This year, Tonys packed with new faces

Broadway is a tight community - 39 theaters in one neighborhood, probably the world's most concentrated critical mass for a single art. But it's not necessarily a closed community. If you were watching the Tony Awards on television Sunday night, you saw winner after winner who'd never before been up on stage to accept an award.

The 2008 Tonys went, generally, to new faces. Six of the eight winners in categories covering leading and supporting performers were first-timers, and most had never before been nominated. Nearly a dozen winners came from shows born far from Broadway.

So-and-so "has box office" is something you hear about casting big-studio films, but while commercial theater doesn't lack for star power, box-office draw is not always part of its story. Broadway - at least this past season - has welcomed plenty of strangers, and they've obviously conquered the place.

The newcomers are not new to the stage, by any means. Paulo Szot, who won for his powerful portrayal of the Frenchman who falls in love with South Pacific's American nurse, is a Brazilian who's never been in musical theater but comes from the opera world.

In her acceptance speech for the award for best actress in a play, Deanna Dunagan - whose portrayal of the substance-abusing meltdown mom in August: Osage County has had audiences buzzing - made clear that while Tony was a wonderful milestone, theater happens all over. August was imported from Chicago's Steppenwolf Theatre.

"When we started rehearsals in Chicago, a year ago . . . none of us dreamed we would be here. I certainly didn't," she said in her acceptance speech at Radio City Music Hall, from which the ceremony was broadcast on CBS. "After 34 years in regional theater, I never even thought about it. I watched it on TV like everybody else."

In recent years - as in this one - regional theater arguably has become the major player in new work that makes it to Broadway, and as such is the often-unheralded winner at the Tonys. Yes, there's an annual award given to a regional theater (this year, Chicago's Shakespeare Theatre won it) - that's the visible part the hinterlands play in the Tonys. The actual role of the regionals is less obvious.

Look in the very small print at the bottom of the main page of play credits in a Broadway Playbill, and you'll often see it. For August, this year's best play: "Commissioned by Steppenwolf Theatre Company and the world premiere was presented at Steppenwolf Theatre Company, Chicago."

For this year's best musical, the rap-and-salsa-inflected In the Heights: "Development of In the Heights was supported by the Eugene O'Neill Theater Center during a residency at the Music Theatre Conference of 2005." The bustling O'Neill is in the Hartford, Conn., area.

For Passing Strange, the musical about a black teen's search for an identity, which won the one-named newcomer Stew a Tony for its script: "Originally presented by Berkeley Repertory Theatre."

Professional theaters elsewhere are major feeders of what eventually becomes Broadway's new work. The irony: Most professional regional theaters, including about two dozen in metropolitan Philadelphia, are nonprofit entities, and when they feed big-bucks Broadway, in most cases they're providing work for commercial theater.

But there's also plain-and-simple pragmatism. Broadway is risky, and the stakes are high - too high to spend money on theater that hasn't been field-tested. A growing number of regional theaters have the backing and talent to create such work, in an environment with much less at stake. (There's no guarantee, though; Signature Theatre in Washington, D.C., sent a musical called Glory Days to Broadway this season. It opened on May 7 and had closed by the next morning.)

The American theater is at a point where commercial and noncommercial interests mesh. Nowadays, it's not unusual for Broadway producers to give regional theaters development money to create new work. Regional theaters, in turn, bring new light to the Great White Way.

Next Broadway season, some of that illumination may be coming from Philadelphia.

The Philadelphia Theatre Company's rollicking production of Nerds, a new musical about the dawn of the computer age that sold out here early last year, has Broadway producers attempting to open the show, possibly in the fall.

Philadelphia playwright Michael Hollinger's Opus, an engaging examination of the internal workings of a string quartet that was premiered by Arden Theatre Company, has attracted Broadway producers who are now planning to stage it. Opus had a successful Off-Broadway run this season, directed by the Arden's artistic director, Terrence J. Nolen.

The Philadelphia Theatre Company and Philadelphia's Prince Music Theater have sent theater to Broadway. In 1995, PTC sent Terrence McNally's Master Class up to New York, where it won the best-play Tony.

Sunday night's Tonys could be seen as a reunion of theater artists who've worked on past productions at those Philadelphia companies. Patti LuPone, who won for her dynamic portrayal of Momma Rose in Gypsy, has had a relationship with the Prince, appearing in several productions. Alex Lacamoire, who won with Bill Sherman for orchestrating In the Heights, was assistant music director for the Prince's Me and Mrs. Jones.

Anna D. Shapiro, who took the director Tony for August, staged PTC's production of The Infidel. August's terrific set designer, Todd Rosenthal, won for his multilevel house for that play. A graduate of Moore College of Art and Design, Rosenthal also did the scenery for The Infidel, and for PTC's versions of The Goat and Take Me Out.

Kevin Adams, who won the play category for his active lighting in the takeoff on movie thrillers, The 39 Steps, also lit Being Alive, which opened the company's new Suzanne Roberts Theatre on Broad Street this season. Donald Holder, who won in the musical category for lighting South Pacific, lit PTC's world premiere of Barbra's Wedding.

Catherine Zuber took home a Tony for dressing South Pacific, and was costume designer for the Prince's The Juniper Tree and Lysistrata; she worked on Lysistrata with set designer Michael Yeargan, who won for his South Pacific scenery. At PTC, Zuber dressed the cast of Compleat Female Stage Beauty.

Zuber may be a cutter and stitcher, but with the Tonys, she's on a tear: Sunday marked the fourth consecutive year she has taken home a Tony for her work. Her other conquests were The Coast of Utopia, the revival of Awake and Sing!, and the musical The Light in the Piazza.