I was out of town and otherwise engaged when the Tony Awards aired last Sunday so I recorded the annual romp. I am an ardent lover of Broadway theater, especially that unique American invention, the Broadway musical. This near-centennial institution grew out of and then replaced burlesque and musical reviews like those mounted by Florenz Zigfield in his Zigfield Follies, reviews that captivated theatergoers in the early part of the last century.
In the Broadway musical, the dance and song numbers and lyrics are organically connected to an actual storyline (also called a "book") as contrasted with the review or follies, which put together a pastiche of mostly un-related, un-connected musical numbers. In that sense, the musical on Broadway is closer to the opera form than the review but the type of music and lyrics it thrived in were of a popular genre rather than something more classical in melodic structure. In between, I guess, would be the operetta. But I digress.
The Tony awards (awards for excellence in theater) have been around for over 65 and were first televised locally in the New York area and on national radio in 1956. They began to be televised nationwide in 1967 and viewers were afforded the opportunity to sample what was on Broadway that year. In my house, no matter what time the Tonys (and Oscars) aired, all unrelated activities underwent catatonia. For many, viewing the Tonys was their first exposure to an actual Broadway show, musical or drama, and it launched the tradition of using the Tony Award show to promote ticket sales, especially to out-of-towners who are planning a visit to NYC.
The Tonys also help promote road shows, the traveling renditions of Broadway originated plays and musicals. Many shows went on for years and years even though their Broadway lights had already dimmed.
Effectively, the Tonys have became one of the major sales event for the Broadway theater (much as Oscars do for Hollywood movies). Theater, wherever it breaks out, always needs help with alerting and enticing customers. Broadway shows are entertainment but they are not mass media. Unless a play or musical is adapted for the large or small screen, it is essentially and eternally a live performance medium playing to a non-mass audience.
Watching the 2009 Tony Awards show provides viewers and with a glimpse of what we're missing and a sense of how good or not so good a year it has been when it comes to theater (primarily Broadway but also road companies and regional theater, dubbed: Broadway Across America).
Word of winners is another vehicle for spreading the word about what's exciting along "the great white way," as the region in which the theater district in Manhattan was once popularly known.
This year the Tony Awards were held in a very large venue, Radio City Music Hall, permitting larger stage numbers than previous venues.
. 
The host of the Tony Award show was Neil Patrick Harris, who stars in the hit TV series How I met Your Mother.
Televised Tony shows often use celebrities from other media venues because they are better known and tend to attract a larger viewing audience than stage actors do because, as previously noted, theater is not a mass medium and doesn't reach mass audiences. It's local and limited. The Tonys is the one annual chance for theater to reach out to the masses. If there was an annual awards show for opera, probably it too would use stars from other media to pull in the viewing audience. You do what you have to do.
Harris was superb, relaxed, affable, great timing for comedic delivery and even managed some very pleasant delivery of a satirical number about the nominees and winners hurriedly delivered at the end of the show. Harris' hilarious closing number re-inventing the lyrics to the music of West Side Story's legendary song, "Tonight," was a savory moment.
The night's opening number which was a smashtogether chorale of all participants to be in the evening's show doing a rousing, stage-filling (but seriously chaotic) number from the 60's rock musical, Hair.
With reservations, this promised an innovative, more lavish production than Tonys have been able to deliver in years. The three hours of banter, awards announcements and thank-yous, scene snippets from nominated plays and musicals and the heart tugging remembrances of Broadway giants who died this year, were done with taste and imagination...
...except for this one, little problem...
Yes, there's always an "except" because very little in entertainment is perfect (except maybe for Rob Marshall's flawless directing and editing of the film adaptation of the musical, Chicago. It won the Best Picture Oscar for the film version of the original Broadway musical of Chicago. But I digress once again.
The "except" problem? Impossibly gawd awful camera coverage of the dance numbers from nominated musicals, especially those of Billy Eliott (the evening's golden child in terms of awards (most important, Best Musical, based on the academy award winning movie of the same name) and the Best revival nominee, West Side Story 
(Hair beat it out for Best Revival. Its numbers were better than the others but not nearly as thrilling as has and could have been).
You'd think after all these years that the Tony showrunners would know how to celebrate the musicals on display and, for heaven's sake, know how to televise dance numbers so that the TV audience is actually drooling at the possibility of seeing the show live.
But no... The camera director did not know when to zoom in or out or pan or do anything to make what were surely exciting numbers in the regular performance context, other than regale the viewing audience with pedestrian shots, sometimes embellished with static movement. One directorial shoe does not fit all media! Dance for a live audience is not staged the same way as it is for a film or TV audience. Or for a radio or CD audience, for that matter.
For example, in the number for West Side Story, the stand-off between the Jets and the Sharks at the school dance with the inset, dream sequenced, epiphanous moment when Tony and Maria meet and mutually enchant, couldn't have been more clumsy and non-enchanting than what was on display. Call it whatever you will: Reverse alchemy. Gold into lead. Iconic into moronic. It stunk!
The numbers for Shrek, Legally Blond and Hair were less defective but not mouth watering. Over all, one watched these pieces of dance and song and muttered into one's chilled Grappa, "Where were the choreographers and directors, out on auditions?"
Ironically, probably the best musical moment of the show was the scene from Next to Normal, a musical drama. It featured Tony winner for Actress in a Musical, Alice Ripley, declaiming to her husband quite emphatically that he does not understand what she's goes through in her bipolar agonies, regardless of what he says to reassure her. As a former therapist and ex-husband, most absolutely did I know what he AND she were going through. Great drama.
Tthe number was absolutely riveting and pulled me forward in my seat. Did that make me want to see that show when I get to Manhattan? Youbetcha! Of course, there was no choreography to distract from the triadic drama unfolding on stage, so...
Now we get to the evening's piece de resistance of directorial and choreographic incompetence. The number chosen to show case Billy Eliott was one where one of the three young actors who play Billy at various ages, is through dance emoting his bout of angst amidst a brawl between the local police and a thicket of laid off coal miners. Undoubtedly, this staging was the anti-Christ to compelling and dramatic choreography.
