The Unscripted 2023 Tony Awards

“We don’t have a script, you guys,” Ariana DeBose announced on Sunday night, still sweaty and panting from her wordless opening number at the seventy-sixth annual Tony Awards. DeBose was hosting for the second time in a row, but the task that lay before her was novel: there were no pre-written zingers, no teleprompters. “So, to anyone who may have thought that last year was a bit unhinged,” DeBose continued, “to them I say, ‘Darlings, buckle up!’ ”

The telecast’s existence was the result of an eleventh-hour show-must-go-on miracle. Broadway is struggling to regain its pre-pandemic attendance, and the Tonys are its most important marketing pitch to audiences around the world. But the ceremony is typically written by members of the Writers Guild of America, which is on strike. Last month, the Tonys asked the guild for a waiver to broadcast on CBS, one of the companies being picketed. The guild said no, and the Tonys were left with a number of bad options: go on untelevised (a blow to the nominated shows, which need their musical numbers on TV for exposure) or delay the awards until the strike ends (by which time some of the shows may have closed). Then, as the Times reported, a group of playwrights intervened, arguing that solidarity with film and TV writers shouldn’t come at such a heavy cost to a fragile sister industry. The guild agreed not to picket the ceremony—on the condition that the telecast go scriptless.

And so DeBose opened the show in her dressing room, closing a binder of blank script pages. What would happen next? Were we ready for the unbridled buoyancy of her viral rap at the baftas, with the immortal line “Angela Bassett did the thing,” but without the eloquence of those words—or any others? As it turns out, the dance number that followed beautifully conveyed the evening’s limitations and its promise, as DeBose, without singing, glided through the theatre hallways, leaping into a dancer’s arms and boogying through the aisles. This year’s ceremony was held not at the Tonys’ frequent location, Radio City Music Hall, but at the United Palace, an opulent former movie house in Washington Heights, and the immersive dance number showed off its gilded cherubs and scalloped archways.

The writing ban played out in less poetic ways during the evening. As you’d expect, there were winners who voiced solidarity in their speeches. Miriam Silverman, who won a featured-actress award, for “The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window,” stated, “We are a staunchly pro-union household.” The playwright David Lindsay-Abaire, who won for writing the book of “Kimberly Akimbo,” the musical version of his play, wore a solidarity pin and promised to be back on the picket line the next day. But the drollest commentary—and the night’s cleverest speech—came from Tom Stoppard, accepting Best Play, for “Leopoldstadt.” “I’m teeming with emotions, which chatbots wouldn’t begin to understand,” he deadpanned. “Writers are the sharp end of the inverted pyramid,” he went on. “With the possible exception of ballet and . . . award evenings, without a script we’re all basically flummoxed.”

He had a point. The presenters, short on prepared banter, were reduced to bare-bones introductions. “Hello, I’m Uzo Aduba,” said Uzo Aduba. “Peace! I’m Common,” said Common. (Both presented Best Revival of a Play to Suzan-Lori Parks, for “Topdog/Underdog.”) Embellishments were few. “I am Marcia—and no matter what state we’re in we can always say ‘Gay’—Harden,” Marcia Gay Harden said, before she and Utkarsh Ambudkar handed Jodie Comer a lead-actress Tony, for “Prima Facie.” Only two presenters really made their mark. Nathan Lane, irrepressible with or without a script, said, of the Baroque digs, “It’s so delightfully over the top. It looks like Beyoncé’s screening room!” And the actress Denée Benton presented the yearly honor given to a theatre educator: the recipient was a teacher who works with the deaf at a school in Plantation, Florida. The town’s unfortunate name prompted Benton, like Harden, to take a swipe at Ron DeSantis, whom she called “the current Grand Wizard—I’m sorry, excuse me, governor—of my home state of Florida.” It was just as blunt, though far slyer, than the time Robert De Niro walked onto the Tony stage, in 2018, and declared, “Fuck Trump.”

Without the canned badinage that usually gums up awards shows, the Tonys could turn the night over to musical numbers and the winners’ speeches, both of which flaunted the industry’s wares. The first few numbers, admittedly, had a wearing peppiness, among them the title song of “New York, New York” (boosterism for the show and its city); Katy Perry’s “Roar,” as sung by Shakespeare’s Juliet, from the pop-tastic “& Juliet”; and an Art Deco whirligig from “Some Like It Hot.” When the late Stephen Sondheim arrived, via revivals of “Into the Woods” and “Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street,” it was nice to be reminded that musicals can convey more ambiguous emotions than “Hi!” The same goes for Ben Platt’s performance of a jailhouse ballad by Jason Robert Brown, from “Parade,” which won Best Revival of a Musical. And Victoria Clark, who won a lead-actress award, brought a winsome sadness to “Anagram,” a sweet, strange ditty from “Kimberly Akimbo.” In the song, by Lindsay-Abaire and Jeanine Tesori (who won for their score), Clark, as a teen-ager who has prematurely aged into a sixtysomething’s body, sings to her geeky crush, “I like the way you think / A little weird, a little wise / A little out of synch.” Nothing could better encapsulate the off-kilter appeal of “Kimberly Akimbo,” which ended the night with five awards, including Best Musical.