The Tony Awards were surprisingly safe and unexciting

So, in the end, it wasn’t so much Oh, Mary! as it was Not Tonight, Mary! Cole Escola’s out-there, queer-as-they-come farce, revolving around the strained relationship between the “foul and hateful” Mary Lincoln, a dipsomaniac with ambitions to be a cabaret singer, and honest Abe, here presented as a pitiful figure so deep in the closet he may as well be in Narnia, was widely regarded as the play to beat at this year’s Tonys. There hasn’t been an out-and-out comedy that’s won the major awards for a considerable time, let alone one that emerged from off-Broadway, and it’s testament to Escola’s prowess (as well as some of the most laudatory reviews in recent memory), that it was front-runner for Best Play.

Alas, in the end, its blend of high-camp musical comedy and sly revisionism wasn’t quite the ticket, and Escola had to be content with taking home Best Performance by a Leading Actor, with the production also winning Sam Pinkleton Best Director. In its stead, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Purpose, a far more conventional and indeed safe play, took the award, which was hardly undeserved, but still felt like a less interesting choice. Yet what was even more notable was that many of the year’s highest-profile shows, such as the George Clooney-led adaptation of his film Good Night, and Good Luck, the Robert Downey Jr. vehicle McNeal and the recent Denzel Washington-Jake Gyllenhaal Othello were nowhere to be seen. For a ceremony that famously (some might say notoriously) prizes star power, this was a volte-face, and then some. Even the acclaimed Glengarry Glen Ross didn’t get a look in.

Not that A-listers were absent. Nicole Scherzinger’s award for Best Actress in a Musical was so predictable that you could have bet your apartment on it, but just as Sunset Boulevard was a popular (and deserved) triumph in London, so its Broadway success felt fitting, rather than simply pre-ordained. Much the same could be said of Sarah Snook’s virtuoso one-woman performance in another British import, The Picture of Dorian Gray, which was a reminder that the relationship between the two major English-language theater cities is a symbiotic one. Many London residents will be hoping for a transfer of Oh Mary! in return before too long.

London was not the only place that created Broadway-bound drama, either. The big musical winner of the night, with six awards, was the South Korean import Maybe Happy Ending, a show revolving around the relationship between two lifelike humanoid robots in 2060. It was considered smart and prescient when it first opened in 2016 and Seoul, but with the rise of AI, it’s now clearly the show du jour, and deservedly took Best Actor for Darren Criss as well as awards for Best Musical, Best Book and Best Score. Whether it endures for another decade or is overtaken by advances in technology remains to be seen, but it clearly spoke to voters in suitably tuneful fashion.

The ceremony itself, hosted by Cynthia Erivo – herself the biggest musical star in the world post-Wicked – was the usual mixture of mawkishness and back-slapping, with the odd amusing moment thrown in. Alex Winter and Keanu Reeves, soon to appear in Waiting for Godot, popped up to present the Best Actress award to Snook, and Scherzinger and Erivo sought to out-diva one another with powerhouse performances of, respectively, “As If We Never Said Goodbye” and “I Am Telling You I’m Not Leaving.” But overall, this was a surprisingly safe and unexciting ceremony that went two steps forward and one step backwards when it came to acknowledging the genuinely dynamite new play sashaying and hissing in its midst.