The Tonys Take a Toke

The (somewhat) gender-reversed Broadway revival of “Company” (shown) has won the 2022 Tony Award for Best Revival of a Musical. Marianne Elliott also won for directing the show, and Patti LuPone and Matt Doyle took home acting Tonys for their roles in the play, which was the final Broadway production the legendary composer and lyricist Stephen Sondheim worked on before he died in November.

Sondheim's lyrics for "Gee, Officer Krupke" in 1957's West Side Story include the lines: "My grandma pushes tea," and "Dear kindly judge your honor / my parents treat me rough / with all the marijuana / they won't give me a puff." In "I'm Still Here" for the musical "Follies" he penned, "Reefers and vino, rest cures, religion and pills. And I'm here." 

Larry Kert, George Coe and Terri Ralston
in the original "Company"

The original 1970 production of "Company," a series of vignettes revolving around Bobby—a single character—and five couples who are his friends, contains a scene where Bobby gets his friends Jenny and David high. Stay-at-home wife Jenny (the angel-voiced Teri Ralston), who has never tried marijuana before, asks for another joint. She is discouraged by David, who tells Bobby that Jenny does not like marijuana, but partook it to show her love for him. (Bobby was played by Larry Kert, who first got Sally Kellerman high.) 

In the revival, Bobby is now the female Bobbie, and in her scene smoking marijuana with David and Jenny (Christopher Fitzgerald and Nikki Renee Daniels), "it’s now David (not Jenny) who is the 'registered square' who’s getting high for the first time – and thank god for that, because Christopher Fitzgerald’s physical comedy while his reality adjusts on Maui Wowie makes this one of the most memorable stage moments of the year," writes reviewer Jonathan Mandell. It's a sign of progress that women can now be depicted as experienced marijuana smokers, but it's kind of too bad that the male actor got the juicier role. 

Also nominated for a Tony this year was SNL's Rachel Dratch, for her role in "POTUS: Or, Behind Every Great Dumbass are Seven Women Trying to Keep Him Alive," in which her character takes a drug that causes, "Vision, Belligerence, Mania, Unquenchable Sexual Thirst, and, finally, Vomiting." Dratch figures it's LSD. She apparently knows how to smoke a joint, since she successfully pantomimed doing so on "The 100,000 Pyramid." 

Mary Louise Parker, who played the pot-peddling suburban mom on TV's "Weeds," was among the nominees. Parker, who got the nom for her role in “How I Learned to Drive," would have made herstory as the only performer in the Actress in a Play category to win consecutively, after winning for “The Sound Inside” last year. 

Christopher Wheeldon took the Best Choreography prize "MJ," a play about Michael Jackson for which its star Myles Frost took the Best Actor in a Musical Tony. Wheeldon also choreographed this caterpillar-with-a-hookah-sitting-on-a-mushroom scene from "Alice and Wonderland" (above) for the Canadian Royal Opera in 2014.

 

I was actually rooting for Bill T. Jones in this category, having seen his wonderful choreography for "Paradise Square" when it debuted at the Berkeley Repertory Theatre in 2019. Jones took home Tonys in 2008 for "Spring Awakening" (the cast of which did a reunion performance at the awards) and in 2010 for his work in "Fela!" based on the life of the late Nigerian singer and activist Fela Kuti (with whom Paul McCartney said he smoked the strongest weed he ever tasted). Joaquina Kalugango won Best Actress in a Musical for "Paradise Square" and she performed "Let It Burn" from the show at the ceremony to thunderous applause.

Included in the "In Memoriam" segment was Tokin' Woman Sally Kellerman, who played the outrageously wild movie star Mag Wildwood in the original Broadway production of Breakfast at Tiffany's in 1966. She also understudied for Holly Golightly, who in the Capote novella tries marijuana before settling on retail therapy. 

 

Also seeing a revival this year is "The Music Man," in which Harold Hill (played by Hugh Jackman) stirs up Trouble in River City by finding a scapegoat (a new pool table in town) that will corrupt the local youth...unless of course they join his sham Boys' Band. In much the same way, politicians today point to marijuana as the underminer of our youth, because that narrative suits their political purposes.

I just may have to plan a theatre trip to NYC to see these shows. Arianna deBose, the award ceremony's dynamite hostess who won an Oscar for portraying Anita in last year's movie revival of West Side Story, made it abundantly clear that Broadway is Back.