Broadway season: Stoppard, star power

It was a special event, a three-part piece of theater whose cultural imprint was larger and deeper than any other on Broadway this past season. It was one work, but three plays - and reviewed three separate times, always on the radar.

It was a theatrical juggernaut, constantly discussed (and not always liked), the big ticket, the most expensive Broadway outing because if you saw the trilogy, you paid three times for your seat. In a place where buzz counts, buzz buzzed.

In hindsight - admittedly, a comfortable place to be - this year's Tony Award for best play, bestowed Sunday night on Tom Stoppard's exhaustively researched and often compelling The Coast of Utopia, was determined even before its third part had debuted on a Lincoln Center schedule about as complex as the plot itself. Utopia, like the move toward modernity across 19th-century Europe that Stoppard surveys, was unstoppable.

Some people called it pedantic, a bit turgid, a display of erudition parading as theater; others - myself included - were locked into Utopia because Stoppard dropped us, in his inventive and impassioned way, into a world we had never considered: mid-19th-century Russia, a peasant society being left behind by much of Europe.

He did it through the eyes of Russia's intellectuals, and so the play deals in we-can-change-the-world thinking. It's not always realistic thought, and a very few times it's not even very interesting thought. But Stoppard has given these people - mostly taken from real life - real lives. They're not just smart, they're jealous and thrilled and depressed and proud, and they suffer loss and celebrate triumph like the rest of us.

Stoppard has two Alexanders to work with as characters, plus an Alexandria, and five distinct Nicholases - it could have been a mud-pie of a play in lesser hands. But it was an achievement, and one whose like we won't soon see again. In fact, The Coast of Utopia is unlikely to be seen soon again, period; it's an overwhelming project of eight-plus hours of theater, and it cost Lincoln Center more than $7 million to produce.

Utopia ended its run last month. For now, this is one best-play Tony we'll see in script form on the page, not the stage.

Utopia and the best-musical winner - the beautifully conceived and acted Spring Awakening, about 19th-century teenage angst in Germany - managed to sweep this year's Tonys, the 61st season of Broadway's most coveted honors. Tony has 25 competitive categories, and the two shows took the medallions in all but 10 of them.

Utopia, in fact, set a record for a play: Winning in seven categories, it broke the record of a six-Tony sweep set by Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman in 1949 and tied last year by Alan Bennett's The History Boys.

Their Tony successes aside, Utopia and Spring Awakening were standouts in a season hardly packed with significant plays. Many were solid, but not the sort you'll remember when you reflect on great evenings in the theater. And some were too airy to remember at all.

What stood out this season was star power - the acting, even though it was frequently in the service of just-OK scripts. In fact, beginning almost nightly at 8 p.m., you need only look over a few blocks to see superb Tony-nominated performances that will stick with you, despite the scripts.

Angela Lansbury (nominated for a Tony) and Marian Seldes (not among the nominees) are sending lines back and forth as the elderly tennis champs in Terrence McNally's Deuce. The comedy is fine, but it lacks the singular quality of some of McNally's other work, and in the hands of lesser actors it could be downright flat. It works, though, because you can't take your eyes off the two exceptional performers who bring it to life.

Across the street, another best-actress nominee, Vanessa Redgrave, alone on stage for the entire performance of The Year of Magical Thinking, is spellbinding. She says as much with a turn of her shoulder as with any number of words in Joan Didion's script. To me, the script was tough - literary but hard-to-believe stage talk, yet I would see the play again just to sit in Redgrave's thrall.

The story's the same on several musical stages. Two blocks from Redgrave, Donna Murphy and Michael Cerveris play Lotte Lenya and Kurt Weill in LoveMusik, which should be an evening where romantic sparks fly. But nothing ignites - except for Murphy's multicolored portrayal of Lenya, even more distinct because so much of the show seems a constant gray.

And speaking of gray, Grey Gardens, a block away, is the most maddening musical on Broadway. Christine Ebersole won the best-musical-actress Tony for the roles she plays - the rich doyenne of a Hamptons household in the first act, and in the second act, the doyenne's daughter many years later, when the family is impoverished.

I suspect she won it for Act 2. I'll never forget her powerhouse performance in that act, as she sings of lost hopes and a pitiable future, and moves pathetically about the stage, sparring with her mom - played by Mary Louise Wilson, who won the best-featured-musical-actress Tony.

But I've already forgotten Act 1, except that it was bloated with so-so songs, the longest setup of the season for the remarkable second part.

The outstanding Audra McDonald, also Tony-nominated, is yet another example of exceptional talent lifting a pedestrian work. She's taken the hokey musical 110 in the Shade and, by the sheer force of her portrayal and song interpretations, given the show weight.

So, yes, Shakespeare was right, the play's the thing, today as much as ever. But when the thing's just OK, or a little weak, the juice from onstage talent can keep it alive.

CBS, which televises the Tony Awards, released preliminary figures yesterday giving the three-hour ceremony a 4.2 rating, which translates to about 6.24 million viewers - the fewest viewers for any network-broadcast Tony show.

Of course, this year two Tonys were competing for attention, as Tony Soprano marched through his last-ever new episode of The Sopranos on HBO, between 9 and 10 p.m. Also, ABC was broadcasting the second game of the NBA finals.

Said Howard Sherman, one of the Tonys' producers. "It is not every Sunday night in June that one of most acclaimed series in television history comes to an end."