria Clark, who's an actor in her 60s. She finds herself in this very strange situation of having this old body but being a young person. It takes that magical concept and it places it in a really touching, funny, sweet, surprising musical with wonderful songs. You can look at the tallies for the nominations this year and you'll see that Kimberly Akimbo has slightly fewer nominations than Some Like It Hot, or & Juliet. That's because it's a smaller show. It doesn't have the blinding lights and the dazzling costumes of some of these bigger productions. Kimberly is the show that I would most recommend that people see.

Alison Stewart: When you about Revival--

Adam Feldman: Shucked.

Alison Stewart: Oh, Shucked, yes.

Adam Feldman: Shucked is the other one. It's completely new. It's not adapted from anything. It's hilarious. It's surprising. It's an old-fashioned musical comedy. It's got a lot of jokes in it, really funny jokes, and it's nice to be in an audience there where people are really laughing.

Alison Stewart: It's a knee-slapper, as I've heard people describe it. [laughs]

Adam Feldman: It really is. It's taken a lot of people by surprise in a pleasant way. That's okay.

Alison Stewart: I'm curious about the revivals. You talked about, and I think it's nostalgia with a lowercase, not in a negative way but what does a revival of musical need in 2023 to make it feel relevant?

Adam Feldman: Well, that's a good question. I think that ultimately it's about how good the show is. It's not a coincidence that you have two musicals in this category this year that were by the late Stephen Sondheim, Sweeney Todd, and Into The Woods. Both of them are two of the best musicals ever written and they both hold up really well because they're incredibly smart, incredibly well crafted, and musically interesting. You can listen to them over and over again. They're not going to get old in the same way that some shows that were very well-liked at their time have. You saw that problem a little bit this year with the revival of Camelot which was quite successful in its original early '60s incarnation but then achieved this broader cultural nostalgia because it became associated with the Kennedy administration after the assassination of John Kennedy.

The show itself isn't really that great. They had a bit of a challenge in front of them of how to revive this show that a lot of people had a lot of affection for but that was very difficult to put forward for a modern audience. To their credit, they really tried to make it a very different show. Aaron Sorkin came in and rewrote the script pretty much entirely and tried to make it more modern and a little less corny, and took out all of the magical elements that had been in the original production, tried to make it more political but it got a mixed reception. It got some nominations in the Tony Awards this year. It was respectfully received but it doesn't have the excitement behind it that Into The Woods and Sweeney Todd and Parade have behind them.

Alison Stewart: I thought Camelot really leaned into the talent of the people on stage.

Adam Feldman: They are all talented. Bartlett Sher who directed it is a wonderful director and they gave it a really good go. [laughs]. They gave a really good college try with Camelot. You just have the problem of a show that although people have a lot of nostalgic sentimental attachments to some of the scores isn't really that great a show and never really was. Even at the time, if you look back at the reception for it when it opened, it didn't hold up very well in comparison to the songwriting team's prior effort which was my Fair Lady in Fairness, one of the great shows in Broadway history. Anything would suffer by comparison but this wasn't really a classic show.

One interesting thing about the Sondheim Revival is that a lot of these shows Sondheim didn't write huge blockbuster hits for the most part. Most of these shows in their original runs didn't make a profit. You can keep on bringing them back because they hold up so well. They have a timelessness and an intelligence that makes them susceptible to revivals, to reinterpretations that makes them conducive to that in a way that many other shows don't. The same thing is true of Parade which was not a hit in its original production in the late '90s. Now people are rediscovering and discovering how much it has to offer.

Alison Stewart: I have to ask about Jordan E. Cooper's Ain't No Mo'. It was funny and provocative.

Adam Feldman: What a great show.

Alison Stewart: It lasted about a hot minute. [crosstalk]

Adam Feldman: This was one of the real surprises and happy surprises of the nominations today is just how much love was given to Ain't No Mo'. That was one of my favorite shows of last season. It played at the public theater earlier off-Broadway, and then it moved to Broadway. It only lasted for about three weeks. It closed before the holidays or it closed before the new year. It got the most nominations of any new play this year tied with Leopoldstadt.

Leopoldstadt is by Tom Stoppard, who's 85 years old and is one of the-- this is not a word I use lightly, one of the icons of World Theater. He's one of the great playwrights of the 20th century and 21st centuries. Jordan Cooper is in his 20s. He wrote this play. He starred in it. It was hilarious. It was smart. It was provocative. I wish that more people had been able to see it, but at least it's getting some recognition here. There is a quirk this year with the voting that they have made, and it's going to be interesting to see how and whether this changes how well Ain't No Mo' does on Tony night.

Alison Stewart: What's the quirk?

Adam Feldman: Well gosh, we're going to get into the weeds here, so forgive me. Usually in order to vote for any category in the Tony Awards, the Tony voters have to have seen everything that is nominated for that award. There are about 750 voters, and they have this new tabulation system that has the voters attest through this portal that they have seen all of the shows. Now, the problem is that this past year, some of the shows were interrupted because of COVID or certain performers were missing at certain performances of the shows.

For this year only the Tony Award rules have been tweaked so that the voters can have seen all but one of the nominated candidates and still be able to vote in the category, so they can have seen four of the five nominees and still be able to vote in the category, which isn't true in the rules usually, and that is probably going to hurt something like Ain't No Mo' where people might not have seen it. Last year, I think it probably helped some of the shows that ran for a shorter period of time because only the people who saw them were able to vote in those categories.

A much more limited voting pool was voting in those categories and so someone like Deirdre O'Connell, who won last year for Dana H. That show only ran for a few weeks, but everyone who saw it loved her in it and so there was a lot of enthusiasm among the small group of people who had seen it. That probably helped last year for shows like that, this year it might hurt-- the new rules might hurt a show like Ain't No Mo' because a number of people in the voting body won't have seen it. At least they've gotten all these nominations and I think it's a terrific testimony to just how strong this show really was.

Alison Stewart: Adam Feldman is theater critic and editor at Time Out New York. Thanks for walking us through the nominations.

Adam Feldman: [chuckles] I'm glad to do it.

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