Friday Briefing: The upcoming Tony Awards and the importance of a bad review

The home stretch to the Tony Awards

No theatre awards ceremony carries more weight than the Tony Awards, which are being presented this year on Sunday 9th June at Radio City Music Hall. Though the Olivier Awards in London have tried in recent years to compete in the glamour stakes - and they've done a pretty good job by now staging them at the Royal Albert Hall and getting an affable presenter in Jason Manford - there still isn't quite the same buzz around them that translates into a tangible impact at the box office for the winners.

Part of the problem remains the fact that whereas the Tony Awards are given a prime-time live broadcast on CBS, our Oliviers are still relegated to a catch-up highlights package broadcast after the event.

Most of the winners of this year's Olivier Awards in London had also actually closed by the time the awards were presented, whereas on Broadway the entire season is geared around them, as evidenced by the sudden rush of shows that open every year in the last week of April when the cut-off date for eligibility for consideration for the awards occurs.

As a keen Broadway visitor - and now regular contributor to LondonTheatre.co.uk's sister site New York Theatre Guide - I see many of the eligible shows. This year, 14 original plays were in consideration, of which I've so far seen eight; 11 new musicals opened, of which I've seen all but one. (In the revivals corner, I've seen four of the seven plays, and both of the musicals that are eligible).

There are some encouraging trends here: firstly, plays are thriving on Broadway again (and while most have been limited runs, a couple have bucked the trend to become open-ended); and new musicals are still big business, with "safe bet" revivals now in much shorter supply.

It's also been a season of some innovation and surprise, too: while there have been several jukebox musicals, of course, including The Temptations in Ain't Too Proud - The Life and Times of The Temptations, (the only musical I'm yet to see), Cher (The Cher Show) and The Go-Gos (the long-departed Head Over Heels), and a bunch of film-to-stage transitions as usual (Tootsie, Pretty Woman, King Kong and Beetlejuice), the roster has also included completely original entries like Hadestown and Be More Chill. There was even that rare thing, the fast flop that Broadway used to specialise in with Gettin' the Band Back Together, a vanity project for producer Ken Davenport who co-wrote the book.

Of course the Tony Awards only reflect work that has taken place on Broadway itself - a total roster of just 34 shows, not the far wider theatrical ecology of New York theatre. This weekend, the Drama Desk Awards also take place at New York's Town Hall, which encompasses shows that run off-Broadway as well as on. While the revival of Oklahoma! has led the nominations with 12, there are 11 each for Tootsie and a musical I've never even heard of, Rags Parkland Sings the Songs of the Future, staged at Off-Broadway's Ars Nova.

When bad reviews are actually necessary

Hope is what keeps most of us going, in theatre as in life. No one, as I previously wrote here, "with the entirely fictitious exception of Bialystock and Bloom in The Producers - sets out to deliberately make a flop show"; and a critic who devotes my life to seeing theatre, I approach every show I see in the hope that it'll be great.

But it can't always work out that way. And when a show isn't, it is my critical duty to say so - readers depend on me to tell them my honest opinion (though as I always stress, too, it's only ever an opinion; my review will aim to convey a flavour of the show so that a reader can make up their own mind).

I routinely tell the acting and musical theatre students I teach at Arts Educational Schools that the reviews aren't written for them as performers in a show, but for their prospective audiences, so advise them to avoid reading them. But of course, for others, reading bad reviews is often a guilty pleasure.

The politician Jacob Rees-Mogg recently published a book called The Victorians. And the reviews were uniformly - and highly entertainingly - terrible. One by Dominic Sandbrook, declared, "There have been many books on the Victorians, but surely none as badly written." Rees-Mogg, he declared, has "all the wit, style and literary elan of a Bulgarian boiler salesman."

As Craig Brown wrote in a column in the Daily Mail, "You would have to be either a saint, or a member of Rees-Mogg's immediate family, or his nanny, not to experience a tingle of pleasure when reading these reviews. There is something about a bad review, beautifully written, that makes all but the kindest heart soar."

And if that kind of schadenfreude is unavoidable for a reader, bad reviews are probably the hardest to write: not because I'm always a kind man (though I hope I am a fair one), but because of the pain that I know will follow.