The Tonycast

[Dave Sikula]

According to Playbill, ratings were down significantly.

While I thought it was a fabulous show -- and it usually is the best of this ilk -- in checking my social media Sunday night and Monday morning, there was a combination of frustration and downright anger about the streaming half of the show, that boiled down to two camps: "Why can't I see this on my teevee?" and "I don't want to subscribe to Paramount Plus!"

I thought about explaining the whole "get a free subscription and cancel it right afterward" concept, but most of the posts I saw seemed to come from people for whom that idea was the equivalent of understanding particle physics. There was also a healthy chunk of folks who didn't even know where and when it was on.

Left mostly unsaid was Paramount/Viacom's questionable decision to air the first two hours (where all but three of the awards were given) live online, but leave the second half broadcast-only for most of the country, so that anyone not in the eastern time zone had to wait as long as three hours to continue the show.

My takeaway was that Paramount alienated far more people than they attracted.

--Dave Sikula

[M-D November]

So there are a couple of things getting lost in the narrative of "the ratings are way down":

• The Tonys are usually in JUNE, not September, so they're not normally competing with Sunday Night Football
• This Tonycast was not well promoted; *I* knew about it because I follow certain theater-related sites/personalities online, but the average person might not have realized they were on this past weekend (esp. since CBS just aired the Emmys the week prior)
• What promotion existed didn't exactly make it clear what was happening on which part of the broadcast, whether the P+ portion would include performances, etc.
• The ceremony itself was honoring a Broadway season that ended in April 2020, and honestly it was a chore to even remember what was eligible to be nominated (which...not a lot, because COVID shut down a whole bunch of productions before they played their first performance)

I'm not saying the ratings would have been DRAMATICALLY better had the awards run in June 2020, but an oddball Sunday in September certainly didn't help.

All told, I actually thought the show was pretty good, apart from some TV direction miscues (what was with the camerawork during the In Memoriam segment?).

[daves...@gmail.com]

In regards to your second point, the people complaining the most strongly were theatre people, who (as far as I know) were connected and aware. They just "didn't know where to find it," despite the news about the online broadcast being plastered all over every major theatre site. The Tonycast is (rightly*) low-rated every year, but was considered enough of a prestige show to air, even if it is not much more than an infomercial for New York tourism.

As for the WTFness of the broadcast, television directors still, after more than fifty years, still haven't figured out that the directors and choreographers who work on Broadway are generally very good at what they do, and have staged their plays to look good from the front. They don't need the "help" of swooping cameras, dramatic angles, or (worst of all) reaction shots of the crowd to make them dynamic. I'm not saying "plop a camera eighth row center and lock it down," but I am saying that the hard work has been done for them and they don't have to reinvent the wheel.

(*Again, it's awarding a very small number of people who work in a very small part of one island on the east coast. I read someone in the industry describe it as "bodega owners giving awards to each other." As a reflection of what's actually happening in the American theatre -- or even in the rest of NYC -- it's pretty useless. Case in point: "The Inheritance," which won Best Play. It's an American story by an American writer, but no one in New York cared about it until it was done in London. The same play with its original cast and staging would have been of no interest to a commercial producer, because it didn't have Brits doing crappy "American" accents.)

--Dave Sikula

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