tony's last night!

So I watched the show last night in my pjs in the kitchen. I'd been looking forward to it - and I nearly had a stroke when my family mentioned possible dinner plans with family friends that night. Uh hello, people? It's time for the Tony's! I really need to find some theater people in this town!

Anyway - the show was - shall I be polite?? Interesting. Lots of technical problems that you think they would have worked out by now. Some unfortunate camera angles - like during the memorial piece and a bunch of sound issues too. Get it together here already!

So yeah - stuff I liked:
1. NPH! I loved the sushi joke... Jeremy Piven probably didn't...
2. The Billys - aw, so cute.
3. Constantine Maroulis - surprisingly. But Rock of Ages looks like so much fun. Ah, the 80s.
4. Crazy hippies from Hair - I was wondering if this show tours, if it will come to Chicago. We have some sort of ridiculous Puritanical law around here about stage nudity and stage smoking, etc.
5. Angela Lansbury - what a classy lady
6. Alice Ripley's voice (and her gorgeous blue dress. And by the way, is David Hyde Pierce the official "Best Actress in a Musical" designated award giver? Didn't he present that category last year, too?)
7. Billy Elliot wins best musical! YAY! It's the only one I saw, so I am a little biased...
8. Liza. So crazy. But I love her, begging the question - Why do I have a thing for slightly crazy people (Italian-American divas, in particular?? Is it because I am a paesana myself?)??
9. Geoffrey Rush!
10. the 11th hour closing number - did he make that song up, or what? How did they know the winners??? Mystery!

Stuff I didn't like:
1. Extremely crappy In Memoriam piece, apparently directed by someone who was asleep and shot by someone who was drunk. The angles would wander off away from the screen so you either couldn't see the picture or read the name and sometimes both. Yeah. Way to honor those people.
2. Extremely random best play excerpts which were - well, extremely random and brief. I had to bust out my trusty Time Out New York stash to figure out what some of the plays were about
3. Also sort of random musical numbers that didn't do a lot for the show represented. The West Side Story one? Kind of sucked. And the Billy Elliot one - arrrgh. Show "Electricity" or even "Solidarity Forever" - that was the only show I saw and I bawled my face off when I saw it, but based on that excerpt, yowch.
4. The touring show interludes. I mean, I get it. The show is targeted towards mainstream America who wouldn't know "Next to Normal" from a hole in the ground. They do know "Mamma Mia" though and "Jersey Boys." So instead of giving the award recipients some extra time to talk, let's have a Jersey Boys medley! Oh yes, that will do great things for the ratings, except for people like ME in the audience who wants Jersey Boys to die a slow painful death. And the Legally Blonde bit sucked a little too.
5. Is anyone else trembling in fear at the thought of John Stamos in Bye Bye Birdie? I remember in grade school we did our little musical thing "Dream a Little Musical Dream" and I wore a poodle skirt and was in the Bye Bye Birdie numbers...